In a past post, I said that if we want classical musicians to look like their future young audience — or the audience we hope will be there in the future — a lot of these musicians will have to have tattoos.
I didn’t quite put it that way. I was talking about a new young audience in Washington, DC. But I think it applies more or less everywhere.
I also thought I was exaggerating. Meant tattoos to serve as only as a symbol of what younger people look like, the ways in which they’re different from the classical music norm.
But I didn’t know how right I was. Recently in the Guardian I read that nearly half of American millennials have tattoos!
So my point is reinforced. If (at least in the US) we want millennials to feel at home at classical performances — if we want them to feel that they’re with people like themselves — then a lot of the musicians need to have tattoos.
Not that tattoos are unknown among classical musicians. But no way half the young ones have them. Just another way that classical music hasn’t kept up with the culture around it.
An alternate thought: why not leave the concert hall as a place of formality and dignity? A house of worship. You dress up, perhaps you cover your tattoos, you adopt solemnity.
I imagine your answer is that classical music is dying, and we have to adapt. No, we don’t. It just becomes an ever smaller niche. That’s ok.
Peter, I’m glad you pose the question as honestly as you do. If we don’t adapt, we become a smaller niche. Bravo! So true, and it’s something that in my experience most people in the business don’t want to face, and at least won’t say out loud.
The only question is whether a smaller niche is sustainable. I assume you’d still like to see large symphony orchestras playing concerts, and opera houses putting on the Ring. So at what point, as the niche keeps shrinking, and the donor base shrinks along with that, does it become impossible to pay all those musicians? To pay all those singers, stagehands, costume shop workers? At what point do conservatories have to go out of business, because there just aren’t enough donors and maybe not even enough students to keep them going?
At that point classical music shrinks so much that it becomes unrecognizable. How much shrinkage could you accept? If the classical music season in New York were reduced to a handful of chamber concerts, with nothing at all outside major urban areas, how could classical music survive?
Greg, bravo to you for laying out my view in a bit more detail, without its dismissal. In my smaller niche outlook, you are correct that much of our classical music world would not survive. I think the amateur world might survive – home music-making and chamber music, choirs, community bands, orchestras, and amateur opera companies – just as these survive and often flourish now. The expensive professional world would shrink, and many music schools and music departments would close up shop. The next generation’s Greg Sandow would have fewer paid consulting gigs, and fewer chances to write paid arts criticism. Eventually most everyone will need another profession, and become an amateur. That’s kind an intriguing shift, and maybe healthy in the long run.
Does all this also sadden me? Only mildly, because in N. America this has been going on for a long time, much longer than our classical community realizes. I would say the decline has been going on for at least 50 years; this is nothing new.
P.S. Maybe your tattoo idea was just a playful conversation starter. If so, it worked!
Glad to have a constructive conversation! One thing that’s already happened, from your list — fewer opportunities to write paid classical music criticism. Those jobs have dried up. So few media outlets covering classical music. Newspapers shedding their classical critics. For the simple reason that writing about classical music isn’t being read.
What grieves me about your scenario is how, after a generation of life like that, anyone will learn to play classical music. If string quartets survive in the hands of a few brave and loyal amateurs, how will those people learn to play? I’d rather see classical music engage the contemporary world, which means it would have to change. I’ll lay out those changes soon enough in the blog. Or at least — not claiming any gift of prophecy! — the changes I think there might be.
I was high-spirited about tattoos, but not really joking. Few people in classical music, I think, realize how great the gap is between them and the rest of our culture. Tattoos (common outside classical music, much rarer inside) to me are one side of that.
“Not that tattoos are unknown among classical musicians. But no way half the young ones have them.”
What makes you so sure about that, Greg? How many of them have you seen without their shirts on?
😉
(I personally know one musician in a major orchestra who is covered with tattoos – but they end where his tuxedo does.)
Hi, Matthew! I’ve spent a lot of time around orchestra musicians. And among conservatory students at Juilliard (where I teach) and elsewhere who will shortly become orchestra musicians. So I can see how many visible tattoos they have, and compare that with what I see as I go about my life in DC, where I live, and in New York. I’m not at all surprised, for instance, when while I’m waiting for a train I see a woman wearing flats, with an elegant tattoo on the top of one foot. But I’d wait a long time to see that in one of my classes.
Tattoos? Isn’t that kind of putting the cart before the horse? What good are tattoos if no one can see them because they’re covered up by sleeves. Seems to me you first need to advocate for short sleeve concert dress for men and women.
Seriously, your goal is laudable but are you seriously suggesting tattoos will bring millennials to concerts of classical music? From my observations, most millennials I know don’t like classical music because they’ve never been exposed to it the way the boomer generation was when we were growing up and they don’t like sitting still for the length of a classical music concert.. I very much doubt tattoos and the other types of marginalia you discuss in your columns is likely to have much of an impact. I think it’s time you re-think your reinvention of classical music and think about ways that young people can be exposed to and learn about classical music. To me, that’s the key.
So, Mark, interesting assumption you make. That if younger people were exposed to classical music, they’d like it enough to join the regular audience. Why do you think that’s true? I’d suggest that there’s been a huge culture change since boomers like myself grew up. A change I’ve watched and been part of, for whatever that’s worth. So if someone young today hears classical music, they’ll think it sounds nice, because it does, but it’s not going to speak to their culture or their concerns.
A problem acknowledged in the business. It’s not hard to create a classical music event that younger people will come to. An orchestra plays in a club! I’ve seen that draw thousands of younger people. What nobody knows is what happens next. Do these people come to the concert hall? Very unlikely, from everything I’ve seen.
And there’s no entitlement to expose anyone to classical music. I mean on society’s part. It’s not required. In past generations people were routinely exposed to classical music because classical music was routinely a part of everyday culture (to repeat myself). That’s why it was taught in schools. It’s not taught now because it’s not a major part of our general culture.
As for tattoos, have you never seen tattoos on necks, hands, or ankles? These would show from the concert stage (at least tattoos on women’s ankles might). But of course on the stage is not the only place people see classical musicians. With all the emphasis now on community outreach, there are going to be all kinds of events in which musicians meet people in less formal settings. So now tattoos would be easily visible.
The overall issue here is whether people can feel that classical music can ever be part of their normal life. For them to feel it, it would help a lot if the people involved in classical music, like the musicians, were people that a new young audience could look at, and say “these people are a lot like me.” As smart as I am, as culturally aware, as connected with things in the current world. Tattoos are only one part of making that happen. But the statistic I quoted might suggest that they’re not an unimportant part. And it was no less than Simon Rattle, by the way, who started me down this path, when I saw him quoted as saying orchestras should look like the cities they play in.
Yes, I’ve seen tattoos on ankles and necks. I’ve seen them because I’ve been close enough to notice. I doubt I would notice tattoos on the ankles and necks of performers on stage if I were sitting in the audience. But there’s an even more basic reason why this idea makes no sense, are you saying tattoos should be required? I can’t imagine what else you mean by a lot of musicians would “need” to have tattoos. And would tattoos on performers actually get people into concert halls? I can’t see that. What would that marketing campaign look like, “Come see the NY Philharmonic, now with tattoos” ?? Finally, when Simon Rattle made his comment about orchestras looking like the cities they perform in, did he mention tattoos specifically? I’m guessing no. And if that’s the case, maybe he was talking about the racial and ethnic composition of an orchestra resembling that of the cities they perform in? That would make a lot more sense to me.
To my other point, I’m talking about more than just “exposing” young people to classical music, I’m talking about educating them about it.. I remember reading an interview with John Adams where he quoted research that showed that children who learn to play an instrument are far more likely to become music lovers than those who don’t. So it’s not necessarily an assumption that more music education makes more music lovers. I also don’t buy your point about classical music not being taught because it’s not part of the culture. I think music education went out the window at some point after the Reagan Revolution,. The forces that brought about that shift are contemptuous of public education specifically and education in general. Why spend money on something that doesn’t make money – that’s their attitude. You say classical audiences started greying in the ’70’s, I think it was later, more like the late 80’s or possibly even later. And I would also say that the diminishment of classical music and classical music education followed an overall trend that negates the arts and arts education in general. From what I see that trend wasn’t part of a cultural shift, it was a backlash against the cultural shift of the 60’s that emphasized culture and the arts (even if it was “pop” art) over the pragmatic values of the older generation. Those values came roaring back in the 80’s after Reagan and the Republican took over.
Mark, Mark, Mark…you make so many assumptions! Do you really know about these things? Kind of hard to have a conversation with you, if you’re going to just assert things you don’t really know are true. Like your idea of why there isn’t education in classical music now. First, there’s more of it than you think. Middle and high schools with bands and orchestras, and encouragement for kids to study the instruments needed for those groups. This, along with other factors (classical music lessons in demand as an accomplishment for upscale kids), produces results. There’s no shortage of students coming out of high school and going to conservatories.
Two problems with that, though. First — as I know well, from teaching at Juilliard for 21 years — the kids who go to conservatories will tell you that their friends don’t listen to classical music. So what classical music education now produces is a thin stream of interested kids, with no effect on the larger population. Just what you’d expect if the culture had shifted. And it’s worth noting that those middle school and high school ensembles don’t only play classical music.
Second, even the kids who play in those ensembles, and in more accomplished youth orchestras, for the most part don’t go to classical concerts! Then, or later on in life. There are many reasons for that. One is that when they get to college, they don’t have a classical music support system. No friends interested in classical music, no groups to play in, unless they’re very good, and maybe at an elite university.
As for why there isn’t music education, or arts education. First and foremost a financial squeeze. I have a house in a small but highly educated NY State town, and throughout the region communities are raising property taxes (or would like to; there are complicated state laws about that) just to keep doing what they already do. Schools might like to have more music, but the money isn’t there. My son goes to a very fine Montessori public charter school in Washington, DC (where I live fulltime), and they just cut back on music, art, and also sports and exercise, for financial reasons.
When did the audience start graying? There’s data on this. Not as much as there should be, but by the ’80s, when the NEA started keeping good numbers, the aging of the audience was already under way, if you compare the data then with data from earlier generations. Plus when I did some blog posts on this, I got some information from people on the scene, about — just for instance — elderly subscribers to the Boston Symphony beginning to fall away in the 1970s, and not being replaced by people coming into older age. This was for the concerts most associated with older people, the (once famous) Friday matinees.
And something important to remember! There’s vast support for the arts, no falloff due to Reagan or anything else, if by art you’re willing to accept film fashion, graphic design, and pop music (a misleading term, such so much of it isn’t popular, and is created with the same focus on the work itself that we associate with artists).
As for tattoos, you really take me far too literally. Of course I don’t think orchestra musicians should be required to have tattoos! When I said they need to have it, go back to my earlier post (linked in the one you read) and see that I was talking about how orchestras might have to look, if they were going to resemble the cities they live in. Yes, Simon Rattle meant ethnic and racial diversity, and seems nobly committed to that, which I love.
But I took off from what he said, and imagined someone saying it in DC. If the National Symphony musicians looked like the city around them, a little more than half would be African-American. And a good many, both white and black, would be millennials, many of whom have tattoos.
What I’m saying shouldn’t be hard to understand. Everybody gets it, when someone African-American or Latino says “there’s nobody like me here.” So we should understand that a millennial at a symphony concert will feel the same way. One thing that would help is if the musicians (thanks, Simon Rattle) reflected the full and varied life of their city. Tnen a millennial could come to a concert, or a community event, or see photos of musicians, and say, “Yes! People like me! I fit in here!”
And in fact exactly this was done some years ago by the Orchestra of the Enlightenment in London, as I should have mentioned. They play a lot in clubs, and have gotten such a following that (at least the last time I looked) they play late night concerts in their regular hall for a younger audience. One part of building this was stressing that members of the orchestra looked like the younger London audience. They promoted that aggressively, and it worked. One thing that helped is that they really had musicians with tattoos, contemporary fashion sense, whatever. And they’d be a higher proportion of the group then we’d find in US orchestras, because British orchestras are younger, in part because the pay is lower, making a lifetime career as an orchestra musician harder to sustain.
I’ve taken a lot of time with this, Mark, because I really want to help. Not just you, but the classical music field. But (and I hope I’m not intruding on your space by saying this) it would be helful, and certainly a kindness, if you could not make assumptions quite so forcefully. Why hot say, “Couldn’t it be
Sorry, Mark. The Amtrak train I’m on as I write this lurched, and my fingers accidently sent the comment. What I wanted to say was, you could put your thoughts this way: “Couldn’t it be that…?” Rather than asserting your beliefs as unassailable fact. If I did that, insisted things were true when I don’t really know they are, people who know the classical music business wouldn’t take me seriously, not for a moment. And since many of them are my friends, and many more read this blog, I’d have a problem on my hands!
Greg, Greg, Greg. Could it be that you are just as guilty of making assumptions as I am? Isn’t your whole point that classical music is less popular because of a cultural shift an assumption? I haven’t seen any data or research to back that up and I haven’t read where you say “Could it be that classical music is less popular because…” It’s actually kind of ironic that you bring up my assumptions. The first column I ever read by you was a review in the Village Voice of a NY Philharmonic New Horizons concert that included a work by David Del Tredici – one of the “Alice” pieces. That was back in 1983. A number of people booed after the Del Tredici work – I was one of them – and in your column you knew exactly why they were booing. Except you didn’t, or at least you didn’t know why I was booing because my reasons were much different than what you stated. I even wrote a letter to the editor about it that was published!
You also seem to place a lot of weight on what you observe of your Juilliard students. Do you really think that’s representative of broader trends? Seems to me that’s a microcosm of a microcosm. You say, “There’s no shortage of students coming out of high school and going to conservatories.” Do you have numbers to back that up or are you only talking about Juilliard? And if the NEA didn’t start keeping good numbers about concert attendance until the 80’s how could they make comparisons to previous years? And I have some experience with Friday Boston Symphony concerts from the 70’s as I was an usher. Even then it was a relic of an ancient time (Boston is good at that!), not sustainable for any number of reasons. And when I talk about “the arts” I’m really talking about “fine arts.” If funding for film and fashion is syphoning money away from music, visual arts, drama, etc., I think that’s a problem. Film and fashion are far more commercially viable than fine arts but I don’t believe they have the staying power of art and music that has survived for centuries – at least in some circles.
Finally, in re-reading my posts, it seems to me that I almost always preface my points with something like “I think” or “it seems to me” or similar, unless I have actual data to back it up. Could it be you missed that? I don’t know that I’d say the same about your posts so I think what you bring up about my assumptions is a straw man argument, more of a distraction than a discussion. I think I’ve been clear about what I think vs. what I know. Last, you say “I really want to help. Not just you…” I really don’t need your help. I’ve been in the music business almost 40 years. I’ve survived when the vast majority of the people I came up with have left the field and gone on to other pursuits. I did that all without your help, I think I can continue to manage without it.
Well, Mark, more power to you! I’d love to know what you’re doing now. Maybe I could learn from it.
I have data to back up what I say. Or anyway a lot of it. I’m not going to say I’ve always had it, or that I’ve always used it, or that I haven’t sometimes made assumptions I should have questioned. 1983 — I don’t remember what I wrote then, why I said people booed David’s piece. Maybe I was guessing, maybe I knew the people or knew who they were, and knew what their view of David’s Alice pieces was. Maybe I talked to some of the booers. I don’t remember. I do remember David, whom I hadn’t met at the time, writing me a letter, asking me to write a recommendation so he could get hired for a faculty job at a major university. The problem, he told me, is that the composers on the faculty thought his Alice pieces were empty junk. I’d published a piece in the Voice in which after studying one of his Alice scores I detailed some of the compositional expertise that went into writing it. He wanted me to share that with the faculty committee that had to rule on hiring him. This from a composer being played by major orchestras!
I wasn’t surprised by his letter. I can’t remember if I’d had conversations with more orthodox composers about David’s music specifically, but I knew what many or most of them thought about anyone who wrote tonal music. Let alone an apostate who used to write atonal scores, and now didn’t! This not by assuming what they thought, but from knowing them and talking with them. Just as many orthodox composers back then thought Philip Glass (whose music they thought was junk) only composed the way he did in order to make money! (Crazy, since for many years even after getting famous he couldn’t make a living from composing, and worked as a cab driver and a carpenter.)
So if I know people in the contemporary music world in New York thought this way, and then I hear booing at David’s music at a concert, and maybe even see some of who was booing, it wouldn’t have been crazy to think I might know why they booed. Of course you might have had a different reason, but how could anyone know that? You could have solid data, as for instance we do, about why people support or oppose Donald Trump, but that doesn’t mean that some people in either camp don’t have their own reasons, that don’t show up in any studies. There are exceptions to just about everything.
As for the aging of the audience, I don’t believe I said the NEA said anything about what might have happened before they did their studies. That was me, looking in from the outside. If I’ve seen studies (as I have) showing orchestra audiences with a median age as low as 27 in the late 1930s, with a median age of 35 in 1955, and classical music audiences generally with a median age of 38 in 1966, and then the median age for classical music audiences is notably higher in 1982, it’s not unreasonable to think that some aging occurred during the 70s.
Of course you might say that a median age of 38 isn’t so young, and that the numbers I’ve quoted show apparent aging from the late ’30s to 1966, but first we’d need more studies to establish that. I only have those three, but since they all say that the audience is strikingly younger than it is now — and, which I think is very important — the people doing the studies don’t find anything remarkable about the age data, I think it’s fair to say they’re representative. Whether they’re representative enough to draw a rising age line from 1937 to 1966 would be another story. The orchestra with the median audience age of 27, for instance (in Grand Rapids, MI) could be an outlier, since the age data in this study (which was mainly about how orchestras financed themselves) didn’t involve many orchestras.
In those days, two large occupational groups in the classical music audience were housewives, as the term was then, and students. In the famous, pioneering sociological studies of the city the studies called Middletown (actually Muncie, IN), the fledgling classical music series that emerged in the 1930s was pretty much attended only by stay at home women and students. I could guess that the low age in Grand Rapids came from this situation being exaggerated, so that students formed a notably larger proportion of that audience than the 23% (or something lik,e that) they represented in the 1955 study.
But one thing about the 1966 study is worth thinking very hard about. (The study was published, to be accurate, in 1966; I don’t know when it was conducted. I know the 1930s study was published in 1940 but conducted a bit earlier.) It’s this. The authors of the book in which the data was published say the most notable fact about the audience for all the arts is that it’s young. And for future study they flag what they think is a great unknown — why people stop going to performing arts events as they get older! That’s night and day from what the situation was by late in the 1970s. So something must have happened in the 1970s to change things.
I won’t go into such detail about why I think the cultural shift leads to people not caring about classical music. I’ve run out of time! But my approach would be similar. Data, plus in my case a lot of experience with both classical music culture and the culture of the outside world, the latter in part (but not at all exclusively) gained by working for some years in the pop music business. But one straw in a very big wind. When I went to high school in the 1940s, I wouldn’t say the kids at my school cared about classical music, but they respected it. It was (except for a few budding hipster kids who liked serious jazz) the only art music out there.
By the ’60s that changed, and in one of his books (called The Second Beatles Album) Dave Marsh, one of the most distinguished rock critics of the past, talked about growing up in the 1960s and concluding from his parents and his high school teachers that people who liked classical music were people who didn’t know who they were, who had no appreciable inner life. Agree or not, that a smart person should conclude that (and keep thinking it, as far as I know, into maturity; I should ask him, though we haven’t talked in years) — that shows a cultural shift right there.
Or John Seabrook’s book Nobrow, in which Seabrook says that when he was young he assumed, based on his parents’ taste, that when he grew up his music would be classical music. He’d go to the opera. Only to find — as he vividly describes — that electronic dance music (of a particularly abrasive kind) was the music he cared about as an adult. His description of the classical music department at one of the big record stores that still existed in NYC when he wrote the book strikingly shows the cultural gap. How to him classical music looks like a protected enclave, almost petrified, deliberately separating itself from the more vibrant, surprising, and challenging world he identifies with.
Anecdotal evidence, yes. But there’s a mountain of it, and you can contrast it with how classical music shows up even casually, but with complete ease and understanding, in (for instance) older movies. And I can supplement the published anecdotal evidence with decades of personal conversations with people outside the classical music universe.
As for what is or isn’t art, and what changes in that understanding might mean — you have your view, I have mine. Not an unfamiliar debate! And to the extent that any number of people in classical music hold your view, I’d cite that as further evidence of a cultural shift, some people involved with classical music thinking one thing, and saying so quite strongly, and people in the rest of the world thinking something different. Add a sociological study from some years ago that concluded most Americans were cultural omnivores, comfortable with both high and popular art, and then so many conversations with younger people who’ll now say they accept all art, high and popular, equally, and again — without wanting to challenge the correctness or value of your view, and least of all your right to hold it — does to my mind again show quite a large cultural shift.
Mark, thanks for having this conversation with me! I’m not going to go further with it, because I need to do other things. I hope you won’t take my silence if you respond to what I’ve just written as coming from anything but necessity. I may strongly disagree with what you say, and with how I think you’ve come to your conclusions, but that doesn’t mean that I dismiss it.