September 2004 Archives

Or, rather, no new music in Toronto. I'm talking about the amazing news yesterday about the Toronto Symphony -- they're going to banish new music from their regular season, at least for this year, and stick it off by itself in a few concerts next spring.

I imagine many people will be outraged. If you're a serious classical music person,  you're supposed to support new music, and demand that orchestras play it whether their audience likes it or not.

But I'd like to take another view. Maybe the Toronto Symphony's management is right. If some large part of the regular audience hates new music, why force them to hear it? Maybe we're better off segregating new works in special concerts. Suppose the mainstream classical audience and the new music audience just aren't the same people. Then new music might do better by itself, where it could draw the audience that wanted it.

Of course, some people will say that there really are members of the regular audience who want to hear new music. Maybe some of these audience members will angrily e-mail me. I met an audience member like that just the other day -- someone who goes to normal orchestra concerts, and who you'd swear was a straightahead Beethoven listener, and yet told me she loved hearing new sounds.

But how many people like her are there, in the standard orchestra audience? I'd love to see some studies. Does anyone actually know how many people in the orchestra audience like to hear new music? Some orchestra professionals I know, perhaps with better data than I have, think the number is very, very small.

Some people, of course, will tell me success stories -- about concerts on which mainstream orchestras played new music, and the audience loved it. I can tell those stories myself. But does this prove that the audience wants to hear more new music -- that they'll be happy when they see new pieces on an orchestra's schedule? It might not. People might find that they like an occasional new piece, but still, on the whole, might cringe at the thought of hearing lots of new music.

And even if I'm wrong, the moral to draw might not be that the Toronto Symphony is walking away from its duty. Instead, maybe the moral is that, in the past, they didn't do their duty the right way. Along, I might add, with most other orchestras. What have they done to get their audience interested in new stuff? Do they talk to their audience? Do they present new works with passion and commitment? Are they in constant communication with their audience -- using every form of communication they can think of -- to make sure their audience knows why new works are performed? Do they let the audience talk back, and do they take seriously what it says? Maybe, just maybe, the audience feels new works are an affront to it because, in actual fact, that's exactly what they are -- pieces that the orchestra knows the audience won't like, which it goes out and programs anyway, without caring enough to reach out and explain why.

In the end, I wonder if the Toronto Symphony isn't giving the classical music world exactly what it deserves. For so many years -- generations -- the situation of new music has been a disgrace. I'm not blaming anybody: not the institutions, not the audience, certainly not the composers. But an art form that can't handle new work -- in which new work is a problem -- can't be in good shape.

But hardly anyone addresses this. Hardly anybody says, "This is an outrage! We have to find out how things got this way, and address the causes right at the root." Instead, nearly everybody limps along, trying to have it both ways. We play new music, because we think it's the right thing to do, but we don't play too much of it, because we'd scare our audience. Does this make sense? Is there any real conviction behind it? Shouldn't the people who don't want to hear new music rise up and say, "That's enough! Don't torture our ears with this junk!" And shouldn't the people who support new music rise up just as strongly, and yell, "We're not putting up with this either! We're going out to find ways to do all the new music we want!"

I know -- I'm being unfair. I'm imagining the aggrieved faces of many fine people I know in this business, people who really love new music, but who work inside the mainstream, and need to be practical. If it weren't for them, the mainstream would be worse than it is, and composers might get their works played a lot less often. (As a composer myself, I wouldn't like that.)

And yet it's refreshing to see someone (like the Toronto Symphony) take a radical stand, on either side of the question. It's refreshing to see someone get up and say, "Look, there's a huge elephant in the room, and nobody dares to talk about it. So we're going to find a way to get the elephant out of here."

Will someone now say, "We love the elephant! And we're going to find a way to show everyone just how fabulous their lives are going to be when the elephant really cuts loose"?

In the past two days, I've talked to two arts professionals who each told me the same troubling thing -- that subscription sales have been dropping strongly, not just in music, but in the other performing arts. (And, within the music world, not just for orchestras, but for opera companies as well. As one of these two people said, the conventional wisdom is that orchestras are in trouble while opera companies are doing fine, but the reality is otherwise.)

I haven't tried to check what these two people told me, but they're both in a position to know what they're talking about, and certainly know what's going on in whatever institutions they might work with. And the implications are dire. I'll speak here of music institutions, because they're the ones I know best. But I wouldn't be surprised if the same conditions held throughout the performing arts.

If subscriptions drop very strongly -- as part of a long term trend -- major classical music institutions are in big trouble. Why? Because they expect to sell a major portion (typically well over half) of their seats by subscription, and their staffing, skills, and marketing budgets have all taken shape with that in mind. Or, to put it differently, selling seats by subscription is what they know how to do, and, at present, also what they can best afford to do. If soon they have to sell most of their seats one at a time, to what the trade calls "single-ticket buyers," they won't -- unless they make big, changes -- have the people, skills, or money to do that.

Why are subscription sales dropping? Both people I talked to said the same thing. The one I talked to today has just done a large-scale audience study for a major music institution outside New York. Former subscribers were asked why they didn't subscribe, and their answers all were more or less the same: "There's too much else to do." "I just don't have time." "I can't commit myself to go to performances that far in advance." The conventional wisdom says that people in their 30s and 40s can be expected to talk this way, but now the audience members doing it are in their 50s and 60s, or in other words the age at which people used to be counted on to subscribe.

The other person I talked to reports the same thing. How long has all this been going on? For a long time. I first heard of it in the mid-1990s, though it may have started before that. Major institutions began to discover that they were selling fewer tickets by subscription, and that they had to work harder (and spend more money) to make those sales.

But now, if I'm to believe what I'm told, the tide is running out at a much faster pace. Some people in the arts believe that we may have arrived at what, in a much-quoted book, Malcolm Gladwell calls a "tipping point," a moment in history where something small all at once becomes a stampede. The reasons for this may be obvious or obscure. If we speculate about classical subscriptions, we might guess that people now coming into their 50s and 60s grew up with pop culture, and are less interested in classical music than previous generations were. Or we might speculate that there's simply more to do now -- more arts, for instance (more theater companies, more dance companies, more museums, more music groups), not to mention competition from movies, home theater and the Internet.

Or maybe the tempo of life has changed, and people put off making choices as long as they can. One of the people I talked to says there's been a longterm decline in the time between a ticket purchase, and the date of the performance the ticket is for. The decline, he says, is very sharp; he calls it "logarithmic."

But whichever theory anybody favors -- and all of them might be correct -- the facts are the same. People who once might have made room in their budgets and their schedules for classical concert or opera subscriptions seem not to be doing that any more, and classical music institutions will have to adapt.

Here's something I found in Crescendo 75, a really marvelous book published by the Indianapolis Symphony, to celebrate their 75th anniversary:

The issues surrounding a less-than-52-week season [which became an issue for orchestras in the mid-1960s] caused the public to take a look at what these highly-trained professionals had been doing to put bread on the table during the periods of time they were not being paid to perform. An article in The Indianapolis Star of August 23, 1964, shed some light on the typical exploits of those who were forced to lay down their instruments for the tools of another trade. Violinist Sidney Szathmary sold lawnmowers at Sears, bassist Herb Guy served as music therapist at Central State Hospital, violinist Al Safford traveled as a tour guide with Miller Tours, violinist Bob Zimmer sold cameras at Hoosier Photo, percussionist Ralph Lillard sold insurance, trumpeter Bob Day was a bricklayer, cellist Bruce Klingbeil and violist Herb Congsdon tuned pianos, clarinetist Achille Rossi worked in the warehouse at Haag Drugs, and hornist Phil Huffman created his own painting company that employed fellow hornist John Miller and violinist Kirke Walker, among others. More than a few ISO musicians found "off-season" work with the Indianapolis Park Department in jobs ranging from trash pick-up to organizing children's activities, and many others were substitute teachers in school systems still in session.

Note the dilemma here. Many musicians, without professional training in anything but music, and, worse still, occupied much of the year playing in the orchestra, couldn't hold professional jobs outside the orchestra season. So they had to take fairly menial work. (I'd bet, too, that the orchestra didn't pay them very much.) Would many musicians accept this today? Maybe when they're young, but at the height of their careers?

No way. So it would be quite a shock for musicians if the classical music business had to contract. And, I think, for everybody else. I've heard talk about the major institutions being in trouble, but smaller ones possibly surviving, especially new music groups. One problem with this is that most classical musicians, even new music specialists, make most of their living from work in and around the classical music mainstream. So if the mainstream can't employ musicians any more, or employs them notably less than it does now, who's going to hire them? How will they make a living?

I don't think the pay cuts that orchestras now look for are drastic enough to make life impossible for classical musicians, but where could this go in the future? Suppose orchestras start seeing drastic drops in, let's say, subscription sales -- from renewal rates around 80%, as they often are now, down to 50% or 60%. What kind of cutbacks will that lead to? We all know that playing classical music isn't any guaranteed way to make a living, but what happens if things get a lot worse? How many people will study music professionally? And what then will happen even to the parts of the field that now seem artistically interesting? I suppose they'll survive -- it's always artists who, in the last resort, support the arts. But that could get a lot harder to do.

Footnote: Anne and I were talking last night about how many -- how extraordinarily many -- classical music performing groups there are in New York. (Anybody would be struck by that, receiving, as we do, a barrage of publicity announcing everyone's new season.) Does this mean classical music is healthy? It suddenly struck me: New York has many classical performing groups because it has so many classical musicians. And so if the mainstream classical business declined (measured, for instance, by the amount of paying freelance work available), we might initially see even more independent groups -- because musicians, hurting for jobs, might try to create work on their own. (I'm just speculating, of course.)

(Crescendo 75 is marvelous, by the way, because it's full of real information instead of glossy hype, and is written seriously but with lots of humor. It makes you want to hear the orchestra, and -- I hope -- value it as an important part of the community, both in the past and now. Congratulations to the Indianapolis Symphony, and everyone involved in putting the book together, especially Thomas N. Akins, the orchestra's former pincipal timpanist and public relations director, who wrote the text.)

I'm back from vacation, much refreshed, back to work, but a little frightened of the schedule I, like many New York professionals, take too much for granted -- constant pressure, too much to do, a whirlwind of deadlines, opportunities, and work-for-hire, which all become more than a little demoralizing.

Maybe that's related to what I want to talk about today. When we imagine the future of classical music, we think a lot about externals -- a larger, younger, more excited audience, less formal concerts, more new music played, a sense that classical music might become more important in our culture. But we don't think much about performances themselves, and too often, I think, we picture those going on much as they do now, but in a different atmosphere, as if what's wrong now is simply our presentation, and that the performances themselves could easily appeal to many more people, if only we could get those people listening.

Is that true? I doubt it. The way we play classical music is part of our larger classical music culture; if that culture changes, surely the performances change, too. And certainly performances were different in the past, when classical music really was more central to the world. They were freer, more flexible, and above all more individual.

This -- though I've known it for a long time -- is brought home to me by Robert Philip's book Performing Music in an Age of Recording, recommended to me by Barney Sherman of Iowa Public Radio (thanks, Barney!). Philip (I've just ordered his earlier book, Early Recordings and Musical Style) documents many fascinating things, including this blockbuster: That Brahms, among others, talked about taking what we'd consider very great liberties with his scores (large tempo changes, extremes of dynamics) when they were performed for the first time, so the audience could more easily follow the shape and flow of the music.

I've italicized those words because I can't too strongly emphasize them. The purpose of performance was to convey what's in the music. An audience that doesn't know a piece can't follow it so easily, so the performer has to help. Later, when more people have heard the work (and when a symphony, let's say, has circulated in piano arrangements, so people have a chance to play it at home; this of course was before recordings existed), then it can be played with fewer or more limited tempo and dynamic variation, because people listening don't need the extra help.

This is a mind-blower. We don't think, these days, that we have to change performances to help an audience with classical music. Our ethic is just the opposite: The music, we think, is untouchable, and the audience must do all the work, to learn how to approach the masterpieces that we play. If we help the audience, we do it by talking to them, by explaining the music in words.

But what if we took our lead from Brahms, and played the music differently? What if we remembered that we have to reach an audience, and showed our listeners in our performance what they should be listening for? We talk so much about attracting a new and younger audience, but what, exactly, are we offering them? Is the music more forbidding and austere than it needs to be -- more forbidding and austere, in fact, than its composers intended?

This, of course, gets into larger questions of performance, questions about how even performances for an experienced audience should go. As I've said, there was much for informality, much more flexibility, and much more individuality in the way classical music was played in past generations, quite apart from any changes made to introduce new works. Simply returning to that practice ought to make classical music a lot more accessible, something I'll talk about in future posts.