April 2005 Archives

All week I've been part of a blog on the future of orchestras. This hasn't been public; it's for people taking part in the Mellon Foundation's Orchestra Forum, a long-term funding project involving 14 orchestras, which is about to half its semi-annual retreat. The blog (moderated, and wonderfully, by ArtsJournal's own Doug McClennan) was meant to focus everyone on the subjects to be discussed at the retreat, and I'm sure it did that.

Generalities aside, this means I had a week of blogging with orchestra administrators, board members, and musicians, along with some sympathetic outsiders. And the discussion was wonderful -- stimulating, thoughtful, full of excitement and ideas.

Here are two posts from this blog, quoted here with permission of the Mellon Foundation and the people who wrote the posts. If orchestras really did what these two posts propose, we'd be in a fabulous place.

First, something from John Shibley, a long-time management consultant and expert on systems theory, who now works for an energy company, and serves as a fellow of the Orchestra Forum (along with me, Liz Lerman -- a choreographer, though it's misleading to pin any label on anyone as thoughtful and full of feeling as Liz -- and Paul DiMaggio, a very smart and sensitive sociologist at Princeton. And please, don't think I'm quoting this because John keeps mentioning my name. It's his idea that counts:

So, after all the Orchestra Forum blogging, all that writing, and even more striking for me, all that reading of everyone's exciting thoughts…I went to an orchestra concert. The Baltimore Symphony at Carnegie Hall.

My first reaction? "My God, why are they dressed like that?" Now of course this isn't a criticism of the Baltimore Symphony. Any orchestra on that stage would have been dressed the same way. And this wasn't a considered reaction. It came right from my gut, and took me by surprise. I wasn't taking a posiition, intellectual or ideological, on how orchestras should dress. I was honestly surprised. Of course I know they dress like that, but…after all those discussions, I'd started to picture orchestras differently.

And at intermission I noticed something else. Many people in the audience were wearing casual clothes. At the Carnegie Cafe, at least, maybe only one out of every three men was wearing a tie. So the formality on stage seemed even weirder.

The program also seemed too long. Maybe that was because it was really two programs -- a tender, wry, and yearning new Giya Kancheli piece and the Shostakovich first violin concerto, both with Gidon Kremer as soloist, and then La Mer and La Valse. The first half was so good, the music so strong, Kremer so completely convincing, that at intermission many people (including even someone from the Baltimore staff) said, "Why do we need to hear anything more?"

So if we think concerts should be shorter, here we had a concert that was really two perfectly programmed smaller concerts. I could imagine doing each separately on a single evening, one at 7:30, say, and one at 9:30. You could sell separate tickets, with a discount to anyone who wanted to see both programs. Over a weekend, you could change the order of the two programs on different days.

I'm sure there are many practicalities to work out. But isn't it worth thinking about?

I'm grateful for Peter Dobrin's fine reporting in his Philadelphia Inquirer story about the Philadelphia Orchestra's new record deal.

I'm sure some people want the meaning of the story to be something like, "Philadelphia Orchestra Gets Record Contract." After years in the desert, with no record deal, the orchestra has reversed the trend in the industry and now has a contract with the Finnish Ondine label, etc., etc., etc.

Ondine, of course, is not quite Columbia Masterworks, which for decades recorded the Philadelphia Orchestra in the full glare of national publicity, and distribution to record stores everywhere. But that's the least of it. Dobrin (and this is why I admire him) tracked down and printed the inner details of this record deal, providing facts and numbers of the kind that don't usually see the light of day. We all know, or ought to know, that classical recording (especially big projects, like orchestral CDs) aren't really done on a commercial basis. They're paid for by the artists being recorded. And here it is in black and white. The Philadelphia Orchestra will pay $75,000 to record each CD. If sales reach 10,000 units, the orchestra will be vaguely in the ballpark of breaking even, expecting to recoup (or so it says) $50,000 to $75,000 from that many sales.

Will the CDs sell 10,000 copies? Not likely. A classical CD that sells on that level is a runaway hit. Sales of even a few thousand are considered a success. Some major-label big recording projects in the last couple of decades have sold, no kidding, in three figures, which is to say just a few hundred sales in their first year on the market.

The orchestra, of course, didn't say how long it might take to sell 10,000 copies of its CDs, and that's a fair question. Classical recording, in the old days, when it was profitable, worked by keeping releases in the catalogue for years. It was the entire catalogue that was profitable, not every individual release (and, above all, not every individual release in its first year out). Now Naxos works that way; few other labels do. One reason for all the crossover projects on the major classical labels is the frequent demand from corporate owners that each release have a shot at being profitable. Or, alternatively, that the label as a whole make more profit that classical labels used to make in the past.

So what's the significance of this deal? To me, it's two things. First, that the orchestra got its musicians to agree to the recordings, with no promise of payment until the records made some money. (And how many years might that take? Compare, by the way, a related success in Cleveland, where the orchestra got the musicians to agree to let their performances at the BBC Proms be streamed on the Internet, which then made it possible for the Cleveland Orchestra to be booked at the Proms for the first time in years.) And second, that the orchestra is making a big commitment to recording, with money out of its own pocket. 

These aren't small things. Obviously the CDs, if they're good, well packaged, and well marketed, can help the orchestra. They're calling cards, proof of success, items which, distributed properly through Philadelphia, can add a lot to the orchestra's presence. I imagine that they'll help in getting tour dates, too.

But I'd think orchestras would do best by making recordings and giving them away, along with downloads and concerts streamed free on the Internet. Philadelphia's budget, for this extensive new recording project, might not allow that. Or at least might not have been drawn up with free distribution in mind.

But for me, the equation is pretty simple. Orchestras, at present, aren't likely to make money from recording. They badly need exposure. Put these things together, and it seems very tempting to make recordings and give them away by the thousand, while streaming every concert on the Internet (and probably putting video screens outside concert halls, so everybody can see and hear what's going on inside; when the Houston Grand Opera did this with a few opera performances, I understand that ticket sales went up).

Let me repeat. Orchestras -- almost all classical music organizations -- need exposure. Free distribution of recordings would be a good way to get it. And after a while, when the free distribution is a great success, and people really want the recordings, the downloads, and the streaming broadcasts, that's when you start charging for the concerts people want most…

Three notable newspaper stories, in the past few days.

1. The Boston Globe, April 24. Indie rock is thriving. Terrific bands, exposure on TV shows, buzz spreading on the Internet, six-figure sales, which in the case of Death Cab for Cutie are now ten times larger than they used to be. All this largely without commercial radio play. ''The Internet is challenging the corporate clutch on both radio and retail," says the founder of Kill Rock Stars, an independent label.

2. The New York Times, today (April 28). Radio won't play current rock any more. Stations are changing their formats. They'll play alternative-rock hits from the '80s and '90s, but not the current stuff.

3. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 27. For four years, the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh, which the story calls "a showcase of visual art," has been "consciously programming music with equal artistic relevance." What music is that? Alternative acts like Lucinda Williams and Sonic Youth. This isn't music with a huge popular following. Sonic Youth is famous for noise and dissonance; the mainstream classical audience couldn't handle its classical equivalent, should there be such a thing. (Its latest album, though, sounds a little more tame.) As a media partner, the festival enlisted WYEP, described as "a diminutive but influential listener-supported station" [my emphasis] that plays alternative music. (A very nice station, too. I was on it once, talking about the concerts I do with the Pittsburgh Symphony. They were completely sympathetic to classical music.)

What's the moral here? Indie pop is art music. It's not designed for a large audience. Increasingly, you won't hear it on the radio. One radio station that plays has to be supported by its listeners. Indie pop is part of a Pittsburgh festival of visual art. Not that this is anything new to people who know pop. Rock bands were doing non-popular art music as far back as the late '60s, if you count the Velvet Underground. But people in classical music often don't seem to know this. They talk as if all pop was simple-minded junk for teens. While in fact pop has developed its own art music. This is a huge threat to classical music. Do we understand this? We talk about attracting a younger audience. But this younger audience already has art music of its own. Why do they need us?

When I first thought of writing all this, I was going to ask why the Three Rivers Festival doesn't book any classical acts. But the answer is obvious, isn't it? A better question would be this: What could classical music people (especially new music people) in Pittsburgh do to get these bookings?

(One caveat. Some of the pop acts at the Three Rivers Festival this summer might not be mass-market, but they're lots of fun -- Buckwheat Zydeco, for instance. But on the other hand, Cowboy Junkies, Aimee Mann, and Nanci Griffiths, also on this summer's schedule, are quiet and serious.)

A couple of weeks ago I asked a question -- how many people would like to see more inside information in reviews and other writing about classical music? As an example, I told a story from the New York Philharmonic. Semyon Bychkov had replaced Christoph von Dohnanyi one weekend, and had substituted the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony for most of the music Dohnanyi had planned to conduct. The Shostakovich, though, is a very expensive piece, because it needs many extra brass players, and so the Philharmonic must have had some special reason for wanting Bychkov to do it. (Which, as I mentioned, might simply have been that they needed Bychkov badly, and this is what he wanted to conduct). Thus my question -- would readers have wanted the New York Times review to talk about all this?

I got nine responses; eight people said they wanted the inside information. I also asked people in Pittsburgh Symphony audience, when I was in Pittsburgh leading "talkback" sessions, in which the audience gets to talk to the Pittsburgh Symphony. Almost everyone I asked said they wanted the information, too, the only exception being a polished, well-traveled board member, who knows all this stuff himself, but didn't think others in the audience would care.

In a moment, I'll quote some of the responses, which were quite compelling. But first, the real reasons why the Philharmonic could afford the change, as communicated to me by a number of people in the industry. First, Dohnanyi's fee is a lot higher than Bychkov's. So the substitution saved the Philharmonic money, which could then go to pay the extra brass. But that's only the beginning. Dohnanyi had planned to conduct the Janacek Sinfonietta, which needs nine extra trumpets! So the orchestra had already budgeted for extra brass, and could schedule the Shostakovich Seventh without losing any sleep at all over money. They were already saving a bundle on the conductor's fee.

And now the responses. From the person who didn't want to go behind the scenes:

Yes, he's glamorous. Yes, he's polished. Yes, he's a wizard of the podium, or some such hackneyed thing. And yes, he's full of larger than life energy.

But does anybody really want to hear him? Or, more to the point, will they want to keep on hearing him?

What music do we identify him with? Itallian opera. This isn't a criticism, merely a fact. That's the repertoire he's best known for. And otherwise, well, sure, he conducts other things, but do many of us have any sense of what he does with them? Are any of us looking forward to Muti's Brahms, Muti's Stravinsky, Muti's Strauss, Muti's Berg, Muti's Wagner? Or Muti's Mahler? Or Muti's favorite living composers?

I've heard him conduct some of the names on the list above, and apart from remembering sumptuous, disciplined, and energetic performances, musical for sure, but in a somewhat generalized way, I can't form any mental picture of what he does with anything but Verdi and Bellini. I'm not at all certain he puts any personal stamp on anything. I have some idea that he likes to conduct tonal Italian 20th century music (Petrassi at the Philharmonic last week, a CD of Nino Rota's orchestral music). And then my understanding of him stops.

I'm sure I'm not being thorough or completely fair. I'm sure he did all kinds of good things at the Philadelphia Orchestra, including new pieces by Americans. I'm sure he did well with them. But has any of it stuck in many people's memories?

I fear, that if he gets the Chicago job, or, down the line, the New York job, he'll wow everybody for a little while, and then bore everybody. What would I look forward to hearing him conduct? Verdi, sure. And beyond that? Nothing. (Except, out of maybe morbid curiosity, something that seems utterly outside his world, like the Mahler 9th.)

If I'm wrong, please tell me. (And remember that I'm not saying he's a bad conductor. Far from it. I just don't see what, apart from generalized glamour and energy, he has to offer. He's been a top conductor for decades now. But do any of us take our prized Muti recordings

I've been very critical of classical music press releases, which typically say nothing that would give me or anybody else -- and especially someone new to classical music -- any reason to go to the concerts they publicize.

Biographies of classical musicians -- the ones we find on press releases, and in program books -- have the same problem. They're deadly. Long blank lists of distinctions and superlatives, and never anything to tell you what kind of artist the musician in question might be. This gets especially annoying when the musician is world-famous, and we're asked to read a mind-glazing list of all the orchestras he or she has played concerti with. (I mean, if you're Emanuel Ax, of course you've appeared with all the major orchestras in the world, and you know what? We already know their names.)

Here's a wonderful exception, a  biography of David Del Tredici that showed up in the program of a concert by the Da Ponte Quartet, in Weill Recital Hall. They were playing the New York premiere of David's string quartet, which they'd commissioned. Here's David's bio:

Generally recognized as the father of the Neo-Romantic movement in music, David Del Tredici has been awarded numerous prizes (including the Pulitzer) and has been commissioned and performed by nearly every major American and European orchestral ensemble. Much of his work has offered elaborate vocal settings of James Joyce, Lewis Carroll and - more recently - a cavalcade of contemporary American poets, often celebrating a gay sensibility. Of late, he has ventured into the more intimate realm of chamber music (in addition to tonight's premiere String Quartet No. 1, he has written A Grand Trio, which the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio brought to life). Still, the extravagant Del Tredici remains at large: In May 2005 Robert Spano conducts the Atlanta Symphony and Chorus in the premier of Paul Revere's Ride (a setting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's landmark poem), while November will see the premiere performances of Rip Van Winkle, for narrator and orchestra (Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony), in which Del Tredici collaborates with his life-partner, Ray Warman, in retelling Washington Irving's classic tale.

This is readable, even lively. And it tells you things you want to know -- what kind of composer David is, and even something of his personality.

(The Da Ponte Quartet, as the New York Times review pointed out, filled the hall with very vocal fans, something very unusual in a New York debut. Some of those fans came from Maine, where the quartet lives, and where it's built enough enthusiastic support to pay for this concert, and to commission David's piece. Clearly the quartet -- which plays with lots of spirit -- is doing something right. Classical music may be losing support nationwide, but who's to say we can't build new support locally? Full disclosure -- the quartet is looking at my music. But I'd write exactly the same way even if they weren't.)

I'm looking at the New York Times' "Arts & Leisure" section, today's edition (it's April 17).

The lead story -- "The Long Goodbye: Why the most celebrated departures in njetwork news are still some of the most visible faces on television" -- doesn't concern me here. We all know what it's about, and I don't see a classical music connection. (Hmm…why are the most celebrated dead composers still some of the most visible voices in concert halls? But let's move on.)

What does interest me are the other two front-page stories:

The Strangest Sound in Hip-Hop Goes National: Chopped and screwed and slowed to distortion, the rhythm born in Houston is leaving home [by the wonderful Kelefa Sanneh]

Go Figure: Trendy artists pick up an old-fashioined habit: staring at nude bodies [by Carol Kino]

These caught my eye at once. What would the strangest sound in hip-hop be? You don't have to know hip-hop inside out to be curious about that. You just have to know that hip-hop is a dominant pop genre these days. And then when you read the story, the strangest sound turns out to be genuinely interesting -- slowed-down, distorted, hallucinatory. Classic hip-hop has mostly been driving, rhythmic, even aggressive. This Houston sound is something new.

And the art story is, if anything, more fascinating still. I'll quote the start of it:

The mood was relaxed, even familiar on a recent Tuesday evening as the painter Will Cotton welcomed visitors to his Lower East Side loft. As he set out bowls of chocolate Easter candy, the artist Inka Essenhigh, who first made her name with paintings of anime-like creatures, pinned paper to an easel. Delia Brown, an art world provocateur who specializes in society scenes starring herself, relaxed in a chair with a drawing pad at the ready. The multimedia and performance artist Guy Richards Smit handed Mr. Cotton the first CD of the night -- a -post-punk mix -- and unpacked his watercolor kit.

And then a model (who turns out to be a stripper) undresses, and the assembled guests, all artists, start to draw her.

Only a few years ago, the idea of artists gathering to paint from a model would have seemed impossibly old-fashioned and hokey - and if the model was female and nude, sexist to boot. Yet for nearly three years now, a number of artists - not students putting charcoal to paper for the first time, but successful artists with established styles and audiences of their own - have flocked to Mr. Cotton's weekly invitation-only sessions.

"There's something kind of fun about doing something so geeky, so nerdy, so traditional," Ms. Essenhigh said. "To do something so anti-conceptual and anti-Modernism feels really good, as if it were going to lead to helping you express things."

Of course, the meaning of "modernism" here is very different from what it would be in the classical music world. In our shop, it means composers like Carter, Wuorinen, and Boulez, the musical equivalent of abstract painting. As used here by Inka Essenhigh, it just means prevailing current trends.

Here are thoughts from the opening pages of Paul Light's book, High Performance: How Robust Organizations Achieve Extraordinary Results. It summarizes lessons learned from more than 10,000 studies done over many years by the RAND Corporation, and it's fascinating to read. (How did Volvo, which hadn't changed its ways in many years, figure out how to introduce a successful SUV? Why did Pearl Harbor take the U.S. by surprise, when all the information necessary to suspect that an attack was coming was available?)

One of the book's mantras is that we now live in an age of rapid, unpredictable change. So organizations have to be prepared to make rapid changes in their own work.

Thus, in the opening pages, we read:

In a perfect world, organizations would not worry about surprise and vulnerability. There would be one future and one future only. It would be steady and predictable, a simple extension of the past.…[Which of course is exactly the assumption that lies behind the planning orchestras have always done.]

High performance requires more than a robust strategy that will succeed in a variety of scenarios. It also requires an organization that is among the first to sense a change in probabilities across a range of probable futures; among the fastest to deploy resources against threats, surprises, and opportunities; among the most creative in forging a presence in the evolving future; and among the very best in moving as a whole into whatever the evolving future holds. In a word, these organizations are robust. They are alert to change, agile in deployment, adaptive in practice and product, and aligned in purpose.

And then this:

Robust organizations think in futures (plural) tense. They plan against landscapes of possible futures; accept the inevitability of surprise; challenge their assumptions about the futures they face;  reduce regret by adapting robust, adaptive plans, avoiding unintended consequences, and reducing vulnerability; and focus on the direct, indirect, and cascading effects of what they do. As such, they are highly alert.

Does any of this describe any classical music organization we know? Nominations welcome!

(Many thanks to my friend Jesse Rosen, for recommending this book. My comments of course express my thoughts, not necessarily his.)

One way to define the classical music crisis is in terms of shrinkage, starting to happen now, and maybe accelerating in the future -- shrinkage of the number of people interested in classical music, and thus in the market for it, and then in the organizations that perform it.

So for anyone who thinks this is a danger, or, worse, even a reality right now, a story linked on ArtsJournal yesterday is really sobering. It's from the Chicago Sun-Times (their music critic, Wynne Delacoma wrote it), and it's about staff cutbacks at the once-triumphant Lyric Opera. But Wynne, in what I think is a piece of impressive journalism, really did her homework, and reported problems at other opera companies, which put what's happening in Chicago in a troubling context.

I'll quote the most telling passage in the story:

Lyric's year-round staff will shrink from 101 to 90.…

"This is the first time we've ever done anything like this,'' [general director William] Mason said of the staff cuts. "The idea of doing [staff cuts] earlier was anathema to us, and we wanted to try to avoid it. But when we started looking to the future, we realized reductions were going to have to be made. We've always been very lean, and we tried desperately to avoid this.''

Lyric has been struggling to keep its annual budget, typically close to $50 million, balanced for the past three seasons. This season's budget is higher than usual, about $58 million, because of Lyric's 50th anniversary celebrations and three sets of performances of Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelung.'' The company ended 2002-03 with a $1.1 million deficit, but closed 2003-04 with a $700,000 surplus.

"After 2002-03, we looked at an economy that was changing,'' Mason said. "That was the first year [in 15 years] we didn't sell 100 percent of our tickets. We really didn't know where the economy was going, and we had to start to think about economies that could be made. Obviously, the very fact that we changed those two operas in 2003-04 [substituting Gounod's 'Faust' and Gilbert and Sullivan's 'The Pirates of Penzance' for two more expensive, less popular operas] was a response to the economic situation.''

In recent years, many major arts organizations throughout the country have sacrificed staff positions in the quest for a balanced budget.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, struggling with shrinking ticket sales and relatively stagnant annual donations, made similar staff cuts in 2001. Through attrition and general belt-tightening, the CSO's full-time staff has shrunk by about one-third, or 50 positions, from its 2000 level. The CSO's current full-time staff is 102.

The San Francisco Opera, which has produced up to 11 operas per season in recent years compared with Lyric's eight, suffered much more severe financial problems than Lyric's in 2002 and '03, incurring deficits of $7 million and $3.8 million, respectively. The company's total budget and staff have been cut by more than 20 percent over the past three years, and its season reduced to nine operas.

We don't get reporting like this in New York. One question, though, is why people blame these things on the economy. That's an optimistic explanation for the problems, since if the economy is bad right now, it'll probably get better. But then we ought to ask why previous downturns didn't have the same results (note that the Lyric Opera never made staff cuts like these before). And we also have to ask why the downturn has lasted so long, and hit the classical music world so hard. Someone at a major orchestra told me not long ago that donations were persistently down for each of the past four years, and that this was the longest decline he'd ever seen.

So maybe there's something else going on -- maybe (once again) there's a decline in interest in classical music, and maybe this decline has picked up speed. It's easy to see how that might happen. Suppose there's a long-term decline in interest in classical music. Of course younger people are the most affected. So now imagine the pool of people who might be interested in classical music, or in other words the potential classical music audience. The older people, 50 and above (roughly speaking), are the ones who buy the tickets. Up till recently, the people in that age group had grown up at a time when interest in classical music was still relatively high, so when they reached ticket-buying age, they bought tickets. And donated money.

But as they grow older, they leave the active audience. And the pool of potential ticket-buyers changes. The younger people who come into it grew up at a time when interest in classical music was declining. So as they grow older, they buy fewer tickets than previous generations did.

With each passing year, then, the pool of potential ticket-buyers changes. In the old days, so to speak, once people reached the ticket-buying age, around 50, a reasonable percentage of them -- enough to keep classical music in business, anyway -- bought tickets.

But now time passes. The older people get older. Younger people coming into the ticket-buying pool are less likely to be interested in classical music. For a while this doesn't matter, because new people coming into prime ticket-buying age still grew up in the days when classical music was more popular. So ticket sales remain strong.

Still more time passes. Now a new group of people starts to be 50 years old. They're the first to grow up in the age when classical music became less popular. So now the prime ticket-buyers -- the people of prime ticket-buying age who actually buy a lot of tickets -- are a little older. They're 52 and older, maybe, not 50 and older. Ticket sales begin to fall, though this might be hard for any individual institution to detect, because there's always a natural fluctuation, due to many factors (the economy, programming, the weather, many more). So a year or two of decline might not mean anything. It's easy to think that it could be reversed.

More time passes. More older people leave the ticket-buying pool, and more younger people enter it. Again the people entering prime ticket-buying age grew up at a time when classical music's popularity was falling. Again they won't buy as many tickets as people from earlier generations. So now, let's say, it's people 55 and older who are still buying tickets at the old rate. People 50 to 55 buy fewer tickets. There's even more decline in overall sales. Maybe now everyone starts to notice the decline. It's talked about. "The economy," people say. "9/11. Competing entertainment options." But still people think that sales can go up. The economy will improve. 9/11 was a long time ago. Better marketing will make classical music more visible, more likely to be chosen, among all the competing forms of art and entertainment.

More years go by. The same process continues. After a while, the prime ticket-buyers are 60 years old. then 62. Then 65. A larger proportion of people from the prime ticket-buying age grew up at a time when classical music was getting less popular. They buy fewer tickets. At some point, the decline in sales gets inescapable. People start saying, "We've reached a tipping point." Or, "Maybe it's not a change in weather. Maybe it's a change of climate."

That's where we seem to be right now. Or at least these things are what people now are saying. Not that anyone is certain -- it's all "maybe." But people think it's possible, at least, that a long-term decline has set in, which can only be blamed on large-scale changes in our culture. (Which, of course, are pretty obviously taking place.) Of course, the ages I used as I presented my theory are hypothetical. I'm not saying ticket-buyers now are mostly in their 60s. The latest figures I've been told about, in fact, show the average age for people buying orchestra tickets at 57, up from 55 a few years ago. (Uh-oh!)

These figures need interpretation, though, because I think they're for all orchestral events. The core subscription series might sell to even older people, while the average age of someone buying tickets for a family or holiday concert might be younger. I'd love to know the age of people buying tickets to the serious classical events; if my theory is correct, it might be rising faster than we think.

Here's something I might add to my list of ways that classical music is in crisis: Even music students now don't seem to have the same interest in classical music that students used to have, years ago. (And as they did when I was a graduate student in composition at the Yale School of Music, from 1972 to 1974).

He says that a consortium of British commercial companies involved with classical music — Gramophone magazine and Classic FM were two of them; I don't remember the others — surveyed young classical musicians, kids who play in youth orchestras. Almost none of these kids, the survey found, would even consider reading Gramophone. They think it's a magazine for old people. And almost none wanted to go to classical concerts. My source was quite shaken by this news.

Britain -- as has been reported several times, in news stories linked on ArtsJournal -- is also seeing a decline in the number of students studying the less popular orchestral instruments, like the viola and the bassoon. This decline, the stories say, is reaching crisis proportions. I have to say, though, that I haven't heard anything like this in the US (and I've asked about it).

I was browsing in Coliseum Books, a very fine and serious bookstore in New York, and I noticed that they sell a few CDs. Some were fascinating compilations from the All-Music Guide (African rap, for instance), and some were low-rent, like a two-CD collection of Sousa marches with nothing on the box to say who played them.

But the worst, the nadir, the rock bottom was something called Classical Music for the Reader, which claims to feature "specially selected triumphs in classical music appealing specifically to the dedicated reader."

And so what does the music turn out to be? The same stuff you'd find on any classical greatest-hits CD, aimed at easy listening: Handel's Largo (more respectably known as "Ombra mai fu"), the "Air on the G String," Schubert's "Ave Maria," "Clair de lune," the Largo from the New World Symphony, the "Meditation" from Thais. There's nothing literary about this, nothing that's involved with reading. I'd guess the company that did this simply took some other compilation they'd produced, and repackaged it with a bookstore-friendly title.

It's really a shame, especially since a classical anthology honestly aimed at serious readers could be a delight. The music on it, I'd think, would have to be quiet, on the whole, to convey what it feels like to read. Some of it could be settings of literary texts (I'd avoid warhorses like the "Erl-King," wonderful as it is, and go instead for Hugo Wolf and Fauré). Some could be music meant to evoke literary themes. And some, maybe the most interesting category, could be music that simply sounds literary, by which I mean thoughtful, intelligent, and a little offbeat, something like, maybe, an excerpt from Stravinsky's Apollo.

This also would be a chance for classical music to reach out to an important audience. One of the saddest things in the classical music crisis is the desertion (so to speak) of artists and intellectuals, along with educated, thoughtful people of all kinds. You just don't find scholars, scientists, painters, and choreographers in the classical concert hall. A few, sure -- but these are classical music fans, who tend (at least in my experience) to enjoy classical music just as uncritically as lawyers and podiatrists. (No disrespect meant to these professions.) Classical music just doesn't have an audience of artists and intellectuals, who listen artistically and intellectually. A CD aimed seriously at serious readers might be a small step toward fixing this problem.

And speaking of Pittsburgh (see two posts earlier), the Symphony has marvelous photos of its musicians, which is uses, in effect, to brand the orchestra. They're all in a delightful book, posed in groups by sections, and individually. And then they're used on the cover of the program book, on posters outside Heinz Hall, where the Symphony plays, and in cutouts standing in various places inside the hall.

Here's one of them, showing the oboists, from a program book cover a few months ago. It's friendly, human, inviting, easily the best cover I've ever seen on any orchestra's program book. And this is one of the less lively photos the Symphony uses!

There's some planning behind this. As the Symphony looks toward a future with three co-conductors, it wants to feature its musicians, to be the face of the orchestra in place of the single music director whom they've chosen not to have. Or you can turn this around: They chose not to have a music director in part because they wanted the musicians to be their public face.

Seems like a good choice to me. You see the musicians; you want to hear them play. Of course, it helps that the photographs are really good. Credit goes to Alicia Photography, the Pittsburgh company that took them.

Some time ago I wrote about two newspaper articles, one from San Francisco, the other from Cincinnati. Both, I said, seemed to be saying that musical organizations (the San Francisco Opera and the Cincinnati Symphony) were in improved financial shape, when in fact details of the stories made it clear that both were still in trouble.

I wondered why the press sometimes seems to go easy on major classical music institutions. But I'm happy to say that the Cincinnati article misled me. Janelle Gelfand, the music critic at the Cincinnati Enquirer, drew my attention to several stories she'd written over the past two years, one with a business reporter, Cliff Peale. And I'm happy to say that they're doing a stellar job. If every classical music institution in every city (and especially New York) got this kind of scrutiny, the entire field would be better off.

Here are some links:

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2003/08/10/biz_cso10.html

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2003/08/10/biz_cso10rbend.html

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/07/22/loc_cso.22.html

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/02/20/loc_cso.20.html

Good as all these stories are, the very best, for me, is the first, dating from August 10, 2003. You'll see that the orchestra, with its endowment shrinking and its ticket sales and donations falling off, painted a notably brighter picture in its annual financial report than it did in its tax return for the same period. And Gelfand, who caught them at it, says so very firmly.

I was just in Pittsburgh, where I did the last of my "Symphony with a Splash" concerts this season. We shaved someone's head on stage during the Bacchanal from Samson and Dalilah. We asked for volunteers from the audience, and got several, including one player from the Pittsburgh Steelers! I picked someone else, though, who'd caught my eye the moment he stood up.

Our haircutter was both expert and theatrical. She actually shaved the guy's head in rhythm with the music, and paced herself so she'd finish with a flourish, just as the music ended. She bent down and kissed the bald scalp to the final chords.

The audience roared with delight, and gave us a standing ovation. The orchestra seemed to love it, too, to judge from what they said backstage and afterwards, and from their evident interest onstage. They played wonderfully, as if the whole thing tickled them no end.

Of course we had someone planted in the audience, ready to go if we didn't get any real volunteers. But we got them! We also announced that two of our subscribers were getting engaged. It's all so we can create a community with our audience.

But now for something even better. The Symphony's subscription concerts last week featured the three pieces that were finalists for the Masterprize two years ago. Masterprize is a British competition, which finished by having the audience vote on the three final pieces. A group of professionals also voted, and the two votes were combined to determine the winner, which was Christopher Theofanidis's Rainbow Body. (Available on a Telarc CD with that name, played by the Atlanta Symphony with Robert Spano conducting, along with Jennifer Higdon's Blue Cathedral, Barber's First Symphony, and Copland's Appalachian Spring.)

The Pittsburgh Symphony decided to recreate the Masterprize, by playing the three final pieces on the first half of all three subscription concerts last weekend. The people in the audience could vote for their favorites at intermission. Then Emanuel Ax played the Mozart B-flat major piano concerto. After he finished, the votes were tallied, the winner was announced, and the orchestra played the winning vote again. Yakov Kreisberg conducted, and the other two pieces, apart from Theofanidis, were Einstein's Violin, by Robert Henderson, and Tango, by Arturs Maskats.

Rainbow Body won all three nights (which meant the orchestra had to play it six times; they did it bravely). But what's really wonderful is how the audience reacted. They loved it. They got wildly involved in their votes. I led discussions each night with members of the audience, and they were very vocal about which pieces they liked (and which they didn't like), and why. At intermission, I heard, this was a hot topic of conversation. In the men's and ladies' rooms, that's what people talked about. One woman I know came alone to the concert, and was drawn into conversation with others sitting near her. Which piece had she liked best, they wanted to know.

So the experiment was a success. The audience listened, as far as I could judge, a lot harder than they normally might. Best of all, they felt involved. I asked one group what they'd do if the Symphony programmed another piece by any of the three composers. Would they come to hear it? Absolutely! they all said. They'd developed, as far as I could tell, some interest in all three composers. And, sure, we can't take their answers as stone-written gospel; most, I'm sure, might not actually buy a ticket if they saw one of those composers popping up again. But some would. And the mere fact that so many people said they'd want to come indicates more interest, I think, than the normal new-music performance would create.

Seems like a no-brainer, really. Give the audience a reason to feel involved, and -- can you believe it? -- they feel involved.

Semyon Bychkov has been conducting the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony at the New York Philharmonic. He's substituting for Christoph von Dohnanyi, who was going to conduct something else. But for Bychkov, the Philharmonic changed the program to the Shostakovich Seventh.

The New York Times review gave a little background, saying that Bychkov had recorded the symphony. As it happens, he'd also conducted it in Pittsburgh the week before. It wasn't surprising, then, that when he agreed to replace Dohnanyi on short notice he wanted to do the piece again. He had it ready, and he also surely knew that he could make a great effect with it, just as he did in Pittsburgh, where his performance was tremendous.

But it is surprising that the Philharmonic let him do it. The Shostakovich Seventh is a very expensive piece for any orchestra to play, because it needs many extra brass players, who have to be hired at extra cost. When I led discussions with members of the Pittsburgh symphony's audience after Bychkov's performances, some of them -- overwhelmed by the music -- asked why the piece isn't played more often. The answer was that it costs too much.

So here's the Philharmonic, which, like any orchestra, budgets its season ahead of time, and knows exactly how many extra players the budget will allow. Suddenly Bychkov comes along, and they break open the bank for him. I'm not saying this is a bad idea; budgets aside, it's a fabulous thing to do. Bychkov has a powerful way with this piece.

But why did they decide to give him what they wanted? Did they do it because they knew how strong the performances would be, or because Bychkov, doing them a favor by coming on short notice, demanded that they do it? Or, of course, for both reasons.

So here's my question. Should the review have mentioned any of this? Should it at the very least have told readers that the symphony is very expensive to play, and that the Philharmonic did something unusual by putting it on their program when it hadn't been budgeted long in advance? (And, perhaps, that this was an indication either of their respect for Bychkov, or of his clout, or both.)

I've been told that this is "inside information," and that the classical music audience isn't interested in such things. But is that true? Please e-mail me at greg@gregsandow.com and let me know what you think! (I'd especially love to hear from people who aren't classical music professionals.)

Footnote: A while ago I used three Bychkov CDs as random examples of something that's hard to deal with in the classical music business -- the profusion of standard repertoire recordings by people who aren't household names. What are we supposed to do with these recordings? Who's going to buy them? Why should any critic feel impelled -- apart from curiosity, or earnest hope -- to listen to them? My point was valid, but my example was accidentally unfortunate. Now that I've heard Bychkov, I know why I'd want to listen!

Like my post on marketing, what follows comes from conversations with many people, and from one consulting job.

Let's say you run an orchestra, or work in a high position at one. You know you have to change, and one obvious change is to become more accessible, more transparent, more understandable to everybody in your city.

And so you start looking at the face you present to your public. You look at all the printed matter you produce -- your brochures, for instance, and your program book. Pretty quickly you find things that ought to change. In the program book, for instance, there might be a page that your executive director writes, with greetings to the audience, little bits of news, and thank-yous (well deserved) to people who've helped the orchestra.

But maybe this page isn't very interesting. The items in it don't amount to much. They're written boringly. Nobody applied any basic rules of magazine writing, even though your program book is, in effect, a magazine, in which your orchestra presents itself to everyone who comes to hear it. Nobody really tried to make the items interesting. If you figure that you'll always have an audience, that doesn't matter. They're buying tickets anyway. But if you think you need to reach out to new people, you need to do it every way you can. In everything you do, you need to make the orchestra seem lively, interesting, artistic, contemporary.

(And you can't blame the executive director for this problem. There's no reason he or she should be a writer. And, to be honest here, he or she almost certainly doesn't write this page in the program book. It's written by somebody who's paid to do it.)

What can you do? To anyone with magazine or newspaper experience, it's very simple to fix the problem, or at least to start to fix it. Begin by looking at the content. If it's arranged as separate items, which of them is the liveliest, the most important, the most interesting? Start with that one!

And if the items aren't interesting, how can they be improved? Often that's not hard, at least in principle. Suppose you're thanking everyone who gives money to the orchestra. Don't just write a boilerplate thank-you note. ("The Miskatonic Symphony wishes to thank the many people who so generously gave support to all of its activities during the past season.") Make it personal. Quote some people who made donations. Why did they support the orchestra? Find someone who gave money for the first time. What motivated them? Maybe quote your development director about the personal bonds that can develop between your fundraisers and your donors. Find a donor to talk about that.

I won't say that now your program book will read like Vanity Fair, but at least it'll be more interesting. It won't seem so much like an in-house newsletter, or, worse, like a community newspaper. It'll look and feel professional, which means that it'll help people to believe that the orchestra is a capable and lively institution.

But now the problems start. Who's going to make these changes? Very likely you don't have anyone on your staff who can do it. If you did, you might have done these things already. So now you'll have to hire somebody. It's going to cost you time and money.

And is it worth it? Maybe not! If you improve the executive director's page, will you sell more tickets? You probably won't. So it's probably more cost-effective to leave things as they are. And with budgets tight, being cost-effective matters.

This same reasoning applies to almost any small change you might make, at least in the areas we're talking about. (A small change in how you run your box office, if, let's say, it makes it easier for your subscribers to exchange tickets, might make a world of difference.) So it really doesn't pay to change anything!

Except that if you changed everything -- if in every way that you address the public, you were lively, thoughtful, and compelling -- that would make a difference. You'd be more persuasive to a larger audience. You'd start to pull yourself out of the classical music ghetto. You'd seem to be part of the wider world, the world where the audience you want to attract already lives.

So you need to change everything -- but, in practice, you can't change anything. The answer, of course, would be to start with things you really can do, without new staff or funding. It's not always easy to identify those things, but they exist. And then maybe they generate some momentum, making further changes possible.

But at the start, you really do face a dilemma. Changing classical music institutions isn't easy.

Or, really, not a footnote, but a huge piece of art history that had no equivalent in classical music.

I'm in Pittsburgh, doing some work with the symphony. I had a day off today, and went to the Andy Warhol Museum, and was just blown away. It's easy to think of Warhol's work as 80% concept, 20% realization (in the form of a compelling art object), but that's just not true. The color, design, and presence of his pieces (the Mao series, for instance) is really stunning. Reproductions don't begin to do them justice, and when I saw many of them in a single afternoon their force really hit me hard.

And so where was pop art in classical music? You can find a few examples, here and there, but almost all of them would be in music not designed for the mainstream classical concert hall. So basically pop art never happened in classical music. And it especially never happened in the '60s, when Warhol was doing it.

Why not? The simplest answer would simply be to say that the classical concert hall was too respectable. There's an air of sanctity around classical music, and it was even stronger 40 years ago. You just couldn't start doing riffs on Elvis songs, or on Campbell soup jingles. (If that's what the musical equivalent of pop art might have been.) You could do high modernist pieces, like settings of Mallarmé by Pierre Boulez. The mainstream audience may have hated that, but at least it was respectable.

And why did respectability matter so much? Again we come back to the conservatism of classical music. Which, I suddenly realized, is easier to explain than I thought it was. Classical music -- at least as it's currently practiced -- is built around large institutions, like orchestras and opera companies. These are expensive. They take a lot of money to maintain, money that has to renewed year in and year out. Thus the institutions can't afford to alienate people who might give the money. And therefore they're conservative. Of course they also need a large audience, so that makes them conservative, too.

Warhol, by contrast, could just go out and make any art he wanted. (I guess I haven't yet explained why museums showed it, museums also being large institutions, that need lots of money to exist. But maybe they're not as conservative as classical music institutions because the art itself is less conservative.)

Classical music would be much better off right now, if we'd had pop art of our own.