Discovery

We talk a lot about the age of the classical music audience. Generally people now assume it's always been (or at least for generations has been) more or less what it is now, 50 and up. That's what Allan Kozinn said it's been in the essay we're debating on one of my comments pages, and I can't blame him. After all, this is what everyone says.

But is there any data to support this common view? I've never seen any. And in fact I've seen data that opposes it. Some years ago, I found a 1940 book that reports the results of a 1937 study of American orchestras. This study wasn't much concerned with the audience (its focus was finance), but it did survey the people at concerts in two cities, Los Angeles and Grand Rapids, MI.

And the result? It's a shock! The audience was young -- median age 27 in Grand Rapids, 33 in LA. In LA (but not in Grand Rapids), subscribers were older than single-ticket buyers, with a median age of 38, which of course is older 33, but nowhere near as old as the subscription audience now.

Can we believe this data? It's hard to say. It's pretty fragmentary (surveys in just two cities, at an unstated number of concerts, though with more than 1900 replies; no further data on the methodology used, though in the book where I found this, there's at least an appendix where we can read the questions that the surveys asked). But on the other hand, it's the only data I've ever seen from this far back, and the authors of the book, in writing about it, show no sign of surprise. Surely, if they'd been as amazed as we're likely to be, they would have said something.

And now I've found data that appears to corroborate that 1937 study. From 1963 to 1965, people at the 20th Century Fund did a study of the performing arts. They made a point of studying the audience, and passed out questionnaires, according to a book about their work, at 153 performances (orchestra, theater, opera, dance, chamber music, and "free open-air" events) in 20 cities. They got nearly 30,000 usable replies.

And how old was this audience? Median age 38! Again a shock. Of course, we have to wonder what the breakdown was among the various performing arts, and at this point I have to say that I haven't seen the full study report (which was published in a book in 1966), but only a single chapter from it, reprinted in a 1973 book about American orchestras. But that chapter does say that -- even though the orchestra audience has a greater percentage of people over 60 -- "the audiences from art form to art form are very similar [the book's emphasis]. They all show a median age in the middle 30's." The orchestra audience, then, really did seem to have a median age of 38.

And again this information is reported without any sign of surprise. What does surprise the authors is the percentage of women in the arts audience; it's smaller than they expected, only 48%. (In 1937, more than 70% of the orchestral audience surveyed in the two cities was female).

So what does this mean? First, it means we don't know our history. Nobody I've talked to in the orchestra world had ever heard of the 1937, and I'm betting they also don't know about the later one, since if they did, they wouldn't be saying that the audience was always as old as it is now. (And I should add that I came across these studies only by chance. I was browsing through the Juilliard library, looking for books on other subjects, and came across these two volumes, one a few years ago, the other just today.)

Second, these data fragments suggest that our history might not at all be what we think it is. The classical music world, as I'm beginning to think, is in the midst of a very long-range shift, which we won't fully understand until we learn a lot more about how things used to be.

Citations:

Margery Grant and Herman B. Hettinger, America's Symphony Orchestras And How They Are Supported. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1940, pp. 226ff, 301ff.

George Seltzer, The Professional Symphony Orchestra in the United States. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1975, pp. 240ff.