an blog | AJBlog Central | Contact me | Advertise | Follow me:

Important news stories (2)

Cities

Compete in Hipness Battle to Attract Young

New

York Times, November 25, 2006

“Baby boomers are retiring and the number of young adults is

declining. By 2012, the work force will be losing more than two workers for

every one it gains.”

So cities are trying to attract people 35 and under.

“They are people who, demographers say, are likely to choose

a location before finding a job. They like downtown living, public

transportation and plenty of entertainment options. They view diversity and

tolerance as marks of sophistication.”

Another way to put it (as the story indeed does) is that this

are the people identified by Richard Florida in his very influential book,

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Rise of the Creative Class, which

ought to be required reading for anyone who wants to know what’s going on in

our culture, especially with the younger people who’ll be classical music’s future

(if it has a future).

One point Florida makes, and very strongly, is that orchestras,

opera houses, and ballet companies don’t work any more to attract corporations,

and the smart, educated, creative people that corporations want to hire. The

creative class isn’t interested in those things. Instead, they like street

culture, and lively local music scenes.

“From Milwaukee to

w:st="on">Tampa Bay,

consultants have been hired to score such nebulous indexes as ‘social capital,’

‘after hours’ and ‘vitality.’ Relocation videos have begun to feature

dreadlocks and mosh pits instead of sunsets and duck

ponds.”

Atlanta seems to be the most

attractive city for the people we’re talking about, and in fact has drawn

people from New York, Washington,

Los Angeles, Chicago

and Houston. “There

are some 45 colleges and universities in the metro area. The Cartoon Network is

based here, as are scores of companies in the technology and entertainment

sectors. The music industry is another draw for the creative class. And the

city has large international and gay populations, considered strong indicators

for popularity with the young and restless.”

Not that there’s any formula. As a consultant quoted in the

story said, “The real issue was, is your city open to a set of ideas from young

people, and their wish to realize their dream or objective in your city. You

could go out and build bike paths, but if that’s not what your young people

want, it’s not going to work.”

Why this is important:

These are the people we need to attract to classical music,

either now or later in their lives. And if you believe what this news story

said — or what Richard Florida says — we’ll have trouble doing it. Classical

music, as currently presented, is just too dull and too predictable, and

certainly not contemporary enough.

So do we have to dumb it down, or tart it up, add all kinds

of glitter to make it seem exciting. No way. This new audience will see right

through that. They’re looking for something authentic. We’ll have to make

classical music smarter — edgier, more current, more exciting. And yes, we

should change the way it looks and feels, but we have to start with the music

itself, both what we feature in performances, and the way we perform it. Make

it sharp, incisive, full of life, and above all, full of meaning. Kill the

formality, and replace it with something real, something that jumps off the

stage, and makes everyone feel from the first note that something’s happening,

something they won’t want to miss.

(It’s a fantasy, by the way — or at least I think so — that

today’s creative class will get older, and then develop a taste for classical music

as we know it now. Why would they? What’s in it for them? We could imagine that

their lives are shallow now, so when they get older, they’ll need something

deeper. But the key word here is “imagine.” This is a smart, solid,

self-motivated group of people, and we’d be silly to think that we can predict

what’s going to happen to them, and especially that we’ve got the answer to any

future problems they might have.)

Comments

  1. Don’t you think that as people get older their tastes become less zealously attached to narrow tastes and become more varied. I am a professional orchestra player who just turned 30 and I like a much greater variety of music than I did at 20.

    I simply wonder that as the creative class grows older they may not naturally gravitate towards classical concerts, but they may be more open to it. When I say “it,” I mean generally what it is now. Maybe there is some danger in trying to make it look more like youth culture when its appeal may not ultimately lie there.

    I’m sure that many people widen their musical tastes as they get older. They might start listening to classical music, or listening to it more. And/or they might start listening to world music, blues, jazz — all kinds of things that tend to appeal to adult tastes, not kid tastes.

    But then people in their 20s are developing wide tastes, too. I’m friendly with the former head of classical music on iTunes, and he’d found out that many younger people were downloading classical tracks. In fact, wide musical taste seems to be one of the hallmarks of present-day people with education and inquiring minds.

    But here’s something else. There was a story recently in the NY Times about the AARP — yes, the AARP — becoming important in marketing pop albums! That’s because the older, baby boomer audience sitll likes pop music. It’s their CD-buying that seems to be making Rod Stewart’s albums of pop standards succeed. They’re also the ones who put Bob Dylan’s current CD at No. 1 on the pop album chart.

    So the older audience is sticking with pop music. Some, surely, will develop a classical interest, and maybe even buy tickets to classical concerts. That’ll also be true of the people getting older now. But it’s not clear that as large a proportion of them will turn to classical music as happened in previous generations. There are many reasons to doubt this, among them something I’ve mentioned in the blog previously — that a much smaller proportion of younger people now go to classical concerts than was true in the early 1980s and earlier.

    So in the future, it seems likely (or at least reasonable) that the classical music audience — or at least the part of it that actively buys tickets to classical concerts — will be smaller than it has been before. This isn’t good news for classical music institutions.

    Finally, about youth culture. I don’t know that classical concerts have to reflect youth culture (whatever that is — there are many kinds of it). I do think they should seem more contemporary, because even people 50 years old are likely, these days, to find the look and feel of classical concerts curiously out of touch with present-day reality.

an ArtsJournal blog