Good things — the Pittsburgh Symphony

In answers to a comment a few posts ago, I made the mistake

of saying I’d seen half-full houses at the Pittsburgh Symphony. That was true,

but it happened a few seasons ago, and the orchestra is doing much better now. As

I should have noted! I was both discourteous and inaccurate.

The growth in both total audience and subscriptions in

Pittsburgh has been pretty dramatic in the past couple of years, in fact. We

could argue about whether this reverses the trend in the industry, since Pittsburgh

is recovering from a larger drop in sales and subscriptions than most

orchestras have seen. If they can raise their subscription rate above the

industry average, which is around 60%, and keep raising it, then there’s no

argument.

And — even if some people in the industry (reflecting the

current conventional wisdom) might think that’s improbable — the orchestra does

have one thing going for it, which is a change in the way it gives some of its

concerts. It’s tried to create what it calls “entry points,” for both new and

old listeners, meaning special things that go on before, during, or after

concerts, which give people in the audience a way to grasp something about the

music, and then hang onto it. I haven’t seen any of these in operation (if I

don’t count a pre-concert multimedia presentation I gave in the fall on Shostakovich),

but I’ve been told about some ideas that seem (and apparently really were)

quite exciting.

My favorite is something they did when they played a

Jennifer Higdon piece, and may do again for new or modern repertoire. Before

the concert, musicians from the orchestra could be found in various parts of

the hall, demonstrating some of the music in the piece. Everyone from the

audience could walk around and listen, and — most important — also talk to the

musicians, and ask questions, in that way both learning some of the music in

the piece, and building at least the start of a relationship with the musicians

playing it. No one can tell me people in the audience won’t feel more connected

to the music, if they look at the stage from their seats, and say, “There’s

Cindy, the principal oboist. I really loved talking to her! Now she’s playing

that passage she showed us, the one she likes, but said was so tricky to

manage.”

In the future, I’m told, the orchestra wants the musicians available

after the performance, as well as before, to give people a chance to build on

their listening experience, by talking again to the players after the

performance.

Here, I detect a delightful resemblance to something I

imagined in my

href="http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2007/02/inspirations.html">blog entry

about the Apple Store. There I wrote that

if you

have a chamber group…you could open the house an hour before your concert (or

however early might be practical), and let people come and hang out with you

onstage. You can talk with them, answer questions, play

a little to demonstrate.

I didn’t dare to imagine that an orchestra could do some

version of this, which puts the Pittsburgh Symphony way ahead of me. It’s

interesting, though, and wonderfully encouraging, to see

similar ideas surfacing in many places at once. As, for instance, has happened

with the idea — tremendously successful, in many places where it’s been tried –

of putting classical music in clubs. What this means, I think, is that many of

us are looking at the classical music world, and seeing the same problems. So

it’s hardly a surprise that we’d propose similar solutions. Which

means, as I’ve said before, that we’re evolving our future, and that it’s a

future that seems to work. Maybe the Pittsburgh Symphony will sell more

tickets than conventional wisdom would expect.