More age footnotes

In a study conducted for the 20th Century Fund in the 1963-64 season, Professor William Baumol, then of Princeton, found that the median age of the performing arts audience (using a sample of 25,000 respondents nationwide weighted about 50/50 theatre versus music/opera/dance)was 38 years compared to 30 years for the urban population (the cities in which the 20th Century Fund study was conducted). More to the point, 9% of the performing arts audience was over 60 compared to 13% of the urban population.

I don't have comparable statistics nationwide today, but my impression is the median age for theatre and all the performings arts, save dance, perhaps, would exceed 38 years. At the same time, I suspect the median age of the urban population has risen above 30 years as well. Baumol is still around at NYU.

Thanks! That study is one of my key sources for the age of the audience in earlier times (though I've also got earlier data, from 1937 and 1955). I've cited it here often. One remarkable thing is Baumol and his co-author Bowen's strong statement about how young the audience is, and their speculation that people simply stop going to performing arts events as they get older, which of course is the opposite of what we think happens today.

I'd love to see the complete study, with (presumably) breakdowns among the performing arts.

The NEA has been studying the age of the performing arts audience from 1982 to the present. Their data shows it to be older than Baumol and Bowen reported in the '60s, and also to have gotten older since 1982. This all can be downloaded from their website. The classical music audience has aged the most.

And yes, the median age of the population as a whole has risen, but not as much as the median age of the clasical music audience, a point the NEA has emphasized.

Hello Greg. In 1920, the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso came to Havana to sing Aida at the Teatro Nacional. When the performance was about to start, Caruso ordered the doors of the theatre open so that the crowd that had congregated across the street could also enjoy the performance (Peter Gelb was not the first populist!)

Among the crowd gathered just outside the theatre along the Paseo del Prado in Central Havana, was my late father- age 16 - getting his free opera experience.

Years later, he and my mother met at the Sociedad Pro-Arte Musical, next to the Auditorium in the Vedado section of Havana, and there joined the guitar ensemble led by the late Abel Nicola.

Years later, when I had grown up to be a young teen about town, I got my first taste of live opera at that same theatre, hearing Tebaldi in La Traviata.

I don't think I was the younger member of the audience, nor was my late father the youngest member of the crowd standing outside the Nacional in 1920. It really was a younger audience then, Greg

Thanks, Rafael! No, Peter is hardly the first populist. And in past eras, populism in the arts didn't have the special meanings it does now, either positive (we need a new audience) or negative (we're dumbing the music down). Caruso recorded pop songs; Lauritz Melchior made films in Hollywood. There was a much easier exchange between classical music and popular culture.

And your story is lovely. Thanks. I went to the Met for the first time in the '50s, when I was a teenager ("Die Meistersinger," with a standing-room ticket). I wish I could remember how old the audience was!

Hello Greg,
I first attended Met performances in the early sixties during their annual visits to Atlanta. Herb Blayman, principal clarinetist would sometimes let me sneak in the side door where the orchestra took their breaks. I spent most of the operas in standing room.

The ushers were all from Georgia Tech, as were the extras in operas such as Aida. The audience was younger than it is today.

My college singer friends from FSU in Tallahassee would drive 250 miles and spend the entire week of the Met visit. The operas were all presented in the Fox Theater and the atmosphere was that of a festival.

Thanks, Dave. That also brings back another vanished era, the era (lasting a few generations) when the Met toured every year.

Yes, I think it is pretty well accepted that the audience is growing older -- a sea of gray heads on the orchestra floor.

But the reason that is not so bad, at the moment, is that those gray heads are living longer, staying active longer, and coming to concerts longer than was possible in the past.

In one of his novels, James Fennimore Cooper describes "a well-preserved man of 37." He'd be dead in a few years. Now, I have friends in their 80s who hold season tickets and go to concerts regularly. (One very dear friend of mine goes with his wife, who is physically incapacitated and sits thru the concert in her wheelchair.) These are people who would not have been in the audience some 20 or more years back.
All hail Viagra!
The viewpoint from my soapbox is that we need to keep this audience coming while we figure out how to restock the seats with younger addicts.