January 2008 Archives

My last post sparked some lively discussion, including interesting comments from Ryan Tracy, who runs the Counter Critic site.

One thing Ryan said left me thinking. He named (almost wistfully, I thought) Ani DiFranco as an example of an alternative rock figure with a small audience, and offered the hope that classical music, too, could accept small performances for relatively few people.

Which of course -- in a way -- it always does. One quick (and crude) take on Ryan's point might be that classical music, compared to pop, is a niche genre, and that all its audiences, even the largest, aren't (by pop standards) very large.

But let that go. I understand what Ryan meant when he named Ani DiFranco (one of the most thoughtful and honest figures in pop, someone who's never worked with a major record label, and controls her own releases), and I sympathize.

But I think there are instructive differences between her and -- let's say -- a string quartet that appears in the same clubs she might play.

Ani DiFranco sells more recordings, whether CDs or downloads - gigantically more. (A pop musician who sells 20,000 copies of a new album in a year would be toward the bottom rungs of the business. A classical musician who sold 3,000 copies would be near the top, at least in recording sales. Reverting to the CD model -- just for clarity, though it's speedily getting out of date -- suppose somebody makes $10 for each CD sale. The pop musician, with a low-selling album, 20,000 copies sold in a year, gets $200,000 for this album alone, plus money from sales of older records. The classical musician, hardly able to believe his or her luck, sells 3,000, and gets $30,000. These figures are meant only to be suggestive. They ignore rather giant complications, like how much the CDs cost you, how much record stores might get, and how you split revenues with your record label, if you have one.)

But then the musicians in the string quartet can teach, get grants, get university residencies, and, if they want, play freelance gigs, none of which Ani DiFranco is likely to do. (She's not about to show up as a guitarist on Madonna's next tour.)

All this is fairly obvious, at least to people who know how the business works. But now for the hidden cost that Ryan sparked me to think of. Ani DiFranco never went to music school. And if by chance she did, she didn't have to, not to get where she is right now. Most pop musicians learn music on their own.

But not the members of the string quartet! Each one had years of schooling -- private lessons, undergraduate music school, maybe a graduate degree. The undergraduate and graduate schools are the most expensive part of that. Who paid for it? Some combination of the musicians' parents, the musicians themselves (through student loans), and of course the schools, with scholarships. But the schools couldn't give those scholarships -- and in fact couldn't exist -- without large donations. They're raising money all the time.

And that's the hidden cost even of small classical performances. Go see Ani DiFranco, and what you see is, pretty much, what she paid for. The costs of her being there are mostly visible, or easy to figure out. (She has to buy her equipment and pay her band; she has to travel to whatever club you've seen her in; she needs a van; she has to sleep somewhere.)

But the string quartet? Invisibly present are all their years of education, paid for, in considerable part, by donations to their music schools.

And now we'd better ask where those donations come from. From individuals, some of them very wealthy. And why do they offer their support? I'm going to take a speculative leap here, because I don't have data, but I'll bet I'm right. These donors don't support Juilliard or Eastman or Curtis or Rice or Indiana University or Peabody because they love seeing string quartets in clubs. Or Pierre Boulez in Zankel Hall. Or the Bang on a Can marathon. They support music schools because they're impressed with the glory of classical music, which means major orchestras, the Metropolitan Opera, and, in general, big concerts by glamorous mainstream stars.

Which means that even small classical performances (at least right now) depend on the big mainstream classical world. And that's an important point we'd better remember, when we imagine what classical music's future might be. If we'd like to think that small performances might survive even if the mainstream world goes belly up, we'll have to figure out where the next generation of musicians will learn to play, and who's going to pay to keep them alive.

(Even string quartets that play in clubs might make much of their living directly from the mainstream, through grants and residencies, and, conceivably, from its members' freelance work. For a little more on this, see my earlier post on making a living.)

Problem: How to attract a young audience

Solution:

I've written about this before, here and here. You can almost infallibly attract a younger audience if you combine classical music with indie rock. (I'm assuming, of course, that you do this well -- that you choose the right indie bands, and produce the concert in the right way.) The London Sinfonietta proved this years ago, and (in the first link, above) I've talked about Wordless Music, a concert series in New York that also offers proof. Last year, their first, they offered just a few events in a 400-seat space, selling out all of them. This year they have 10 concerts in Manhattan, in spaces that hold 800 people, and they've sold these out, too, with extra performances in Brooklyn and Minneapolis.

And then last week they presented their first orchestral concerts, two performances of the same program, in a church near Lincoln Center. I went to the first of them. It was packed, completely sold out, without any advertising, promoted almost entirely by e-mail. More than a thousand people were there, and more than 90 percent bought tickets in advance. The second one, I'm told, was sold out, too. This was a young audience, and they came early, most by 7:30, clearly knowing that the shows would be crowded.

The program? All new music, by Gavin Bryars, John Adams, and Jonny Greenwood, the lead guitarist of Radiohead. And I could say lots about it -- especially about the Greenwood piece, which wasn't the usual hesitant, not quite original or competent rock-guy-writes-classical attempt, but a sharp and original essay in absorbing, biting sound -- but instead I'll cut right to the larger chase. First, the orchestra, all young, mostly (or so I'm told) students from Eastman and Juilliard. They played with radiant focus. Clearly they loved doing this.

And next the impact of the event on seasoned people from the classical music world. This seemed to be the Wordless Music event that brought out the mainstream. I talked to -- well, I shouldn't name names. But the people I talked to play central roles in the mainstream classical biz. And both were saying that they'd never seen anything like these concerts, that this was something new, that this was a doorway into the future (my words, but that's what they were saying). Here was the young audience everybody wants to attract, out in force, attracted to a genuine classical concert, with no advertising.

Well, OK, Jonny Greenwood's name was an attraction, and there had been an advance piece in the New York Times the day of the first performance. But Wordless Music itself attracts people, and studies (here, for example) show that younger people won't go to something because they read about it in a newspaper. Word of mouth is far more important. So what happened at these Wordless orchestral concerts was a surge of something new -- a new audience, reacting to something new in ways that the classical music world hasn't seen before. (Though New York saw something similar when Sufjan Stevens did his multimedia piece -- featuring 30 minutes of orchestral music -- back in November at BAM. The large BAM Opera House was sold out three times, again with no advertising.)

And note one important -- maybe to some people devastating -- twist. Normally when we talk about attracting young audiences, we mean (whether we've thought this through or not) attracting young people to standard classical concerts, the concerts that already exist. But maybe that's not possible! Or at least that the classical music world, in its present state, can attract a few young people, but not very many. To attract a large young audience, you have to do something new.

Or let me put this much more strongly. The young audience won't come to the concerts we want them to go to. ("We" being all of us in the mainstream classical music world.) They'll come to the concerts they want to hear. So to draw the young audience it needs, the classical music world will have to change, It'll have to reflect current culture.

And that change, I fear, will come as a shock to people who want the classical music world to stay the way it is. One of my friends put it very strongly. He's a leading manager of classical artists, who of course has worked a lot with major orchestras. And at the concert, as we talked about this issues, he said (I'm paraphrasing, but these were more or less his words): "I told one orchestra I've worked with: If you really do get a younger audience, watch out. It won't be an audience you like." Meaning, of course, that it won't be an audience that wants what orchestras normally offer.

There's lots to think about here. Starting with this: Since our culture, over the past generation, has so drastically changed, why should we expect the future of classical music to be anything like the past?

[Note: in an earlier version of this post, I said the church held 800 people, and had been 80% sold out in advance. But the true figures, I've learned, were even more impressive than that, and they're given above. Thanks to Ronen Givony, who runs Wordless Music, for setting me straight.]