January 2009 Archives
A legendary quote from Casey Stengel, when he managed first season of the then-hapless New York Mets.
A publicist for the Boston Symphony asked me to mention the latest edition of their online "Concert Companion," which is mostly about Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, an opera they're performing in a concert version starting right now. So I'll oblige. What they've done is very lame.
And it's lame in instructive ways. Mostly they offer videos -- a Verdi biography, something about the historical context of Verdi's work, an interview with James Levine, and a synopsis of the opera. Maybe they think they're marvelously up to date, offering multimedia. But they apparently don't understand how the Web works these days. The Web now is interactive, offering chances for participation, or at least for play. The BSO's Simon Boccanegra stuff, by contrast, forces me to be passive. They want me to sit there for minutes on end, watching videos.
There's nothing wrong with that, as a supplement to other things. If something else on the website can get me interested, I might watch the videos. But there isn't anything else on the page (except a truly lame quiz about opera in general). I can't go to the page, and quickly read the story of the opera. I can't quickly learn intriguing facts about it. I can't hear any of the music. If I could do any of these things, I might want to watch the videos. But I'm caught in a Catch-22. I can't find out whether I want to watch the videos unless I watch them.
But that's only a symptom of the real problem, which is that the BSO isn't using the interactive Web techniques that really do get people interested. Go, for instance, to the terrific interactive page about Super Bowl commercials on the New York Times website. See how just by looking at it you absorb some information, and how easily you can get more, just by moving your mouse around. You can also watch Super Bowl commercials from the past, and in fact you want to do that, because they're put in a context that makes you interested.
Or (still from Times's business pages) look at the interactive timeline of the economic crisis, where videos are offered, but again in a context that might make you want to watch them. Notice how, on this page and the one about the Super Bowl commercials, there isn't anything didactic. Nobody is teaching you. The ways to find the information are laid out in an irresistibly attractive way, and you happily go looking for it.
Or (last example) look at the absolutely marvelous interactive graphic about housing prices in selected cities for the past six years. It's as addictive as popcorn, and wonderfully informative. You move from city to city, see how prices fared, and compare them, at every point, to the average change in prices in all the cities put together.
The Times is famous for doing things like these on its website. There was even an article about this in New York magazine, focusing on the people responsible, how they came to the Times, what their status is there, and how the paper's culture might be changing to accomodate them. (While you're on the New York site, take a look at how attractive the navigation is, when you're browsing past issues.)
I wish the BSO could change its culture, learn how Web 2.0 works, and create some interactive features that might really draw people to their concerts. I wish that the entire classical music world could do this. We're seriously behind the times (and, website-wise, the Times). And it's hurting us.
(Footnote: Yes, I know it costs a lot of money to do what the Times does. But classical music institutions have no choice. They're competing with everything else in our culture, and if they're going to use the web, they have to use it as well as everybody else does.
(ADDED LATER: And it doesn't have to cost all that much. Graphics don't have to be as elaborate -- or presumably expensive -- as my examples from the New York Times. I'm sure orchestras and other classical music institutions could find young web designers who could do an expert job. I'd be happy to work as a consultant with any group that wants to try this. The hard part, I think, would be the concept -- which information to present, and how to present it. The key would be to rid our minds of anything that smacks of "outreach," and simply make the things we care about as compelling as all the other good stuff in peoples' lives.)
A publicist for the Boston Symphony asked me to mention the latest edition of their online "Concert Companion," which is mostly about Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, an opera they're performing in a concert version starting right now. So I'll oblige. What they've done is very lame.
And it's lame in instructive ways. Mostly they offer videos -- a Verdi biography, something about the historical context of Verdi's work, an interview with James Levine, and a synopsis of the opera. Maybe they think they're marvelously up to date, offering multimedia. But they apparently don't understand how the Web works these days. The Web now is interactive, offering chances for participation, or at least for play. The BSO's Simon Boccanegra stuff, by contrast, forces me to be passive. They want me to sit there for minutes on end, watching videos.
There's nothing wrong with that, as a supplement to other things. If something else on the website can get me interested, I might watch the videos. But there isn't anything else on the page (except a truly lame quiz about opera in general). I can't go to the page, and quickly read the story of the opera. I can't quickly learn intriguing facts about it. I can't hear any of the music. If I could do any of these things, I might want to watch the videos. But I'm caught in a Catch-22. I can't find out whether I want to watch the videos unless I watch them.
But that's only a symptom of the real problem, which is that the BSO isn't using the interactive Web techniques that really do get people interested. Go, for instance, to the terrific interactive page about Super Bowl commercials on the New York Times website. See how just by looking at it you absorb some information, and how easily you can get more, just by moving your mouse around. You can also watch Super Bowl commercials from the past, and in fact you want to do that, because they're put in a context that makes you interested.
Or (still from Times's business pages) look at the interactive timeline of the economic crisis, where videos are offered, but again in a context that might make you want to watch them. Notice how, on this page and the one about the Super Bowl commercials, there isn't anything didactic. Nobody is teaching you. The ways to find the information are laid out in an irresistibly attractive way, and you happily go looking for it.
Or (last example) look at the absolutely marvelous interactive graphic about housing prices in selected cities for the past six years. It's as addictive as popcorn, and wonderfully informative. You move from city to city, see how prices fared, and compare them, at every point, to the average change in prices in all the cities put together.
The Times is famous for doing things like these on its website. There was even an article about this in New York magazine, focusing on the people responsible, how they came to the Times, what their status is there, and how the paper's culture might be changing to accomodate them. (While you're on the New York site, take a look at how attractive the navigation is, when you're browsing past issues.)
I wish the BSO could change its culture, learn how Web 2.0 works, and create some interactive features that might really draw people to their concerts. I wish that the entire classical music world could do this. We're seriously behind the times (and, website-wise, the Times). And it's hurting us.
(Footnote: Yes, I know it costs a lot of money to do what the Times does. But classical music institutions have no choice. They're competing with everything else in our culture, and if they're going to use the web, they have to use it as well as everybody else does.
(ADDED LATER: And it doesn't have to cost all that much. Graphics don't have to be as elaborate -- or presumably expensive -- as my examples from the New York Times. I'm sure orchestras and other classical music institutions could find young web designers who could do an expert job. I'd be happy to work as a consultant with any group that wants to try this. The hard part, I think, would be the concept -- which information to present, and how to present it. The key would be to rid our minds of anything that smacks of "outreach," and simply make the things we care about as compelling as all the other good stuff in peoples' lives.)
Continuing with my series of "let's see where we are" posts...the others were here (an overview), and here (about a new spirit in the world about classical music). Plus supplements to the first post, and to the second.
This one is about statistics, but maybe more importantly -- in the long run -- about transparency. We don't have enough numbers (and certainly not enough publicly available numbers) about how classical music institutions are doing. Opera America, I'm happy to say (they're the association of North American opera companies), each year publishes an Annual Field Report, a thorough statistical roundup that includes ticket sales and detailed financial data. But the League of American Orchestras makes equivalent information (its Orchestra Statistical Report) available only to its member orchestras. (And Opera America, I fear, buries information about its field reports deep in its website. You have to go to their publications page and click the "General Information" tab.) Chamber Music America and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters don't offer any information on their websites about how their members might be doing. So we can't readily find out if chamber ensembles are selling more tickets or getting more performances than they used to, or if presenting organizations are selling more or fewer tickets to their classical
What this means: We don't know how well the classical music field, taking as a whole, is doing. We don't know how many tickets orchestras are selling this year, or how many they sold last year, or sold 20 years ago. We don't know whether sales to recitals and chamber concerts are up or down.
Contrast other areas of life and the economy, and even the arts. The auto industry has a crisis, and we can read exactly how many cars each car company sold each year. So when we talk about the crisis, we know what we're talking about. We know, just for instance, that Toyota sold more units of one of its models, the Camry, than Chrysler sold of its entire line. And if we want to know how museums are doing, in the economic downturn, we can find out. Someone surveyed around 40 of them, and published a summary of the what the survey found.
How can we not have similar data about classical music? We have it for movies (though, I'll grant, not for pop records, since record companies don't like to release sales figures, unless they have some great success to brag about. But for how many years -- how many decades -- have we been pondering the classical music crisis? How many articles, in newspapers and elsewhere, have been written about it?
And we're doing all of that without proper data. I myself don't have enough data. I've concluded -- based on what I do know, or have heard about (from various public, private, and anecdotal sources) -- that, most likely, sales are down over many years. The League of American Orchestras gave me some figures on attendance, some time ago, and they showed a decline starting in the 1997-98 season.
But as I've noted many times, attendance figures (as opposed to sales numbers) can be misleading. They count free concerts, kids bused to concert halls to hear performances, Fourth of July events in parks. They're not as sensitive a measure as ticket sales to an orchestra's core subscription concerts. The League hasn't yet released any figures on those sales.
Now, I hope to remedy this problem. Watch this space for updates. But my thought, so far, is that it's a sign of immaturity that the classical music field doesn't have solid data on itself. And also, at least in some cases, a sign of too much secrecy. There's a fear that donors won't give money if they think things are really bad. But if donors are sweet-talked with notions that everything is more or less OK, and then find out later that this isn't true, won't they feel cheated? And won't organizations that tell the public when they're having trouble are better equipped to face their problems? They can't hide, can't go into denial. If they say they're having trouble, they also have to say what they're going to do about it.
And aren't we moving, as a society, toward transparency? Transparency is a current buzzword. Cf. Obama's insistence that everything his administration does, all planned spending, should be available in detail online for everyone to read. The classical music business isn't yet transparent, which puts it out of step with developing trends in the country at large.
The classical music press bears some responsibility, too, for not asking tough enough questions, for not demanding that classical music institutions disclose solid information about funding and ticket sales. But in the end, it's the institutions who ought to be more transparent. Classical music institutions get government funds, and also solicit money from the public. Shouldn't they tell the public how they're doing?
This one is about statistics, but maybe more importantly -- in the long run -- about transparency. We don't have enough numbers (and certainly not enough publicly available numbers) about how classical music institutions are doing. Opera America, I'm happy to say (they're the association of North American opera companies), each year publishes an Annual Field Report, a thorough statistical roundup that includes ticket sales and detailed financial data. But the League of American Orchestras makes equivalent information (its Orchestra Statistical Report) available only to its member orchestras. (And Opera America, I fear, buries information about its field reports deep in its website. You have to go to their publications page and click the "General Information" tab.) Chamber Music America and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters don't offer any information on their websites about how their members might be doing. So we can't readily find out if chamber ensembles are selling more tickets or getting more performances than they used to, or if presenting organizations are selling more or fewer tickets to their classical
What this means: We don't know how well the classical music field, taking as a whole, is doing. We don't know how many tickets orchestras are selling this year, or how many they sold last year, or sold 20 years ago. We don't know whether sales to recitals and chamber concerts are up or down.
Contrast other areas of life and the economy, and even the arts. The auto industry has a crisis, and we can read exactly how many cars each car company sold each year. So when we talk about the crisis, we know what we're talking about. We know, just for instance, that Toyota sold more units of one of its models, the Camry, than Chrysler sold of its entire line. And if we want to know how museums are doing, in the economic downturn, we can find out. Someone surveyed around 40 of them, and published a summary of the what the survey found.
How can we not have similar data about classical music? We have it for movies (though, I'll grant, not for pop records, since record companies don't like to release sales figures, unless they have some great success to brag about. But for how many years -- how many decades -- have we been pondering the classical music crisis? How many articles, in newspapers and elsewhere, have been written about it?
And we're doing all of that without proper data. I myself don't have enough data. I've concluded -- based on what I do know, or have heard about (from various public, private, and anecdotal sources) -- that, most likely, sales are down over many years. The League of American Orchestras gave me some figures on attendance, some time ago, and they showed a decline starting in the 1997-98 season.
But as I've noted many times, attendance figures (as opposed to sales numbers) can be misleading. They count free concerts, kids bused to concert halls to hear performances, Fourth of July events in parks. They're not as sensitive a measure as ticket sales to an orchestra's core subscription concerts. The League hasn't yet released any figures on those sales.
Now, I hope to remedy this problem. Watch this space for updates. But my thought, so far, is that it's a sign of immaturity that the classical music field doesn't have solid data on itself. And also, at least in some cases, a sign of too much secrecy. There's a fear that donors won't give money if they think things are really bad. But if donors are sweet-talked with notions that everything is more or less OK, and then find out later that this isn't true, won't they feel cheated? And won't organizations that tell the public when they're having trouble are better equipped to face their problems? They can't hide, can't go into denial. If they say they're having trouble, they also have to say what they're going to do about it.
And aren't we moving, as a society, toward transparency? Transparency is a current buzzword. Cf. Obama's insistence that everything his administration does, all planned spending, should be available in detail online for everyone to read. The classical music business isn't yet transparent, which puts it out of step with developing trends in the country at large.
The classical music press bears some responsibility, too, for not asking tough enough questions, for not demanding that classical music institutions disclose solid information about funding and ticket sales. But in the end, it's the institutions who ought to be more transparent. Classical music institutions get government funds, and also solicit money from the public. Shouldn't they tell the public how they're doing?
Left out, that is, in my "new spirit" post, about the new openness I sense about classical music, in our wider culture. This was the second of my "where we stand" series, updating some ongoing thoughts on the future of, and really -- I blew it.
Yes, what I said about a new freedom in using classical music in commercials -- that's all true. And it's important. But I should have mentioned two other signs of a new wind blowing.
One of them is Alex Ross's book. Here we have a serious book on classical music, and first, it's not stuffy or pompous, or written for insiders. It brings classical music -- and its history, and its meaning, and its vitality, and, maybe best of all, a vivid taste of the reasons one person loves it -- alive. And it got noticed, to put it mildly, by the outside world, named (just for instance) one of the best books of the year by all sorts of prominent media places.
And, best of all, bought by all kinds of nonspecialists. I'd love to know what they thought, how many read it to the end, how many then went out to sample the music that it talks about. In one case, someone I know, well, she didn't finish the book. But so what? There are books I don't finish, and what could be more natural, when anyone tries a book on something they haven't previously known about? Some stay the course, some don't.
But is she more likely to try classical music -- or anyway 20th century classical music -- than she might have been before? I'm sure of it. If she'd been flipping channels, and came across the Met's pretty stunning Salome, wouldn't she have been thrilled, and felt a shock of recognition?
The second thing I forgot.was the BBC series Maestro -- a reality show in which contestants tried to be conductors. Telecast last summer, on BBC2, and an enourmous success, musically as well as with viewers (and endless press comments.)
Yes, what I said about a new freedom in using classical music in commercials -- that's all true. And it's important. But I should have mentioned two other signs of a new wind blowing.
One of them is Alex Ross's book. Here we have a serious book on classical music, and first, it's not stuffy or pompous, or written for insiders. It brings classical music -- and its history, and its meaning, and its vitality, and, maybe best of all, a vivid taste of the reasons one person loves it -- alive. And it got noticed, to put it mildly, by the outside world, named (just for instance) one of the best books of the year by all sorts of prominent media places.
And, best of all, bought by all kinds of nonspecialists. I'd love to know what they thought, how many read it to the end, how many then went out to sample the music that it talks about. In one case, someone I know, well, she didn't finish the book. But so what? There are books I don't finish, and what could be more natural, when anyone tries a book on something they haven't previously known about? Some stay the course, some don't.
But is she more likely to try classical music -- or anyway 20th century classical music -- than she might have been before? I'm sure of it. If she'd been flipping channels, and came across the Met's pretty stunning Salome, wouldn't she have been thrilled, and felt a shock of recognition?
Maestro
The second thing I forgot.was the BBC series Maestro -- a reality show in which contestants tried to be conductors. Telecast last summer, on BBC2, and an enourmous success, musically as well as with viewers (and endless press comments.)
It hasn't been shown here, on BBC America, and sadly the video excerpts on the show's homepage won't play outside the UK. There are YouTube clips, though. I got the series on DVD from the BBC, and quite honestly, I was knocked out. In the first episode, the eight contestants -- B-list (or below) celebrities, for instance David Soul, long ago of Starsky and Hutch -- are given pieces to conduct, and get up in front of an orchestra with no preparation, to do their best.
Shown in the photo is Goldie, a British dance music guy, who doesn't read music. The orchestra was clearly told to plaly exactly what the contestants indicated, and the results were a revelation to anyone who wonders what, in fact, a conductor does. One of the contestants, the lead singer from Blur, had such unstable tempo that the players lurched, abruptly speeding up and slowing down, with a train wreck each time. And yes, a professional orchestra, in a concert, will keep time on its own, but here anyone could see what the conductor is supposed to contribute, and what the orchestra contends with if he/she doesn't do the job.
Then the contestants got five days' intensive training, involving (among other things) instruction on beat patterns, general tips on musical leadership, and movement training, to free their bodies. Then they tried again. They were better, but one, a veteran TV personality, was so hopeless that he was sent home. Goldie, who can't read music, was one of the two best, inspiring the orchestra to get excited (in "The Hall of the Mountain King," from Peer Gynt), even if his beat needed work.
The judges were a substantial group. Sir Roger Norrington, Simone Young (a major career in Europe and Australia, even if she doesn't conduct much in the US), a composer/cellist, and a bass player from an orchestra in Wales. They were lucid, lively, and often musically quite specific, so that even people who don't know classical music -- or, for that matter, classical music fans who aren't tinsiders -- could see what problems the aspiring conductors had.
Four judges: two men, two women. Which was yet another great thing about Maestro, though (which was terrific) not one word was said about it. Conducting wasn't just, or wasn't mainly, for boys. And, overall, classical music wasn't just for specialists. I don't think I've ever seen a presentation which so clearly showed how classical music works, so strongly gave tastes of why the music's wonderful, so vividly conveyed love of the music, and yet did so without ever, not for an instant, putting classical music inside a frame of stuffiness or Art.
In later episodes, the contestants led choral music, opera, many things. I saw Goldie -- despite his musciality -- get tripped up by upbeats in a Mozart aria (one of Despina's, from Cosi), and get called on it by the judges. (Though they might have been a little clearer in explaining what an upbeat is.) The winner (Sue Perkins, a British comedian) led a piece at one of the Proms concerts.
The show, for me, was a triumphant success, and yet another sign that a fresh new hopeful wind is blowing.
Shown in the photo is Goldie, a British dance music guy, who doesn't read music. The orchestra was clearly told to plaly exactly what the contestants indicated, and the results were a revelation to anyone who wonders what, in fact, a conductor does. One of the contestants, the lead singer from Blur, had such unstable tempo that the players lurched, abruptly speeding up and slowing down, with a train wreck each time. And yes, a professional orchestra, in a concert, will keep time on its own, but here anyone could see what the conductor is supposed to contribute, and what the orchestra contends with if he/she doesn't do the job.
Then the contestants got five days' intensive training, involving (among other things) instruction on beat patterns, general tips on musical leadership, and movement training, to free their bodies. Then they tried again. They were better, but one, a veteran TV personality, was so hopeless that he was sent home. Goldie, who can't read music, was one of the two best, inspiring the orchestra to get excited (in "The Hall of the Mountain King," from Peer Gynt), even if his beat needed work.
The judges were a substantial group. Sir Roger Norrington, Simone Young (a major career in Europe and Australia, even if she doesn't conduct much in the US), a composer/cellist, and a bass player from an orchestra in Wales. They were lucid, lively, and often musically quite specific, so that even people who don't know classical music -- or, for that matter, classical music fans who aren't tinsiders -- could see what problems the aspiring conductors had.
Four judges: two men, two women. Which was yet another great thing about Maestro, though (which was terrific) not one word was said about it. Conducting wasn't just, or wasn't mainly, for boys. And, overall, classical music wasn't just for specialists. I don't think I've ever seen a presentation which so clearly showed how classical music works, so strongly gave tastes of why the music's wonderful, so vividly conveyed love of the music, and yet did so without ever, not for an instant, putting classical music inside a frame of stuffiness or Art.
In later episodes, the contestants led choral music, opera, many things. I saw Goldie -- despite his musciality -- get tripped up by upbeats in a Mozart aria (one of Despina's, from Cosi), and get called on it by the judges. (Though they might have been a little clearer in explaining what an upbeat is.) The winner (Sue Perkins, a British comedian) led a piece at one of the Proms concerts.
The show, for me, was a triumphant success, and yet another sign that a fresh new hopeful wind is blowing.
I've neglected the blog, I know. I did a lot of intense preparation for my Juilliard and Eastman classes, both on the future of classical music. And in the middle of that, I took a long drive from my country place down to Washington to be at the inauguration, and of course to be with Anne.
There I am, after the festivities, not a notable photo in itself (and the crowd looks so small!), but it's my souvenir, along with an overpriced t-shirt I bought later on. And you can see how happy I am.
That night, after miles of walking, I had to drive back to NY. And then came teaching, a trip to Rochester to teach at Eastman...a strenuous time. And I made a rule for myself: This week, nothing obsessive. No forcing myself to work when I was fried.
But now I'm back. Continuing. The future of classical music won't wait. And there's a lot to talk about.
That night, after miles of walking, I had to drive back to NY. And then came teaching, a trip to Rochester to teach at Eastman...a strenuous time. And I made a rule for myself: This week, nothing obsessive. No forcing myself to work when I was fried.
But now I'm back. Continuing. The future of classical music won't wait. And there's a lot to talk about.
(So many things that cross my mind I never blog about. Here are last week's, though some are earlier...)
But on Thursday, Terrance McKnight, the host, was playing lieder. Chestnuts. Schubert's Serenade, then Liszt's "Oh quand je dors." The music sounded like a lovely jewelbox, golden and untouchable.
Then came the very long Symphony No. 2, by Harri Vuori. Modernism Bleeps, skreeks, slides, and orchestral moans and screams. This was the kind of new classical music we'd all have sworn would never be on mainstream radio. But there it was. I had to like that, even if I didn't love the piece.
Emotionally, the Vuori piece seemed tense and anxious. So here, with the lieder, we had two extremes, a lovely, distant jewelbox, and unremitting angst. Which offers a deadly critique of high-church classical programming, in which standard works alternate with modernist new music. Where's the middleground? Where's the music that's contemporary, but offers a fuller view of life than screams alone can give? (There's a lot of it, of course, both classical and pop.).
(Go here for last Thursday's Evening Music playlist.)
And the Bruce Springsteen song -- which comes in over the credits, and was written for the movie -- made me think. The Wrestler takes place in Springsteen territory, New Jersey, with even a scene in Asbury Park. And it's in Springsteen social and emotional territory, too, since it shows us working people whose lives haven't worked out.
But the two leads in the film, Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, aren't listening to Springsteen. They're into '80s hard rock and metal. There's a lovely scene where they each discover that about the other. "Nineties music sucks!" "Kurt Cobain ruined music!"
And it struck me that Springsteen -- as far as I can remember -- doesn't deal with metal at all, either in his lyrics, or musically. Nearly all his songs, to my ear, come ultimately from two sources, folk music and mainstream pop from the '50s through the '70s. (With some Dylan detours in the early albums.)
But when he made albums in the '80s, the people he sang about might well have been listening to hard rock, hair bands, and metal. Yet Springsteen doesn't go there. I don't mean this as any criticism of him. But the movie made me see a gap in his culture, so to speak, a place he doesn't go. I'd never thought of that before.
Can we imagine one-work concerts? Which might say, to the world at large, "Here's something we really want you to listen to."
This isn't hard to listen to. This cartoon refutes any thought that nobody can follow classical music without special education. Anyone can hear how the music screeches to a halt when the chase scenes do, or trembles with anxiety when someone's scared, or why (when someone seems to be in serious danger) the galloping Rossini overture suddenly turns sour.
If people can follow music doing these things in a cartoon, why can't they hear them in the music alone? (Which is not to say that classical masterpieces might not be more subtle than the cartoon score, but then many people who watched the cartoon were also watching subtler movies, and reading sublter books. So why couldn't they appreciate subtler music, too?)
Quite literally it reminded me of Shostakovich's Song of the Forests, a painful piece of Stalinist propaganda. Of course Brahms wrote Triumphlied without being forced. But it takes him to an overstuffed, forced, and unconvincing place. It's Stalinist, in the sense that music's being used as propaganda, even if Brahms's Stalinism came from within.
Makes me wonder what Mendelssohn and Rosenbaum might say if they turned their attention to standard classical performances. (Mendelssohn did write about last year's new Lucia at the Met, and devastated it.)
But still I'm sad. I made my debut there, when I was nine, in the children's chorus in Carmen. I'd loved opera on records. Now I could not just see one live, but sing in it!
Evening musicI was driving last Thursday night, and listening to WNYC's Evening Music show, aka the flagship classical program on New York public radio. (Which I've blogged about before.) Since they play so much new music, and also music that isn't even classical, I'm ready for anything when I turn it on. I even once encountered a cheesy -- delightfully cheesy -- horror-movie score.
But on Thursday, Terrance McKnight, the host, was playing lieder. Chestnuts. Schubert's Serenade, then Liszt's "Oh quand je dors." The music sounded like a lovely jewelbox, golden and untouchable.
Then came the very long Symphony No. 2, by Harri Vuori. Modernism Bleeps, skreeks, slides, and orchestral moans and screams. This was the kind of new classical music we'd all have sworn would never be on mainstream radio. But there it was. I had to like that, even if I didn't love the piece.
Emotionally, the Vuori piece seemed tense and anxious. So here, with the lieder, we had two extremes, a lovely, distant jewelbox, and unremitting angst. Which offers a deadly critique of high-church classical programming, in which standard works alternate with modernist new music. Where's the middleground? Where's the music that's contemporary, but offers a fuller view of life than screams alone can give? (There's a lot of it, of course, both classical and pop.).
(Go here for last Thursday's Evening Music playlist.)
Classical music cravasseI said people see classical music differently these days, not as stuffy, or elite, or boring, but simply as music. Not completely, though! Here's the Frazz comic strip from Saturday:
Saw The Wrestler, powerful, touching film that doesn't at all go in the direction cynical moviegoers might expect.
Springsteen and metal
And the Bruce Springsteen song -- which comes in over the credits, and was written for the movie -- made me think. The Wrestler takes place in Springsteen territory, New Jersey, with even a scene in Asbury Park. And it's in Springsteen social and emotional territory, too, since it shows us working people whose lives haven't worked out.
But the two leads in the film, Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, aren't listening to Springsteen. They're into '80s hard rock and metal. There's a lovely scene where they each discover that about the other. "Nineties music sucks!" "Kurt Cobain ruined music!"
And it struck me that Springsteen -- as far as I can remember -- doesn't deal with metal at all, either in his lyrics, or musically. Nearly all his songs, to my ear, come ultimately from two sources, folk music and mainstream pop from the '50s through the '70s. (With some Dylan detours in the early albums.)
But when he made albums in the '80s, the people he sang about might well have been listening to hard rock, hair bands, and metal. Yet Springsteen doesn't go there. I don't mean this as any criticism of him. But the movie made me see a gap in his culture, so to speak, a place he doesn't go. I'd never thought of that before.
One-painting showsThe director of the National Gallery in London likes museum shows with just one painting, and of course a reduced admission fee. He brought in a show from the National Galleries of Scotland, consisting of two Titians. People flocked to see it, he said, and stayed longer than they often do, looking at the paintings and debating them.
Can we imagine one-work concerts? Which might say, to the world at large, "Here's something we really want you to listen to."
Kitty FoiledA Tom and Jerry cartoon, from 1948, which I ran into on TV, flipping channels. The score -- so typical of old cartoons -- is very classical, featuring classical quotes (the Barber of Seville overture), and even thematic development. Even the Rossini overture is developed, not just quoted.) And the score keeps changing, as it follows the action, just like an opera, or a symphonic poem.
This isn't hard to listen to. This cartoon refutes any thought that nobody can follow classical music without special education. Anyone can hear how the music screeches to a halt when the chase scenes do, or trembles with anxiety when someone's scared, or why (when someone seems to be in serious danger) the galloping Rossini overture suddenly turns sour.
If people can follow music doing these things in a cartoon, why can't they hear them in the music alone? (Which is not to say that classical masterpieces might not be more subtle than the cartoon score, but then many people who watched the cartoon were also watching subtler movies, and reading sublter books. So why couldn't they appreciate subtler music, too?)
TriumphliedBrahms's Stalinist piece, "Song of Triumph." written to celebrate a German military victory. I'd never heard it till last week, and hope I never do again.
Quite literally it reminded me of Shostakovich's Song of the Forests, a painful piece of Stalinist propaganda. Of course Brahms wrote Triumphlied without being forced. But it takes him to an overstuffed, forced, and unconvincing place. It's Stalinist, in the sense that music's being used as propaganda, even if Brahms's Stalinism came from within.
Daniel Mendelssohn on Dr. AtomicA long essay by the noted critic, in the New York Review (not yet available to read on their site). Like Ron Rosenbaum (whose critique I blogged about), he strongly doesn't like the piece. It's good news, bad news. Good news: a classical piece gets attention outside the classical world. Bad news: It doesn't stand up well when looked at by serious journalistic and literary intellectuals.
Makes me wonder what Mendelssohn and Rosenbaum might say if they turned their attention to standard classical performances. (Mendelssohn did write about last year's new Lucia at the Met, and devastated it.)
The end of the Amato OperaNew York's tiny company, bad for generations, but lovable. Its onlie begetter, Anthony Amato, is 88, and it's no dishonor if he can't go on.
But still I'm sad. I made my debut there, when I was nine, in the children's chorus in Carmen. I'd loved opera on records. Now I could not just see one live, but sing in it!
The second of five posts about the current state of classical music.
This one is about some good news. I think there's a new spirit in the air -- a new openness to classical music. I first noticed it in commercials. I could even go back a few years, to something I didn't understand at the time, a commercial for the Starz movie channel that featured the big tune from Beethoven's Ninth, with people singing, "Movies, movies, movies, movies."
Try it for yourself. It's insane. What were they thinking? Or so I asked myself. What's the connection with Beethoven? Now it's clear that they just used the tune because it sounded grand and festive, shorn of any classical music connection. And what I also didn't see is that this is a good thing. Someone who knows and loves Beethoven's Ninth may roll her eyes, but for the rest of the world, the point is that classical music no longer signified -- as it so often used to -- something exclusive, expensive, and elite.
But the commercial that really drove this home to me was more recent, something from one of the big fast food chains. McDonald's? Wendy's? I've Googled and Googled, with no results. Can anyone help? This commerical introduced a new sandwich, something we were meant to think was very special, something we should think a lot about. A guy was contemplating it, and on the soundtrack we heard (if my memory is right) one of the Bach cello suites.
Again, somebody's going to say that's an insult to Bach. Bach means more -- much more -- than fast food. (Or "Quick serve," as I believe they prefer to call it in the biz.) But turn your telescope around, and now look at the commercial as if you didn't know Bach. Now what you hear is an admirable, serious piece of music, something that shows you how you're supposed to think about the new sandwich. A classical piece, in other words, is being used for its intrinsic qualities -- for its sound, and for its feeling. The fact that it's classical doesn't matter very much, serving only, I think, to underscore the message that the sound is giving us. Yes, the sandwich really must be serious; they're using classical music. But not: this is an elite product, not for the masses; you're special if you buy it. (Cf. a decades-old commercial for Grey Poupon, using, if my memory hasn't fled, the Sixth Brandenburg.)
Lately I've seen other examples in commercial music. A commercial for an XP computer, with Vivaldi, the music telling us how much fun the computer is to use. A Coke commercial, in which two Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons wrangle a third one, which is a Coke bottle. Music? A Rossini overture, telling us that we're seeing something funny. This is surely modeled on old cartoons (like "Kitty Foiled," a Tom and Jerry classic I ran across lately on TV), which often used Rossini for chase scenes and the like.
And then Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, where the theme music briefly -- with very canny cutting -- excerpts the second movement of Beethoven's Ninth, apparently to set a tone that's sober, but also edge-of-the seat dramatic.
And then finally -- and for my purposes the announcement couldn't be more timely -- the Hyundai commercial we're going to see on the Super Bowl, in which Yo Yo Ma will play Bach. From the Reuters story about this:
But this is only the beginning. Ever since my wife and I learned that 12% of all downloads on iTunes are classical, it was clear that people, especially younger people, are reacting to classical music in a new way. They're happy to listen to it, just as they're happy to listen to music of many other kinds. (That 12% figure badly needs updating, by the way. And confirmation! We had one source, a good one, someone in an excellent position to know the percentage. But is it still true?)
And how did this happen? I'll propose two theories. First, our culture is shifting. Normally I say that to show that classical music is getting left on the beach as the cultural tide moves elsewhere (a mixed metaphor, I know). But in fact the cultural change is remarkably unbiased. It won't give classical music the privileged position it insisted that it had to have, a generation ago.
But it also won't reject classical music. Classical music simply takes its place among other cultural options, with special qualities of its own ("a quiet, gorgeous cello moment"), but with no cultural baggage otherwise. We need to go beyond "quiet, gorgeous," since classical music has a lot more to offer (and my next post will touch on that), but let's be thankful for what we've got.
Second theory: the many mainstream experiments with new kinds of classical concerts have had an impact. Ultimately they're part of the same cultural change, a move toward accepting classical music on its own terms, without overtones of privilege and money, and without composers presented as marble busts. But I'm impressed, thinking back, on how many of these new presentations there have been. Classical concerts with video. Classical concerts in which musicians talk to the audience. Classical concerts with helpful comments on the music projected at the side of the stage. Classical concerts in informal dress. Classical concerts where the conductor and orchestra greet the audience in front of the concert hall. Not to mention presentations outside the mainstream, like classical music played in clubs, or played alongside indie rock.
I've rolled my eyes at many of these presentations, and deplored the way classical music institutions try them out, and then don't follow through. But if I said that people who roll their eyes at Bach in commercials should think again, then so should I. I think that these more informal ways of giving concerts -- all of them together -- have had an effect. They've signalled a change. I don't think we'll see a new audience breaking down the doors of concert halls to go to standard classical concerts any time soon. In fact, I doubt we'll ever see it.
But that a new wind is blowing, I have no doubt.
(Again, I'll be grateful to anyone who identifies the fast food commercial. Why didn't I take some notes the many times I watched it?)
This one is about some good news. I think there's a new spirit in the air -- a new openness to classical music. I first noticed it in commercials. I could even go back a few years, to something I didn't understand at the time, a commercial for the Starz movie channel that featured the big tune from Beethoven's Ninth, with people singing, "Movies, movies, movies, movies."
Try it for yourself. It's insane. What were they thinking? Or so I asked myself. What's the connection with Beethoven? Now it's clear that they just used the tune because it sounded grand and festive, shorn of any classical music connection. And what I also didn't see is that this is a good thing. Someone who knows and loves Beethoven's Ninth may roll her eyes, but for the rest of the world, the point is that classical music no longer signified -- as it so often used to -- something exclusive, expensive, and elite.
But the commercial that really drove this home to me was more recent, something from one of the big fast food chains. McDonald's? Wendy's? I've Googled and Googled, with no results. Can anyone help? This commerical introduced a new sandwich, something we were meant to think was very special, something we should think a lot about. A guy was contemplating it, and on the soundtrack we heard (if my memory is right) one of the Bach cello suites.
Again, somebody's going to say that's an insult to Bach. Bach means more -- much more -- than fast food. (Or "Quick serve," as I believe they prefer to call it in the biz.) But turn your telescope around, and now look at the commercial as if you didn't know Bach. Now what you hear is an admirable, serious piece of music, something that shows you how you're supposed to think about the new sandwich. A classical piece, in other words, is being used for its intrinsic qualities -- for its sound, and for its feeling. The fact that it's classical doesn't matter very much, serving only, I think, to underscore the message that the sound is giving us. Yes, the sandwich really must be serious; they're using classical music. But not: this is an elite product, not for the masses; you're special if you buy it. (Cf. a decades-old commercial for Grey Poupon, using, if my memory hasn't fled, the Sixth Brandenburg.)
Lately I've seen other examples in commercial music. A commercial for an XP computer, with Vivaldi, the music telling us how much fun the computer is to use. A Coke commercial, in which two Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons wrangle a third one, which is a Coke bottle. Music? A Rossini overture, telling us that we're seeing something funny. This is surely modeled on old cartoons (like "Kitty Foiled," a Tom and Jerry classic I ran across lately on TV), which often used Rossini for chase scenes and the like.
And then Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, where the theme music briefly -- with very canny cutting -- excerpts the second movement of Beethoven's Ninth, apparently to set a tone that's sober, but also edge-of-the seat dramatic.
And then finally -- and for my purposes the announcement couldn't be more timely -- the Hyundai commercial we're going to see on the Super Bowl, in which Yo Yo Ma will play Bach. From the Reuters story about this:
Classical music fans aren't the most obvious target for a National Football League telecast or an ad campaign with an online video editing component. But advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, which produced the Hyundai spot, said it expects the ad to resonate with many of those watching the game. Last year's game between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots drew a record 97.5 million viewers."A quiet, gorgeous cello moment" -- classical music (once again) used for its sound and feeling, not because it's elite.
"I think the people that will respond to the Yo-Yo Ma piece when watching the Super Bowl won't necessarily be classical music fans," Goodby, Silverstein & Partners creative director Jim Elliot said. "Within the context of all the other advertising, which can be so chaotic that it almost becomes white noise, a quiet, gorgeous solo cello moment can be very arresting."
But this is only the beginning. Ever since my wife and I learned that 12% of all downloads on iTunes are classical, it was clear that people, especially younger people, are reacting to classical music in a new way. They're happy to listen to it, just as they're happy to listen to music of many other kinds. (That 12% figure badly needs updating, by the way. And confirmation! We had one source, a good one, someone in an excellent position to know the percentage. But is it still true?)
And how did this happen? I'll propose two theories. First, our culture is shifting. Normally I say that to show that classical music is getting left on the beach as the cultural tide moves elsewhere (a mixed metaphor, I know). But in fact the cultural change is remarkably unbiased. It won't give classical music the privileged position it insisted that it had to have, a generation ago.
But it also won't reject classical music. Classical music simply takes its place among other cultural options, with special qualities of its own ("a quiet, gorgeous cello moment"), but with no cultural baggage otherwise. We need to go beyond "quiet, gorgeous," since classical music has a lot more to offer (and my next post will touch on that), but let's be thankful for what we've got.
Second theory: the many mainstream experiments with new kinds of classical concerts have had an impact. Ultimately they're part of the same cultural change, a move toward accepting classical music on its own terms, without overtones of privilege and money, and without composers presented as marble busts. But I'm impressed, thinking back, on how many of these new presentations there have been. Classical concerts with video. Classical concerts in which musicians talk to the audience. Classical concerts with helpful comments on the music projected at the side of the stage. Classical concerts in informal dress. Classical concerts where the conductor and orchestra greet the audience in front of the concert hall. Not to mention presentations outside the mainstream, like classical music played in clubs, or played alongside indie rock.
I've rolled my eyes at many of these presentations, and deplored the way classical music institutions try them out, and then don't follow through. But if I said that people who roll their eyes at Bach in commercials should think again, then so should I. I think that these more informal ways of giving concerts -- all of them together -- have had an effect. They've signalled a change. I don't think we'll see a new audience breaking down the doors of concert halls to go to standard classical concerts any time soon. In fact, I doubt we'll ever see it.
But that a new wind is blowing, I have no doubt.
(Again, I'll be grateful to anyone who identifies the fast food commercial. Why didn't I take some notes the many times I watched it?)
Here's a supplement to my last post, while I prepare the next installment in the series. I wrote a "where we stand" last year, in considerable detail. Here it is, needing just a bit of revision and amplification to be up to date. Or you can download it as a PDF, I'll revise it a bit very shortly, since I'm going to assign it this semester in my Juilliard and Eastman courses on the future of classical music.
And as I neglected to say in my last post -- comments are very, very welcome. We're all in this together.
Hard data on other things can be hard to find -- you have to ask around, assemble sketchy press reports, and nose out things that haven't been publicized (or are quite literally secret) --but I hear from managers that there are fewer bookings for classical artists. And ticket sales have been falling, apparently for quite a while. (With a bump upward over the past couple of years; more on that later.)
More than a year ago, the League of American Orchestras (formerly the American Symphony Orchestra League) made public a steady drop in attendance at orchestra events, beginning in the mid-1990s. Here we run into statistical confusion, because "attendance" doesn't mean paid ticket sales; the League's numbers include free parks concerts, school concerts, and every other performance that orchestras give. Paid attendance at core classical events -- an orchestra's main subscription series -- might be a more sensitive measure of how well or badly orchestras are doing, since these concerts are an orchestra's main mission.
And here the decline seems to be greater than it is for total attendance at all orchestra events. Private statistics from our largest orchestras show a long-term fall in ticket sales beginning around 1990, a drop so large, cumulatively, that by itself it might account for recent orchestral deficits. It's so large a drop that the uptick in the past two years only begins to reverse it..
For opera companies I don't have comparable data. But Peter Gelb, who took over the Metropolitan Opera a year ago, publicly acknowledged a serious drop in ticket sales before he came on board. And the Chicago Lyric Opera, which used to sell more than 100% of its seats (subscribers would return tickets they couldn't use, and the company would resell them), was down, last I heard, to around 92%. (The Met, which used to sell around 92% of its tickets, fell far below that before Peter Gelb took over.)
Nobody seems to gather overall numbers for chamber music, but in recent years I've heard anecdotal accounts -- a couple of dozen by now, I'd guess -- from chamber music presenters about their decline. Recently I got more precise numbers from one of these presenters, located in a large American city (not New York). Each year for a decade, I was told, this group has lost 10 to 20 subscribers. Which doesn't sound like much until you do the math. The group now has around 700 subscribers, so if we assume an average drop each year of 15, that means that since 1997 the subscription sales have fallen 18%, from 850 to 700. That's a big drop, which certainly leaves the group worrying about its future.
And it's also true that classical music institutions vary, that some do better than others, and that some events are romping success stories, with cheering, sold-out houses. To understand the overall picture, you need comprehensive data from many institutions.
It's also hard to measure a long-term decline simply by going to concerts and looking to see how many seats are empty. "I go to the X Symphony a lot," a Juilliard student said to me last year, naming one of America's foremost orchestras. "And the houses look full to me."
But "full" is a relative term. If the X Symphony sold 95% of its tickets 15 years ago and sells 85% now, of course they're feeling that decline on their bottom line. But someone looking around a concert hall that's 85% full can honestly say that they don't see many empty seats. Especially since empty seats might be concentrated in certain parts of the hall, and -- of course --some concerts sell more than others (so sometimes you look around and see a completely sold-out house).
But younger people continue to come into the business, studying music, and becoming composers, performers, critics, managers, and administrators. This ought to be a sign of hope, in an age when the number of younger people in the mainstream audience has been falling (see below). If younger people want to play classical music, surely other younger people might want to listen to it. Maybe the younger people -- who of course will take over the business in future years -- will find a way to build a young audience (and to attract younger people to donate money).
I mentioned the ticket surge in the past two years, which I know is real at the Metropolitan Opera and at the largest orchestras. This, as far as I can see, is the result of organizations taking the long-term decline seriously, and trying to do something about it. If you start using sophisticated marketing techniques, and try to make your concerts more appealing, of course you sell more tickets. Or if, like the Met, you mount a wildly successful campaign to make your institution more visible in the city you're in -- much more visible, in the Met's case --again you sell more tickets.
But, as I've said, the surge in ticket sales has only just begun (at least for orchestras) to reverse the long-term decline in ticket sales and attendance. How long can it go on? Nobody knows. And are the increased sales mainly to the orchestras' core audience, or are new people buying tickets? These are crucial questions, especially since there are other long-term problems that might limit just how successful classical music can be in our present age, at least in its present form.
And it costs money to reverse the fall in ticket sales. One problem I haven't mentioned is the decline in subscriptions. Orchestras used to sell more than 90% of their tickets in subscription packages, with people buying many tickets at a time. Now subscription sales have fallen to something like 65%, which means that orchestras have to find ways to sell more single tickets, which means their marketing departments have to work harder and promote the orchestra more, which in turn costs money.
The Metropolitan Opera is the great success story these days among large classical music institutions, but all the innovations that contribute to its success -- for instance the live streaming of its productions to movie theaters -- cost a lot of money. The Met was running large deficits when Peter Gelb took over, and from several sources I've learned that the deficits continue. They pretty much have to -- you can't invest in the future without spending money. But this also means that the financial survival of the Met is not a settled matter. There isn't yet a proven model for its operations that shows how it can pay for everything it does.
The aging audience
And there's one more piece of bad news to report. The mainstream audience is aging. This is a cliché, of course, one of the things most frequently mentioned in discussions of classical music's future. Though at the same time, it's often denied. The conventional wisdom, at least in the orchestra world, has for many years been that the audience has always been the same age it is now (gray- or white-haired, over 50). If that were true, an older audience wouldn't be a problem, because it would always be replaced by younger people, who, as they got older, would start going to classical music concerts, just as their parents did before them.
What's been missing in these discussions, as a rule, is any reference to concrete data. A writer in the New York Times even said last year -- in a large and prominent piece, alleging that things with classical music are just fine -- that no concrete data even exists.
But that's simply not true. The National Endowment for the Arts has been collecting data on the age of the classical music audience since 1982, and their figures show the median age of this audience rising from 40, when they began this research, to 49 in 2002. (You can download this data from the NEA's website.) Most large classical music institutions, from everything I've heard, would say these figures are too low. The numbers based on self-reporting by people filling out census forms. Did they or anyone in their families go to a classical performance during the past year? But the forms don't ask what kind of performances these were. They could have been pops concerts, Fourth of July concerts, or school concerts a family's kid might have played in. Peter Gelb said publicly that the Met's subscribers were 65 years old (I don't know if he was talking about their average age or median age). Figures I've seen for major orchestras put their core audience high in its fifties.
And data from the past -- which I've uncovered on my own -- is astounding. A study of two orchestras in 1937 showed the median age of their audience to be around 30! The Minnesota Orchestra (then the Minneapolis Symphony) surveyed its audience in 1955, and found that half of it was younger than 35. The median age of this audience was about 33. In the early 1960s, a major study showed the audience for all the performing arts to have a median age of 38, with no difference reported between one art form and another.
So evidently the age of the classical music audience has been rising for decades -- for 50 years or more! Some people say this is natural, because the age of the population of the whole has risen. But this can't account for the trends in classical music. In 1955, if we assume that the Minnesota data would be valid for all orchestras, the orchestra audience had about the same median age as the population as a whole. But now that audience (if I take data I have from a couple of major orchestras to be typical) is about 50% older than the general population, which means that it's aged faster than the general population has. A lot faster, in fact.
The NEA also reports something truly devastating -- that the percentage of people under 30 in the classical music audience fell in half between 1982 and 1997, and has fallen further since then. How, then, can anyone be sure that younger people, as they grow older, will replace the present audience? Some of them might, but if fewer people -- a lot fewer -- are going to classical concerts when they're young, shouldn't we expect fewer people to go when they're older?
Thus, as time goes on, the mainstream audience (at least for classical music in its present form) is likely to shrink. Its older members stop going. They won't be replaced. A German scholar, using German data that seems very much like the data from the US, estimates that the audience for German orchestral concerts will shrink 36% over the next two decades.
I'd make a bolder prediction. I think we're at the end of a long era. Classical music, as we know it, only started to come into existence around 1800. Before that time, almost all the music played was new. Musicians improvised, and audiences talked while music was performed. Music wasn't considered a serious art, and in fact the entire concept of serious art, as we know it today, was barely known.
After 1800, things started to change. Music was taken very seriously. Composers were revered. Musicians were expected to play exactly what the composer wrote (though for a century more, opera singers still felt free to make changes on their own). Concerts began to be formal, and audiences were asked to sit in reverent silence. The classical repertoire began to be established, and the music performed began more and more to be from the past.
This is the era that I think is ending. More on that below.
Conservative changes preserve the classical repertoire, as we've known it for so many years, and also at least the broad outlines of the performance styles we're all familiar with. But musicians now might talk to the audience. The stage might be lit in more or less dramatic ways, to reinforce the mood of the music. Musicians might dress less formally. Musicians might be available before or after a concert to talk to members of the audience. The audience might be given chances to participate -- to vote, for instance, on which of three new pieces they like best.
Radical changes go further. String quartets might play in clubs. A new music festival (I'm thinking of this year's Bang on a Can marathon in New York ) might happen in a large public space, with free admission, and the audience welcome to come and go as it pleased. Composers (Steve Reich and Philip Glass started this in the 1970s) might form their own ensembles, and find their own audience, outside the classical music world. New music might start sounding like pop music, with electronic instruments and a beat. Classical musicians turn into entrepreneurs, looking for any audience they can find, especially on the Internet. Classical music is combined on concerts with dance music and alternative rock. Performance styles, even for standard repertoire, become freer, more personal, and more informal.
The radical changes seem, at least to me, the most important. They make classical music look, feel, and even sound like what goes on in the rest of the world. The big problem, though -- as I've already said about the surge in new music events -- is that these new-style concerts don't make much money. So they're not ready, yet, to replace the classical music mainstream. How can we maintain classical music on the scale at which it currently operates, if concerts get smaller, and attract a younger audience which won't have the money for large-scale donations that the current, older audience has? I'm not saying that a new financial model won't evolve, but we haven't seen it yet.
Here's one way to look at it. Find a photo of the crowd at a baseball game in the 1940s. You'll see men in suits and ties, wearing hats. Now go to a game today. You'll see men and women, people of all ages, dressed (to put it mildly) informally. I'm not going to say that classical concerts haven't gotten more informal -- certainly you see more people dressed casually in the audience -- but orchestra musicians still wear formal dress, and the formal atmosphere of performances (the entrance of the concertmaster, followed a little later by the conductor) has barely changed. The rest of the world has evolved; classical music has only just started to. Younger people, for this reason, as time goes on, will find classical concerts less and less plausible. They just don't look or feel like the rest of the world.
To some people, that's of course a virtue -- classical music can seem like a refuge to everything unpleasant about modern life. But in practical terms, it's a disaster. And even artistically it's questionable. If classical music is cut off from bad things in modern life, it's also cut off from good things, and loses whatever roots it ever had in the vitality of our evolving culture. In past centuries, it was a contemporary art, reflecting whatever was going on in the world. It can't pretend to be that now.
Another change, of course, is the rise of popular culture, and especially -- at least to me -- the rise of new forms of art, inside the pop music world. When I was growing up, in the 1950s, most people believed that classical music was the only legitimate art music. Even then, that idea was dubious. It left out jazz, which (with the rise of bebop, in the 1940s, with musicians like Charlie Parker) had moved far beyond mass entertainment (though even before bebop, musicians like Duke Ellington had every right to be ranked as serious artists).
But by the '60s, with people like Bob Dylan emerging, pop music changed. New styles emerged that weren't even popular. Classical music now had competition, and the competition was more lively, more vital, more about the present day, and more rooted in modern life than classical music knew how to be.
I'm not going to outline every major aspect of this change, whose effects -- even though we take them very much for granted today -- are profound. Suddenly classical music, along with all the other formal high arts (and in fact the very notion of "the arts"), starts to look old-fashioned. People today don't want to sit passively while they're fed art that they're told is superior. They want to participate. They want to make their own art, and in the wide and increasingly serious world of popular culture, they can do exactly that. Classical music -- with all its rules, and all its assumptions of superiority, plus all the traditional idea that people need special education to appreciate it -- seems stuffy, out of date, and even pointless. People don't mind the music (in fact, they're downloading it quite a bit), but the structure and ambience of the classical concert world now seems a little pointless.
I'll end with just one large consequence that might follow from all of this. And when I say large, I think I mean gigantic. It's all about funding. Classical music costs a lot of money. Major orchestras, for instance, have budgets ranging from $30 million to $60 million a year, and even higher. They can't earn that much money from ticket sales, so somebody has to give it to them. Up to now, that money has been available, from private donors, from corporations, from foundations, and from government agencies, even if the audience for these orchestras -- the people who go regularly -- make up only a tiny fraction of their cites' population.
How long can this continue? Once we understand that classical music isn't the only music that we can call art, how can we justify spending so much money to -- just for instance -- keep major orchestras functioning 52 weeks every year? Obviously, they ought to get some money; they keep alive a form of musical art that can't earn its keep in the marketplace. But should they get as much as they're getting? As time goes on, it might be harder and harder to argue that they should.
And I see signs that this is more than a theoretical discussion. A recent front-page story in the New York Times discussed a new consciousness in charitable giving. An economist has theorized that tax breaks for those who donate money may promote inequality. Why? Because studies show that only 10% of charitable donations go to causes that actually improve how people live. The other 90% goes to things that rich people enjoy, and which are part of rich peoples' culture -- new buildings for elite universities, and (sigh) the arts. This doesn't mean that the benefits of these things don't spread beyond the rich; obviously they do, at least to some extent. But donations go to them primarily because the rich enjoy them, not because they're seen as any route to social betterment. And it turns out, according to the Times, that at least some wealthy donors are starting to see that this is true, and aim their giving away from classical music and other elite, expensive forms of art.
Second, and maybe most important, is an evolution in the social structure of New York. For years the richest zipcodes in New York were on the Upper East Side, where the old social, financial, and political elites were found. These were the people who, among many other things, supported the arts.
But now the money -- along with political and social power -- has moved. The richest, and most powerful zipcodes are now downtown, in Tribeca. Does Tribeca support the traditional arts? Apparently not. The people who live there have much more modern taste, and they certainly don't appear to care about classical music. I asked around, and learned that at least one of New York's big classical music institutions has hardly any ticket-buyers from Tribeca. Which zipcode buys the most tickets (for this, and, I've found, other classical music institutions)? You guessed it -- the Upper East Side.
So here we have what seems to be a tangible -- quantifiable -- emergence of the cultural change I've been outlining. The new generation of wealthy, powerful people in New York (and I'm sure this is echoed in other cities) don't support classical music the way the older generation did.
And if this is really true, where will classical music get its money, when the cultural transformation is complete?
And as I neglected to say in my last post -- comments are very, very welcome. We're all in this together.
NumbersSeems like the classical music mainstream, as we've known it all these years, is shrinking. By now, I'm sure everybody knows that there are fewer classical music radio stations than there used to be, less media coverage of classical music, and many fewer new releases -- at least of serious classical music -- by major classical record labels.
Hard data on other things can be hard to find -- you have to ask around, assemble sketchy press reports, and nose out things that haven't been publicized (or are quite literally secret) --but I hear from managers that there are fewer bookings for classical artists. And ticket sales have been falling, apparently for quite a while. (With a bump upward over the past couple of years; more on that later.)
More than a year ago, the League of American Orchestras (formerly the American Symphony Orchestra League) made public a steady drop in attendance at orchestra events, beginning in the mid-1990s. Here we run into statistical confusion, because "attendance" doesn't mean paid ticket sales; the League's numbers include free parks concerts, school concerts, and every other performance that orchestras give. Paid attendance at core classical events -- an orchestra's main subscription series -- might be a more sensitive measure of how well or badly orchestras are doing, since these concerts are an orchestra's main mission.
And here the decline seems to be greater than it is for total attendance at all orchestra events. Private statistics from our largest orchestras show a long-term fall in ticket sales beginning around 1990, a drop so large, cumulatively, that by itself it might account for recent orchestral deficits. It's so large a drop that the uptick in the past two years only begins to reverse it..
For opera companies I don't have comparable data. But Peter Gelb, who took over the Metropolitan Opera a year ago, publicly acknowledged a serious drop in ticket sales before he came on board. And the Chicago Lyric Opera, which used to sell more than 100% of its seats (subscribers would return tickets they couldn't use, and the company would resell them), was down, last I heard, to around 92%. (The Met, which used to sell around 92% of its tickets, fell far below that before Peter Gelb took over.)
Nobody seems to gather overall numbers for chamber music, but in recent years I've heard anecdotal accounts -- a couple of dozen by now, I'd guess -- from chamber music presenters about their decline. Recently I got more precise numbers from one of these presenters, located in a large American city (not New York). Each year for a decade, I was told, this group has lost 10 to 20 subscribers. Which doesn't sound like much until you do the math. The group now has around 700 subscribers, so if we assume an average drop each year of 15, that means that since 1997 the subscription sales have fallen 18%, from 850 to 700. That's a big drop, which certainly leaves the group worrying about its future.
Why don't people notice?Why don't more people notice what I've just recounted? Partly because the data is hard to uncover. Some of it is kept secret, because large institutions don't want to frighten their donors. The press, meanwhile, doesn't ask tough enough questions. If an institution reports a rise in ticket sales, classical music writers don't normally ask which concerts the data is for, or how it compares with data for the past decade.
And it's also true that classical music institutions vary, that some do better than others, and that some events are romping success stories, with cheering, sold-out houses. To understand the overall picture, you need comprehensive data from many institutions.
It's also hard to measure a long-term decline simply by going to concerts and looking to see how many seats are empty. "I go to the X Symphony a lot," a Juilliard student said to me last year, naming one of America's foremost orchestras. "And the houses look full to me."
But "full" is a relative term. If the X Symphony sold 95% of its tickets 15 years ago and sells 85% now, of course they're feeling that decline on their bottom line. But someone looking around a concert hall that's 85% full can honestly say that they don't see many empty seats. Especially since empty seats might be concentrated in certain parts of the hall, and -- of course --some concerts sell more than others (so sometimes you look around and see a completely sold-out house).
Good newsI don't want to pass over good news, which many people think might counterbalance everything I've said so far. I've mentioned the small surge in ticket sales during the past few years. There are also many more new music performances than there used to be, which is good both artistically and as a growth trend for the future. Maybe new music can (at least to some extent) make up for any decline in the classical music mainstream. Though there's one problem. These new-music performances don't make much money (if they make any at all). So how can musicians make a living from them? How can classical music institutions use them to survive? The classical music business, as it's presently organized, makes its money from the mainstream. That'll have to change, before any surge in new kinds of concerts can establish any lasting change.
But younger people continue to come into the business, studying music, and becoming composers, performers, critics, managers, and administrators. This ought to be a sign of hope, in an age when the number of younger people in the mainstream audience has been falling (see below). If younger people want to play classical music, surely other younger people might want to listen to it. Maybe the younger people -- who of course will take over the business in future years -- will find a way to build a young audience (and to attract younger people to donate money).
I mentioned the ticket surge in the past two years, which I know is real at the Metropolitan Opera and at the largest orchestras. This, as far as I can see, is the result of organizations taking the long-term decline seriously, and trying to do something about it. If you start using sophisticated marketing techniques, and try to make your concerts more appealing, of course you sell more tickets. Or if, like the Met, you mount a wildly successful campaign to make your institution more visible in the city you're in -- much more visible, in the Met's case --again you sell more tickets.
But, as I've said, the surge in ticket sales has only just begun (at least for orchestras) to reverse the long-term decline in ticket sales and attendance. How long can it go on? Nobody knows. And are the increased sales mainly to the orchestras' core audience, or are new people buying tickets? These are crucial questions, especially since there are other long-term problems that might limit just how successful classical music can be in our present age, at least in its present form.
FinancesFinances are one of these problems. This can be a long discussion, and I won't try to go into much detail here. But classical music institutions have -- in recent years -- often run deficits. Some of these are persistent. (They vary, of course, from institution to institution.) One reason for the deficits might be, as I've said, the decline in ticket sales. But another is ongoing trouble raising funds. People simply aren't as interested in classical music as they used to be. Foundations and private donors increasingly feel they should support social causes. (More on this later.) Foundations, in particular, from everything I've heard, are losing interest in classical music. One prominent person in the orchestra field said outright, in a conversation I was part of, that at a gathering of foundations hardly anyone would even attend a meeting on why orchestras should be funded.
And it costs money to reverse the fall in ticket sales. One problem I haven't mentioned is the decline in subscriptions. Orchestras used to sell more than 90% of their tickets in subscription packages, with people buying many tickets at a time. Now subscription sales have fallen to something like 65%, which means that orchestras have to find ways to sell more single tickets, which means their marketing departments have to work harder and promote the orchestra more, which in turn costs money.
The Metropolitan Opera is the great success story these days among large classical music institutions, but all the innovations that contribute to its success -- for instance the live streaming of its productions to movie theaters -- cost a lot of money. The Met was running large deficits when Peter Gelb took over, and from several sources I've learned that the deficits continue. They pretty much have to -- you can't invest in the future without spending money. But this also means that the financial survival of the Met is not a settled matter. There isn't yet a proven model for its operations that shows how it can pay for everything it does.
The aging audience
And there's one more piece of bad news to report. The mainstream audience is aging. This is a cliché, of course, one of the things most frequently mentioned in discussions of classical music's future. Though at the same time, it's often denied. The conventional wisdom, at least in the orchestra world, has for many years been that the audience has always been the same age it is now (gray- or white-haired, over 50). If that were true, an older audience wouldn't be a problem, because it would always be replaced by younger people, who, as they got older, would start going to classical music concerts, just as their parents did before them.
What's been missing in these discussions, as a rule, is any reference to concrete data. A writer in the New York Times even said last year -- in a large and prominent piece, alleging that things with classical music are just fine -- that no concrete data even exists.
But that's simply not true. The National Endowment for the Arts has been collecting data on the age of the classical music audience since 1982, and their figures show the median age of this audience rising from 40, when they began this research, to 49 in 2002. (You can download this data from the NEA's website.) Most large classical music institutions, from everything I've heard, would say these figures are too low. The numbers based on self-reporting by people filling out census forms. Did they or anyone in their families go to a classical performance during the past year? But the forms don't ask what kind of performances these were. They could have been pops concerts, Fourth of July concerts, or school concerts a family's kid might have played in. Peter Gelb said publicly that the Met's subscribers were 65 years old (I don't know if he was talking about their average age or median age). Figures I've seen for major orchestras put their core audience high in its fifties.
And data from the past -- which I've uncovered on my own -- is astounding. A study of two orchestras in 1937 showed the median age of their audience to be around 30! The Minnesota Orchestra (then the Minneapolis Symphony) surveyed its audience in 1955, and found that half of it was younger than 35. The median age of this audience was about 33. In the early 1960s, a major study showed the audience for all the performing arts to have a median age of 38, with no difference reported between one art form and another.
So evidently the age of the classical music audience has been rising for decades -- for 50 years or more! Some people say this is natural, because the age of the population of the whole has risen. But this can't account for the trends in classical music. In 1955, if we assume that the Minnesota data would be valid for all orchestras, the orchestra audience had about the same median age as the population as a whole. But now that audience (if I take data I have from a couple of major orchestras to be typical) is about 50% older than the general population, which means that it's aged faster than the general population has. A lot faster, in fact.
The NEA also reports something truly devastating -- that the percentage of people under 30 in the classical music audience fell in half between 1982 and 1997, and has fallen further since then. How, then, can anyone be sure that younger people, as they grow older, will replace the present audience? Some of them might, but if fewer people -- a lot fewer -- are going to classical concerts when they're young, shouldn't we expect fewer people to go when they're older?
Thus, as time goes on, the mainstream audience (at least for classical music in its present form) is likely to shrink. Its older members stop going. They won't be replaced. A German scholar, using German data that seems very much like the data from the US, estimates that the audience for German orchestral concerts will shrink 36% over the next two decades.
I'd make a bolder prediction. I think we're at the end of a long era. Classical music, as we know it, only started to come into existence around 1800. Before that time, almost all the music played was new. Musicians improvised, and audiences talked while music was performed. Music wasn't considered a serious art, and in fact the entire concept of serious art, as we know it today, was barely known.
After 1800, things started to change. Music was taken very seriously. Composers were revered. Musicians were expected to play exactly what the composer wrote (though for a century more, opera singers still felt free to make changes on their own). Concerts began to be formal, and audiences were asked to sit in reverent silence. The classical repertoire began to be established, and the music performed began more and more to be from the past.
This is the era that I think is ending. More on that below.
ChangesOf course the classical music world doesn't sit quietly, watching itself die. There's activity, sometimes almost wild activity, as people try to make changes. These changes take two forms, which I'll call conservative and radical, though I don't mean to dismiss the conservative ones.
Conservative changes preserve the classical repertoire, as we've known it for so many years, and also at least the broad outlines of the performance styles we're all familiar with. But musicians now might talk to the audience. The stage might be lit in more or less dramatic ways, to reinforce the mood of the music. Musicians might dress less formally. Musicians might be available before or after a concert to talk to members of the audience. The audience might be given chances to participate -- to vote, for instance, on which of three new pieces they like best.
Radical changes go further. String quartets might play in clubs. A new music festival (I'm thinking of this year's Bang on a Can marathon in New York ) might happen in a large public space, with free admission, and the audience welcome to come and go as it pleased. Composers (Steve Reich and Philip Glass started this in the 1970s) might form their own ensembles, and find their own audience, outside the classical music world. New music might start sounding like pop music, with electronic instruments and a beat. Classical musicians turn into entrepreneurs, looking for any audience they can find, especially on the Internet. Classical music is combined on concerts with dance music and alternative rock. Performance styles, even for standard repertoire, become freer, more personal, and more informal.
The radical changes seem, at least to me, the most important. They make classical music look, feel, and even sound like what goes on in the rest of the world. The big problem, though -- as I've already said about the surge in new music events -- is that these new-style concerts don't make much money. So they're not ready, yet, to replace the classical music mainstream. How can we maintain classical music on the scale at which it currently operates, if concerts get smaller, and attract a younger audience which won't have the money for large-scale donations that the current, older audience has? I'm not saying that a new financial model won't evolve, but we haven't seen it yet.
CultureHere comes the real wild card in the present situation -- the evolution of our wider culture, which doesn't favor mainstream classical music at all.
Here's one way to look at it. Find a photo of the crowd at a baseball game in the 1940s. You'll see men in suits and ties, wearing hats. Now go to a game today. You'll see men and women, people of all ages, dressed (to put it mildly) informally. I'm not going to say that classical concerts haven't gotten more informal -- certainly you see more people dressed casually in the audience -- but orchestra musicians still wear formal dress, and the formal atmosphere of performances (the entrance of the concertmaster, followed a little later by the conductor) has barely changed. The rest of the world has evolved; classical music has only just started to. Younger people, for this reason, as time goes on, will find classical concerts less and less plausible. They just don't look or feel like the rest of the world.
To some people, that's of course a virtue -- classical music can seem like a refuge to everything unpleasant about modern life. But in practical terms, it's a disaster. And even artistically it's questionable. If classical music is cut off from bad things in modern life, it's also cut off from good things, and loses whatever roots it ever had in the vitality of our evolving culture. In past centuries, it was a contemporary art, reflecting whatever was going on in the world. It can't pretend to be that now.
Another change, of course, is the rise of popular culture, and especially -- at least to me -- the rise of new forms of art, inside the pop music world. When I was growing up, in the 1950s, most people believed that classical music was the only legitimate art music. Even then, that idea was dubious. It left out jazz, which (with the rise of bebop, in the 1940s, with musicians like Charlie Parker) had moved far beyond mass entertainment (though even before bebop, musicians like Duke Ellington had every right to be ranked as serious artists).
But by the '60s, with people like Bob Dylan emerging, pop music changed. New styles emerged that weren't even popular. Classical music now had competition, and the competition was more lively, more vital, more about the present day, and more rooted in modern life than classical music knew how to be.
I'm not going to outline every major aspect of this change, whose effects -- even though we take them very much for granted today -- are profound. Suddenly classical music, along with all the other formal high arts (and in fact the very notion of "the arts"), starts to look old-fashioned. People today don't want to sit passively while they're fed art that they're told is superior. They want to participate. They want to make their own art, and in the wide and increasingly serious world of popular culture, they can do exactly that. Classical music -- with all its rules, and all its assumptions of superiority, plus all the traditional idea that people need special education to appreciate it -- seems stuffy, out of date, and even pointless. People don't mind the music (in fact, they're downloading it quite a bit), but the structure and ambience of the classical concert world now seems a little pointless.
I'll end with just one large consequence that might follow from all of this. And when I say large, I think I mean gigantic. It's all about funding. Classical music costs a lot of money. Major orchestras, for instance, have budgets ranging from $30 million to $60 million a year, and even higher. They can't earn that much money from ticket sales, so somebody has to give it to them. Up to now, that money has been available, from private donors, from corporations, from foundations, and from government agencies, even if the audience for these orchestras -- the people who go regularly -- make up only a tiny fraction of their cites' population.
How long can this continue? Once we understand that classical music isn't the only music that we can call art, how can we justify spending so much money to -- just for instance -- keep major orchestras functioning 52 weeks every year? Obviously, they ought to get some money; they keep alive a form of musical art that can't earn its keep in the marketplace. But should they get as much as they're getting? As time goes on, it might be harder and harder to argue that they should.
And I see signs that this is more than a theoretical discussion. A recent front-page story in the New York Times discussed a new consciousness in charitable giving. An economist has theorized that tax breaks for those who donate money may promote inequality. Why? Because studies show that only 10% of charitable donations go to causes that actually improve how people live. The other 90% goes to things that rich people enjoy, and which are part of rich peoples' culture -- new buildings for elite universities, and (sigh) the arts. This doesn't mean that the benefits of these things don't spread beyond the rich; obviously they do, at least to some extent. But donations go to them primarily because the rich enjoy them, not because they're seen as any route to social betterment. And it turns out, according to the Times, that at least some wealthy donors are starting to see that this is true, and aim their giving away from classical music and other elite, expensive forms of art.
Second, and maybe most important, is an evolution in the social structure of New York. For years the richest zipcodes in New York were on the Upper East Side, where the old social, financial, and political elites were found. These were the people who, among many other things, supported the arts.
But now the money -- along with political and social power -- has moved. The richest, and most powerful zipcodes are now downtown, in Tribeca. Does Tribeca support the traditional arts? Apparently not. The people who live there have much more modern taste, and they certainly don't appear to care about classical music. I asked around, and learned that at least one of New York's big classical music institutions has hardly any ticket-buyers from Tribeca. Which zipcode buys the most tickets (for this, and, I've found, other classical music institutions)? You guessed it -- the Upper East Side.
So here we have what seems to be a tangible -- quantifiable -- emergence of the cultural change I've been outlining. The new generation of wealthy, powerful people in New York (and I'm sure this is echoed in other cities) don't support classical music the way the older generation did.
And if this is really true, where will classical music get its money, when the cultural transformation is complete?
A happy new year to everyone. Hope you all had revitalizing holidays, and that 2009 will be everything you want it to be. Or else something even better than you hoped.
I thought I'd start the year, blogwise, with an overview -- in five posts -- of where I think classical music stands right now. This opening entry will summarize some things you may have read here before, but later posts will have quite a lot that's new.
So where are we, as we start 2009? Understanding, of course, that the economy is a wild card -- maybe a ferocious wild card -- that might strengthen (or maybe greatly strengthen) any downward trends.
Not, of course, that there isn't debate about all this, especially about the shrinking mainstream. Some people think there isn't any problem, or even -- if it's really true (see below) that ticket sales have gone up in recent yeas -- that the problems have largely been solved. But I think most of us think that classical music faces a "legitimation crisis" (to use a phrase from Julian Johnson's otherwise not so useful book, Who Needs Classical Music?). Most of us worry that classical music's place in the world isn't secure. And we think it needs a new, larger, and surely younger audience.
We need numbers -- reliable data, most crucially, about classical music ticket sales. What's their trend, over the past 20 years? Have they gone down? Have they gone down enough to raise an alarm?
Here we have a major problem. We don't have those numbers. They aren't publicly available, and some of them, as far as I know, haven't even been gathered privately. This cripples any discussion of classical music's future. Regular readers will know that I've put together whatever public and private data I've been able to find, along with anecdotal reports, and that I've concluded there has in fact been a decline. I don't know that I've ever done a single post on all of this, but I've mentioned it piecemeal. the data comes from private figures gathered by large orchestras, scattered reports (public and private) involving major opera companies, and voluminous anecdotal comments from people who run chamber music series.
But my conclusion has to be tentative, because the solid data just isn't there. To me, this lack of data is itself a crisis, which I'll discuss in this series of posts. And I'll note that there's apparently been an uptick in ticket sales during the past couple of years, largely (or so I think) because of better marketing.
But does this uptick mean that the long-term trend has turned around?
I said we don't have data, but we do have one crucial statistic. There isn't any doubt that our audience has aged -- and in fact aged drastically. Fifty years ago the classical music audience was about the same age as the population at large, with a median age in its early thirties. It began, as far as I can learn, to get older in the 1960s, and its continued aging can be traced through the decades that followed.
This data comes from my own research, and of course I've talked about it here. For an extensive look at it -- with links to primary sources, and also with some anecdotal data that supports the numbers -- see my newly enlarged and updated entry on the age of the audience, in my "Resources" section, on the right of my blog page. (This section -- if I have the time -- will grow.)
But starting in the 1960s, a new culture developed, and younger people began to feel that classical music didn't speak to the world they lived in. As the decades passed, they felt more and more that way, and in the '80s and the '90s (according to data from the National Endowment for the Arts; see my "Resources" section, linked above) the percentage of people under 30 in the classical music audience just collapsed.
Which of course brings me to the disconnects we talked about here last month (and also, even better, here) -- disconnects between classical music and the rest of our culture -- which I'll return to after I finish these new year's posts. Classical music (as the aging of the audience helps demonstrate) stands apart from contemporary culture. And it does so, I think, in ways that no other art form does.
Which explains, I think, why the classical music mainstream will decline. How can it continue, if it doesn't speak to current needs, and if the people most attached to it are those who formed that attachment in past generations? And if those people disappear, then how will mainstream classical institutions find the funding and the audience to support all the performances they currently present?
Both things, of course, are happening. And some of the new performances that have evolved -- which I've called "alternative classical" events -- have actually attracted large, young audiences. (Also here and here.)
That should give us hope. Though people with a lifelong love of mainstream classical events might understandably not be satisfied. And what we don't know yet is how alternative classical performances can support themselves, and thus -- if alternative events become any large part of our future -- how classical musicians can make a living. If the mainstream shrinks, how can classical musicians make as much money as at least some of them do now?
That, to me, is the major problem that we have to solve. And anyone who solves it deserves a major prize.
(Attention, foundations -- this is something you should study!)
I thought I'd start the year, blogwise, with an overview -- in five posts -- of where I think classical music stands right now. This opening entry will summarize some things you may have read here before, but later posts will have quite a lot that's new.
So where are we, as we start 2009? Understanding, of course, that the economy is a wild card -- maybe a ferocious wild card -- that might strengthen (or maybe greatly strengthen) any downward trends.
Classical music is changingThat's true, no matter what the economy does. The classical music mainstream will very likely shrink, at least in the long run, and new ways of doing things -- new kinds of concerts, new venues, new styles of performance, new kinds of new music, and along with this a new audience -- have been emerging. They'll continue to emerge, and they'll grow.
Not, of course, that there isn't debate about all this, especially about the shrinking mainstream. Some people think there isn't any problem, or even -- if it's really true (see below) that ticket sales have gone up in recent yeas -- that the problems have largely been solved. But I think most of us think that classical music faces a "legitimation crisis" (to use a phrase from Julian Johnson's otherwise not so useful book, Who Needs Classical Music?). Most of us worry that classical music's place in the world isn't secure. And we think it needs a new, larger, and surely younger audience.
NumbersBut how can we measure this crisis?
We need numbers -- reliable data, most crucially, about classical music ticket sales. What's their trend, over the past 20 years? Have they gone down? Have they gone down enough to raise an alarm?
Here we have a major problem. We don't have those numbers. They aren't publicly available, and some of them, as far as I know, haven't even been gathered privately. This cripples any discussion of classical music's future. Regular readers will know that I've put together whatever public and private data I've been able to find, along with anecdotal reports, and that I've concluded there has in fact been a decline. I don't know that I've ever done a single post on all of this, but I've mentioned it piecemeal. the data comes from private figures gathered by large orchestras, scattered reports (public and private) involving major opera companies, and voluminous anecdotal comments from people who run chamber music series.
But my conclusion has to be tentative, because the solid data just isn't there. To me, this lack of data is itself a crisis, which I'll discuss in this series of posts. And I'll note that there's apparently been an uptick in ticket sales during the past couple of years, largely (or so I think) because of better marketing.
But does this uptick mean that the long-term trend has turned around?
Some good newsThis is something I haven't said here before. I see a new and much more cheerful attitude toward classical music, both inside the field (well, in some places), and above all in how classical music is viewed in the outside world. No, we haven't rejoined mainstream culture in any decisive way, but I do think they're looking at us differently, with more enjoyment, and most crucially without the old-fashioned sense that we're stuffy and elite. This -- not to keep you all waiting -- will be my next post.
What should we do?How do we attract the new, larger, younger audience? People in our field take -- broadly speaking -- two views of that, as I'll note later on in this series. Some of us think that we should educate the outside world, in schools and with education programs launched by classical music institutions. Others think that classical music itself has to change. I'm in the latter camp, as regular readers don't have to be told. But I think that both camps have something to contribute, and that each should be open to the other's ideas, not to mention the other's acheivements.
Other points, reduxAnd here I'll summarize some things I've talked about before, which won't be in these update posts.
I said we don't have data, but we do have one crucial statistic. There isn't any doubt that our audience has aged -- and in fact aged drastically. Fifty years ago the classical music audience was about the same age as the population at large, with a median age in its early thirties. It began, as far as I can learn, to get older in the 1960s, and its continued aging can be traced through the decades that followed.
This data comes from my own research, and of course I've talked about it here. For an extensive look at it -- with links to primary sources, and also with some anecdotal data that supports the numbers -- see my newly enlarged and updated entry on the age of the audience, in my "Resources" section, on the right of my blog page. (This section -- if I have the time -- will grow.)
CultureSo why did the audience get older? I think it's because our culture changed. I think the aging of the audience paints a graphic picture, even a dramatic one, of classical music receding from our changing culture. Fifty years ago, classical music (even repeated performances of older repertoire) seemed somehow current, and so younger people took to it. Even the formal dress that musicians wore was part of current culture. In old movies, we see butlers wearing it, and we see people going out to nightclubs in tuxedos.
But starting in the 1960s, a new culture developed, and younger people began to feel that classical music didn't speak to the world they lived in. As the decades passed, they felt more and more that way, and in the '80s and the '90s (according to data from the National Endowment for the Arts; see my "Resources" section, linked above) the percentage of people under 30 in the classical music audience just collapsed.
Which of course brings me to the disconnects we talked about here last month (and also, even better, here) -- disconnects between classical music and the rest of our culture -- which I'll return to after I finish these new year's posts. Classical music (as the aging of the audience helps demonstrate) stands apart from contemporary culture. And it does so, I think, in ways that no other art form does.
Which explains, I think, why the classical music mainstream will decline. How can it continue, if it doesn't speak to current needs, and if the people most attached to it are those who formed that attachment in past generations? And if those people disappear, then how will mainstream classical institutions find the funding and the audience to support all the performances they currently present?
The futureSo we have to see some change. The mainstream has to change, or something will have to emerge outside it.
Both things, of course, are happening. And some of the new performances that have evolved -- which I've called "alternative classical" events -- have actually attracted large, young audiences. (Also here and here.)
That should give us hope. Though people with a lifelong love of mainstream classical events might understandably not be satisfied. And what we don't know yet is how alternative classical performances can support themselves, and thus -- if alternative events become any large part of our future -- how classical musicians can make a living. If the mainstream shrinks, how can classical musicians make as much money as at least some of them do now?
That, to me, is the major problem that we have to solve. And anyone who solves it deserves a major prize.
(Attention, foundations -- this is something you should study!)
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Straight Up |
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude
dance
Foot in Mouth
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Seeing Things
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...
jazz
Jazz Beyond Jazz
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
ListenGood
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Rifftides
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
media
Out There
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Serious Popcorn
Martha Bayles on Film...
Martha Bayles on Film...
classical music
Creative Destruction
Fresh ideas on building arts communities
Fresh ideas on building arts communities
The Future of Classical Music?
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
On the Record
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Overflow
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
PianoMorphosis
Bruce Brubaker on all things Piano
Bruce Brubaker on all things Piano
PostClassic
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Sandow
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Slipped Disc
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds
publishing
book/daddy
Jerome Weeks on Books
Jerome Weeks on Books
Quick Study
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera
theatre
Drama Queen
Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
lies like truth
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world
visual
Aesthetic Grounds
Public Art, Public Space
Public Art, Public Space
Another Bouncing Ball
Regina Hackett takes her Art To Go
Regina Hackett takes her Art To Go
Artopia
John Perreault's art diary
John Perreault's art diary
CultureGrrl
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Modern Art Notes
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog
