February 2009 Archives

Here's an e-mail I got this morning, from a publicist friend, Patch Canada. Look what Twitter did for her! (Thanks, Patch, for giving me permission to put this on the blog.)

Hi Greg -

I was absolutely blown away by Twitter last night and felt compelled to share it with you since you and I have talked about the usefulness of Twitter.

Did you happen to see my Tweet yesterday about Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel doing a free live in-store performance at Waterloo Records in Austin? We had this in-store performance scheduled sans Willie. About 30 minutes before the performance I get a call from the powers that be saying that Willie will indeed be showing up (He wanted to surprise Ray Benson and fans).

So, I post the short tweet (with maybe one or two Austin followers) and then start to pull out my TV and print contacts which took about 5 minutes. I made one call to the Austin Chronicle  and chatted with the music editor for 3 or 4 minutes.  This is important because it's now T-minus 21 minutes until this performance. I then call the FOX affiliate newsroom.  The news desk says, "Oh, yes, we know. One of our editors just saw it on Facebook." I kept dialing and kept getting similar answers from photo desks and TV assignment editors.

At 5pm Austin time, there were a sea of people at Waterloo Records, an entire press corps and the only people that were surprised were Asleep at The Wheel and Willie Nelson who didn't know that people already knew!  I have NEVER in my life seen anything like it.

Behold the power of social networking sites!

As Patch and I have said to each other in Twitter direct messages (private messages using Twitter, for those who don't know) -- it's Twitter's speed that's new. And quite amazing. 

In all our fine discussion here about silent listening, there's something obvious that I've forgotten to say.

We've talked about noise at concerts, whether it's from people Twittering, or people talking, or applauding during the music. Some of us are worried that this would disturb the musicians. As in fact it might, but maybe only (as I said in a reply to a comment) because the musicians aren't used to noise coming from the audience.

Just look at sports. A major league pitcher has to fire pitches at pinpoint targets, maybe at a particular cubic inch of space. At 99 mph. And meanwhile the crowd is shouting, even screaming, even yelling insults directly at the pitcher, using his name.

The pitcher makes the pitches anyway. And the players in the field make their plays. We shouldn't underestimate how complex baseball strategy can be. A ball is hit, and the fielders have to understand immediately where it's going, who's on base, how fast each runner is, and what the strategy might be for the situation unfolding at that moment (based on who's on base, how many outs there are, what the score is, how late in the game it is, and more). And then they have to react almost instantaneously, run for the ball (I'm thinking of outfielders right now), catch it, immediately throw it where it needs to go, and hit precise targets. All maybe in a fraction of a second, with the crowd screaming.

Same in football. Many complex plays, many instantaneous decisions, many targets to hit. Or, in the case of pass receivers, targets to catch. All with the crowd screaming and roaring.

Cut to golf and tennis. There it's different. When someone's serving, or making a difficult putt, nobody watching is allowed to make a sound. If the crowd screamed at Rafael Nadal when he was returning a nasty serve from Federer, maybe he'd be thrown off stride. But that, I think it should be clear, would only be because he's not used to crowd noise.  If he were Johann Santana, pitching for the Mets, he'd make his shot no matter what the crowd was doing.

Maybe it's different for classical musicians, because their art involves making sound, so they have to listen very carefully to everything that's going on. I wonder, though, how much difference that would make, since concert noises aren't likely to be loud. And because -- if you're playing in an orchestra -- the orchestra itself makes so much noise that you very likely can't hear the audience. And may well (depending on where you're sitting) have trouble hearing all the other instruments. A back-stand violist, sitting right in front of the trombones, may not be well placed to hear exactly what the violins are doing while the trombones play.

This picks up from some comments posted here, and also from a Twitter debate I had with a musician from the London Symphony. (Thanks, @londonsymphony!)

And it all comes from my suggestion that classical music organizations consider Twittering during concerts -- sending out real-time thoughts about the music, from musicians, for instance, or (a very interesting option, for me) from members of the audience.

Some people don't like this -- and understandably, of course -- because they feel that it would interfere with listening. That's a point to take seriously. We have a tradition (not as long-established as we think it is, but still very firmly established now) of listening to classical music in silence, without distractions. And yes, this has been  head-butted a little in recent years, with video screens at concerts, and other innovations. But still most concerts are untroubled with distractions, and many people want to keep it that way.

I want to make it clear that I sympathize with them, and that -- no matter what innovations might appear -- there should be concerts, maybe the majority of concerts (to serve our existing audience), where nothing will trouble people who want to listen silently.

Where I take issue, though, is when the discussion turns ideological -- when people say that classical music absolutely demands silent listening, and when some of us start drawing large conclusions about our society, saying (as my London Symphony debating partner said) that we're bombarded by music everywhere, and that we might be losing the ability to truly listen.

I don't agree with either point. I've said many times that the entire pre-19th century classical repertoire -- with the exception, I'd imagine, of church music -- was created for performances when the audience talked while the music played, and applauded whenever they heard anything they liked. There's no sign that composers disapproved of this. Quite the contrary -- we have evidence from Mozart and Verdi, for instance, that they were highly gratified.

Now, I could even name advatnages we'd get from an active audience. If we want their attention, we'll have to earn it. And it's not at all clear to me that 18th century audiences didn't pay attention. Mozart's famous letter about the premiere of his Paris Symphony shows an audience apparently alert to what he compose. He teased them by starting the last movement quietly, instead of with the loud, resounding coup d'archet -- stroke of the bow -- that in Paris was traditional. They immediately shushed each other, taken by surprise, then burst into cheers when, a few bars later, Mozart brought in the whole orchestra, forte. They understood the joke that was played on them.

There's also an anecdote about the opera audience in Lully's time, a raucous bunch, who'd scream insults to each other, among much else, while the operas were performed. A star singer couldn't appear; his substitute was bad; the audience immediately noticed, and began insulting him. He answered wittily, and from then on, they listened to him happily.

I once programmed the first movement of the Paris Symphony at a concert with the Pittsburgh Symphony, which I was hosting. I read Mozart's letter, and told the audience that they were free to clap whenever they felt like it. The results were fascinating. The applause, first of all, varied greatly from point to point. People clearly were listening very hard. And when they clapped, and then something new started in the music, they fell silent, to listen to what happened next. It soon was clear to me that Mozart designed the piece for that, constantly bringing in attractive new ideas, to hold the audience's attention.

None of which, of course, tells us what would happen if people started talking, or clapping, or tweeting during something as profound and serious as the last movement of the Mahler Ninth.

But now let me ask what we think our present audience is doing? Yes, they're sitting quietly, but are they paying attention? To what extent do their minds wander? A little? That's for sure. My mind wanders during concerts, and I'm a musciain. We're all human. But maybe the audience has minds that wander a lot. Maybe they pay very sketchy attention. How do we know?

And might they pay more attention if they had something else to do, besides sitting still and listening? Virgil Thomson -- who, to judge from his writing, was an acute listener -- wrote once that he listened more carefully if he had a little bit of distraction. I've found the same is true for me. If I force myself to concentrate, to pay attention, my mind will sometimes wander. (A famliar happening, I might add, in any form of meditation.) If I distract myself a little -- if, let's say, I look at an app on my iPhone that displays floating clouds -- I'll focus better on the music. (I do that at home, with CDs. Not at concerts.)

And now suppose I got up and moved. Even danced to the music. I think that would focus my attention even more. Even in the Mahler Ninth. (The last movement, I might add, is one of my touchstones for great music that deeply gets to me.) Likewise if I was talking quietly to a friend about the music. "Listen to that...interesting countermelody there...oh, no, the conductor completely missed the point, a moment ago..." I think I'd pay much closer attention than I do at concerts.

And no, i'm not necessarily saying that people should talk to each other during Mahler. If 1000 people did it all together, the chaos might outweigh the benefits. Or maybe not! Have we tried this? What would actually happen?

Let's also remember that there are cultural differences about these things. (Which is where ideology comes in.) In western, European-derived culture, it would be highly inappropriate to react out loud when music is played at a church service. Highly inapprorpriate! Just about irrrelgious.

But if you go to a gospel church, the rules are turned around. There, it would be highly inapprorpriate not to react, not to cry out something when the music (or the preacher) gets to you. Likewise in Kabuki. Connoisseurs will bark out little syllables, when something onstage seems especially good.

Our kind of silent listening goes back, I think, to a long-established trope of western philosophy, in which the mind is hugely favored over the body. The mind is rational, responsible; the body is childish, dangerous, and primitive. So we sit in silence when we listen to profound music (or music that's thought to be profound.

But is this what we still have to believe, now that we have a multicultural society? Other cultures see the world quite differently, and give the body equal weight. So what would happen if we listened to classical music with our bodies -- and with our feelings visible, for all to see -- instead of mainly with our minds? Maybe we'd listen better, as I've been saying.

And maybe the established habit of silent listening actually gets in the way of concentration! This is a point that's not original with me. But I think it's worth taking seriously. Take a group of people. Shackle them. Tell them they can't move, or speak, or visibly react in any way. And now expect them to pay full attention to Mahler. I don't think they (or I) can do it. But if I could participate in the experience, put my body and my voice into action alongside the music, I think I'd listen harder. And I think that's also true of the existing audience, although they might be hesitant or even shocked to try this, even as an experiment.

Which leaves one more point of ideology -- the idea that people aren't listening to anything, because we're drowned in music. This reminds me of something I read in an exhaustive history of Britain in the late '50s and early '60s, Never Had It So Good, written by Dominick Sandbrook. In the late '50s, just as in the US, British cities started growing suburbs. British intellectuals hated the suburbs, and wrote extensively about how alienating they were, how people were atomized, isolated from each other, losing all community ties.

And then some sociologists looked into this, and found out what suburban life was actually like. It wasn't anything like what the intellectuals had feared -- and assumed, without any data at all, to be reality. People in the suburbs formed community groups, looked after each other when anyone got sick, and didn't behave in any way as the intellectuals had assumed.

I fear that we in classical music may be in the same position, when we look at music outside the classical world. Of course there's music everywhere. I myself don't often mind it, and might suddenly find myself looking up with pleasure when (as happened a while ago) the background music at an airport turns out to be a song I really like, and whose words don't suggest background music at all, the Pet Shop Boys' "Rent."

But suppose the music is largely trivial, and might in some way trivialize both the idea of music, and the spaces where background music plays. Why do we assume that nobody outside the classical music world resists that? In fact, popular culture is full of debates about things like that. There isn't anything anyone in classical music says about mass-market pop music that rock critics don't already say, and often much more strongly. Nobody hates Celine Dion, for instance, as much as rock critics do.

And if you get at all involved with pop music, you see people listening to it very hard and carefully, and making detailed critical judgments. So if mass-market listening is some kind of problem, classical music isn't the only antidote, and maybe not the most effective one. Serious pop music, entering the same cultural arena (loosely speaking) as mass-market pop, is far better placed to combat whatever ills mass-market pop might encourage.

Which would mean that the listening habits we're used to in classical music might have nothing to do with these larger debates. We know, many of us, how we like to listen, and we shouldn't be deprived of that. But our listening isn't the only way to pay serious attention to music, and isn't the only answer to whatever ills music in society at large might get caught up in.

In my last post, about going viral, I mentioned a skeptical Wall Street Journal piece I'd written about stimulus money for the arts. It appeared last Wednesday, and of course grew out of my skeptical posts about the arts stimulus (here and here).

In it, I said much of what you might have read in the blog. The economic argument for giving stimulus money to the arts is shallow, and easy for non-arts organizations to trump. It's hard to argue for money for the arts when money for crucial social programs -- public health, for instance -- is lacking. It's hard, politically, to give stimulus money for arts organizations like the Metropolitan Opera, which seem to be swimming in money. (Even if they're hurting financially.)

And then I ended with something about the pro-arts arguments I wish we'd make, which would be based on the intrinsic value of the arts (or better still, of art itself). And which -- this is the hard part for many of us -- would reflect a world in which popular culture already supplies some of the depth and meaning we credit (and often so ecstatically) the formal high arts for giving us.

Which brings me to a book I strongly recommend, and the challenge it gives us. The book is Bruce Springsteen's America: The People Listening, A Poet Singing, by Robert Coles.Coles is a child psychiatrist, a Pulitzer Prize winner for a book called Children in Crisis, and for more than a generation one of the most humane voices in American writing. A very serious person, both in his own field, and nationally.

His Springsteen book is about why everyday Americans have loved Springsteen, and been educated and inspired by him. Encouraged by him. Taught about themselves by him. Caught in conversations -- in their minds, but no less real for that -- with him. With references to Walker Percy, a novelist who was moved by Springsteen, and by William Carlos Williams, the great poet, whom Coles knew, and who in the '50s, living in New Jersey, felt how important, in that age, Frank Sinatra was. And who noted even then, prompted by his son, that Sinatra would have been even stronger if he'd been singing his own songs, his own thoughts, his own words, as Springsteen does.

This book does what arts advocates should do. We talk about the meaning of the arts, their depth, their transformative power. But most often I think we talk windily, in great generalities, without saying much about specific instances, specific things that we or others get from any work of art.

Coles does all that. Here's book, more than 200 pages long, that tells how Springsteen brought depth, meaning, and transformation to many, many people. With the people talking about it in their own words.

That demonstrates, first of all, what I mean when I say that we in the arts have to acknowledge the artistic strength of popular culture. Whatever we think the arts do, popular culture does, too. (No, not all of it. But that's an old debate, one most strongly carried on within popular culture itself.)

So we need to do for the arts what Coles does for Springsteen. Until we do, our advocacy, if you ask me, rings a little hollow. So let's get to work. What depth, what meaning, what transformative urgency, did a production of Tosca at your local opera company have, in the words of people who attended it?

(And yes, I'm deliberately provocative by choosing that example. The question I'd love to provoke is: Do we really believe that everything that bears the label "art" has more artistic value than the best of popular culture? And if we do, can we demonstrate how this is true?)

That would be Thursday. February 19.

And I don't want to make too much of this. It's not like I got two million hits on a YouTube video, or sold 40,000 downloads of a song I wrote last week.

But something really did happen. For at least that one day, people on Twitter were telling each other about two things I've written. One was my skeptical piece for the Wall Street Journal about arts funding in the stimulus bill. The other was my post here about one way that classical music institutions might use Twitter. These were largely people I don't know. My writing took on a life of its own, right before my eyes, and by the end of the day, I had many, many more new Twitter followers than I'd ever had in a single day before.

So why am I saying this here? Not to brag, though I'd never deny that I loved my moment in the Twitter sun. No, I'm blogging about this because I learned something. This is what social networking can do. So it's what classical music institutions that use social networking should aim for.

Of course, you aim for a viral take-off the way a Zen archer takes aim -- without any scheme for hitting your target. You don't want to craft your tweets or your Facebook updates with both your eyes (or even one eye) on fame. Your goal is saying things you care about -- which, let's note, is not the same thing as tweeting about this week's performance, as I've seen institutions do, without one word to show you're really interested.

And all the worse if you put an exclamation point at the end of your tweet! That only underlines how little, in what you wrote, there is to care about. Because if you don't show you care, others won't care. Your job, in using social networking, is to reach out in a human way, showing you care, and then forming bonds with others who care enough to respond to you, or at least to be your friend or fan, or sign up to follow your tweets.

Which brings me to another lesson I learned, which is that my new followers, and others who tweeted and retweeted about my stuff aren't just scalps I've collected. (A "retweet," for those who don't know, is a tweet you get, and then send on to everyone who follows you.) They're people I'm now joined with in some way.

And since the writing of mine that people were talking about involved ideas for the future of classical music and, more generally, the arts, I'm now interested in ideas from the people who read me. The first tweet I sent out today thanked everyone, said hello, and said we should share our thoughts.

Too often, big institutions (I'm sure not only in classical music) put old wine in new bottles, treat new media as just another way to send the messages old media were good for. Thus they use social networks to send out (sorry to repeat myself; I've been saying this a lot) the equivalent of press releases.

Press releases are perfectly reasonable if you're using the press, because readers of the press can't easily reply to you. But if you're using media where people can contact you as easily as you can contact them, the game changes. Now they want to know who you are.

Or, much more simply -- it's a network. It connects us to each other. And the pleasure of being connected -- of hearing what others say in response to anything you say -- is both the measure of marketing success in our new culture, and trumps all the measures (how many hits you got on your website, how many newspapers wrote about what you sent out in your press release) we used to use.

That's what I learned from my viral day.


A new Twitter delight, though it started on Valentine's Day: a Twitter production of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. Read the press release -- ironic, huh? -- to see how it works. Click any of the links for a sample. You don't have to sign up for Twitter to do that.

Follow me on Twitter. Or friend me on Facebook.

Anyone who reads David Pogue's technology column in the New York Times (Thursday, in the business section) knows that he's hot for Twitter, the social networking/microblogging/what should we call it? thing that lets us send out short announcements all day long about what we're doing.

I think that marks a Twitter tipping point, because Twitter is popping up all over, in places I wouldn't have expected. It's a serious business application now. Millions of people, all day long, are sending out thoughts and observations, getting questions answered, letting the world know what they're up to. Frank Eliason, customer service manager for Comcast (the cable TV/phone/Internet provider), realized he could use that. He could search Twitter for references to Comcast (or "Comcrap"), find people with Comcast complaints, and then contact these people to get the complaint resolved. (Note that all tweets -- Twitter messages -- are public, so this isn't an invasion of privacy.)

And that's just one random way in which Twitter is exploding. Hospitals use it -- go here and here for more. One hospital used Twitter as a teaching tool for surgery, A surgical procedure (quite a complex one) was shown on video, while doctors on the surgical team sent tweets about what, exactly, they were doing. You can get the tweets on any cellphone that can go on the Web.

Do we all see how useful this could be for music? An orchestra gives a concert. Someone sends commentary tweets, in real time while the music plays, describing what's going on. I don't know how pinpoint the time accuracy might be, so maybe you can't time something precisely to a downbeat. But you could certainly indicate major sections of a piece.

But it gets better. You could have a dozen Twitter streams. What does the conductor think about, while she's conducting the piece? What's the hardest part for the principal flute? What passage in the horns makes the principal trumpet player's hair stand on end? All kinds of people in the orchestra could send tweets during the performance, or rather could write them in advance, and have them sent out at the proper time by others. Someone in the audience could decide which Twitter streams to follow, or could follow them all.

(A few years ago I was involved with a project called the Concert Companion, which delivered real-time program notes to handheld devices. People who tested the system mostly loved it, but look what was needed -- special handhelds, and a special system broadcasting to them in wifi. Cumbersome, expensive. Now you can do it all with cellphones, laptops, and the web, maybe not with pinpoint accuracy, as I said, but certainly some version of it will work.)

Some classical music institutions already use Twitter, as well they should, for marketing. You can sign up to follow anyone who sends out tweets, and if you sign up for a classical music insitution, you'll probably get tiny press releases, sometimes only once every couple of weeks. This, needless to say, isn't how Twitter should be used. Tweets need to be livelier, more frequent, and more personal. For something better, follow the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra or the Museum of Modern Art, whose Twitter feed talks about all kinds of art things, even some that aren't at the museum (though I haven't seen any tweets since before Valentine's Day). (Added later: The best LACO tweets are here.)

MOMA -- whose tweets (and this is how Twitter ought to work) come from a real person, with a name, even has Twitter conversations with some of the 5000-odd people who've signed on to follow. Which is another key to proper use of social networking. It goes both ways. You talk to the people who care about you, and they talk back to you.

I've blogged about social networking before. Classical music institutions need to learn how to use it. As a friend of mine says (he's a mangement consultant), they're using new media mainly to deliver the messages older media were good for. We can do better.

You can follow me on Twitter. Not the same as the blog -- more personal.

Some things I realized...

First (this came clear for me today when I responded to a comment): I don't worry about the ultimate relevance of classical music in the world today. Or in the future. Might seem strange for me to say that, since I'm forever finding ways in which I think classical music doesn't connect.

But there's a difference. I can find things that clearly don't connect, in the way the music is presented and performed, maybe less often in the music itself. I'll say that we should fix these things, and I'll suggest ways in which they might be fixed, paths that we could try.

But I don't know the result of going down those paths. That's for the future to determine. I think classical music will be reborn in some form -- in fact, I think "Rebirth" will be the title of my book. And I think I've seen some glimmers of what that form will be. But only glimmers. None of us, very much including me, will know what will happen to classical music until the future comes.

That's one reason that I love hearing about new things that people are trying. I learn what the future might (stress :might") be like, and I'm humbled, realizing that I can't predict what's going to happen.

I've often said -- and often told my students -- that I think classical music works too much from the top down, at a time when our culture is going in the opposite direction. All the talk in popular culture these days is about people participating, creating art on their own, making mashups of existing art.

While classical music still mostly serves up the same old masterworks, in a format (the standard concert format) that encourages (if not compels) the audience to sit silently, and absorb what's good for them.

How can we change this? Here's an idea I thought of, when I was reading a paper by Talia Dicker, a student in my Eastman course this winter. Thanks, Talia, for getting me to think of it!

Suppose an orchestra -- or an opera company, or a chamber group, or a performing arts center -- had a performance coming up, and encouraged mashups and remixes, in advance of the event. Suppose it put on its website recordings of the music that would be performed. And suppose it offered software to allow for mashups.

It wouldn't even need complete recordings. It could post just a few highlights. Along, maybe, with software, that made slicing and dicing and mixing and matching easy to do. Anyone really ambitious could even allow genuine remixes. A string quartet could post recordings of each instrumental part. So could an orchestra! And people who came to the website could remix the recording, leaving some parts out, making some more prominent, or less prominent. Whatever!

Soon we'd have some remixes -- if, that is, the whole thing were promoted well. We'd have, maybe, a mashup of all the big climaxes from a Tchaikovsky symphony, overlaid on a Bach solo violin piece. The possibilities are truly endless. The results could be a lot of fun.

The organization of course would post everything that anybody did, on its website. And then would pick the best submissions, and feature them in every way possible. Highlight them on the website. Set up a kiosk at the concert hall or opera house, where people could listen. Play the best mashups at the concert! Make them downloadable. Whatever! I can't believe this wouldn't get people more interested in the organization, the upcoming concert, and the music itself.

And of course the mashups could continue after the event, if people were inspired to come up with something after they heard the music live.

I know there are hurdles to jump. Rights, for instance. You'd have to find recordings you could do all these things to, legally The recordings of separate parts, curiously, are less of a problem, because the musicians could either create them specially for this project (not for the entire piece, I'd think, but highlights would work just as well). Or else you could make the parts electronically, with samplers, the way TV scores often are created.

I'd love to see someone do this. I'd be happy to help get the project off the ground. And has anyone ever done anything like this? I'm thinking that they have. I'd love to know about it. If anyone knows any examples, please tell me!

(Jennifer Foster, at WDAV in North Carolina, made some terrific mashups of music played on a WDAC live performance show.

(And this idea shouldn't be limited to arts organizations. Individual musicians could do it, too, on their websites.)

The discussion, in so many comments, of my arts bailout post has been terrific. Many thanks to everyone.

In one comment, my friend Chris McGl stressed, as others did, the difference between a bailout and a stimulus, which I'm happy to acknowledge.

Chris also offered a link to data from Americans for the Arts on the economic impact of arts activity. Everyone concerned with this question should look at this data. It's important, and often cited in these debates:

The $166.2 billion in total economic activity [each year] has a significant national impact, generating the following:

• 5.7 million full-time equivalent jobs
• $104.2 billion in household income

Etc.

But I don't quite know what to do with these numbers. What's the baseline? What do other industries contribute? How do these numbers break down from state to state, and city to city? Which kinds of spending for the arts has the most economic impact?

I also think there's something just a little disingenuous about these arguments. And there's a pitfall waiting just beyond them. What's disingenous is that we -- people in the arts (among whom I certainly count myself), and especially arts advocates -- don't support the arts because of their economic impact, or their effect on students' test scores, or for any other reason not directly linked to art itself. We support the arts because we love art, and think it's good for the world. We then cite extrinsic benefits (to adopt the term that specialists use), like the economicc effect of arts spending, to build a bridge to people who don't share our love of art, and give them a reason to support us.

Which is perfectly reasonable. Advocates for other industries will do the same. The pitfall, though, comes once we've made our economic case. Someone else comes along, and says, "Well, if the point of arts support is to generate economic activity, my own industry can generate even more of it." And then we've lost. This is why the Wallace Foundation, in their "Gifts of the Muse" report, suggested not using extrinsic arguments, and instead stressing the intrinsic benefits of art, which (as I've said) is where all of us start in the first place.

It can also be where we end, even if we start with economic arguments. When someone else says that their industry will do more for the economy (and hence should get the money), we're likely to come back with something about how intrinsically wonderful the arts are, what their moral impact is, how much they make us better people. That, joined with the economic data, becomes our argument.

Americans for the Arts supplements their economic data with a very helpful FAQ, in which they say:

Social service organizations, libraries, and all entities that spend money have an economic impact. What makes the economic impact of arts and culture organizations unique is that, unlike most other industries, they induce large amounts of related spending by their audiences. For example, when patrons attend a performing arts event, they may purchase dinner at a restaurant, eat dessert after the show, and return home and pay the baby-sitter.  All of these expenditures have a positive and measurable impact on the economy.

And certainly I've heard others say that. A friend of mine, highly placed in the music business, said exactly this to me the other night.

The only problem here is that this is exactly the argument made in New York in support of Wall Street bonuses -- the very bonuses that raised such fury from ordinary people, and in Washington, from Democrats and Republicans alike, and most notably (most vehemently) from the president. In New York, restaurants are hurting and real estate prices are down, all because people who work in finance don't have as much money as they used to.

I feel this personally. My wife and I own an apartment in New York. Should we want to sell it, the young, well-off Wall Street people who bid up prices earlier in this decade are largely gone. Or at least there are fewer of them. They're the ones who bought almost all the apartments that changed hands in our building in the past few years. So our options, if we sold, would shrink -- quite beyond the decline in real estate prices that's the result of the bursting of the housing bubble.

But that doesn't mean that I support those bonuses. Nor does it mean that people in the city do. In fact, the idea has now been floated that New York's economy is out of whack, that too much of it depends on Wall Street money, which shrank dramatically when the bubble burst, and may not return. The thought then is to reorient the economy, not to put money back in Wall Street.

The same kind of thinking could apply to this trickle-down effect of the arts, the spending for restaurants and parking and the like. (Assuming those expenditures continue. As the recession grows, aren't people less likely to eat out when they go to a show?) Let's say a city's downtown is full of restaurants, expensive places (where, by the way, I myself love to eat). Let's say these restaurants would suffer if arts activity should shrink.

Maybe that means we have too many fancy restaurants! Maybe our economy is out of joint. Maybe we're spending too much money, society-wide, on fancy things (here we can also bring in the high salaries that top people in classical music make), and not enough on health care. Which we know is true!

So then the dinner and dessert argument can start to seem a little hollow. (Though I feel for the unemployed baby sitters!)  And the arts again appear elitist.

We need to do better than that. (Though, God, I love those restaurants.)

(I think this is all I have to say on this subject.)

I fear that what I'm going to say might ignite a firestorm. But I think it needs to be said.

We hear a lot -- or at least we do if we're in the arts -- about an arts bailout. Many people (in the arts, at least) want money for the arts included in the stimulus bill. I get e-mail about that, and eager Twitter tweets. Please support an arts bailout, these communications say. E-mail your senator, your congressperson.

And in fact there's a $50 million supplement to the NEA budget in the bill that passed the House. It's not in the version of the bill the Senate's looking at, so if that bill passes in the Senate, the Senate and the House will have to negotiate the differences. And so the arts money might well be debated.

I can understand why arts people want that money. And, I'd imagine, whatever other bailout money might be possible to get. For one thing -- let's be honest -- all of us naturally support our own causes. Every industry, and every interest group, is making arguments for their inclusion. Why not arts?

But beyond that, arts people -- and this is one of our best qualities -- are enthusiastic about the arts. There's something bright and eager in our advocacy, something that might go beyond the grimmer need in other pleas. The downside of this is, though, that we sometimes have an aura of entitlement, a sense that art is good for people, good for the country, superior, in tact, to other things, and so thus the money for the arts just has to be there.

And then there's the very simple argument -- very direct and to the point -- which a friend of mine in the music business made on the phone to me: Arts jobs are as real (and as important to anyone who holds them) as any other jobs. So why not protect them, or restore them?

But there are two large arguments against all this. Or, at least, arguments we'd better think about before we make our case.

Choices

Arts money isn't simply there to take. It has to be allocated, and if it isn't allocated for the arts, it'll go to something else. Cut now to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (aka the city council, as it's called in many other cities), which at a recent meeting debated an $8 million cut in public health expenditures. This is part of a plan to cut $100 million from the San Francisco budget, since the city faces deficits as high as $575 million.

The health money could be saved, according to one plan, in part by cutting money for the arts. And so people from the ballet and the symphony were at the meeting, arguing that their groups, too, performed a public service.

Which in some ways might be reasonable. But how would you feel, if you were from the symphony and ballet, and had to make your case with people demonstrating outside, saying "We can't be cutting food stamps at the time people need food"? Dozens of supporters, says the story that I've linked to, from San Francisco's BeyondChron website, "streamed into the supervisors' chamber to give some four hours of testimony in support of their work. Speakers gave stories of lives turned around and saved by the various organizations as well as emotional pleas not to cut funding from already strained social services....[A]gencies facing funding cuts include tenants' advocacy organizations, substance abuse treatment programs, homeless shelters, and the city's own job placement programs."

Would you really want to testify in favor of taking money from all that, especially when the symphony and ballet audience is largely upscale, and comfortable? Here's a report from James Glicker, who used to run the Baltimore Symphony. He told this story as part of a comment to another post here:

One highly placed politician in Maryland told me (when I came hat in hand asking for more money) that he had to choose that day between closing a fire station in a depressed neighborhood or installing metal detectors in 50 schools. 'You want me to divert that money to pay for a symphony orchestra program?' he asked me incredulously.

In New York State, the governor's proposed budget for next year will end all grants to zoos, botantical gardens, and aquariums. "The state cuts [says the New York Times story I've linked to], combined with a precipitous drop in endowment funds and corporate donations, have organizations from the New York Botanical Garden to the Niagara Falls Aquarium to the Utica Zoo reeling." People from all walks of life love these institutions. Children love them. And then there's the welfare of the elephants, whales, and fish. The arts are worthy, but how comfortable would you be, arguing that opera is more important than the local zoo?

And yes, you could say that zoos should get their money, but that orchestras should get some, too. But that evades the need for choices. Rarely, in the abundant years of recent memory, did we think that we might have to choose between Beethoven and public health, or rather between giving money to one or the other. The New York Daily News ran a story about what the stimulus bill would do for New York City. With it ran a photo of a New York politician, standing in front of a display of things the stimulus would give the city, including more police (when the economic crisis is forcing cuts), health care, housing, schools, job training, food stamps.

And if you think some of that money could be siphoned to the arts, where, exactly, would you cut? Would you (to cite some things mentioned in the story that I linked) deny a public housing project roof repairs? Stop renovating doubtless rundown kitchens and bathrooms in other public housing? Block 2000 classrooms from connecting to the Internet? Prevent an overhaul of Harlem Hospital?

Maybe the arts still should get some money, but the argument has to be a lot more nuanced. We can't just say, "the arts are wonderful, and arts jobs should be saved." Especially when...

There might be a backlash

In November, a writer in the San Francisco Weekly scathingly denounced lavish spending by large San Francisco arts organizations, focusing, for instance, on what Michael Tilson Thomas gets paid -- more than $2 million each year, the article said. In response, the president of the Board of Supervisors vowed to cut the symphony's funding.

Philistines, someone might object. MTT is worth it. He's paid the going market rate for top conductors. Brent Assink, the Symphony's Executive Director, said the facts were wrong, that MTT makes less than the article asserted. Mark Swed, classical music critic for the Los Angeles Times, said the city, if the cuts went through, can't promote itself as a sophisticated city.

But does anyone think that similar things might be said if an arts bailout is seriously debated? At a time when all the civic cuts that I've discussed here will very likely happen, how do we justify support for the Metropolitan Opera, when it sells tickets for $375 and has donors who'll give millions individually (and in one case, $25 million)? How, politically, will we argue that the New York Philharmonic needs some bailout funds, when it paid Lorin Maazel over $2 million, and pays its president, Zarin Mehta, more than $800,000?

In a country that's outraged over Wall Street bonuses (and auto company corporate jets), I don't think that bailouts for large and lavish arts groups can easily be passed. If, that is, they're openly debated. And yes, I know the Met is in financial trouble, and of course I know that banks with hugely paid executives are getting bailouts. But the banks are getting bailouts so we can save our financial system, and get credit flowing again, so that working people and small businesses can get loans. What will the reaction be to bailouts for arts groups with a lot of money, and whose audience is also comfortably off?

The backlash to all this could be toxic. We'd better be careful how we argue for support, and about what kind of support we argue for. Can we fashion an arts bailout package that focuses on small organizations, with audiences of people from the middle class? Personally, I'd support an arts program like the depression-era WPA, where the money goes directly to independent projects that employ artists and create new art.

But whatever we propose, we'd better be very careful about what we're asking for, and how possible it is, politically, to get what we want.

(Footnote: suppose the NEA gets that extra $50 million, and suppose it distributes the money in the same way it makes its normal grants. I spent a few minutes with the NEA's report of its most recent opera grants. Turns out 1/3 of the grantees (approximately) get 2/3 of the money. They're the bigger opera companies, of course. So if some of the $50 million goes to opera companies, in the pattern of previous funding, the bulk of the opera stimulus would go to organizations many or most of which have expensive tickets, high salaries, wealthy boards, and an extremely upscale audience. Would this fly, politically? I can just hear Lou Dobbs denouncing it.)

(This is the end of my "Where we stand" series for 2009.)

I've notice that, broadly speaking, people take two positions on the future of classical music. Or,.rather, they take these positions if they think that classical music faces any problems. Some people think everything's fine, but I'm going to assume that these people are a small minority, and won't be reading this blog. (If I'm wrong, and you're one of those people, tell me!)

So let's assume that all of us -- or most of us -- think that classical music has problems. Some of us will blame the culture classical music is part of. That's the first of the two positions. Classical music is fine, some of us think, but the culture around us needs to be taught (or re-taught) to understand it.

This view has some clear advantages. Classical music, if this view is correct, doesn't have to change. In all the things that matter most -- the repertoire, how the repertoire is played, what concerts are like -- it can continue just as it is.

But we'll need to do more education. This is the remedy this view proposes, the plan for fixing classical music's problems, the way to find a new audience. We need to teach people to understand classical music. We need to explain its complexities. We need, in short, to teach people how to listen. Once we've done that, the music will speak for itself. Its value will be obvious to everyone.

And of course we need to restore music education in the schools. That's the most important thing we can do. And the belief that it's important is held very passionately. If the world needs to be taught to love classical music, we'd better start early. We've lost an entire generation, an entire generation of people who don't like classical music because they weren't taught to like it when they were young. We have to change that, right now. And then we'll build a new audience for the next generation.

This position has disadvantages, of course. It's hard to change an entire culture. There's a danger that we'll sound preachy, or superior, even patronizing. If we hold the hardcore version of this position  -- the version in which we think that the culture at large is mostly crap, that people don't think, aren't creative, have short attention spans, and listen to music that's little more than junk -- then what can we say to them? Do we go out in the world, and tell people that their musical taste is terrible? That's not likely to work.

And if we want to restore music education, how can we do that, if the problem we're trying to solve is that our culture doesn't value classical music? If our culture doesn't value it, how can we get school systems -- funded by state and local governments -- to spend money (especially when money is short) on classical music education?

Because nothing's black or white -- because classical music still has prestige, because school systems might not say no, if (let's say) the local orchestra offers to send musicians to teach classical music -- we might make some headway. But it's not clear how far we can get. The very problem we've defined -- that our culture doesn't value classical music -- seems to block our success.

The second approach

The second approach is more or less the opposite of the first. In this view (which as regular readers won't have to guess, is mine), the classical music world has created all the problems it might face. The culture around it has changed, not for the worse, and classical music hasn't kept up. The repertoire hasn't kept up, the way concerts are presented hasn't kept up, the way we relate to our audience hasn't kept up, the way we talk to the world hasn't kept up. So what we offer, as time goes on, appeals to fewer and fewer people.

The advantages of this approach should be obvious. It gives us power over our future. Or at least it puts the means for change in our own hands. If you take the first view, and want to restore music education throughout the US, that's a brave and noble goal (which those of us who hold the second view would happily support). But it's not something we can control. We need school systems, government (especially state and local government), parents, and the public to join our campaign. We need government and school boards to come up with some money. Maybe they'll do that, and maybe they won't. There's always a chance that we'll mount a fabulous campaign, and not get very far.

But if we decide to change the way we ourselves do things, who can stop us? Our changes might or might not work, but if they don't work, we can tweak them, or try something else. What we do is entirely up to us.

And there are other advantages. If we take the second view, we can talk to people outside classical music without talking down to them, without thinking we need to teach them anything. We can meet these people on common ground, because we share their assumptions. We share their culture. Yes, we know something they might not know -- how terrific classical music is -- but it's much easier to tell them what we think if we know that live in their world.

And we can learn from them. One problem -- I'd forgotten this -- with position one is that it more or less assumes that we won't change. We know what's good, and we'll teach other people to agree with us. The communication goes just one way. Position two, by contrast, allows for dialogue. We talk to the people we're trying to reach, we learn what they care about, we learn how classical music strikes them, and maybe we make more changes. Maybe classical music changes when it encounters a new audience (just as anything has to change, when it moves to a new space).

We also get the chance to make classical music a contemporary art, which it was in centuries past. We can reflect the world around us, incorporate the world around us, speak to current life in everything we do. That doesn't preclude presenting music of the past. In fact, it gives that music even more meaning, because it gets connected far more strongly with how people live now.

To take this view, we of course have to think that current culture is healthy. Not completely healthy -- when has that ever been true? we still have wars, ignorance, ugliness -- but healthy in enough ways that the healthy parts can make a difference. We're not likely to believe, for instance, that there's no creativity in current life, or that people have short attention spans. We're willing to admit that they don't pay attention to the things we might wish they'd take a look at, but we grant that they're able to look with focused concentration at anything they care about.

We understand that popular culture has art and subtlety of its own, and that people who focus on it are just as smart, just as nuanced, just as cultured as we are, even if their culture is different. We understand that they listen to music carefully, and that, because they're smart, they can follow classical music's complexities (or many of them, anyway) without special coaching. We know that the things they might want to learn -- what sonata form is, for instance -- aren't all that complicated, and that our prospective new audience can easily learn them if they want to.

For me, this is a very happy place to be, especially since (like so many people now, especially younger people, but not only them) I move back and forth from popular culture to the art formerly called high, without even feeling that I'm crossing any border. I feel enriched from so many directions, and I learn a lot about classical music from things that, in position one, might not seem to be connected with it, things like pop music, fashion, or film.

The problem with position two? Classical music has to change, thoroughly and decisively, in ways we've only just begun to learn about. That's the first problem. The second might be that we have to work with the people who hold position one, and get them to try position two, at least enough to see what the results might be.

The third problem is that we need to find resources -- staff time, for instance, at a classical music institution, and money -- to support the changes we want to make. The fourth problem is that we'll make mistakes, maybe even costly ones, and will have to recover from them.

And the final problem -- which might be the first that people from position one might think of -- is that we don't want to dumb classical music down, just to make it more accessible. Of course, I think that if we really understand current culture, we'll want to go the other way, and make classical music smarter. But I know that there's a danger of getting all fluffy and friendly, and perky, too, making everything fun and simple, and losing track of what our art is really about. Again, if we really understand the culture around us -- or at least the parts of it we want to speak to -- we won't do that. But we should be alert in any case.

Those are the two approaches. Any thoughts, anyone? What have I missed?

I loved the Springsteen half-time show. He's 59. An inspiration -- if he has that much energy, I can have it, even if I've got a few years on him.

And many people might have said that rock like that was dead, as any kind of current music. That it's now nostalgia. But maybe not. Or maybe nostalgia is part of its strength, a way of bringing back our innocence.

A great way to launch the new album, of course. The new song stood up to the classics (though since everything was cut, we don't know how it would hold up at full length). Also -- how happy to do a show like that with your wife in the band.

But what I loved most -- besides the sheer rock & roll energy, and the double shot of nostalgia and current force -- was the Obama subtext. Bruce turned down the Super Bowl before this. But then Obama won, and we know Bruce feels renewed by that, that he can once again sign on to where America is going. So now, just maybe, he agrees to do the Super Bowl, because now he's thrilled to sign on to a mainstream American event.

And look at the last two song titles -- "Working on a Dream" and "Glory Days." The Obama era. When your guy is president, the Super Bowl doesn't seem so empty anymore.

(I also sent these thoughts out with Twitter, in four quick tweets. Go here if you want to follow me.)

No, not the surge in Iraq. This is a surge, or at least a heartening increase, in ticket sales, which I've been hearing about for the past couple of years. Of course -- since, as I've said, we just don't have reliable data for classical music ticket sales and finances (I should put that in bold type) -- I don't know how big this surge is, or how broad, by which I mean how widespread it is in the classical music world.

We know the Metropolitan Opera has been selling more tickets, but that might be a special case, caused by Peter Gelb's unique innovations. The surge I hear about informally involves big orchestras, and while that might not mean that smaller orchestras are selling more tickets -- or that chamber music concerts are -- it's certainly a good thing, and worth thinking about, even if we don't know very much about it. And while I won't just now pore through orchestras' annual reports and tax returns, looking for data, I've noticed that the Pittsburgh Symphony shows a notable increase in concert revenue from 2005 to 2007, which could be due to increased ticket sales (or might not be, if, for instance, they raised ticket prices a lot), and that the Cleveland Orchestra shows a similar but smaller increase from 2005 to 2006. (I'm using annual reports available on both orchestras' websites.)

I'll also note that last October, in an obscure press release announcing senior staff promotions, the New York Philharmonic mentioned something that you'd think they'd trumpet from the rooftops, that combined subscription and non-subscription ticket sales have gone up 38% over the last three years. This was in a paragraph about their marketing director, who'd been promoted to the higher rank of vice president. So there we have testimony to the surge, from one orchestra, at least. (If anyone has further documented evidence, please let me know! I'd also be happy to have private data, which I'll keep confidential.)

So assuming that this surge is real, what does it mean? My working assumption -- thinking especially of what I know about orchestras -- might go like this. Having seen that their ticket sales were falling, many institutions upped their marketing, using solid, well-established, traditional techniques, based on solid research. That's the first thing anyone should do, faced with falling ticket sales. Of course I think more radical changes will be needed in the long run, but the first thing to try is the traditional approach. It might work better than you think, which is another way of saying that your marketing right now might not be all it could be.

But then we have to ask if institutions are selling more tickets to their established customers, or whether they're selling to new people. The first seems likely, if only because it's where -- in your heightened marketing -- you'd want to start. Get a database of people who used to buy tickets, but aren't buying now, or who are buying fewer tickets than they used to. Do some research -- questionnaires, phone surveys, focus groups, individual interviews -- and find out why. Then address those problems, and above all target marketing directly to these people. If you do this well, you'll get results.

So then -- I'm theorizing, I should stress -- we might have something like the following. Ticket sales were falling. Hard-core ticket buyers now are truly hard-core. They're your most loyal audience, the people whom nothing short of death can keep away. You're left with them, I'd further theorize, because (perhaps not meaning to) you've neglected those who lie outside the inner circle. So now you pay attention to them again, and you bring them back.

But now you'd have another question. How large is your welcome recent sales increase? Does it wipe out the longer-term decline you're remedying? Or is it just an uptick whose meaning isn't clear yet, which might turn out to only be a bump in what will soon turn out to be continuing decline?

That might be the case, if  -- as I've theorized before -- the decline is due to cultural changes that you haven't addressed. That is, you've mobilized your marketing, and brought back people who share the old classical music culture that your institution is part of. You sell more tickets. But the number of those people is, over many years, steadily declining. So your current rise in ticket sales can't be sustained. In not too long, your sales will fall again.

This is why you'd like to bring in new people -- and ideally younger people. That's the only way -- if my theories are correct -- that the decline can be reversed.

And here the Philharmonic presents an interesting, maybe hopeful picture. Go to the search page of their website. It's nicely up to date, featuring a "tag cloud" of searches people made, with the largest words showing the most popular searches. Here it is:

Some of the most popular searches are for student tickets! Most likely, then, the Philharmonic is selling many student tickets. I don't know, of course, how many "many" is, but let's suppose it's more than they sold in earlier years. Does this mean they've found a younger audience?

Yes and no (as I go on theorizing). Yes, because they have some younger people coming. And no, because I'd guess they don't and couldn't know if these student ticket buyers will keep coming. Younger people now are open to many forms of music, classical among them. They're open-minded, curious. Prime targets for Philharmonic marketing (if their offered low-priced tickets).

But that doesn't mean that they'll come back. Or, more to the point, it doesn't mean that they'll come back very often. And the ticket sales that orchestras depend on are repeat ticket sales, even though subscription numbers have been falling now for many years. A reasonably large proportion of the audience still subscribes, and if a future audience doesn't subscribe, or subscribes in lower numbers, then orchestras -- despite the recent bump in sales, and even if we think they've found a younger audience -- will shrink.

Theorizing still, I'd say the burden of proof lies on those who think that ticket sales can be as high in the future as they are now. Maybe college students who try out a Philharmonic concert will become subscribers, but given the culture that younger people have, I'd say it isn't likely. They may enjoy the orchestra, but they identify with other kinds of music, unlike the core audience today, which might like other kinds of music, but most closely bonds with classical. Maybe that will change, as the student audience (whose numbers, let's remember, we don't even know) grows up. But I don't think it's likely. If I'm right, the surge won't be sustained, and in the longer run, mainstream classical music institutions will be forced to cut back.