June 2009 Archives
Seems like a couple of points often -- always? -- come up when I talk about changes -- aging, shrinkage -- in the classical music audience.
Any stats about aging (and there are plenty, proving the aging of the audience, over many years, beyond much doubt) elicit a familiar response, that the population as a whole has aged, and so the aging of the classical music audience is simply something one would expect.
(Some of what follows might be a little dry, for those who don't move easily in the world of numbers. Apologies for that, though of course there really isn't any other way to delve into these issues.)
But there's more to the aging of the audience than that. If the classical music audience had aged simply because the population had, then the relationship of ages -- the relationship of the classical music audience's age to the age of the population as a whole -- would remain the same. If the classical audience was, let's say, 10% older than the population at large in 1950, it'd be 10% older today.
But that's not the case. In the 1950s, when the Minnesota Orchestra found that its audience had a median age of around 35, the median age of the population was just a hair over 30. In our present decade, when one major orchestra told me privately that the median age of their single-ticket buyers was late '50s, and for subscribers over 60 -- typical figures for an orchestra that size -- the median age was only around 36. Clearly, if these figures are representative, in the 1950s orchestras had an audience about 16% older than the population as a whole, while in our time, the audience (figuring a median age of about 60) would be 67% older.
These are rough figures; many approximations went into my calculations. (For instance, I don't have age data for 1955. The earliest figures I can find were for 1958, so I compared the audience age in 1955 to the population's age in 1958.) But I don't think the approximations make my calculations suspect. The trends are too large to be thrown off by small approximations/
For another look at the same phenomenon, consider NEA data that shows the median age of the classical music audience increasing from 40 in 1982 to 49 in 2008. That's a 22% rise. The median age of the population, meanwhile, went up from 31 to 36, a 16% rise. So the classical audience is aging faster than the general population, a point, by the way, that the NEA has been making in various public statements for many yeras.
(The NEA's age figures are lower than those reported by orchestras, for reasons I've discussed before. The NEA doesn't focus on any part of the classical audience, and in fact defines "classical audience" as people 18 and over who say they've been to classical concerts. They aren't asked which concerts they went to. The orchestra audience is a subset of that, clearly with its own characteristics, one of which is that it's older.)
Not that my saying this will put the argument to rest. I'm sure I'll get the same response next time I raise these issues. Not everyone reads all of my posts, and it's hard to think about these issues -- hard to separate speculation from fact, especially when the facts aren't terribly well known, and can be hard to find.
One more argument I've run into. When I talk about the classical music audience being much younger very far in the past -- for instance, when I cite the famous passage about teens and young adults hearing Beethoven's Fifth at a concert, in E.M. Forster's 1904 novel Howard's End -- I'll be told that life expectancy was so much lower in those distant years that the youth of the classical music audience doesn't mean what it would mean today. One person posting a comment here even said that in 1904 people 25 years old were middleaged!
This, with all respect, is just zany. Life expectancy was lower in those past years for many reasons. People died in childbirth more often than they do now, and also died more often in infancy, childhood, and young adulthood. Nor of course did people so readily live into their 80s and 90s as they currently do.
But that didn't mean that the population you'd encounter as you went about your life in the 19th century, let's say, skewed notably younger than what we see today, and certainly not that 25 was the middle of life for those who made it that far. Average life expectancy is a misleading statistic here, since it includes so many people who died very young. If you read literature from the past, you see an age distribution among the characters that doesn't seem all that far off from what we see now. I'm reading Dickens' Bleak House right now, for instance. There are young characters, middleaged characters, and old characters. Similarly with Balzac, whom I read over the past year, and for that matter Shakespeare.
And the young characters act young, while the old characters act older. If, in Balzac, you find Parisian aristocrats in their 20s going to the opera every night, that's not because they're behaving the way 55 year-olds behave today. They clearly don't, and the contrast -- in things other than opera attendance -- between them and the older people they encounter is very much the contrast we'd see today, between people in their 20s and people in their 50s.
So if the people in their 20s went to the opera constantly, that shows a different relationship to opera and classical music than people in their 20s have today. It hardly matters -- for my purposes here -- that the people in their 20s might get married earlier than they would now, or that possibly they'd encounter fewer people in their 50s and 60s than people in their 20s encounter today. The relationships between people of all these ages remained very much the same, and so the presence of many 25 year-olds at the opera really does mean something.
Any stats about aging (and there are plenty, proving the aging of the audience, over many years, beyond much doubt) elicit a familiar response, that the population as a whole has aged, and so the aging of the classical music audience is simply something one would expect.
(Some of what follows might be a little dry, for those who don't move easily in the world of numbers. Apologies for that, though of course there really isn't any other way to delve into these issues.)
But there's more to the aging of the audience than that. If the classical music audience had aged simply because the population had, then the relationship of ages -- the relationship of the classical music audience's age to the age of the population as a whole -- would remain the same. If the classical audience was, let's say, 10% older than the population at large in 1950, it'd be 10% older today.
But that's not the case. In the 1950s, when the Minnesota Orchestra found that its audience had a median age of around 35, the median age of the population was just a hair over 30. In our present decade, when one major orchestra told me privately that the median age of their single-ticket buyers was late '50s, and for subscribers over 60 -- typical figures for an orchestra that size -- the median age was only around 36. Clearly, if these figures are representative, in the 1950s orchestras had an audience about 16% older than the population as a whole, while in our time, the audience (figuring a median age of about 60) would be 67% older.
These are rough figures; many approximations went into my calculations. (For instance, I don't have age data for 1955. The earliest figures I can find were for 1958, so I compared the audience age in 1955 to the population's age in 1958.) But I don't think the approximations make my calculations suspect. The trends are too large to be thrown off by small approximations/
For another look at the same phenomenon, consider NEA data that shows the median age of the classical music audience increasing from 40 in 1982 to 49 in 2008. That's a 22% rise. The median age of the population, meanwhile, went up from 31 to 36, a 16% rise. So the classical audience is aging faster than the general population, a point, by the way, that the NEA has been making in various public statements for many yeras.
(The NEA's age figures are lower than those reported by orchestras, for reasons I've discussed before. The NEA doesn't focus on any part of the classical audience, and in fact defines "classical audience" as people 18 and over who say they've been to classical concerts. They aren't asked which concerts they went to. The orchestra audience is a subset of that, clearly with its own characteristics, one of which is that it's older.)
Not that my saying this will put the argument to rest. I'm sure I'll get the same response next time I raise these issues. Not everyone reads all of my posts, and it's hard to think about these issues -- hard to separate speculation from fact, especially when the facts aren't terribly well known, and can be hard to find.
One more argument I've run into. When I talk about the classical music audience being much younger very far in the past -- for instance, when I cite the famous passage about teens and young adults hearing Beethoven's Fifth at a concert, in E.M. Forster's 1904 novel Howard's End -- I'll be told that life expectancy was so much lower in those distant years that the youth of the classical music audience doesn't mean what it would mean today. One person posting a comment here even said that in 1904 people 25 years old were middleaged!
This, with all respect, is just zany. Life expectancy was lower in those past years for many reasons. People died in childbirth more often than they do now, and also died more often in infancy, childhood, and young adulthood. Nor of course did people so readily live into their 80s and 90s as they currently do.
But that didn't mean that the population you'd encounter as you went about your life in the 19th century, let's say, skewed notably younger than what we see today, and certainly not that 25 was the middle of life for those who made it that far. Average life expectancy is a misleading statistic here, since it includes so many people who died very young. If you read literature from the past, you see an age distribution among the characters that doesn't seem all that far off from what we see now. I'm reading Dickens' Bleak House right now, for instance. There are young characters, middleaged characters, and old characters. Similarly with Balzac, whom I read over the past year, and for that matter Shakespeare.
And the young characters act young, while the old characters act older. If, in Balzac, you find Parisian aristocrats in their 20s going to the opera every night, that's not because they're behaving the way 55 year-olds behave today. They clearly don't, and the contrast -- in things other than opera attendance -- between them and the older people they encounter is very much the contrast we'd see today, between people in their 20s and people in their 50s.
So if the people in their 20s went to the opera constantly, that shows a different relationship to opera and classical music than people in their 20s have today. It hardly matters -- for my purposes here -- that the people in their 20s might get married earlier than they would now, or that possibly they'd encounter fewer people in their 50s and 60s than people in their 20s encounter today. The relationships between people of all these ages remained very much the same, and so the presence of many 25 year-olds at the opera really does mean something.
Last Thursday night -- June 25 -- was the first National Orchestral Institute concert in which the students tried out the ideas we've talked about here, here, and here. (And, more indirectly, here, too.)
The concert was, if you ask me -- and if you ask the students -- a great success. I'll describe it in a moment. But here's something to think about. Debate raged over the ideas the students put forth, a very raw collection, right off the top of their heads, the first day they'd thought about these things. Some people making comments here liked the ideas. Some didn't. Some liked some of the ideas, but not others. Some thought the ideas would lead to effective outreach, some didn't. Some worried that the ideas -- if carried out on any large scale -- would make too great a change in classical concerts.
But suppose the students hadn't been thinking of larger implications? Suppose they'd just been trying to please themselves?
Here's what happened. This was a concert called "New Lights," featuring contemporary music chosen by the director of the NOI, James Ross. He'd picked four pieces: Leon Kirchner's String Quartet No. 4, Elliott Carter's pathbreaking woodwind quartet, Eight Etudes and a Fantasy, Christopher Rouse's Ogoun Badageris, for percussion quartet, and John Adams's Chamber Symphony. A serious program, by any standard.
And part of the point had nothing to do with concert innovations. This was music the students mostly didn't know, and hadn't played, in styles they might not have had experience with. And they were challenged to put the program together without a conductor (for the Adams), or with any outside coaching. They had to figure it all out for themselves. Of course they could listen to recordings, but that's not at all the same as understanding -- in your mind, your ear, and your gut -- how the figure in measure 76 that you play on your viola fits into the larger texture. That's especially a problem in the Adams, which has complex textures, tricky rhythms, constant changes, and often goes at a breakneck pace.
So musically the students were challenged (a wonderful challenge, I think, which is bound to grow their understanding of music, just as it'd grow my own if I could be in their position). But they were also empowered, because they were in charge. Which surely made this concert a good choice for trying out the students' ideas for new ways to present music. Not -- an important point -- because the music might have been difficult for the audience, or for the students themselves, but because this was a concert in which the students took full charge.
The Kirchner opened the program, and the four students who played it chose to introduce it with a video, in which we saw and heard them rehearsing, and talking about how they put the piece together. The video was quite professional. The students shot and edited it themselves. They also decided to add some subtle lighting changes, to go with changes in the music's mood. These were unobtrusive, I thought, and if anyone didn't care for them -- or didn't care for the idea of lighting changes, under any circumstances -- at least these didn't hit anyone in the face. So the idea was, I thought, expertly executed.
Then came an addition to the program, rock songs -- by Yes, theDecembrists Decemberists, and Journey, plus one by a former NOI student (a good song, no way to tell it wasn't by a well known band), plus a last-minute addition, "Billie Jean," of course added as a tribute to Michael Jackson, whose death was in the news that day.
The instrumentation for this: marimba, acoustic bass, guitar, discreet flute, drums (or more precisely a drummer drumming informally on what looked like a wooden box), and finally, but not least, a bassoon, which took major solos, with a sound that could have been a slightly shadowy sax. This produced an intriguing kind of line-drawing sound, distinguished more by light and shade than by bright or changing colors. Again, the students' choice. Turns out that they could sing very well, two of them with complete rock-band professional skill.
And then came the Carter (or most of it; the students were told they were free to leave out some of the etudes, and just to play the ones they felt they'd really mastered in their rehearsals; they played most of them). I thought this would be a strange segue, that the Carter would seem like it came from some other universe, and especially that it would sound stiff after the rock songs.
But that didn't happen! For me, this was the happiest part of the concert. The students chose to give a spoken introduction to each etude separately (the etudes re short, and greatly varied). The flute player did this, and chose to emphasize the compositional techniques used in each piece. Which turned out not to be at all academic, because his genuine interest in those techniques was unmistakable, because the techniques are clearly audible, and finally because the techniques turn out to be a lot of fun.
So the piece came across as loose and colloquial, the kind of music anyone could listen to. The people in audience liked it all so much that they started applauding spontaneously after each etude, quite spontaneously, and happily continued applauding even after the flutist, not wanting them to feel any obligation, suggested that they didn't have to keep doing it.
Then came intermission. Student percussionists were supposed to play Ogoun Badageris in the lobby during the intermission, but that got canned, because an elderly woman in the audience fell and hurt herself (a broken bone, I was told, but she seemed alert and not too badly troubled). You can't play a percussion quartet when the EMS is about to show up. The Rouse was rescheduled, still out in the lobby, for the end of the concert.
Back into the concert hall (a small one, seating perhaps two or three hundred people; it was nearly full) for the second half. First came what the students called the "No Lights" Ensemble, eight musicians (trumpets, viola, tuba, harp, and horn) who announced that they'd play a free improvisation. And that we in the audience were invited to join in. Which many of us did.
There's a little more backstory -- at chamber concerts during the past couple of weeks, the audience was invited to submit material for the improvisation, either musical phrases (which they'd write down in musical notation), or else verbal phrases, which the students could interpret musically however they liked. From all of this, the "No Lights" players picked a single, simple rhythm, which they taught to the audience (it didn't take long), and which turned out to give the improvisation a clear and strong spine.
The results were a lot of fun. Hard to resist, and quite invented, from everyone involved.
Then came Adams, with a brief spoken introduction. Adams had been inspired, he said, by classic old cartoons, and so, we were told, cartoons would be shown on TV monitors, placed just beyond the two ends of the stage. The monitors were a little small, which might have reflected a not quite right decision, or else a limitation in available equipment. That helped make the cartoons unobtrustive, but I can't imagine how -- unless they were blown up to gigantic size -- they would have bothered anyone. They certainly went with the music, and a Washington Post critic (not my wife) thought they added a lot.
(And that the music added a lot to the cartoons. You can read his review here. Scroll down to find it. It's on my wife's blog, but that doesn't mean that she had any connection to it, other than to have assigned it as part of a selection of NOI reviews that the paper runs every year. All classical reviews in the paper show up in her blog; that's why it's there.)
And then, as people variously headed home or gathered to talk, the Rouse piece was rousingly played in the lobby. And that was it. End of the concert. As I talked to various students whom I'd met when I spoke at two sessions at the start of their program, what emerged is something I can't stress enough. They loved this concert, whether they were playing in it, or sitting in the audience. (And joining the group improvisation, with their voices, with clapping, or whatever sound they felt like making.) I can't guess what percentage of the students were involved, either way, but there seemed to be a lot of them.
And why did they love it? Not because they were trying to reach out to anyone, though I'm sure that if we asked them, they say they thought people their age might relate to what they did. But what they liked most was that the concert was theirs -- not just because they were in full charge (Jim Ross told me the only guidance he offered was that any innovations they tried should grow out of the music), but because the concert involved them as a complete human beings and musicians. In other words, it spoke to a wide range of things they like about music, and a wide range of music that they like.
Some of them, at least, truly felt empowered. One talked to me afterwards about what a high the concert had been for him, and how sobering it might be to get back into the normal classical music world, where he'd be much more limited.
So let's put aside, for a moment, any question about whether all classical concerts should morph into something like this one. Who knows? That question isn't even on the table yet, not in the real world. Only in some speculative discussions. And let's also agree not to worry much about whether any particular person, no matter how impassioned, might not have liked what was going on. This was only one concert. Nobody had to like it. Nobody had to go to it! And nobody said -- before, during, or after -- that this was perfect.
Just consider this. Some fair number of student classical musicians -- selected, after thorough auditions, for a very demanding special program -- chose this as the kind of concert they'd like to give, when they were given full control. Some people reading this might have made a a different choice. But what does it mean that the students chose the way they did -- especially if they're at all representative of classical musicians their age?
Footnote: I guess I had some role in getting things moving in this direction, but the best part of my involvement is that, when I was at the concert, I couldn't tell that I'd had a role. I didn't recognize ideas that were specifically mine, ideas I'd told the students about, or in any way urged on them. The event seemed entirely theirs, and that seemed like the best involvement that I could have had.
A second footnote: Jim Ross is a visionary. Not just for setting the students on the path of concert innovations, but for putting them in full charge. And for giving them tough music to learn, all on their own. This is how to produce empowered, self-motivated musicians, a human bonanza that goes far beyond anything that might be needed for the future of classical music.
The concert was, if you ask me -- and if you ask the students -- a great success. I'll describe it in a moment. But here's something to think about. Debate raged over the ideas the students put forth, a very raw collection, right off the top of their heads, the first day they'd thought about these things. Some people making comments here liked the ideas. Some didn't. Some liked some of the ideas, but not others. Some thought the ideas would lead to effective outreach, some didn't. Some worried that the ideas -- if carried out on any large scale -- would make too great a change in classical concerts.
But suppose the students hadn't been thinking of larger implications? Suppose they'd just been trying to please themselves?
Here's what happened. This was a concert called "New Lights," featuring contemporary music chosen by the director of the NOI, James Ross. He'd picked four pieces: Leon Kirchner's String Quartet No. 4, Elliott Carter's pathbreaking woodwind quartet, Eight Etudes and a Fantasy, Christopher Rouse's Ogoun Badageris, for percussion quartet, and John Adams's Chamber Symphony. A serious program, by any standard.
And part of the point had nothing to do with concert innovations. This was music the students mostly didn't know, and hadn't played, in styles they might not have had experience with. And they were challenged to put the program together without a conductor (for the Adams), or with any outside coaching. They had to figure it all out for themselves. Of course they could listen to recordings, but that's not at all the same as understanding -- in your mind, your ear, and your gut -- how the figure in measure 76 that you play on your viola fits into the larger texture. That's especially a problem in the Adams, which has complex textures, tricky rhythms, constant changes, and often goes at a breakneck pace.
So musically the students were challenged (a wonderful challenge, I think, which is bound to grow their understanding of music, just as it'd grow my own if I could be in their position). But they were also empowered, because they were in charge. Which surely made this concert a good choice for trying out the students' ideas for new ways to present music. Not -- an important point -- because the music might have been difficult for the audience, or for the students themselves, but because this was a concert in which the students took full charge.
The Kirchner opened the program, and the four students who played it chose to introduce it with a video, in which we saw and heard them rehearsing, and talking about how they put the piece together. The video was quite professional. The students shot and edited it themselves. They also decided to add some subtle lighting changes, to go with changes in the music's mood. These were unobtrusive, I thought, and if anyone didn't care for them -- or didn't care for the idea of lighting changes, under any circumstances -- at least these didn't hit anyone in the face. So the idea was, I thought, expertly executed.
Then came an addition to the program, rock songs -- by Yes, the
The instrumentation for this: marimba, acoustic bass, guitar, discreet flute, drums (or more precisely a drummer drumming informally on what looked like a wooden box), and finally, but not least, a bassoon, which took major solos, with a sound that could have been a slightly shadowy sax. This produced an intriguing kind of line-drawing sound, distinguished more by light and shade than by bright or changing colors. Again, the students' choice. Turns out that they could sing very well, two of them with complete rock-band professional skill.
And then came the Carter (or most of it; the students were told they were free to leave out some of the etudes, and just to play the ones they felt they'd really mastered in their rehearsals; they played most of them). I thought this would be a strange segue, that the Carter would seem like it came from some other universe, and especially that it would sound stiff after the rock songs.
But that didn't happen! For me, this was the happiest part of the concert. The students chose to give a spoken introduction to each etude separately (the etudes re short, and greatly varied). The flute player did this, and chose to emphasize the compositional techniques used in each piece. Which turned out not to be at all academic, because his genuine interest in those techniques was unmistakable, because the techniques are clearly audible, and finally because the techniques turn out to be a lot of fun.
So the piece came across as loose and colloquial, the kind of music anyone could listen to. The people in audience liked it all so much that they started applauding spontaneously after each etude, quite spontaneously, and happily continued applauding even after the flutist, not wanting them to feel any obligation, suggested that they didn't have to keep doing it.
Then came intermission. Student percussionists were supposed to play Ogoun Badageris in the lobby during the intermission, but that got canned, because an elderly woman in the audience fell and hurt herself (a broken bone, I was told, but she seemed alert and not too badly troubled). You can't play a percussion quartet when the EMS is about to show up. The Rouse was rescheduled, still out in the lobby, for the end of the concert.
Back into the concert hall (a small one, seating perhaps two or three hundred people; it was nearly full) for the second half. First came what the students called the "No Lights" Ensemble, eight musicians (trumpets, viola, tuba, harp, and horn) who announced that they'd play a free improvisation. And that we in the audience were invited to join in. Which many of us did.
There's a little more backstory -- at chamber concerts during the past couple of weeks, the audience was invited to submit material for the improvisation, either musical phrases (which they'd write down in musical notation), or else verbal phrases, which the students could interpret musically however they liked. From all of this, the "No Lights" players picked a single, simple rhythm, which they taught to the audience (it didn't take long), and which turned out to give the improvisation a clear and strong spine.
The results were a lot of fun. Hard to resist, and quite invented, from everyone involved.
Then came Adams, with a brief spoken introduction. Adams had been inspired, he said, by classic old cartoons, and so, we were told, cartoons would be shown on TV monitors, placed just beyond the two ends of the stage. The monitors were a little small, which might have reflected a not quite right decision, or else a limitation in available equipment. That helped make the cartoons unobtrustive, but I can't imagine how -- unless they were blown up to gigantic size -- they would have bothered anyone. They certainly went with the music, and a Washington Post critic (not my wife) thought they added a lot.
(And that the music added a lot to the cartoons. You can read his review here. Scroll down to find it. It's on my wife's blog, but that doesn't mean that she had any connection to it, other than to have assigned it as part of a selection of NOI reviews that the paper runs every year. All classical reviews in the paper show up in her blog; that's why it's there.)
And then, as people variously headed home or gathered to talk, the Rouse piece was rousingly played in the lobby. And that was it. End of the concert. As I talked to various students whom I'd met when I spoke at two sessions at the start of their program, what emerged is something I can't stress enough. They loved this concert, whether they were playing in it, or sitting in the audience. (And joining the group improvisation, with their voices, with clapping, or whatever sound they felt like making.) I can't guess what percentage of the students were involved, either way, but there seemed to be a lot of them.
And why did they love it? Not because they were trying to reach out to anyone, though I'm sure that if we asked them, they say they thought people their age might relate to what they did. But what they liked most was that the concert was theirs -- not just because they were in full charge (Jim Ross told me the only guidance he offered was that any innovations they tried should grow out of the music), but because the concert involved them as a complete human beings and musicians. In other words, it spoke to a wide range of things they like about music, and a wide range of music that they like.
Some of them, at least, truly felt empowered. One talked to me afterwards about what a high the concert had been for him, and how sobering it might be to get back into the normal classical music world, where he'd be much more limited.
So let's put aside, for a moment, any question about whether all classical concerts should morph into something like this one. Who knows? That question isn't even on the table yet, not in the real world. Only in some speculative discussions. And let's also agree not to worry much about whether any particular person, no matter how impassioned, might not have liked what was going on. This was only one concert. Nobody had to like it. Nobody had to go to it! And nobody said -- before, during, or after -- that this was perfect.
Just consider this. Some fair number of student classical musicians -- selected, after thorough auditions, for a very demanding special program -- chose this as the kind of concert they'd like to give, when they were given full control. Some people reading this might have made a a different choice. But what does it mean that the students chose the way they did -- especially if they're at all representative of classical musicians their age?
Footnote: I guess I had some role in getting things moving in this direction, but the best part of my involvement is that, when I was at the concert, I couldn't tell that I'd had a role. I didn't recognize ideas that were specifically mine, ideas I'd told the students about, or in any way urged on them. The event seemed entirely theirs, and that seemed like the best involvement that I could have had.
A second footnote: Jim Ross is a visionary. Not just for setting the students on the path of concert innovations, but for putting them in full charge. And for giving them tough music to learn, all on their own. This is how to produce empowered, self-motivated musicians, a human bonanza that goes far beyond anything that might be needed for the future of classical music.
Hell is other people, Sartre famously wrote.
But not in my life, and certainly not on this blog. When I posted my estimates yesterday of how much -- in real numbers -- the classical music audience has increased or declined between 1982 and 2008, I needed to know the 2008 adult (18 and over) population of the US. I couldn't find that figure, so I used 2004 numbers instead, figuring they'd be close enough. Using those numbers, I calculated a five percent drop in the size of the classical audience. See yesterday's post for details.
But then I thought I could do better. I asked both here and on Twitter and Facebook if anyone could find a 2008 number for the data I wanted, and several people did. Thanks, all of you! The page I wanted, with the U.S. Census Bureau's 2008 population estimates was here. If you want the data yourself, download the second of the Excel files they offer. That's the one that breaks out the age of the population from 18 up.
So now I know that -- at least according to the Census Bureau's best estimate -- the 18 and up population of the US in 2008 was 230,117,876. That's a 41% increase from 1982. During that period, the percentage of adults 18 and over going to classical music performances declined 30% (from 13.3% to 8.3%). But the increase of population almost wiped out that decline, so the absolute number of adults attending classical music events -- the size, in other words, of the adult classical music audience -- declined only 1.3%, quite a bit less than the 5% drop I wrongly calculated yesterday.
Which would explain why the rate of attendance could drop so steeply without causing panic at the box office. See my last post for various footnotes and qualifications. This is very rough data. And see the post before that for my theory about the longterm trends at work here, which -- if they continue -- should eventually lead to shrinkage we can see and feel.
But not in my life, and certainly not on this blog. When I posted my estimates yesterday of how much -- in real numbers -- the classical music audience has increased or declined between 1982 and 2008, I needed to know the 2008 adult (18 and over) population of the US. I couldn't find that figure, so I used 2004 numbers instead, figuring they'd be close enough. Using those numbers, I calculated a five percent drop in the size of the classical audience. See yesterday's post for details.
But then I thought I could do better. I asked both here and on Twitter and Facebook if anyone could find a 2008 number for the data I wanted, and several people did. Thanks, all of you! The page I wanted, with the U.S. Census Bureau's 2008 population estimates was here. If you want the data yourself, download the second of the Excel files they offer. That's the one that breaks out the age of the population from 18 up.
So now I know that -- at least according to the Census Bureau's best estimate -- the 18 and up population of the US in 2008 was 230,117,876. That's a 41% increase from 1982. During that period, the percentage of adults 18 and over going to classical music performances declined 30% (from 13.3% to 8.3%). But the increase of population almost wiped out that decline, so the absolute number of adults attending classical music events -- the size, in other words, of the adult classical music audience -- declined only 1.3%, quite a bit less than the 5% drop I wrongly calculated yesterday.
Which would explain why the rate of attendance could drop so steeply without causing panic at the box office. See my last post for various footnotes and qualifications. This is very rough data. And see the post before that for my theory about the longterm trends at work here, which -- if they continue -- should eventually lead to shrinkage we can see and feel.
Followup to my "Dire Data" post.
The National Endowment finds a decreasing percentage of Americans going to classical music concerts. And it's a sizable decline. In the 1982 study, thirteen percent of American adults had attended a classical music performance during the past year. In 2008, the number had fallen to 9.3%, a 30% drop.
But does this mean that the classical music audience now is smaller, in absolute numbers? Maybe not, because of course the population grew. So a diminished percentage might not mean a smaller audience. The audience might even have grown.
Has it? No, as it turns out. A rough estimate I've made shows that, in absolute numbers, the classical music audience -- as measured by this NEA data -- has in fact shrunk, but only by five percent. The percentage of adults going to classical concerts dropped by 30%, but the size of the adult population increased by a higher percentage, 35%. Calculate the actual numbers, the number of actual people going to classical performances, and you get the five percent drop. Which means that population growth protected us from the 30% drop in audience that the attendance percentage, taken by itself, would predict.
In my next post, I'll answer some doubters, and show why a decline in attendance matters. Matters quite a bit, in fact.
Footnotes:
The National Endowment finds a decreasing percentage of Americans going to classical music concerts. And it's a sizable decline. In the 1982 study, thirteen percent of American adults had attended a classical music performance during the past year. In 2008, the number had fallen to 9.3%, a 30% drop.
But does this mean that the classical music audience now is smaller, in absolute numbers? Maybe not, because of course the population grew. So a diminished percentage might not mean a smaller audience. The audience might even have grown.
Has it? No, as it turns out. A rough estimate I've made shows that, in absolute numbers, the classical music audience -- as measured by this NEA data -- has in fact shrunk, but only by five percent. The percentage of adults going to classical concerts dropped by 30%, but the size of the adult population increased by a higher percentage, 35%. Calculate the actual numbers, the number of actual people going to classical performances, and you get the five percent drop. Which means that population growth protected us from the 30% drop in audience that the attendance percentage, taken by itself, would predict.
In my next post, I'll answer some doubters, and show why a decline in attendance matters. Matters quite a bit, in fact.
Footnotes:
My numbers are rough estimates because I don't know what the adult population of the US -- people 18 and over -- was (or was estimated by the Census Bureau to be) in 2008. I'm sure that number exists, but, after extensive searches using Google, Ask.com, Wolfram Alpha,Wikipedia, and Bing, I haven't found it. I've found numbers for various other years, with various cutoff points (people 15 and over, people 19 and over, people 20 and over; I need 18 and over, because that's what the NEA meant by "adult"). So I give up. I just don't have anymore time to spend with this. I know the 18 and over number for 1982, and also for 2004, so I'm using the 2004 figure as a stand-in for 2008, figuring there won't be all that much difference. If anyone has a 2008 number for people18 and over in the US, please let me know!
The opera numbers, from the NEA data, work out the same as the classical music data. (The NEA surveys the audiences for opera and classical music separately.) Three percent of adult Americans went to opera performances in 1982, and 2.1% went in 2008. That's a 30% drop, just as the classical music numbers showed, which then leads to a five percent drop in the absolute number of people attending opera. By "classical music," by the way, the NEA means orchestral, choral, and chamber performances.
All of this data is raw. In my last post, I theorized about cultural factors that might have led to the percentage declines. I find my theories plausible, because of the way the declines hit people of different ages, over the decades. Attendance in any age group seems to drop when the people in that age group grew up in an era when interest in classical music seems to have declined. But people may also -- surely are also -- going less because there's more to do than there used to be, more live performances, and more competition at home (from DVDs, for instance). We also don't know the effects of marketing on attendance. My sense is that classical music marketing, especially at the big institutions, improved a lot over the past few years, in large part in reaction to what seems (especially at big institutions) to have been a decline in ticket sales from 1990 or so on. So maybe improved marketing is making the attendance percentages better than they might have been if marketing didn't improve.
And what do these NEA surveys actually measure? In 2008, people were asked: "With the exception of elementary or high school performances, did you go to a live classical
music performance such as symphony, chamber, or choral music during the last 12 months?" (And then similarly for others in their households, their spouse and children.) That makes the resulting figures ambiguous, to say the least. We don't know, for instance, what, exactly the respondents thought were symphony, chamber, or choral performances. And the answers also of course smoosh together paid concerts, free concerts, pops concerts, everything. Thus these numbers can only indicate really large-scale trends, which might not precisely mirror more nuanced behavior, for instance the percentage of people buying tickets to an orchestra's core subscription concerts. So we need to be careful in predicting any consequence from what these numbers show. Orchestra attendance, for instance, might not reflect the trends in the NEA's numbers, or might not precisely reflect them. There are indications that it does (and that data from opera companies mirrors the NEA's opera figures), but I'm giving this caution anyway.
I'm amazed, from time to time, to see debates still raging in the classical music world about declines in ticket sales and the aging of the audience. You'd think we'd have settled these questions by now. How many cars does the US auto industry sell? We know that. So why don't we know how many people are buying tickets to classical concerts? I'll grant that the classical data is harder to assemble, since we have to gather information from many sources.
But still, it's strikingly -- well, pick a word: immature? unworldly? unprofessional? -- certainly something not at all good that we in the classical music business can't collectively point to data about some of our most urgent and hotly debated issues that all of us can agree on. Especially since the aging of the audience (as I've pretty firmly shown) can be established beyond much doubt.
And so now comes the National Endowment for the Arts with the latest of its periodic studies of the arts audience. We've seen numbers from 1982, 1992, 1997, 2002, and now 2008. (Later I'll explain why I haven't given links for the first two studies.) And what does the 2008 data show? It's not good, though none of it, I have to say, should surprise anyone who's looked at the earlier studies. But among much else, the new figures, as I'll show, pretty much blow up any hope that the classical audience is going to be renewed -- or at least renewed at the size it is now -- by younger people coming into it in future years.
Why do I think that? Let's start with some quotes from the NEA's press release on the new numbers. (The press release is what the link in the last paragraph goes to. Though you can also read the actual study, and see the detailed data. I'll show how later.)
Here are the quotes:
So why does this show that the classical music audience isn't renewing itself? First, we should remember that these age groups are moving targets. As the years pass, people get older, and those who were 45 to 64 in 1982 aren't the same people who are 45 to 64 now.
So let's look at those people who were 45 to 64 in 1982, and whose attendance at classical music events hadn't yet started to decline. They were born between 1918 and 1937, and grew up -- which I'll roughly define as spending their high school and college years, from age 14 to age 22 -- between 1932 and 1959. During those years, classical music hadn't yet become a problem, still functioned as part of the mainstream of our culture, still reigned unchallenged as serious musical art, and, most important, still had a younger audience. It was natural for younger people to go to classical concerts, and then to keep going as they grew older, and still to keep going now.
But what about people aged 45 to 64 now? They were born between 1945 and 1964, and grew up, roughly speaking, between 1959 and 1986. Those were years when interest in classical music started to decline, when popular culture rose up (starting in the '60s) with a force and seriousness never seen before, and when the classical music audience was starting to age. Younger people, during those years, were increasingly less likely to go to classical concerts.
And so why should we be surprised that people in this age group are going to classical concerts less often now? What all this really means is that, as time goes on, people coming into what used to be seen as the prime classical concertgoing ages -- 45 and older -- increasingly grew up at a time when classical music had started to recede from the cultural mainstream. So naturally they're less interested in classical music than the generations before them were. With each passing year, more people from 45 to 64 fit this description, and, no surprise, are less interested than those before them in going to classical concerts.
And thus we see the dire numbers that the new NEA study reveals. Unless we have reasons to believe that these trends will reverse -- and what would those reasons be? -- as time goes on, a smaller percentage of Americans in all age groups (even, eventually, those over 65) will go to classical performances, and the classical audience, rather than being renewed, will shrink.
Footnotes:
1. In my next post, I'll show why a declining percentage of people going to classical concerts might not yet mean a decline in absolute numbers, a decline in the actual count of people attending. But, even if we haven't seen it yet, it's surely coming in the future.
2. The NEA, for reasons best known to itself, treats classical music and opera as separate categories in these studies. The numbers I'm quoting all come from the classical music category. Many fewer people attend opera (maybe because there aren't as many opera performances as there are orchestra and chamber concerts), and -- very interesting, this -- the percentage of people going to opera only declined after 2002. The idea, though, that there was any increase in younger people going to opera in recent decades looks like a myth, though what really did happen -- that the percentage of younger people in the audience after 1982 didn't decline until our current decade -- is still pretty striking.
3. Links. The 2008 link I gave at the start, goes, as I said, to the NEA's news release about the study. But for people who want more, they offer links to an NEA brochure about the study, to detailed statistical tables, and to a summary page with still more links. As for the 1982 and 1992 studies, they aren't available online. But data from them is included in the statistical tables appended to the new study, and here's a link to another NEA study that refers to those earlier years. You can also go here to find out how to order hard copies of the studies not available online.
But still, it's strikingly -- well, pick a word: immature? unworldly? unprofessional? -- certainly something not at all good that we in the classical music business can't collectively point to data about some of our most urgent and hotly debated issues that all of us can agree on. Especially since the aging of the audience (as I've pretty firmly shown) can be established beyond much doubt.
And so now comes the National Endowment for the Arts with the latest of its periodic studies of the arts audience. We've seen numbers from 1982, 1992, 1997, 2002, and now 2008. (Later I'll explain why I haven't given links for the first two studies.) And what does the 2008 data show? It's not good, though none of it, I have to say, should surprise anyone who's looked at the earlier studies. But among much else, the new figures, as I'll show, pretty much blow up any hope that the classical audience is going to be renewed -- or at least renewed at the size it is now -- by younger people coming into it in future years.
Why do I think that? Let's start with some quotes from the NEA's press release on the new numbers. (The press release is what the link in the last paragraph goes to. Though you can also read the actual study, and see the detailed data. I'll show how later.)
Here are the quotes:
"There are persistent patterns of decline in participation for most art forms."And then, as if all this weren't bad enough, there's one final, killer finding, the one that blows up the hopeful belief that younger people can renew the classical audience:
"Between 1982 and 2008, attendance at performing arts such as classical music, jazz, opera, ballet, musical theater, and dramatic plays has seen double-digit rates of decline."
"Audiences for jazz and classical music are substantially older than before....Since 1982, young adult (18-24) attendance rates for jazz and classical music have declined the most, compared with other art forms."
"Forty-five to 54-year-olds - historically dependable arts participants - showed the steepest declines in attendance for most art events, compared with other age groups."But wait, it gets worse! If you look at the statistical tables that accompany the report, you'll see that people 55 to 64 also show a steep decline in classical music attendance. So now we have people from 45 to 64 going less often to classical performances. That's the core of the classical music audience! And they're showing a greater decline than any other age group. Younger age groups, the tables show, had their most striking declines earlier. Now the core of the audience, people 45 to 64 -- whose rate of attendance was more or less constant between 1982 and 2002 -- has started to go to classical concerts less often. Only those 65 and over still go to classical concerts at the same rate that they did in the past.
So why does this show that the classical music audience isn't renewing itself? First, we should remember that these age groups are moving targets. As the years pass, people get older, and those who were 45 to 64 in 1982 aren't the same people who are 45 to 64 now.
So let's look at those people who were 45 to 64 in 1982, and whose attendance at classical music events hadn't yet started to decline. They were born between 1918 and 1937, and grew up -- which I'll roughly define as spending their high school and college years, from age 14 to age 22 -- between 1932 and 1959. During those years, classical music hadn't yet become a problem, still functioned as part of the mainstream of our culture, still reigned unchallenged as serious musical art, and, most important, still had a younger audience. It was natural for younger people to go to classical concerts, and then to keep going as they grew older, and still to keep going now.
But what about people aged 45 to 64 now? They were born between 1945 and 1964, and grew up, roughly speaking, between 1959 and 1986. Those were years when interest in classical music started to decline, when popular culture rose up (starting in the '60s) with a force and seriousness never seen before, and when the classical music audience was starting to age. Younger people, during those years, were increasingly less likely to go to classical concerts.
And so why should we be surprised that people in this age group are going to classical concerts less often now? What all this really means is that, as time goes on, people coming into what used to be seen as the prime classical concertgoing ages -- 45 and older -- increasingly grew up at a time when classical music had started to recede from the cultural mainstream. So naturally they're less interested in classical music than the generations before them were. With each passing year, more people from 45 to 64 fit this description, and, no surprise, are less interested than those before them in going to classical concerts.
And thus we see the dire numbers that the new NEA study reveals. Unless we have reasons to believe that these trends will reverse -- and what would those reasons be? -- as time goes on, a smaller percentage of Americans in all age groups (even, eventually, those over 65) will go to classical performances, and the classical audience, rather than being renewed, will shrink.
Footnotes:
1. In my next post, I'll show why a declining percentage of people going to classical concerts might not yet mean a decline in absolute numbers, a decline in the actual count of people attending. But, even if we haven't seen it yet, it's surely coming in the future.
2. The NEA, for reasons best known to itself, treats classical music and opera as separate categories in these studies. The numbers I'm quoting all come from the classical music category. Many fewer people attend opera (maybe because there aren't as many opera performances as there are orchestra and chamber concerts), and -- very interesting, this -- the percentage of people going to opera only declined after 2002. The idea, though, that there was any increase in younger people going to opera in recent decades looks like a myth, though what really did happen -- that the percentage of younger people in the audience after 1982 didn't decline until our current decade -- is still pretty striking.
3. Links. The 2008 link I gave at the start, goes, as I said, to the NEA's news release about the study. But for people who want more, they offer links to an NEA brochure about the study, to detailed statistical tables, and to a summary page with still more links. As for the 1982 and 1992 studies, they aren't available online. But data from them is included in the statistical tables appended to the new study, and here's a link to another NEA study that refers to those earlier years. You can also go here to find out how to order hard copies of the studies not available online.
Comments on this blog got fierce, over the past week. Comments, that is, to my posts about the NOI students at the University of Maryland. Here and here. I'm partly to blame, I'm sure, because I got heated myself. And I even got accused of brooking no oppositi/or thinon to anything I said.
But I'm easy with the heat, from myself and others, because I think there's something big at stake. I passed on suggestions, from the students, for changes in the concert format, not for all concerts everywhere, but for a couple of concerts the students themselves will give in Maryland this month.
And some people reacted with alarm, not just disliking some of the specific suggestions, but worrying about all concerts, saying they liked the standard concert format (even if they might want to loosen the rules a little), that other people like it, too, that even some younger people like it.
And this is where we get a culture war (even if it's quieter than the huge, sharp culture wars out in the big bad world beyond classical music). Some people like classical music the way it is. Some don't. This isn't an either/or thing -- it's a spectrum, with people locating themselves on all parts of it, some wanting no change, some wanting a little change, some wanting radical change.
All of which is natural. But what I see happening is some defensiveness on the conservative side, and some sharpened teeth on the radical side (including mine, I'm sure). This, too, is natural, but the defensiveness leads to a muddle. We lose clarity. In particular, I'll criticize myself. I'm pretty sick of standard classical concerts. I want a lot of change. But what I maybe haven't said clearly enough is that I also understand that everything isn't suddenly going to change completely, that this would kill classical music, that many people in the current audience like the standard concert format (why else would they keep going?), and that classical music institutions, especially big ones, have to cater to these people, who after all are their ticket-buyers, their subscribers, and their donors.
Which means that the classical music world has to move in two directions at once. It has to keep doing everything it's doing, for the sake of the existing audience, which may be shrinking, but still predominates. And at the same time, we have to go in new directions, so we'll have an audience in the future.
This isn't easy. Most classical music institutions, even the very big ones, use all their resources -- all their people, all their money, all their energy -- just going down the standard tracks. How are they going to go down two tracks at once? Especially if track B, the new track, is going to be anywhere near as big as track A. This won't be easy. It might even seem impossible. But I think it has to be done, and I imagine that, in the future, when the need for track B is clearer -- and when pioneers have shown ways to go down that track successfully -- the impossible will become possible. And even be accepted as necessary.
But I'm easy with the heat, from myself and others, because I think there's something big at stake. I passed on suggestions, from the students, for changes in the concert format, not for all concerts everywhere, but for a couple of concerts the students themselves will give in Maryland this month.
And some people reacted with alarm, not just disliking some of the specific suggestions, but worrying about all concerts, saying they liked the standard concert format (even if they might want to loosen the rules a little), that other people like it, too, that even some younger people like it.
And this is where we get a culture war (even if it's quieter than the huge, sharp culture wars out in the big bad world beyond classical music). Some people like classical music the way it is. Some don't. This isn't an either/or thing -- it's a spectrum, with people locating themselves on all parts of it, some wanting no change, some wanting a little change, some wanting radical change.
All of which is natural. But what I see happening is some defensiveness on the conservative side, and some sharpened teeth on the radical side (including mine, I'm sure). This, too, is natural, but the defensiveness leads to a muddle. We lose clarity. In particular, I'll criticize myself. I'm pretty sick of standard classical concerts. I want a lot of change. But what I maybe haven't said clearly enough is that I also understand that everything isn't suddenly going to change completely, that this would kill classical music, that many people in the current audience like the standard concert format (why else would they keep going?), and that classical music institutions, especially big ones, have to cater to these people, who after all are their ticket-buyers, their subscribers, and their donors.
Which means that the classical music world has to move in two directions at once. It has to keep doing everything it's doing, for the sake of the existing audience, which may be shrinking, but still predominates. And at the same time, we have to go in new directions, so we'll have an audience in the future.
This isn't easy. Most classical music institutions, even the very big ones, use all their resources -- all their people, all their money, all their energy -- just going down the standard tracks. How are they going to go down two tracks at once? Especially if track B, the new track, is going to be anywhere near as big as track A. This won't be easy. It might even seem impossible. But I think it has to be done, and I imagine that, in the future, when the need for track B is clearer -- and when pioneers have shown ways to go down that track successfully -- the impossible will become possible. And even be accepted as necessary.
Once upon a time, a generation ago or so, classical music was far closer to everyday life than it is now. We all know this, I'm sure. But it's good to be reminded. So here are four quick appearances of classical music in the popular culture of the past.
The Birds (the classic Hitchcock film, released in 1963): Tippi Hedren, the star, playing a woman in her 20s, visits a normal middle-class family, husband, wife, 11 year-old daughter. The family has a piano. Hedren sits down and plays Debussy's First Arabesque, which isn't identified, any more than her playing is remarked on in any way. Nobody says, "Oh, you play classical music." It's just taken or granted that she might.
Laura (the classic noir -- or, more accurately, semi-noir -- thriller, released in 1944): Vincent Price, playing a high-society type who appears to be in his early thirties (Price himself was 33 when the film was released), is a suspect in a murder case. Where was he, the detective asks, on the night of the murder? At a concert, he says. What music was played? Brahms's First and Beethoven's Ninth, he replies. And whether a concert program like that makes sense, or would have been heard back then, the fact that he's at a classical concert is simply taken for granted. There's nothing special about it. Of course he might have been there.
House Dick (a hard-boiled mystery thriller by E. Howard Hunt -- yes, the Watergate burglar, though that doesn't matter for my purposes here, and he turns out to be quite a sharp writer): The world-weary hotel detective, banged around by life, attracted to the wrong kind of women, has had a hard day. He goes home, and listens to Brahms on the radio. This is just a throwaway reference, nothing special about it, no need to explain why a tough ex-cop would listen to classical music. He just did it. The book was published in 1961.
And now my favorite, an extravagant interlude from Skylark Three, the second (despite the "three") in a trilogy of science fiction novels by E. E. "Doc" Smith, the greatest name in the great old tradition of "space opera," stories in which evil aliens plot destruction, planets explode, and the laws of physics are pretty much ignored. This book was serialized in Amazing Stories magazine in 1930.
For our purposes here, it doesn't matter why two married couples in their twenties are traveling through space, many times faster than the speed of light, saving the galaxy from a ghastly threat. Or why one of them plays a Strad. But here they are, entertaining themselves in a rare quiet moment:
The Birds (the classic Hitchcock film, released in 1963): Tippi Hedren, the star, playing a woman in her 20s, visits a normal middle-class family, husband, wife, 11 year-old daughter. The family has a piano. Hedren sits down and plays Debussy's First Arabesque, which isn't identified, any more than her playing is remarked on in any way. Nobody says, "Oh, you play classical music." It's just taken or granted that she might.
Laura (the classic noir -- or, more accurately, semi-noir -- thriller, released in 1944): Vincent Price, playing a high-society type who appears to be in his early thirties (Price himself was 33 when the film was released), is a suspect in a murder case. Where was he, the detective asks, on the night of the murder? At a concert, he says. What music was played? Brahms's First and Beethoven's Ninth, he replies. And whether a concert program like that makes sense, or would have been heard back then, the fact that he's at a classical concert is simply taken for granted. There's nothing special about it. Of course he might have been there.
House Dick (a hard-boiled mystery thriller by E. Howard Hunt -- yes, the Watergate burglar, though that doesn't matter for my purposes here, and he turns out to be quite a sharp writer): The world-weary hotel detective, banged around by life, attracted to the wrong kind of women, has had a hard day. He goes home, and listens to Brahms on the radio. This is just a throwaway reference, nothing special about it, no need to explain why a tough ex-cop would listen to classical music. He just did it. The book was published in 1961.
And now my favorite, an extravagant interlude from Skylark Three, the second (despite the "three") in a trilogy of science fiction novels by E. E. "Doc" Smith, the greatest name in the great old tradition of "space opera," stories in which evil aliens plot destruction, planets explode, and the laws of physics are pretty much ignored. This book was serialized in Amazing Stories magazine in 1930.
For our purposes here, it doesn't matter why two married couples in their twenties are traveling through space, many times faster than the speed of light, saving the galaxy from a ghastly threat. Or why one of them plays a Strad. But here they are, entertaining themselves in a rare quiet moment:
"What say [says the hero, Richard Seaton] you girls get your fiddle and guitar and we'll sing us a little song? I feel good...it's the first time I've felt like singing since we cut that warship up."It's sweet that she plays light classics, which Doc Smith reveres as if they were the greatest masterworks. But note that these aren't culturally fancy people. Great scientists the men might be, and galaxy-spanning warriors, but as the dialogue shows, these are colloquial people (well, three of them are -- Seaton's buddy Crane is adorably stiff), in their behavior perfectly normal twentysomethings from their time. But classical music (which, if my memory is accurate, shows up just twice in the Skylark trilogy, is an easy part of their lives.
Dorothy brought out her "fiddle" -- the magnificent Stradivarius, formerly Crane's, which he had given her, and they sang one rollicking number after another. Though by no means a Metropolitan Opera quartette, their voices were all better than mediocre, and they had sung together so much that they harmonized readily.
"Why don't you play us some real music, Dottie?" asked Margaret, after a time. "You haven't practiced for ages."
"Right. This quartette of ours ain't so hot," agreed Seaton. "If we had any audience except Shiro [their Japanese servant, an ethnic stereotype from a thankfully bygone age], they'd probably be throwing eggs by this time."
"I haven't felt like playing lately, but I do now," and Dorothy stood up and swept the bow over the strings. Doctor of Music in violin, an accomplished musician, playing upon one of the finest instruments the world has ever known, she was lifted out of herself by relief from the dread of the Fenachrone invasion and the splendid violin expressed every subtle nuance of her thought.
She played rhapsodies and paeans, and solos by the great masters. She played vivacious dances, then "Traumerei" and "Liebestraum." At last she swept into the immortal "Meditation" [this would be by Massenet, the "Meditation" from Thais], and as the last note died away Seaton held out his arms.
"You're a blinding flash and a deafening report, Dottie Dimple, and I love you," he declared -- and his eyes and his arms spoke volumes that his light utterance had left unsaid."
1. The San Francisco Opera streams its live performance of Tosca to a sports stadium.
2. The Seattle Opera held a competition to find a host for what it calls a "reality-style video project," titled "Confessions of a First-Time Operagoer." They chose a 19 year-old student, who'll create an online chronicle of her first exposure to Wagner's Ring.
These are good things. They make the opera companies more visible in their communities. They create buzz. They bring in people who wouldn't normally pay attention. The San Francisco Opera -- which has streamed opera to the stadium twice before -- drew 27,000 people to its show. And seems like they knew exactly how to make this a real event:
Seattle's winner, says a Los Angeles Times blog, will
Is all of this a little hoky? Sure. So what? It's also fun. I'm sure the 27,000 people in AT&T Park in San Francisco had a good time. I could also say that my interests in classical music might go in other directions, but again, so what? Our field badly needs exposure and excitement. And, if what happens in pop music is any guide, the bigger and more popular we get, the more room also opens up for challenging offbeat stuff. The bigger the market, the bigger its fringe.
Every classical music institution, big or small, should do things like these. And not just once, or once a year -- repeatedly, over and over, so people (even people who might never want to go to a performance) know that the institutions are there, and that they're constantly doing new things.
As Leonard Slatkin said this week, assessing the condition of the Detroit Symphony (where he's now music director):
2. The Seattle Opera held a competition to find a host for what it calls a "reality-style video project," titled "Confessions of a First-Time Operagoer." They chose a 19 year-old student, who'll create an online chronicle of her first exposure to Wagner's Ring.
These are good things. They make the opera companies more visible in their communities. They create buzz. They bring in people who wouldn't normally pay attention. The San Francisco Opera -- which has streamed opera to the stadium twice before -- drew 27,000 people to its show. And seems like they knew exactly how to make this a real event:
Opera General Director David Gockley threw out the first pitch, so to speak, in a precurtain speech from the Opera House [says a story in the San Francisco Chronicle]. After introducing conductor Marco Armiliato, who led the ballpark and sold-out Opera House audiences in the national anthem, Gockley poked his head out from behind the curtain to call out, "Play opera!"
Seattle's winner, says a Los Angeles Times blog, will
conduct behind-the scenes interviews with the artists, attend rehearsals and even meet with the so-called Ringies, the die-hard fans who follow "Ring" performances all over the world.She'll also post Facebook updates, and tweet on both her own and the opera company's Twitter accounts.
Is all of this a little hoky? Sure. So what? It's also fun. I'm sure the 27,000 people in AT&T Park in San Francisco had a good time. I could also say that my interests in classical music might go in other directions, but again, so what? Our field badly needs exposure and excitement. And, if what happens in pop music is any guide, the bigger and more popular we get, the more room also opens up for challenging offbeat stuff. The bigger the market, the bigger its fringe.
Every classical music institution, big or small, should do things like these. And not just once, or once a year -- repeatedly, over and over, so people (even people who might never want to go to a performance) know that the institutions are there, and that they're constantly doing new things.
As Leonard Slatkin said this week, assessing the condition of the Detroit Symphony (where he's now music director):
We need to become more of a presence in the community. Not everybody goes to hockey games, but everybody knows about the Red Wings. A lot of their people do very good things in the community. We need to be like them. We want more people to know about the DSO.
Here's the complete list of ideas -- for new ways of giving concerts -- from the students at the National Orchestral Institute. Treat it as a footnote to the more focused list in my last post. There are lots of repeats, no surprise, especially since the students wrote down their ideas after a discussion in which there had been many ideas, and lots of agreement.
The point of all this? Go here for more explanation, beyond what's in my last post. As I've said, these students are more than ready for change. And the NOI, in my experience, goes further in welcoming than any mainstream classical music institution I've ever encountered.
Some people in this blog community made critical comments on the students' ideas, which I respect, but don't agree with. The point, as I tried to say (but not effectively, I fear), isn't whether these ideas seem good or bad, taken individually or even collectively, or whether they're original. The point, to me, is that the students had them, and will absolutely be carrying some of them out. The process, I'm told in e-mail, is under way, and on June 25, there'll be a concert where some of the ideas will be tried. I expect to be there, and I'll report on what happens.
And this excites and empowers the students. That's more important than getting everything right the first time they try things -- especially since I'm not sure any of us know what's right and what's wrong, especially if we judge by what we've already seen. Sometimes the mood in which something is done can be just as important, if not more so, than what the thing is. The students, too, are younger than many of us, and many of them are thinking about what might appeal to people their own age, which some of us (not all, I know) might not be in a very good position to judge.
Anyhow, let them try their ideas, and we'll see what all of us learn. The process set in motion here -- young musicians making change at concerts that once were solidly mainstream -- is more important than what any of us might feel about any particular thing that they do.
Here's the complete list of changes. No need to read it, maybe, unless you're intensely interested. I was struck by how little dissent there was. Only one student, unless I missed something, wanted to keep things as they'd been in the past.
Orchestra concerts should be more like baseball games. More people would go if there was a hot dog stand, casual dress, and drinking. I have a really hard time sitting through concerts, even though I obviously like music, so I don't know how other people can be expected to sit there.
Happy hour before concert/intermission - $1 beers! This will both:draw an audience and make them more excited about what is going on onstage.
Orchestra/chamber music webcast
Audience members sit onstage in the midst of the orchestra
The point of all this? Go here for more explanation, beyond what's in my last post. As I've said, these students are more than ready for change. And the NOI, in my experience, goes further in welcoming than any mainstream classical music institution I've ever encountered.
Some people in this blog community made critical comments on the students' ideas, which I respect, but don't agree with. The point, as I tried to say (but not effectively, I fear), isn't whether these ideas seem good or bad, taken individually or even collectively, or whether they're original. The point, to me, is that the students had them, and will absolutely be carrying some of them out. The process, I'm told in e-mail, is under way, and on June 25, there'll be a concert where some of the ideas will be tried. I expect to be there, and I'll report on what happens.
And this excites and empowers the students. That's more important than getting everything right the first time they try things -- especially since I'm not sure any of us know what's right and what's wrong, especially if we judge by what we've already seen. Sometimes the mood in which something is done can be just as important, if not more so, than what the thing is. The students, too, are younger than many of us, and many of them are thinking about what might appeal to people their own age, which some of us (not all, I know) might not be in a very good position to judge.
Anyhow, let them try their ideas, and we'll see what all of us learn. The process set in motion here -- young musicians making change at concerts that once were solidly mainstream -- is more important than what any of us might feel about any particular thing that they do.
Here's the complete list of changes. No need to read it, maybe, unless you're intensely interested. I was struck by how little dissent there was. Only one student, unless I missed something, wanted to keep things as they'd been in the past.
***
Orchestra concerts should be more like baseball games. More people would go if there was a hot dog stand, casual dress, and drinking. I have a really hard time sitting through concerts, even though I obviously like music, so I don't know how other people can be expected to sit there.
Happy hour before concert/intermission - $1 beers! This will both:draw an audience and make them more excited about what is going on onstage.
Orchestra/chamber music webcast
Audience members sit onstage in the midst of the orchestra
Continue reading Defending the students.
I blogged last week about the National Orchestral Institute, at the University of Maryland -- how I'd talked to students there, and how excited they were to start changing classical music.
So now I have the ideas they wrote down at the end of one of my sessions. I'm going to post these in two parts. First, today, a list of the top 30 ideas, as chosen by James Ross, who runs the NOI (which is a month-long training program for student orchestral musicians; here's a link to it). Tomorrow I'll post the complete list, everything the students suggested, exactly as they wrote it all down.
Remember, as you read what follows, that these students weren't chosen for their interest in change. They were auditioned just as anyone might audition for any summer program, and accepted on the basis of their ability. Maybe Jim Ross, because of his own way of thinking, was inclined to choose people whose playing struck him in some particular way. But the excitement and interest the students showed -- when Jim proposed making changes on their initiative, and I primed the pump by describing things that had been done elsewhere, and encouraging the students to talk -- was a surprise to me. I think it shows younger musicians are far more ready to change than even I might have imagined. Tomorrow, you'll see that only one student offered any dissent.
Here are the top 30 ideas. I've done some very light editing, and added a few explanations. The students were writing these for Jim and for each other, and often used a kind of shorthand, which was natural to do, since students had already suggested some of these ideas at one of my sessions.
So now I have the ideas they wrote down at the end of one of my sessions. I'm going to post these in two parts. First, today, a list of the top 30 ideas, as chosen by James Ross, who runs the NOI (which is a month-long training program for student orchestral musicians; here's a link to it). Tomorrow I'll post the complete list, everything the students suggested, exactly as they wrote it all down.
Remember, as you read what follows, that these students weren't chosen for their interest in change. They were auditioned just as anyone might audition for any summer program, and accepted on the basis of their ability. Maybe Jim Ross, because of his own way of thinking, was inclined to choose people whose playing struck him in some particular way. But the excitement and interest the students showed -- when Jim proposed making changes on their initiative, and I primed the pump by describing things that had been done elsewhere, and encouraging the students to talk -- was a surprise to me. I think it shows younger musicians are far more ready to change than even I might have imagined. Tomorrow, you'll see that only one student offered any dissent.
Here are the top 30 ideas. I've done some very light editing, and added a few explanations. The students were writing these for Jim and for each other, and often used a kind of shorthand, which was natural to do, since students had already suggested some of these ideas at one of my sessions.
1. Standing while playing - Conductorless, Chamber Music +/or New Lights [Besides their three full orchestra performances, they're doing one concert -- playing complicated music! -- without a conductor. They also give chamber concerts, and one "New Lights" concert of contemporary music.]I'm not endorsing or objecting to any of these (though regular readers will recognize some things I've advocated myself). These are the students' ideas -- that's the whole point. They and Jim will figure out which ones to put into action.
2. Orchestra members waving at audience before concert starts (even if they don't know them).
3. Video clips of rehearsals/interviews with performers shown in lobby before concert and at intermission.
4. Other talents of Orchestra member[s] showcased (before concert) or at New Lights - musical (crossover type) or non-musical (juggling, mime, etc.)
5. Video with conductor and orchestra comments and opinions about pieces on concert on the web. Or Video documentary of NOI with webcam live rehearsals streamed. [live rehearsals streamed by webcam]
6. Chamber Music in lobby before concert (Conductorless concert, Big Orchestra concerts)
7. Interaction between performers and audience: (motive, melody demonstration) [demonstrations of motifs and melodies from the pieces being played]
8. Musician Quotes about [the music being played] added as an insert to the program
9. Repertoire for New Lights concert- Pop or Rock band covers [The New Lights program has only been partially planned. Jim wants the students to choose some of the pieces.]
10. Audience onstage for big orchestra open rehearsal [open rehearsal of full orchestra] with question time following rehearsal
11. If Adams could be played twice on the New Lights (beginning and end of program), play the 2nd time on the stage of Deckelboum and have audience sitting right in among the players. [This is the program, so far, for the New Lights concert: John Adams Chamber Symphony,
Leon Kirchner 4th String Quartet, Christopher Rouse Ogoun Badagris for 5 percussionists,
Elliot Carter 8 Etudes and a Fantasy (or only some of it, if the group chooses not to perform all eight movements).
12. Add a short non-classical "fun piece" to any of our big orchestra programs, ala Time for Three.
13. Cookies [give the audience cookies at the concerts]
14. Availability of scores for audience members (or watch the score go by on a big screen above the performer's heads).
15. Intersperse musician[s] in the audience (in the hall) for one piece.
16. Hell's Orchestra reality TV show.
17. Laser pointers for audience. Who are they looking at? [Who are they looking at, that is, while the music is being played]
18. Personal musicians bios in program supplement[ed] with how musicians feel about the piece, about music in general, why they became a musician, or fun extraneous information (large sock collection, e.g.)
19. Allow/Encourage clapping between movements (Tchaikovsky 6) and maybe even during movements.
20. Hannah-Barbera cartoons showed in Gildenhorn prior to the start of Adams. [The Chamber Symphony is partly inspired by classic cartoon scores]
21. Pick/Commission a composer to write a work in response to one of the big NOI pieces, which we then premiere.
22. Orchestra member[s] talk to the audience at concerts. Especially final chamber concert, New Lights, Final Big Orch. Program.
23. Audience texting onto screen above the orchestra. Participatory feedback about the music (technology for this?). [I offered to put them in touch with Peter Gregson, a British cellist I met on Twitter who's done several concerts in which texts and tweets from the audience are displayed during the performance]
24. Lots of eating and drinking suggestions. Play a piece once in the hall, then again in the lobby with drinks and snack served. New Lights?
25. Consider concert dress options for all concerts. Colorful, casual, etc.
26. Any lighting changes, effects.
27. Surprise performance of a piece - unexpected addition to the program.
28. Theatrical realization of Don Juan story before we play it. [Strauss's Don Juan is on one of their programs.]
29. Story-telling to audience.
30. Orchestra concerts should feel more like baseball games.
Here's how I discovered a wonderful classical music fan.
On my iPhone, I have an app called Reportage, which lets you pick up Twitter feeds in your area. Who's tweeting within a mile of you, within five miles, within ten miles?
Tonight, in a down moment, I played with it. Who's tweeting within a mile of my apartment in New York? A lot of people, I figured. But not so. There were only about a dozen recent tweeters. Idly, I looked at what a couple of them had been tweeting. It''s fun, sometimes, just to dip into the Twitter stream at random.
And I found @vivzan, who'd gone to a NY Philharmonic concert, probably yesterday. And tweeted from the concert, and loved every bit of it. I'll quote her tweets here (which I can do because everything on Twitter is public). As a professional, I love her reactions to the music she heard. She responds with such honesty, and such enthusiasm. And she heard exactly what's there. If we had thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people going to classical concerts, and reacting this freely...
Here's @vivzan, her NY Phil tweets in the order she sent them:
(Brief analytical footnote. I think she caught something essential about each piece. The attraction of the Haydn, first and last, is the sound of the trumpet. What else? The Copland is exactly as Vivzan described it. And Bolero -- she knows the piece from recordings, never heard it live before, and nails exactly what the difference is. Bravo to her, and someday maybe I'll learn to be that succinct.)
On my iPhone, I have an app called Reportage, which lets you pick up Twitter feeds in your area. Who's tweeting within a mile of you, within five miles, within ten miles?
Tonight, in a down moment, I played with it. Who's tweeting within a mile of my apartment in New York? A lot of people, I figured. But not so. There were only about a dozen recent tweeters. Idly, I looked at what a couple of them had been tweeting. It''s fun, sometimes, just to dip into the Twitter stream at random.
And I found @vivzan, who'd gone to a NY Philharmonic concert, probably yesterday. And tweeted from the concert, and loved every bit of it. I'll quote her tweets here (which I can do because everything on Twitter is public). As a professional, I love her reactions to the music she heard. She responds with such honesty, and such enthusiasm. And she heard exactly what's there. If we had thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people going to classical concerts, and reacting this freely...
Here's @vivzan, her NY Phil tweets in the order she sent them:
Ran, fell down some stairs, ripped my jacket, got banged up all to get to NYPhil in time so I can finally hear Ravel's Bolero played live!Do we need to argue anymore about whether people should tweet from concerts?
Intermission. Fun piece by Haydn, a trumpet concerto. Who doesn't love trumpets? Next Copland then Ravel last. Wheee!
Oh nice! The Copland piece is a concerto for clarinet, strings, piano and a harp! It's gonna be pretty!
Man, the 1st movement of Copland's was so gorgeous & the 2nd batshit crazy that ppl freaked out w/shouts of bravo, standing O. Wild!
Stanley Drucker, NYPhil's principal clarinet, retiring this week after 60 yrs, awarded Guiness world record for longest career w/clarinet
Bolero is spectacular live. Seeing musicians change, hearing gradual crescendo & it got really loud! Just so enjoyable! Great night!
(Brief analytical footnote. I think she caught something essential about each piece. The attraction of the Haydn, first and last, is the sound of the trumpet. What else? The Copland is exactly as Vivzan described it. And Bolero -- she knows the piece from recordings, never heard it live before, and nails exactly what the difference is. Bravo to her, and someday maybe I'll learn to be that succinct.)
ADDED LATER: There's been much talk, here and elsewhere, about tweeting during concerts. Some people think that you'll disturb other people -- and disturb your own listening -- if you do it. I'm not disturbed if other people tweet while music is playing, but I don't like to do it myself, because then I don't listen. So, in that connection, note that @vivzan didn't t seem to be tweeting during the music. I think it's clear that she tweeted before the concert, between pieces, at intermission, and after the concert ended.
As I've been saying on Facebook and Twitter, I spoke Saturday and Monday to students at the NOI, the National Orchestral Institute at the University of Maryland. I did that last year as well -- this is a one-month program every June for music students who play orchestral instruments -- but this year I was invited with something very specific in mind. Jim Ross,who conducts the student orchestra at the university and runs the NOI, wanted me to help the students come up with ideas for new ways of giving concerts -- ideas that he's ready to implement.
I've now got the complete collection, of all the ideas the students thought of at my second session, and wrote down at Jim's request. I'll share some of them in my next post. But first I want to describe what happened. It truly was exciting. Music students, I think I learned, are far ahead on the curve that leads to the future.
I spoke twice. First I talked about classical music in the past, saying more or less what I say in my Juilliard and Eastman courses about the future of classical music. If you follow the link, you'll find the curriculum for the Juilliard course, with links to all the reading, including things about classical music's past.
My reason for talking about this: classical music was quite a bit looser in generations and centuries past. Musicians improvised, the audience applauded the moment it heard anything it liked, and (more recently; improvisation and immediate applause were 18th and early 19th century traits, for the most part) were much more individual in their performances. I played recordings for the students, and showed some videos. One video was a colossal performance of the Toreador Song from Carmen by the Italian baritone Gino Bechi, filmed in 1950 for a movie (and watchable on YouTube). The man is an animal, vocally and physically. He might as well be Elvis. There's no one like him in opera today.
But that was just the prelude to the second session, which was the exciting one. I primed the pump by talking about classical music's future, and especially by describing some of the many things that classical musicians and classical music institutions have done, to make classical music more lively, more accessible, smarter, more current. (I made a list of some of these, for my Juilliard and Eastman students.)
And then I asked the students for ideas of their own. They were hesitant at first. That's only natural. And then the floodgates burst, and the ideas started coming out. Hands went up everywhere. Make concerts more informal. Talk to the audience. Tell the audience who were are -- not just our potted bios in the program book, not just the cute Q and A's we've lately seen, describing members of the orchestra (and telling what kind of pets they have), but let people get to know us as people. Mix pop music into the programming. Take the music into bars and clubs.
It's not that these ideas are all completely new. But the students were just about unanimous. They all (or so it seemed) wanted changes like the ones I've listed. They were ready! They may not have talked about these things at their music schools, but once someone asked them for ideas, they were ready to move.
One guy, a trumpet player, gave us an idea he was implementing on his own. It started with a role reversal. A hiphop musician he knew wanted some career help. (The hiphop guy asking the classical geek for career enhancement. I love it.) So they came up with a plan. The trumpet player would organize a performance of the second Brandenburg Concerto, and the hiphop musician would bring his band and improvise along with that.
I talked to the trumpet player after the session. He'd gone to Juilliard, he told me. And for his graduation recital, he'd played standard trumpet repertoire, and then, after intermission, Radiohead arrangements. The moral of this story? It's not just Chris O'Reilly. It's not just people I talk about in this blog. And God knows, it's not just people whom I somehow provoke. Music students are thinking about the things I talk about -- and better, doing them -- whether they've heard of me or not. This is becoming a gigantic movement. It's bigger than I thought it was.
And I think it's ready to break loose, as soon as the people who are students move out into professional life, and, in decades to come, start to run the business. This is wonderfully exciting (and thanks to Jim Ross, for so enthusiastically midwifing the NOI's role in the evolution).
I've now got the complete collection, of all the ideas the students thought of at my second session, and wrote down at Jim's request. I'll share some of them in my next post. But first I want to describe what happened. It truly was exciting. Music students, I think I learned, are far ahead on the curve that leads to the future.
I spoke twice. First I talked about classical music in the past, saying more or less what I say in my Juilliard and Eastman courses about the future of classical music. If you follow the link, you'll find the curriculum for the Juilliard course, with links to all the reading, including things about classical music's past.
My reason for talking about this: classical music was quite a bit looser in generations and centuries past. Musicians improvised, the audience applauded the moment it heard anything it liked, and (more recently; improvisation and immediate applause were 18th and early 19th century traits, for the most part) were much more individual in their performances. I played recordings for the students, and showed some videos. One video was a colossal performance of the Toreador Song from Carmen by the Italian baritone Gino Bechi, filmed in 1950 for a movie (and watchable on YouTube). The man is an animal, vocally and physically. He might as well be Elvis. There's no one like him in opera today.
But that was just the prelude to the second session, which was the exciting one. I primed the pump by talking about classical music's future, and especially by describing some of the many things that classical musicians and classical music institutions have done, to make classical music more lively, more accessible, smarter, more current. (I made a list of some of these, for my Juilliard and Eastman students.)
And then I asked the students for ideas of their own. They were hesitant at first. That's only natural. And then the floodgates burst, and the ideas started coming out. Hands went up everywhere. Make concerts more informal. Talk to the audience. Tell the audience who were are -- not just our potted bios in the program book, not just the cute Q and A's we've lately seen, describing members of the orchestra (and telling what kind of pets they have), but let people get to know us as people. Mix pop music into the programming. Take the music into bars and clubs.
It's not that these ideas are all completely new. But the students were just about unanimous. They all (or so it seemed) wanted changes like the ones I've listed. They were ready! They may not have talked about these things at their music schools, but once someone asked them for ideas, they were ready to move.
One guy, a trumpet player, gave us an idea he was implementing on his own. It started with a role reversal. A hiphop musician he knew wanted some career help. (The hiphop guy asking the classical geek for career enhancement. I love it.) So they came up with a plan. The trumpet player would organize a performance of the second Brandenburg Concerto, and the hiphop musician would bring his band and improvise along with that.
I talked to the trumpet player after the session. He'd gone to Juilliard, he told me. And for his graduation recital, he'd played standard trumpet repertoire, and then, after intermission, Radiohead arrangements. The moral of this story? It's not just Chris O'Reilly. It's not just people I talk about in this blog. And God knows, it's not just people whom I somehow provoke. Music students are thinking about the things I talk about -- and better, doing them -- whether they've heard of me or not. This is becoming a gigantic movement. It's bigger than I thought it was.
And I think it's ready to break loose, as soon as the people who are students move out into professional life, and, in decades to come, start to run the business. This is wonderfully exciting (and thanks to Jim Ross, for so enthusiastically midwifing the NOI's role in the evolution).
From a profile in this week's Washington Post Magazine, by Manuel Roig-Franzia:
Is this good for classical music? Well, on one hand, let's take what we can get. Who cares why people like it, as long as they buy tickets to classical concerts, buy classical recordings, listen to classical music on the radio.
But on the other hand, if this is really the impression we're making, then something's gone wrong. At the very least, there's a vast disconnect -- an abyss -- between the way we think about classical music, and the way our culture views it. All the turmoil and passion, all the towering grandeur, all the probing emotional truth, all these artistic things we like to talk about...none of them make much impression on the outside world?
How can we change this?
(Manuel's piece happens to be about a confessed killer. But that doesn't affect the passage I quoted.)
He pads in his socks across finely woven Persian carpets -- "This one would be worth $100,000 if it were in better shape," he remarks offhandedly. He passes the buttery soft Le Corbusier leather sofas arranged by his interior designer and the burbling fountain positioned just so by his feng shui consultant in a living room where soothing classical music is almost always on the stereo"Soothing classical music." People really do think classical music is soothing. Calm. That's a large part of its meaning in our current culture, as I said in my last post. What I've just quoted -- such a terrific piece of writing -- is a demonstration of that.
Is this good for classical music? Well, on one hand, let's take what we can get. Who cares why people like it, as long as they buy tickets to classical concerts, buy classical recordings, listen to classical music on the radio.
But on the other hand, if this is really the impression we're making, then something's gone wrong. At the very least, there's a vast disconnect -- an abyss -- between the way we think about classical music, and the way our culture views it. All the turmoil and passion, all the towering grandeur, all the probing emotional truth, all these artistic things we like to talk about...none of them make much impression on the outside world?
How can we change this?
(Manuel's piece happens to be about a confessed killer. But that doesn't affect the passage I quoted.)
This is the flip side, more or less, to my last post, about how safe it is for an authoritarian government like China's to encourage classical music. The repertoire from the past -- all those great masterpieces -- seems very safe today. There's not much in it that could challenge anything the Chinese government wants its people to believe. And classical music has worldwide prestige, so China seems greatly cultured by encouraging it.
But today there's a stunning piece in the New York Times, by their classical music reporter, Dan Wakin, that shows how exactly these traits of classical music can have the opposite effect. Dan writes about classical music in Palestine, about what he calls "a rising tide of interest in Western classical music" among young Palestinians.
And why is this happening? Well, for a start, it's an escape from the ugly realities of Palestinian life. Which dovetails precisely with something I've noticed many times in my own far more peaceful (what an understatement!) country. People often say they like classical music because it's calm, or because it provides a refuge from the jangles of contemporary life. To me, that sounds very much like escapism, or nostalgia, and -- if this is really what classical music means in our culture -- calls into question classical music's standing as serious art. Art ought to do far more than comfort people.
But in Palestine, who could blame anyone for needing an escape? By spending your time playing the flute, as one teenager described in Dan's piece does, you're affirming your humanity. You don't turn your back on the harsh realities of your life. The flute player Dan writes about said, as Dan writes, "that she felt 'in prison' because of travel restrictions. 'Every time we look at this wall, we feel suffocated,' she added." But she makes space for something else.
And she and others can do this precisely because classical music doesn't have any embattled content. Because it stands apart from everyday life, you make a large statement, as a Palestinian, by spending time with it. You're saying that you're more than the horrors you're part of. And so are your people. You're saying that you stand for something higher and better, something that could eventually be a larger part of your life.
Which then ties into the worldwide prestige of classical music. As a Palestinian, playing Bach and Mozart, you've tied into something more or less universally viewed as lofty, high-minded, ethical, inspiring. And other people in the world can see you doing that. No surprise, then (quoting Dan again), that
That's the idealistic view, of course. As Dan makes clear, some Palestinians think that playing classical music means selling out to Israel. And there are other cultural problems, too. One music school was set on fire by Palestinians who disapproved of it. Nor does Israel, on the whole, support classical music in Palestine, or even know about it. "We cannot perceive them as people who have their own cultural lives," an Israeli music critic says. (Daniel Barenboim, with his work to bring young Israelis and Palestinians together through music, is of course an exception.)
But the paradox is clear. Classical music develops an overt political meaning in Palestine precisely because it doesn't have one elsewhere. Or, to go a little deeper, its implicit political meaning elsewhere in the world, which is quite conservative, in Palestine starts to seem radical, because Palestinians have been excluded from the cultural life, conservative as it might be, that classical music represents.
(On musical life in China, see a comment posted to my previous post, about someone's experience playing metal in China. The government watched every concert, censored every lyric.)
But today there's a stunning piece in the New York Times, by their classical music reporter, Dan Wakin, that shows how exactly these traits of classical music can have the opposite effect. Dan writes about classical music in Palestine, about what he calls "a rising tide of interest in Western classical music" among young Palestinians.
And why is this happening? Well, for a start, it's an escape from the ugly realities of Palestinian life. Which dovetails precisely with something I've noticed many times in my own far more peaceful (what an understatement!) country. People often say they like classical music because it's calm, or because it provides a refuge from the jangles of contemporary life. To me, that sounds very much like escapism, or nostalgia, and -- if this is really what classical music means in our culture -- calls into question classical music's standing as serious art. Art ought to do far more than comfort people.
But in Palestine, who could blame anyone for needing an escape? By spending your time playing the flute, as one teenager described in Dan's piece does, you're affirming your humanity. You don't turn your back on the harsh realities of your life. The flute player Dan writes about said, as Dan writes, "that she felt 'in prison' because of travel restrictions. 'Every time we look at this wall, we feel suffocated,' she added." But she makes space for something else.
And she and others can do this precisely because classical music doesn't have any embattled content. Because it stands apart from everyday life, you make a large statement, as a Palestinian, by spending time with it. You're saying that you're more than the horrors you're part of. And so are your people. You're saying that you stand for something higher and better, something that could eventually be a larger part of your life.
Which then ties into the worldwide prestige of classical music. As a Palestinian, playing Bach and Mozart, you've tied into something more or less universally viewed as lofty, high-minded, ethical, inspiring. And other people in the world can see you doing that. No surprise, then (quoting Dan again), that
many Palestinians see the study of Western classical music -- part of a broader cultural revival in the West Bank -- as a source of hope, a way to connect to the outer world from a hemmed-in and controlled existence, particularly at a time when hope for a Palestinian state seems ever more distant.Classical music thus takes on a political meaning, precisely -- what a paradox -- because otherwise it wouldn't have any. You rise above any stereotypes others might have of you (or at least in principle you could) , and take your place in a worldwide enterprise in which those stereotypes no longer make any sense.
That's the idealistic view, of course. As Dan makes clear, some Palestinians think that playing classical music means selling out to Israel. And there are other cultural problems, too. One music school was set on fire by Palestinians who disapproved of it. Nor does Israel, on the whole, support classical music in Palestine, or even know about it. "We cannot perceive them as people who have their own cultural lives," an Israeli music critic says. (Daniel Barenboim, with his work to bring young Israelis and Palestinians together through music, is of course an exception.)
But the paradox is clear. Classical music develops an overt political meaning in Palestine precisely because it doesn't have one elsewhere. Or, to go a little deeper, its implicit political meaning elsewhere in the world, which is quite conservative, in Palestine starts to seem radical, because Palestinians have been excluded from the cultural life, conservative as it might be, that classical music represents.
(On musical life in China, see a comment posted to my previous post, about someone's experience playing metal in China. The government watched every concert, censored every lyric.)
AJ Ads
Introducing
AJ Arts Blog Ads
Now you can reach the most discerning arts blog readers on the internet. Target individual blogs or topics in the ArtsJournal ad network.
Advertise Here
AJ Arts Blog Ads
Now you can reach the most discerning arts blog readers on the internet. Target individual blogs or topics in the ArtsJournal ad network.
Advertise Here
AJ Blogs
AJBlogCentral | rssculture
About Last Night
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Artful Manager
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
blog riley
rock culture approximately
rock culture approximately
critical difference
Laura Collins-Hughes on arts, culture and coverage
Laura Collins-Hughes on arts, culture and coverage
Dewey21C
Richard Kessler on arts education
Richard Kessler on arts education
diacritical
Douglas McLennan's blog
Douglas McLennan's blog
Dog Days
Dalouge Smith advocates for the Arts
Dalouge Smith advocates for the Arts
Flyover
Art from the American Outback
Art from the American Outback
Life's a Pitch
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
Mind the Gap
No genre is the new genre
No genre is the new genre
Performance Monkey
David Jays on theatre and dance
David Jays on theatre and dance
Plain English
Paul Levy measures the Angles
Paul Levy measures the Angles
Real Clear Arts
Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture
Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture
Rockwell Matters
John Rockwell on the arts
John Rockwell on the arts
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
