Monthly Archives: February 2012

More good news

This from Britain, where

I’ve been aware of this for some time — note my blog posts after my visit to London last year, about the Roundhouse, a pop venue, where classical concerts draw a big pop-oriented audience, and about the large crowds for a festival of music by Steve Reich and younger composers identified as his successors. Produced, I might add, by the London Symphony.

But in the last month or so, the Guardian ran two pieces — linked in the bullet points — about a British classical explosion. Yes, these pieces were long on generalities, and short on numbers. But both writers seemed sure that something was going on, drawing on their first-hand observations, and on the success of many performances.

Some quotes:

We’re currently seeing a melding of genres and a breaking of boundaries across the music world. This recent trend – listeners moving to the avant garde after they start demanding more from the mainstream– has long been acknowledged within pop. In recent years, mainstream pop artists have even started adopting aspects of the avant garde in their search for fresh output: it’s a dialogue that has benefited artists, labels and listeners alike.

In a world where listeners no longer define themselves along firm genre lines, music is increasingly just that – music. As a result, we are now witnessing a musician-led movement gleefully adopted by listeners, in which classical is being rebranded from the ground up. Even the term “classical” itself seems obsolete in the face of what’s being produced and consumed.

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[The increased audience for [edgy contemporary] works is the result of a campaign to reach people interested in the cutting edge of other contemporary art forms, rather than those who prefer to hear Beethoven.

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It’s the weirdest pieces which get the strongest reaction….People are looking for something to get their teeth into.

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[]M]any people arrive at the avant garde of contemporary music via the wilder shores of pop.

Not that the melding of indie pop and contemporary classical music is anything new. And the London phenomenon happens in New York, too — large crowds for new music events, plus a new audience for classical music at festivals not billed as classical (like Tully Scope and White Light at Lincoln Center).

This is very good news, and supports — is a crucial part of — what I blogged earlier about how we should think much bigger, when we talk about enlarging our audience.

A second commandment, for the future of classical music: Think big. The new audience is larger than most of us imagine it is. 

(The first one was: respect the culture outside classical music.)

 

 

 

 

Alec Baldwin shows us the way

I’m going to be posting a lot about the future — or, rather, about how to make classical music ready for the future. And, especially, how to make classical music institutions ready. A lot of what we need to think about involves the culture around us — the culture into which classical music needs to expand, if we’re going to find more audience.

I know this idea isn’t always welcome, but think about it. If we want to attract people who don’t now listen to classical music, who are they? Clearly they’re people who live in our lar

 

ger culture. Or did we think we’d find people who’ve withdrawn from our culture, who spend their cultural time in tiny, fascinating niches?

Not likely. And so, to introduce this thought, let me present someone who certainly takes part in mainstream culture, Alec Baldwin, who of course is a classical music fan — celebrity spokesman for the New York Philharmonic, no less, and host of their radio broadcasts. He loves classical music.

But of course he’s  also a star on 30 Rock. And as for his musical taste…well, as it happens it’s not fully classical. Alec Ross has been asking art celebrities — Björk, Mark Morris — what their favorite records are, and when h

e asked Baldwin for a list of favorites, only two were classical. Namely, recordings of Mahler’s Fourth and Ninth Symphonies, conducted by George Szell and Georg Solti. Showing, I have to say, a connoisseur’s taste.

And the rest? A Decade of Steely Dan, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, With the Beatles, and Sondheim’s Assassins (a connoisseur’s taste, again). The Who Live at Leeds, the complete Columbia recordings with Miles Davis and John Coltrane playing together, U2 Live from Paris, Eric Clapton’s Layla and Assorted Love Song

s, Elton John’s Tumblewe

ed Connection, Tony Bennett At Carnegie Hall, and 21, the album for which Adele won all those Grammys.

Truly a connoisseur’s taste, and quite individual. The moral of the story? This is the audience we’re looking for — people with developed musical minds, who (unlike Alec Baldwin), haven’t yet taken to classical music. Or who already like classical music, but don’t go to concerts much, or buy many classical recordings. This is a snapshot of who these people are, what their larger tastes are in music.

Which should be obvious, right? But for many of us it isn’t. I’ve run into a lot of what I’d call classical music exceptionalism, the belief — so often passionately held — that classical music is special, that U2 may be fine, in its place, but that classical music is something people have to like, that it’s superior to the dross (musical and otherwise) of current culture. Etc., etc., etc.

We can believe that, if we like, but the people we’re trying to reach don’t believe it. To reach them, we’ll have to let them see that we value — not just understand, but value — who they are, and what their culture is.

Thinking bigger — Grammy post followup

 

Our audience can grow, explosively.I’m all for growing our niche audiences incrementally, using the Grammy awards for whatever they can get us. But we shouldn’t be satisfied with incremental growth. We’re ready to explode. Let’s go for it!

I’m surprised — but happy — about how much comment my Grammy post got, the post in which I said the classical Grammys didn’t matter much.

And I got a lot of pushback. Yes, the Grammys matter. They’re recognition for recordings that might not otherwise get it (or at least not so prominently). The Grammys help with promotion — if you’re selling a record, or booking tours for a group whose record won, saying “Grammy winner” is a selling point.

All true. I thought I’d acknowledged all that in my post, but maybe I didn’t do it strongly enough. And what I now feel I should have done is made much more clear why I was making my point in the first place.

And here’s the reason. We — those of us who work professionally in classical music — don’t think big enough. We accept realities we ought to try to change. We operate within limited parameters. This, we say, is the classical music audience. And this is the new music audience.

So when we have music to promote, that’s where we go. To the people who’ve bought music like that before.

Which is natural. Who could blame us? That’s how the world works. Most of us do what we’ve always done, what’s worked in the past. No blame for that.

But now we’re in a new era! The old classical music ways are changing. People are doing new things. And in the outside world, there’s more interest in music of all kinds — more experimentation, more curiosity, more creativity — than I’ve ever seen.

And that extends to classical music. For instance, in the striking crossover between new classical music and indie rock, but also in a heightened openness to old classical music, as long as it’s performed with spirit and presented with contemporary attitude.

So why, then, do we accept so many limits? Some things about the classical music world just don’t make sense. We have — and this was what I was getting at in my post — an audience that doesn’t participate very much in what, as professionals, we think classical music is about.

Forget the Grammys for a moment, and just imagine asking people at a Boston Symphony concert (or substitute any orchestra) what the best orchestral recording of the past year might be. They wouldn’t know. And if you asked them to name what the best new orchestral piece of the year had been — or even to name three or four orchestral pieces new this year — of course they couldn’t do it. What chance would they have to hear — or even hear about — these pieces? Any new work their local orchestra didn’t play would almost surely be unknown to them.

Some people responding to my post think this also happens in pop music. Not a chance. Sure, there are obscure bands, some of which might get awards. But the big awards go to people who are much discussed, outside their genres, as well as by their genres’ fans. And even for the more obscure stuff, there’s an active community discussing, comparing, evaluating, accepting or rejecting it.

(To see just a little of how this works, go to the NPR music site. quite a wonderful spot on the web, and the best window I know into how the educated public thinks about music.)

So if in classical music, recordings get nominated for the Grammys that hardly anyone in the classical music audience knows about — that’s an anomaly. And it’s due, I think, to our small, niche audience, and also to some ossification that’s occurred over time, as classical music began to turn in on itself, and not engage the outside world. A consequence of that, a very sad one, was that even people inside classical music didn’t engage, in any full sense, with our art form.

Which is why I want us to think bigger! I want us to find an engaged new audience. I want us to think beyond the relatively few people we speak to so far, and expand our reach. For me, that means music students finding fans in the cities their music schools are in, and getting 50, 100, 200, 400 people at their graduation recitals, instead of the 20 or so I’ve routinely seen at Juilliard.

It means that new music records — the ones inhabiting a sonic landscape that they share with indie rock — should sell 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 copies (CDs, downloads, paid streams, whatever).

And for established classical music institutions, it means an influx of new, younger listeners — active, lively, curious, engaged, smart people.

When we have these things, our field will start to grow. And will start to have a normal audience, of the kind we find in popular culture, an audience that knows what’s out there, discusses it, and actively chooses what it likes and doesn’t like.

Then the classical Grammy awards will start to mean something not just to me, but to the classical music audience. Because they already knew the records nominated.

That’s the goal I’d like to see us shoot for. So as I said at the start:

I’m all for growing our niche audiences incrementally, using the Grammy awards for whatever they can get us. But we shouldn’t be satisfied with incremental growth. We’re ready to explode. Let’s go for it!

 

So that’s

Why the classical Grammys don’t matter

Well, maybe they give their winners bragging rights, or a small — tiny? — commercial boost.

Who is this man?

But in any larger musical, cultural, or commercial sense they don’t matter at all. Not because awards shows might be silly, or because winning an award might be no guarantee of artistic strength, or because (as some people might think) classical music itself might not matter.

No, the classical Grammys don’t matter because hardly anyone — including classical music fans — hears most of the recordings that are nominated, so there’s no context in which winning could mean very much.

Compare pop. Adele was nominated for six awards, and — this doesn’t happen often — won all of them. Which means quite a lot. She’s a huge star, of course. But to be nominated this many times, and then to sweep her nominations, represents a rare tidal surge, a confluence of popularity, critical acclaim, and professional respect. (This last matters a lot in the Grammys, because the voters who decide the awards are music professionals.)

Likewise for Kanye West winning all four hiphop  Grammys (even though, as critics noted, he should have also been nominated for record and album of the year). His album was praised, honored, loved, talked about. No way you could follow pop music, and not know that he and Adele would, very likely, be top Grammy contenders.

Now back to classical music. Here are the nominees for Best Orchestral Performance:

  • Brahms: Symphony No. 4, conducted by Dudamel
  • York Bowen: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2, conducted by Andrew Davis
  • Haydn: Symphonies 104, 88 & 101, conducted by Nicholas McGegan
  • Henze: Symphonies Nos. 3-5, conducted by Marek Janowski
  • Martinu: The Six Symphonies, conducted by Jirí Belohlávek,

Dudamel, of course, is huge. But classical recordings don’t sell very well. so it’s more than possible that many classical fans didn’t know this recording existed. And very likely not many bought it.

A thought experiment. Picture the top 20 orchestras in the US, playing night after night in their very large halls, Symphony Hall in Boston, Powell Hall in St. Louis, Disney Hall in LA, the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas.

Thousands and thousands of people. Suppose a mere 100 people who hear each orchestra bought one of these Best Orchestral Performance nominees. That would mean 2000 sales for that album, gigantic for a classical release.

And maybe, just maybe, Dudamel’s Brahms sold that well. But Henze? Martinu? Bowen? Not likely.

In fact, if you went to Symphony Hall, Powell Hall, Disney Hall, or the Meyerson — or anywhere else that classical music is played — and randomly asked people if they’d even heard of these recordings (let alone listened to them), wouldn’t the answer be “No!”

So what does it mean if one of these records wins? For most classical listeners, nothing at all. It touches nothing they know, not even anything in their musical lives.

And if that’s true of the orchestral recordings, what should we say about the Best Contemporary Classical Composition nominees? Robert Aldridge’s opera Elmer Gantry beat out, among other recordings, Jefferson Friedman’s String Quartet No. 3. How many people care?

Well, I do — Friedman’s quartet (from a CD that  sat around for years, unreleased) is very hot, one of the most striking classical pieces I’ve heard in the past few years, while Elmer Gantry doesn’t do much for me. But go back to Powell Hall. Or, for a new music crowd, the thousands who flock to Bang on a Can’s annual marathon. How many people at either place know these recordings exist?

(Go here to see the other nominees in this category, works by George Crumb, Steven Mackey, and Poul Ruders.)

One of this year’s classical Grammys most likely did resonate — Eric Whitacre’s Light & Gold, which won for Best Choral Performance. Whitacre is a phenomenon, someone with quite a large following.

And it’s not as if classical records never make waves, at least in the classical world. Thinking back over my long life in classical music, I might name Toscanini’s Beethoven Symphonies, Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, the first Callas recording of Tosa, Leonard Bernstein’s Mahler, Van Cliburn’s Tchaikovsky (which got on the pop charts), and Georg Solti’s Das Rheingold, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung.

(Solti’s Walkūre wasn’t news, even though it finished his Ring. There had been two fine commercial recordings of Walkūre earlier, but none of Rheingold and Siegfried, and no competentrelease of Götterdämmerung.)

Plus the first Three Tenors CD, a Gregorian chant release in the ‘early 90s, and, maybe, Simone Dinnerstein’s Goldberg Variations. Or maybe, these days, anything she records, since her last album got on the pop charts.

And I’m sure I’ve neglected some notable records — the first Harnoncourt/Leonhardt Bach cantatas, maybe. And, to go back again to the past, when Solti won classical Grammys just about every year, that — whether or not he deserved to win so often — really did reflect his enormous fame as music director of the Chicago Symphony.

But most classical Grammy winners? It’s hard to see where their winning might resonate.

(The photo shows York Bowen, whose symphonies, conducted by Andrew Davis, were nominated for Best Orchestral Performance.)

Good news from Toronto

I talk a lot about problems with classical music, and maybe don’t say enough that what I really care about is classical music’s rebirth.

Which — knock on any wood-like substance available — seems to be happening.

For instance: The Toronto Symphony says it has an amazingly young audience. More than one-third of it is younger than 35!

I read this some months ago in a story that appeared late in June, in the Culture Monster page on the Los Angeles Times website. And then was surprised to see that the story — in journalist-speak — didn’t seem to have legs. It wasn’t picked up, as far as I could see, by other major media. And even people in the classical music business didn’t seem to know the Toronto Symphony was having this notable — pathbreaking — success.

And i confess I sat on the story myself. It was summer, Then came Rafa, the baby we adopted, and two months focused largely on him. (Such a joy.) And what I wanted to do — since there was, as far as I know, no precedent and no context for news like this — was talk to people in Toronto.

I should have linked the story right away, though. I did set up a conversation with Carey Suleiman, the Toronto Symphony’s Senior Director of Marketing. From whom I learned that, yes, the astounding stat (about the audience age) is correct. The number dates from the 2009-10 season.

Carey also said, anecdotally, that “audience at our concerts looks younger than other things i’ve seen” — meaning other audiences she’s encountered in her classical music career, which included time at the Philadelphia Orchestra.

I’d love more hard data. And also I — and I’m sure many others — would like to know how this happened. And at what cost, if any. (Some classical music institutions attract a young audience by lowering ticket prices, but then they need funding to offset the loss from selling tickets at a cheaper price.)

In fact, I think I held up posting because I wanted some explanation. I’ve formed a theory, for what it’s worth: I think that the Toronto Symphony persevered. More than a decade ago, in 2001, they introduced their Tsoundcheck program, which sells tickets at a low price to anyone 15 to 35.

You have to sign up, which puts you on the Symphony’s mailing list. They can market to you. And they’re selling 3-packs, tickets to three concerts at a time, which makes Tsoundcheck members Symphony subscribers.

There are more details — for instance, that Tsoundcheck tickets are only available if full-price tickets aren’t all sold. And how, as a Tsoundcheck member, you can bring a friend along at the same low price.

But what I think is crucial is that they’ve continued the program for all these years. All too often, I’ve seen classical music institutions try an innovation, and then drop it. If you want a new audience, you might have to work on that for years.

Which is what the Toronto Symphony seems to have done. They also have some special series — Casual Concerts, Late Night Concerts — that might appeal to younger people, and as far as I know they’ve continued these for years, too.

Or maybe it’s Toronto, at least in part. The Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra has had success with younger people, too.