{"id":119,"date":"2009-03-24T18:27:12","date_gmt":"2009-03-24T18:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp\/?p=119"},"modified":"2009-03-24T18:27:12","modified_gmt":"2009-03-24T18:27:12","slug":"musical_chairs_on_network_tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/2009\/03\/musical_chairs_on_network_tv\/","title":{"rendered":"Musical Chairs on Network TV"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night Scott<\/a> and I were having a drink and a nosh and the subject came ’round to concert music and reality TV, as these things have a way of doing. Okay, okay, it was actually that we were comparing the TV we seemed to be consuming of late, and while I have been watching sub-par dramas, Scott copped to the fact that he’d been thoroughly enjoying the reality series Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team<\/i><\/a>. What he seemed to like about the show was that it wasn’t about the trappings of the contestant’s lives, but pretty well focused on the goals they had their eyes on: learning routines and getting through uniform fittings and other tests of pro cheerleader skill. These people were fighting to succeed at something they wanted to do professionally very badly, and it made for some knuckle-biting drama. (In cute outfits, but I let that part slide.)<\/p>\n

From there we started imagining what it would be like if they pulled the curtain back on musicians from the X orchestra and got into the real working lives of the people behind the black wall o’ performers: study, auditions, rehearsals, unions, politics, performances. I knew from experience that, if done well, a pretty colorful picture would emerge and yes, that would most definitely shake up people’s perceptions of the industry. But two major road blocks lay in the path of this “new slant on a classic program model” coming to fruition: <\/p>\n

1) Viewers have to care about the people in the abstract already, and by and large they probably wouldn’t care about orchestra musicians. But wait, isn’t that just feeding into the self-defeatist perspective we in the industry tend to lug around on our backs? People melt when amateur contestants reach for classical repertoire (think Paul Potts on Britain’s Got Talent<\/i>). I can see a trailer made up of clips from my own orchestral experiences that would have everyone tuning in. Pure drama. <\/p>\n

2) We couldn’t make the show ourselves in-house. This one I think we can’t surmount. The frame is super important and a major network would have to make the show on their own if it is to have any chance of being popular in the same way and having a similar cultural impact. Repeat, this is not an audience development move the orchestra can engage in. I mean, they could, but it would not have the same result. It needs an outsider, a team of creative people who know nothing about this world, so that what they find is not balanced, not tempered–it’s just raw reaction. The things that would strike outsiders we may no longer even notice. What would they see in us?<\/p>\n

Silly conjecture, yes, but there’s something inside this fantasy that I can’t shake. On top of the practical impossibility of knowing all 70 people in your local symphony, there’s also a certain amount of subsuming the players into the ensemble, supposedly in service to the music. But if that’s so, why are athletes never asked to remain so anonymous for the good of the game? If there were 10 members of an orchestra that the nation started to really feel invested in, wouldn’t the stock of all orchestra members rise?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night Scott and I were having a drink and a nosh and the subject came ’round to concert music and reality TV, as these things have a way of doing. Okay, okay, it was actually that we were comparing the TV we seemed to be consuming of late, and while I have been watching […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-119","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}