{"id":1330,"date":"2014-06-09T06:04:45","date_gmt":"2014-06-09T13:04:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/?p=1330"},"modified":"2014-06-09T06:04:45","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T13:04:45","slug":"opera-and-arts-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/06\/opera-and-arts-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Opera and arts education"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"much<\/a>Audiences for live performance of opera are aging and declining. What ought to be done about that? General Manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb, in an interview with the BBC<\/a> (on which I posted<\/a>, on a different topic, yesterday) has this to say:<\/p>\n

“The box office has not increased, it’s been flat which represents a shrinking playing field for opera – it’s not a secret in the US that the frequency of opera going is going down. …<\/p>\n

“We are getting a newer audience, a younger audience, but there aren’t enough new audience members to replace the old audience members who are dying off.” …<\/p>\n

Gelb lamented the lack of opera and arts education in schools in the US and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

“Children are brought up to be tech wizards and to have the attention spans of mice. How do you educate new audiences to like opera which takes three or four hours and is in foreign languages?<\/p>\n

“We’re trying. As long as governments are not interested in arts education, I think we are in a Catch-22 situation. [sic]<\/p>\n

“How can we possibly hope to create new audiences for this art form if we are not introducing them or educating them?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let me speak to this not only as someone who studies the economics of the arts, but also as someone with children in public schools.<\/p>\n

There is<\/em> art in schools, not all of them, I know. My children are lucky enough to attend an elementary school with a terrific music teacher – they learn to sing, play recorder, put on a show. But the teachers at this school have a lot to do. They have to take kids of widely varying backgrounds and educational experiences, and get them into the habit of learning, questioning, studying, writing across the humanities, natural science and social science. They don’t want their students to have the “attention spans of mice,” so they engage in big projects that demand focus and perseverance.<\/p>\n

Students are not going to learn about opera in school, at least not in any way beyond the completely superficial. And I don’t know how anyone who knows anything about life in a public elementary school could reasonably expect otherwise. I’m glad there is art education in school, and wish every school had its art and music teachers. But arts managers need to appreciate the limits of what could be done in schools to build future arts participants, even in the best of all possible worlds. Arts organizations will have to do some of the heavy lifting themselves.<\/p>\n

So I would suggest that the General Director of one of the world’s most prestigious opera companies, located in a metropolitan area with a population of over twenty million, and who has an annual budget of more than $300 million to work with, ought not to blame the public education system for not doing enough to generate audience for his productions. It is unfair, and suggests an organization out of touch with its environment, a situation I thought elite arts organizations were at pains to overcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Audiences for live performance of opera are aging and declining. What ought to be done about that? General Manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb, in an interview with the BBC (on which I posted, on a different topic, yesterday) has this to say: “The box office has not increased, it’s been flat which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1332,"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":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1330","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-issues","8":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/NYCschool.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3dIW5-ls","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1325,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/06\/cutting-wages-is-hard-to-do\/","url_meta":{"origin":1330,"position":0},"title":"Cutting wages is hard to do","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"June 8, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Peter Gelb says New York's Metropolitan Opera will go broke within the next few years without wage cuts. The BBC reports: He proposed cutting 16% of its $200m (\u00a3119m) labour costs by changing work rules for the orchestra and chorus. Gelb also defended spending $169,000 (\u00a3100,000) on a poppy field\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "issues"","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"what goes up is tough to get down","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/ladder.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3074,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2024\/09\/should-opera-companies-just-slash-their-ticket-prices\/","url_meta":{"origin":1330,"position":1},"title":"Should opera companies just slash their ticket prices? Updated with responses to comments","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"September 4, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"The\u00a0Philadelphia Inquirer\u00a0reports that Opera Philadelphia is radically cutting their prices (the article is paywalled, but you get 6 months of the\u00a0Inquirer\u00a0for a buck, which is not a very high wall): In the first 48 hours after unveiling its new \u201cpick your price\u201d ticket program Tuesday morning, Opera Philadelphia sold 5,876\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "issues"","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/image.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/image.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/image.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/image.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/image.png?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/image.png?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1043,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/02\/pricing-to-fill-the-house\/","url_meta":{"origin":1330,"position":2},"title":"Pricing to fill the house","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"February 13, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"ArtsJournal links to this piece from Britain's Guardian on pricing at the Met (see here for an earlier post of mine on the subject). Tom Service writes: They filled just 79% of the seats in that huge, red-velvet covered house, and made only 69% of their projected box-office revenue. For\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 1 comment","block_context":{"text":"With 1 comment","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/02\/pricing-to-fill-the-house\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"not fun","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Man-Sitting-Alone-In-Empt-001.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1018,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/01\/pricing-at-the-met\/","url_meta":{"origin":1330,"position":3},"title":"Pricing at the Met","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"January 29, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Today the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times report on statements from the Metropolitan Opera regarding recent changes in prices and box office revenues. The WSJ reports, under the headline \"Met Opera Suffers Budget Shortfall From Pricing Backlash\": \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 The Metropolitan Opera's $311 million budget fell\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "issues"","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"not just a theory, it's the law","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/demand.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1613,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/10\/culture-and-urban-growth-we-still-dont-know-much\/","url_meta":{"origin":1330,"position":4},"title":"Culture and urban growth: we still don’t know much","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"October 14, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"A few years ago I came across a paper by Oliver Falck, Michael Fritsch and Stephan Heblich, 'The Phantom of the Opera: Cultural Amenities, Human Capital, and Regional Economic Growth' that used a rather unique data set to try to get around the knotty problem of finding whether cultural amenities\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "issues"","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"a safer photo choice...","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/beer-garden.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1207,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/04\/nonprofit-costs-are-driven-by-revenues\/","url_meta":{"origin":1330,"position":5},"title":"Nonprofit costs are driven by revenues","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"April 8, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"This post takes us through health care, college sports, and opera... One of the first things arts administration students are taught about nonprofit organizations is that by law, and by definition, nonprofits are not to distribute any net earnings to managers or shareholders, but rather any revenues over costs must\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "issues"","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"lots of rent to collect","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Saban.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}