Orchestra Revolution

Sorry to be starting here a little late. Life takes its toll. I’m gratified, I have to say, by Doug’s lovely post about me, and I could fantasize about making a dramatic late entrance after that fanfare of trumpets.

But I wish I’d started earlier.

My thought for the day, or the year, or the decade, is simple enough. We’re talking about evolution and revolution, but what would these things be? I fear we’re being very cautious, and also making a classic mistake. We’re seeing things only from our point of view, which in this case is the point of view of people passionate about classical music. And, more important than that, people involved with it professionally, people who actually go to orchestra concerts.

But what about the people who don’t go? These, it seems to me, are the most important people for us to think about. I trust I don’t have to recapitulate all those dire NEA statistics that surfaced in the past year, along with the League’s own study, that showed the NEA was right. The percentage of adult Americans who go to classical concerts has been dropping for a generation. It now has hit all age groups except those over 65. The drop will surely continue. The orchestra audience will shrink.

Lying behind all this is an amazing piece of data — that the audience for classical music used to be quite young, with a median age not too much over 30. (For extensive documentation of this fact — which still isn’t as widely acknowledged in our business as it should be — go here.)

Why has the audience aged so much since those past days (which extended into the 1960s)? Because classical music receded from the rest of our culture.

And that’s the key fact we have to face. When we look for new audiences, we’re talking about smart, educated people who’ve moved far beyond what we offer. We like to tell ourselves that they don’t understand the complexity of classical music, or that they weren’t educated in classical music when they were young, but I think the truth lies elsewhere, and is much more devastating. We have nothing to say to them. Their culture is far more complex, far smarter, far more interesting than the culture we project at orchestra concerts. And so while they might dip a toe into our waters from time to time, most of them will never be a steady audience.

I’ve written about this in a piece in the current issue of Symphony, which I’d love you to read, if you want to find out more about why I’m saying these things.

I’ll elaborate more in future posts. Possible directions — the 50th anniversary powerful reissue of the Stones’ album Exile on Main Street. What can orchestras offer with even half the historical resonance of that? Resonance, by the way, which isn’t theoretical at all, but is part of the living culture of people in our wider world. Resonance that, we ought to understand, is totally missing — and I mean totally — when an orchestra proclaims a “celebration” of Schumann or Dvorak. The world really does celebrate that Stones album, without any need for hype.

Or visual and performance art. I’ve gone to a number of shows lately, all of which would register far out on the avant-garde, by orchestra standards. And yet all were mainstream, in 21st century New York. One — of tremendously high quality — I went to because it was written up in the New York Daily News, a mainstream tabloid.

If orchestras can’t speak to the mainstream of current art — if that mainstream has moved far beyond anything orchestras ever offer — how can we hope to keep up? What, exactly, are we offering people?

The famous Robert Burns quote:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

That should be the mantra for everyone involved in orchestras today — to see orchestras as they appear to the world outside.