At last week's concert of Brahms 4, I was bewildered by the woman in front of me tapping her manicured nails on her program, fixing her lipstick, going after tic-tacs multiple times, looking bored the entire time, except for intermission when she could chat with her friends. Why in the world did she come??
Whenever I go to Severence, I continuously wonder what kind of people are sitting with me, sharing this experience from such a different viewpoint. I am rarely interested in a piece if I cannot relate to it in some way. How is it that so many non-musicians in the audience are still interested and always come back? What does a Saturday night orchestra concert at $35 per ticket represent to them?
Is it a status symbol, a social hour, or pure enjoyment?
This interesting article on the state of American orchestras from 2003 brings up some of those questions.
MUSIC; How To Kill Orchestras
By BERNARD HOLLAND
Published: June 29, 2003
AS American orchestras lick their wounds, or die of them, the blame falls on fleeing contributors, bad management and disappearing audiences. Maybe these are symptoms, not causes.
Real causes? Take the model on which American orchestras are built. It no longer works. It survives in a few big cities, but even musical fortresses like the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Chicago Symphony are, by all reports, leaking blood by the quart.
American orchestras began with a place, not a culture. Simplified, the story goes like this: With westward expansion, cities were new and their roots shallow. Certain things were needed to keep them from blowing away with the wind. For stability, the American city needed street lighting, sewers, schools, parks, libraries and -- oh, yes -- a symphony orchestra.
The free-enterprise system, which worked so admirably to bring the American city its new wealth, transferred poorly to the performing arts. Local tycoons found that the pay-as-you-go ethic that had made their own fortunes fitted not at all. But they had been to New York and Boston, and to Europe. ''These places have Beethoven symphonies,'' they said, ''and so should we.'' When the American orchestra presented its unpaid bills at the end of a season, the wealthy few wrote personal checks.
But then the wealthy few became too many. They had children, and the children had children. Family wealth spread sideways; descendants multiplied and left for other American cities. They took their diminishing share of the family riches with them. Family foundations were established, and though arts-friendly at first, they became more interested in AIDS research and social reform.
With the great mansion on the hill no longer a reliable source of fiscal salvation, local corporations helped with the burden. If U.S. Steel was to keep its Pittsburgh executives happy, and if it was to attract new ones from elsewhere, it needed a city with first-rate universities, the Steelers and the Pirates and -- oh, yes -- a symphony orchestra.
This remained good business until the coming of the worldwide conglomerate: a handful of international operatives buying up the many companies that had made their own American cities thrive. Boardrooms in London and Geneva could hardly be expected to burn with civic pride for the Midwestern city halfway across America. Local, state and federal governments offered a little, but not much. American officialdom has always been uneasy with any enterprise that cannot take care of itself. Now everyone is so strapped financially that giving more, or even as much as usual, becomes moot.
With good management, it is supposed, money and listeners will come rolling in -- again, a symptom masquerading as a cause. Orchestras are not sick because they have bad management. They have bad management because they are sick. Failing industries do not attract top employees.
One wan and revealing little culprit here is the invention of the arts-administration degree, fostering a younger generation that can administer but doesn't know what it is administering. The incidence of musical illiteracy in symphony offices, staffed with music lovers and record collectors, is high. Symphony boards tend toward successful businesspeople admirably devoted to keeping orchestras fiscally afloat but who, with little knowledge of music or real interest in it, have no capacity to fix a purpose or a path.
As for disappearing audiences, no amount of managing will solve that one. Classical music has only itself to blame. It has indulged the creation of a narcissistic avant-garde speaking in languages that repel the average committed listener in even our most sophisticated American cities. Intelligent, music-loving and eager to learn, such listeners largely understand that true talent and originality must find their own voice. What they do not understand is why the commitment to reach and touch listeners in the seats does not stand at the beginning of the creative process, as it did with Haydn and Mozart. This kind of art-for-art's-sake has much to answer for.
Once upon a time, a regenerative process was in motion: the mysterious new piece of music that was gradually transformed into the next old masterpiece. It still happens, but as an exception, not the rule. A recent performance of Schoenberg's Five Pieces on the West Coast was preceded by an explanatory lecture from the podium that was longer than the music itself. The Five Pieces are almost 100 years old.
The failure of cross-pollinating programs (old favorites standing next to new music) is painfully obvious in the way programs are arranged. Schedule Brahms before intermission and Birtwistle after, and you will watch one-third to one-half of your audience vanish prematurely into the night. Program forgotten masterpieces 200 years old, and still, avoidance mechanisms kick in. ''New'' has come to equal ''suspect'' among wary patrons.
It is nice to celebrate the hip, fresh faces who come to hear Stefan Wolpe at the Miller Theater or Bang on a Can composers at Symphony Space. These are not, on the other hand, faces you are likely to find listening to Rimsky-Korsakov in the symphony halls of American cities. Audiences have fragmented. Lovers of the new have their own worlds now. Rejecting the new, symphony managements and the patrons who keep them in business have fallen back on the tried and true, repeated endlessly.
SO have American opera houses. One is happy watching as they attract new listeners for old favorites. But our blind faith in immortal masterpieces is just that: blind. ''La Bohème'' is not a renewable resource. Use it too often, and it wears out. The ''Bohème'' audience, furthermore, likes neither ''Lulu'' nor any ''Son of Lulu.'' So what are opera companies to do other than idle in neutral? The wave of new pieces sweeping American houses, staggering in their mediocrity, live and die like fireflies.
I wish I could interest the Environmental Protection Agency in looking into the symphony managers and conductors -- almost all of them -- who have so mercilessly exploited the mighty Beethoven Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, reducing them to pop-culture clichés and deadening their amazing qualities to the public ear. The record business is failing in the same way. After 50 recordings of Brahms's Fourth Symphony, Nos. 51 and 52 become irrelevant.
Fleeing audiences are one more symptom, the cause being a public art that has been abandoned by its avant-garde and uses up its given natural resources with profligacy. Audiences are not to blame. They are smarter than Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt want to think they are.
American orchestras will keep failing. I feel less for them than for the excellent musicians who will be displaced. But face a few facts. American orchestras will no more grow than Mother Nature will take the liver spots off my hands. We have grown old together. Darwinism is at work, and American orchestras must adjust: to smaller dreams, fewer orchestras serving wider areas, fragmented listenerships, hopes for some kind of government help and, above all, a way of preserving the past, electronically if not by word of mouth.
