So who is Spring for Music for?

If you go to the concerts, the answer seems obvious. This festival — which finished its third season at Carnegie Hall last week — features orchestras from around the US, some of which haven’t played in New York before, or haven’t done so for years. Their hometown fans (sometimes more than a thousand at a time) flood Carnegie Hall, waving colored banners.

So that’s who the festival in practice is for, the people who most visibly come to it, the ones who most clearly care. The hometown fans.

But I don’t think that was the original plan. The founders of the festival talked about programming. Unusual programming. Programs that orchestras couldn’t normally do, or could only do by taking big risks, because they might not please the normal audience.

And that’s what’s stressed in the Spring for Music mission statement:

Spring For Music provides an idealized laboratory, free of the normal marketing and financial constraints, for an orchestra to be truly creative with programs that are interesting, provocative and stimulating, and that reflect its beliefs, its standards, and vision. Spring For Music believes that an orchestra’s fundamental obligation is to lead and not follow taste. As such, programming needs to advance, and not just satisfy, expectations.

So this year the Detroit Symphony played all four Ives symphonies. The Albany (NY) Symphony played Gershwin’s not so well known Second Rhapsody, and a symphony by Morton Gould. The Buffalo Philharmonic played a Giya Kancheli piece, and a symphony by Glière.

Clearly this isn’t mainstream stuff. But it’s not what’s bringing people to the concerts, despite a low, low ticket price — all seats are $25. What brings people to the concerts is hometown pride.

I wonder if the founders of Spring for Music expected that. And I wonder if they asked themselves whether the programming — the heart of their concept — would itself have an audience.

My sense is that it doesn’t, that there isn’t any established audience, even in New York, for adventurous classical programming. There’s a young new music audience, but that’s a different thing. It’s not showing up for Glière.

There’s an audience that’ll come to mixed classical/indie rock events. There’s an event audience — people who’ll go to classical programs at Lincoln Center festivals that include all kinds of performances, not just music (and where not all the music is classical). Performances that in the context of the larger festival seem like events. Or people who for 30 years have been going to the Next Wave Festival at BAM.

And there’s an audience for free or inexpensive classical performances, the audience that goes to hear the Met and the New York Philharmonic when they play in city parks, or who show up when ticket prices drop. But these people, from everything I’ve seen about them, would look at Spring for Music’s programming, and say, “But I don’t know this music!” They want the familiar masterworks.

Without the hometown crowds at S4M’s concerts, Carnegie Hall would look pretty empty. Of course, the orchestras can buy tickets for their hometown fans in advance, so maybe the seats, if they’d been available, would have been filled by New Yorkers.

But I’ve heard that S4M tickest are hard to sell in the NY market, and I’m not surprised. Because, again, I’ve never seen or heard of any large NY audience drawn by the kind of programs S4M does. Someone I know who’s involved with classical programming in New York used to complain — sometimes wryly, but also sometimes bitterly — about how few people would come to unusual programs. 

And I think of someone in her 30s whom I met at a birthday party years ago. She’d just moved from San Francisco to NY. When, as we talked, I told her what I do for a living, she responded with great excitement. She’d heard MTT conduct the Ives Fourth Symphony at one of the San Francisco Symphony’s “Mavericks” concerts, and been thrilled. But she wasn’t an Ives fan. Before the concert, she hadn’t known who Ives was. It was the Mavericks brand that drew her, the sense of event, the buzz around those concerts that told people they’d have a great time no matter what was played.

And this is what Spring for Music seems to miss. Look at their website. Utterly blah. Routine graphics (like the one at the start of this post) — standard shots of conductors and orchestras, signifying nothing, offering not even interest, let alone excitement.

And on the home page there’s not one word about the programming mission! Nothing that says, “These are special concerts! Not like anything else. Pick one at random. You’ll be intrigued, absorbed, captivated, thrilled. Go to several, to multiply that. No two of these concerts are alike.” I’m just improvising these words. S4M, if it wanted to, could do much better.

And of course I’m looking only at the website. Maybe, in other marketing, other PR, S4M did do what I’m suggesting. But not doing it on the website is — not to mince words here — an amazing omission. Why aren’t they selling what they most care about? Why aren’t they offering (at least in my opinion) any selling points at all? When someone goes to the site, what’s there to make her care?

One last thought. Back to those exuberant, whooping hometown fans. I loved seeing them at the Detroit Symphony concert I went to. But if S4M did draw a NY-based event audience, would there be two not wholly compatible groups at the concert? The event audience would be an arts audience. The hometown fans come off simply as fans. I don’t mean to say they don’t love classical music, and might not know lots about it. But what comes across is their not arts-based enthusiasm. They’re cheering, in the end, for the home team, much more than for the programming.

The event crowd, from what I’ve seen of it, is an entirely different group, hipper, more clearly urban, edgier, more visibly interested things that are new and advanced. What would they think of the hometown fans? Maybe they’d love them! But on the other hand, I’m not sure anyone would deliberately go out to create an event meant to appeal to both groups at once. An unlikely marketing strategy, I’d think

Three posts, in reaction to Spring for Music, an orchestra festival at Carnegie Hall, now in its third and next to last year.

I’ve been to only two of the concerts, because I no longer live in New York. But the one I went to last Friday — the Detroit Symphony, under Leonard Slatkin, playing all four Ives symphonies, which I very much enjoyed  — certainly made me think.

So first my reaction to the concert’s audience, to the Detroitness of the whole thing, because one feature of this festival is the excitement of the hometown audience for each visiting orchestra, which brings hundreds of people (sometimes even more than a thousand) to Carnegie Hall from Detroit. Or Baltimore. Or Toledo. Or Buffalo. Then I’ll talk about a marketing problem. And then about Ives!

The Detroit audience. Hundreds of them, Exuberant, thrilled, even before the concert began. Waving red  banners. A very fine idea — Spring for Music makes banners for each orchestra, in a different color for each. Hometown fans get the banners, and wave them with splashing excitement.

I loved that. Who wouldn’t? How often do we see real excitement at any orchestra event? And for the four Ives symphonies! Not exactly standard orchestra programming. That’s one key to Spring for Music — creative programs. But I’ll talk about that in my next post.

But now I have to be Scrooge, and ask one sad question about the celebration that burst out Friday night on the Carnegie Hall stage. A celebration, I’ll stress, not just of the orchestra, but of Detroit. A city, we were assured, that’s coming back, from what surely are the most dire problems faced in our time by any US city. The arts, we were told — there was celebratory talking before the performance, as upbeat as could be, with two Detroit representatives, one from GM and one a Detroit official (if memory serves) — the arts were crucial for this recovery.

There were just two (unreferenced) problems. First, Detroit seems to be going downhill, if you believe current news reports, not up. In March, the state of Michigan invoked a law allowing it to replace local elected leaders with an emergency manager, if a town or city is heading toward financial disaster. On Sunday, two days after the concert, the New York Times ran a story about a report the emergency manager would issue on Monday, saying that “the picture of [Detroit's] debt and disarray he paints may be bleaker even than earlier grim portrayals.”

We’re talking here about a city with just about unprecedented corruption, disastrous police and fire departments, and (according to the Times piece) 78,000 abandoned buildings. I don’t claim to be an expert on all of this (though I did read an arresting, if anecdotal, book about it).

I’m also not going to say that the Detroit Symphony hasn’t made an extraordinary comeback from its own near-death experience, or that it’s unconcerned about its city, or that it hasn’t tried to get involved in efforts to make Detroit better.

Nor am I going to say that Detroit hasn’t gotten better in many ways. Look at the revival of the auto industry, or the growth of urban farms and community gardens (wonderful idea for a city with so much abandoned land),  or (admittedly looking toward the future) an eager plan to remake Detroit’s downtown. Or the orchestra’s rebirth!

But it’s also possible for good things to happen while the bad things get worse. Or for a city to go in two directions at once. We had, in the US, before the economy tanked, an economic boom combined with growing inequality, so the boom was very far from benefitting everyone. I don’t want to be cruel, but the revival of the Symphony could reflect something similar in Detroit.

And there’s one more thing. Detroit is a black majority city, hugely so — 83%. So its revival unavoidably needs to be an African-American story. Which we’d never have guessed from the pre-concert festivities in Carnegie Hall. Apart from the orchestra’s very few African-American musicians (I’m told there are four, more than some orchestras have, but of course a tiny number), there wasn’t a black face visible on stage. And very, very few in the audience. Though I’m told, once more, that the Symphony has more African-American ticket buyers than most other orchestras — and that this is something consciously aimed at, with its success being a fine achievement — the people waving red banners were overwhelmingly white.

It’s bad form, I think, to celebrate the revival (or alleged revival) of a black majority city without anyone black taking prominent part. I’ll make more disclaimers — this wouldn’t exactly be the first time African-Americans were publicly ignored in situations concerning them, and it also wouldn’t be the first time people got carried away with small improvements in a situation that might be getting worse.

So what I saw, Friday night, is in part just another installment in the ongoing tale of understandable, not at all uncommon human failings.

But on the other hand, it’s also not exactly new for classical music music, as an enterprise in our society, to be a little blind to external realities, to not fully grasp the world it lives in. Or for the arts to exaggerate their importance, in the face of chilling social and economic realities. Or for classical music, in our time, to be overwhelmingly a white enterprise.

So I think what I saw on Friday is also a classical music problem. To take only the racial aspect of it: It’s hard to think of another field that, at a moment like this, wouldn’t make a point of including African-Americans  — in some prominent way — in what happened at Carnegie Hall. It’s politically tone-deaf not to do that. Also bad form. Also wrong.

But classical music, which for so many years has dealt overwhelmingly with white people, may not quite get this. Despite all its other achievements, the Detroit Symphony (along with Spring for Music and Carnegie Hall, since both organizations could have asked for some action) seemed to reflect that on Friday night.

Next: Spring for Music’s marketing. Including a marketing point one of its leaders made to be when the festival launched, which showed poor understanding of the racial realities of 21st century New York. 

Today, two orchestra tales.

When Leopold Stokowski was music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra

he somehow discovered that the Philadelphia police force had a motorcycle officer who was an expert xylophonist.  So he invited him to a children’s concert and made him the centerpiece of a surprise charade. Stokowski himself opened the program with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro Overture. But he played it at a mile-a-minute clip — so rapidly that the orchestra could hardly keep up with him. Just as it was ending, the motorcycle cop, in full uniform including helmet, goggles and black gloves, strode out on stage and firmly seized Stokowski’s elbow. “You’re going too fast,” he told him while the children gaped. “I’m giving you a ticket for speeding.” Stokowski, in the manner of most citizens in similar situations, attempted to talk his way out of it. The policeman finally offered to let him go in exchange for a chance to play with the orchestra. “What do you play?” asked Stokowski in pretended astonishment. “The xylophone,” said the cop. One was promptly wheeled out, off came the gloves and goggles, and The Flight of the Bumblebee resounded through the Academy — one of the most tumultuously acclaimed performances it ever had there. With events like these taking place, it was small wonder that adult Philadelphians tried to crowd into the children’s concerts — so much so, that a rule was adopted that grownups were not allowed unless they were chaperoning no fewer than ten children. Even at that, all sorts of ruses were attempted to gain entrance. One prominent Philadelphia couple attempted to get in my having the wife dress up in pumps and a short skirt, while the husband put on a false beard and passed himself off as her father. Some Philadelphians remember Stokowski’s children’s concerts more vividly than those they attended in later years.

[from Herbert Kupferberg, Those Fabulous Philadelphians: The Life and Times of a Great Orchestra, pp. 92-3. The xylophone stunt woud have happened in the 1920s or '30s. Maybe more likely in the '30s, when people drove more, and motorcycle cops were out on the road enforcing speed limits.]

And from Houston, during the second world war:

On one famous occasion  at the urging of local sports writers and his own patriotic emotions, [Roy Cullen, the president of the Houston Symphony] allowed the orchestra to be used in conjunction with a professional wrestling match, as part of a war bond show. It was a grotesque spectacle, with the the orchestra sounding a dirge while the gory gladiators beat each other about in the ring. Unluckily the scene was recorded by a newsreel camera and the pictures created a scandal. What was not told was that this atrocity sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in war bonds.

[from Hubert Roussell, The Houston Symphony Orchetra, 1913-1971, p. 108n]

So our era didn’t invent the classical music showmanship that some people now think gives the field a band name. Hubert Rousell, of course, was outraged by the Houston stunt, and apparently others were, too.  But it happened! 

Those Philadelphia children’s concerts must have been jammed, if a rule of one adult to 10 children was even conceivable. And lots of adult concertgoers didn’t disdain the showmanship, didn’t ask whether it dumbed classical music dumb down.

[How that typo happened: I was getting new lenses put in my eyeglass frames, because I had a new prescription. Had to wait in Reihle Opticians in Warwick, NY (recommended, if you're in the area) for almost two hours. Working on the blog post on my MacBook Air, without glasses. (Not recommended.)]

This is a post about assumptions. We all make them. And we couldn’t do without them. None of us approaches anything we do as some kind of blank slate. We have opinions, preconceptions, things we like and things we don’t, and all of this colors everything we do. Even research. If you want to find a new audience for classical music, and do research to find how best to do that, the direction of your research — and even your conclusions — will blow with the winds of the assumptions you made at the start.

To show what I mean, here are two assumptions you might — consciously or not — make about the new audience:

You might — again, consciously or not — believe that the new audience won’t be too different from the old one. Younger, yes, and more informal. But still ready to fall in love with the great classical masterworks, and to share the same classical music culture we have inside the field.

Or you might believe it doesn’t work like that, that the new audience won’t be like the old one. Years ago, B. H. Haggin wrote an introduction to classical music called Music for the Man [sic] Who Enjoys Hamlet. Now, after decades of cultural change, it would have to be Classical Music for People Who Like Mad Men. That’s another universe.

Where would these two assumptions lead us?

If you share the first one, you might reasonably ask who your new audience would most likely be. Where’s the first place you might go to find it? You wouldn’t have to look far, you might all but unconsciously think, since you’ve assumed your new audience would be, in many ways, much like your old one.

So you might ask who, in the world around you, already is close to classical music. Maybe, you’d think, you could approach people who play classical instruments, whether or not they go to classical concerts. So you might commission research on these people, trying to find out why they don’t go to your performances, and what might make them want to. 

An approach like that — minus the research — worked at the University of Maryland when I was artist in residence there. Students who played in the music’s school’s symphony orchestra and wind orchestra (a fine group that mostly plays contemporary classical works) visited marching band rehearsals, and also rehearsals of the Gamer Symphony, a student group that plays videogame music (with a full-sized symphonic orchestra), and is — since it sells out all its concerts — the most successful musical group on campus.

The result? Success! More than 200 new people showed up at the next symphony orchestra and wind orchestra concerts.

Or you might want to do what the Cincinnati Symphony did a few months ago — play Beethoven’s Ninth, stream the performance to video screens all over town, and arrange listening parties in various neighborhoods. You might do research to find out which neighborhoods in your town would work best for something like that.

But if the art museum in your town did a show of punk fashion, you might not think to reach out to those involved (either the curators or the crowds coming to see the show), because you might think these weren’t your people. Even if this show was the talk of the town, as seemed to happen in New York (at least to judge from more than one piece in the New York Times), when the Metropolitan Museum of Art did just such a show.

If you made the second assumption, though, then the punk show would be on your radar. You’d know that punk is much loved in current culture, that kids who were in high school or college when punk hit in the 1970s now are 50 years old or more, and that punk has been revived both in music and (as the Met Museum show exemplified) in fashion. This is one place, you might think, that you’d find today’s cultured people. So how — your research might ask — could you find common cause with them?

Or maybe you’d just reach out to people geographically near you, without first asking who’d be mostly to care about classical music. An approach like that worked, once again, at the University of Maryland, when students who played in the symphony orchestra promoted their concerts in the dorms where they lived. The result? The hall, which before that was normally just half full, now was overflowing (as I saw myself) with excited students, most of them there for the first time.

Or you might think you could do what the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment did, which was to brand special concerts as young, current, maybe even hip. Using members of their actual young audience who — with tattoos and edgy clothes — were clearly not the old classical music crowd. You could do research to learn how the OAE did that, and whether their approach would work, transposed from London to your own town. 

Or you might, as Lara Downes did, try to craft concerts that speak the cultural language of smart, savvy, arts-friendly people who don’t normally go to hear classical music. I don’t think Lara did research, because I imagine that the cultural gap  — between us and the people we want to reach — seemed obvious to her (as it does to me). But if someone wasn’t so sure, they could do research to find what the people Lara wanted to reach might respond to.

Now I’ve outed myself as someone who makes the second assumption — as if that would surprise anyone who’s been reading my blog for a while. But which side I take isn’t the point in this post. I just want to highlight the two very different mindsets, and show how they might send you down very different paths, even if you honestly think your research is objective.

And I also want to ask one last question. What research could we do to show which assumption is right?

When I walked onstage at Yoshi’s San Francisco last Wednesday night, it was with a completely new version of butterflies in the stomach. This time, after a lifetime of going onstage as a concert pianist, I was going on as a concert presenter, welcoming the audience as Artistic Director to the very first program on my new series The Artist Sessions. I was launching the series with the West Coast release party for my new CD Exiles’ Cafe, and I’d invited the genre-bending Quartet San Francisco as my guests, along with a co-host, Rik Malone from SF’s Classical radio station KDFC. It was going to be an evening of celebration, conversation, and exploration – in this case, a musical searching into a kaleidoscopic range of time and place, through music of exile and diaspora.

My idea for the Sessions came out of a lot of thinking over the last few years, about all the issues we explore here on Greg’s blog. Lots of thinking about the present and future of the art, about putting some ideas to the test, building something new, creating the kind of concert experience where real engagement, on a personal, human level, can bring artists and audiences together in a game-changing way. I’ve been out on the front lines for some time, talking the talk about new and better ways to make music happen. Next step: walk the walk.

Late one night last fall I was talking with my great good friend Christopher O’Riley about these ideas, and my plans to find a venue in SF to give them a try. He suggested Yoshi’s, where we’d both played in the past and had appreciated the unbeatable combination of a magnificent Hamburg Steinway, swanky room and excellent cocktails. So I asked my old SF Symphony Youth Orchestra buddy and fabulous trumpet player Chris Grady, who knows his way around Yoshi’s as a frequent performer with various jazz groups, to get me a meeting. I pitched my idea, we agreed to move forward, and I became, suddenly, a concert promoter. And then began months of planning, building, and organizing. Talking to my friends, curating programs, working with the media, booking artists and dates. And understanding, at a completely new level, just what is involved in presenting music, after all.

These last months, I’ve thought really hard and deep about the structures of relationships and community. As we discuss often in this space, there are many different audiences for music, and part of the puzzle of presenting is defining the audience you want to reach, and how. In the case of The Artist Sessions, I wanted to find a mixed audience: people who go to concerts regularly and people who don’t. I wanted to seek out the people who support music and art in the city, and would be excited about the different style and content that the series would be offering, and I also wanted to reach people who are curious and adventurous but not yet initiated -  the people who direct their entertainment/culture selections into other channels: food, art, film, fashion – and could be drawn in by a resonant aesthetic to try something new, and, hopefully, to love it.

I guess my search was directed in large part towards an audience of my own peers. What I see from the stage, night after night in concert halls all over the country, is a real absence of people who look like me out in the audience. I mean people in their 30s and 40s, with busy careers, young kids, limited opportunities for nights out and plenty of competition for their fun money. And I get why they (we) aren’t there. We who are in the thick of things with developing careers and raising families are overworked and overwhelmed. We  feel that our nights out are limited by many things, and when we do get to go out, we would like to have a really good time I believe absolutely that classical music needs to step up its game and offer its audiences not only transcendent art, but also a really good time. Tall order much?

As I waited in the wings on Wednesday I was a little terrified. I was feeling all the anxiety that comes with accountability, and all the expectancy that comes with having put in a lot of hard work. And when I walked out onstage and saw the people sitting out front, it was a moment of exhilaration and blessed relief.  The audience–about 100 ticket holders and some invited friends and family–was made up of a beautiful range of ages and faces, exactly that mix I had hoped for. The usual suspects from the concert circuit around town, but many brand new faces too. There was a full-out energy flowing back my way.  The room felt great, and I was so happy that we were all there together.

It was a pretty wonderful night. Here’s a review.

When we as artists talk about the future, when we talk about building our audience and increasing our opportunities, I think we need to recognize two things:

1)    The job of building that audience is our job. I hear musicians complaining, so often and so loud, about the state of the art. But we can take an active role in addressing this, both when we’re onstage and when we’re off.

2)    The job is a hard job. I think that many musicians believe that concert presenters have access to mysterious resources and powers. Really, they don’t have any magic. Ultimately, they have the same basic tools as everyone else: the courage of conviction and the power of persuasion. How they use those tools, how we all use them, is at the heart of the matter.

Here I am, talking with Classical KDFC’s Rik Malone about my vision for the Artist Sessions, at last Wednesday’s launch. (You can watch us on video.) 

***

Back to what I did behind the scenes, before that. Basically, I called everyone I knew. I started with my inner circle – got my family and close friends to swear blood oaths that they would come to the show, and would try to get their friends out too. Then I called my music colleagues around the Bay Area to get their support, advice and ideas. I brainstormed with the staff at KDFC — the station had sponsored a classical series at Yoshi’s a couple of years ago, with great success, and they were enthusiastic about getting involved with this new venture. I made personal calls to my friends in the media, the bloggers and writers who have their fingers always on the local musical pulse. I was fortunate that my new record was in its release phase during this time, so I had a lot of support from my label’s PR team, and I was able to leverage some of the visibility the record was getting in the press and media all around the country to bring attention to the series. But, above all, I just talked to people, over coffee, over drinks, over the phone…

Our easy access to social media is one thing. It’s kind of great to be able to send a Facebook invite to thousands of people, or retweet a great review. Our circles get wider and wider. But our messages get diluted as well, precisely because of the ease of their dissemination. Marketing as a group message is just that, and we all know it when we see it. We need that kind of marketing, obviously, and we need to do it well. We need to put the information out into the world so it’s there for the seeing and hearing, and we need to do that in the most creative, interesting, attractive, informative ways possible.

But still, there’s nothing that replaces the immediacy of a personal suggestion that comes with some individual caring and effort. And I think this is a simple, obvious answer to our questions about building audiences too. Word of mouth. If everyone who came to Wednesday’s Artist Sessions launch invites two friends to the next Session, that’s about 300 people next time. If, in turn, those 300 people each bring two friends next time, well, you see where this goes. It’s really easy to do, and I think we’re all guilty of not doing it. When I need a new babysitter or hair stylist, or a recommendation about a movie, a restaurant, a book – I ask a friend. You do too. We trust our friends, and they trust us. So if we care about music, out here on the front lines, we need to mine that trust and share information. We need to walk the walk.

Try this: the next time you go to a great concert, text two friends on your way home. Tell them about it. Tell them why you loved it, and why you think they would too. Look up the next concert on the series, or the next appearance by that artist. Find a bar nearby. Invite your friends to meet you for a drink and go with you to that next concert.

By the way, I recommend The Artist Sessions in San Francisco! May 29, Chris O’Riley with the West Coast launch of his new album O’Riley’s Liszt. Please come. Please bring a friend. Walk the walk.

Well, part of this isn’t imaginary. I have speaking gigs coming up — late May at the Bergen International Festival in Norway, and June 19 at the League of American Orchestras annual conference in St. Louis.

In Bergen, I’ll be speaking privately on May 30 to Klassisk, the association of Norwegian concert promoters, and then I seem to have top billing in a debate on the future of classical music, from 5 to 6 PM on May 31. Debating with me will be Rolf Gupta, a conductor, and the manager of the classical music at NRK Radio (the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation), Ragnhild Veirs. Hilde Sandvik is the moderator. She’s the Culture and Debate Editor (that’s how Google Translate puts it) at Bergens Tidende newspaper.

I’m eager to hear what my co-debaters have to say. And to learn what concert life in Norway is like, especially about the audience, whether it’s similar to ours in the US

At the League I’m billed (see the press release) — as one of the five featured attractions at the conference, under the title “A Conversation with Greg Sandow.” The theme of the conference — and where this post leaps into imagined terrain —  is “Imagining 2023,” imagining orchestras 10 years from now. And what I’ll do with whoever comes to talk with me will be to imagine a happy future for orchestras just a decade away. They’re describing this as a “group visioning experience”:

Where will your orchestra be in 10 years? Can you imagine having thousands of fans in your community who go to any concert you put on, buy any recording you make – even buy your merchandise? How far could you actually go, and what is holding you back?

I’m so eager to see where this goes. It’s like a leap into another dimension. The 1000-lb rhino in the room, of course, is what would have to change for this dream to come true. Orchestras? The community? Both? Neither? I’m looking forward to leading this discussion.

If you’re there — and if you’re in Bergen — come say hello. I’ve always had a good time on my travels, and have forged lasting bonds. With any luck, I’ll be at the entire League conference, and hope I’ll have a chance to see many of my old orchestra friends, and to make new ones.

Cue howls of outrage. But opera was in fact funded that way in 19th century Italy. That’s one thing I’ve learned from a book called Bel Canto Bully (not a great title), a biography of Domenico Barbaja, the leading 19th century Italian opera impresario, written by Philip Eisenbeiss, and about to be published.

I knew Barbaja’s name, as many serious opera fans might, because he ran the San Carlo opera house — the grandest in Italy — in Naples. And made Rossini a superstar by giving him a contract to write spectacular operas. So Barbaja will be mentioned in any biography of Rossini, and in most program or liner notes for any of his Naples  operas (Elisabetta, for instance, or Mosè, Armida, or Otello).

I also knew, from extensive reading, that opera in Italy back then was private enterprise. Opera houses were owned either by private individuals or by local royalty (Italy was divided into many small states), but in either case the building would be rented to entrepreneurs — impresarios — who’d pay for and produce the operas, hoping to make a profit. Which they’d better make, because opera house owner was guaranteed a share, with no excuses allowed if the profit wasn’t made.

But now the book educated me. Impresarios often didn’t make a profit. They’d crash and burn, either because they weren’t good at running things, or because the enterprise was so expensive that profit wasn’t likely. So they’d flee town, or maybe get thrown in jail.

How to fix that? Gambling! Set up gambling in the opera house, as many hours as possible each day and night — even (especially!) during performances — and now the money might pour in. Performance nights were the best time to offer gambling, because people were in the opera house, and, according to the custom of the time, didn’t listen from beginning to end, but rather talked, and visited with friends, And wandered out to gamble.

Barbaja was the king of this arrangement. He first got the gambling concession for the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, and then proposed he run the operas, too, which he did with fabulous results, both musically and on the bottom line.

Engaging Rossini was one of his coups. But Rossini was no fool. He demanded (beyond the large fees that he was paid) a share of the profits, which included the profits from gambling! He was all of 22 years old, but wise in the ways of the world. He’d made money from his early operas, and — on top of his fees, and his cut of the profits — invested some of it in Barbaja’s double enterprise. So now he had three Barbaja income streams.

I call this a hidden history because we’re not taught it in music school. There’s still a sense that classical music is somehow sacrosanct, and we read that notion back into the past, when it had no truth at all. Time to revise those music history courses! Especially now that we’re teaching entrepreneurship in music schools. Let’s tell students how entrepreneurial — how wildly entrepreneurial — classical music used to be.

And if the Met won’t fund itself with gambling, every time they put Rossini on their stage, he’s laughing at them.

For those without a sense of humor: I know very well that gambling raises moral questions, and legal questions, too, not to mention questions involving real estate. Where would the Met put its new casino? Where in the opera house would there be room enough? 

But let’s not forget that gambling — I’ll never call it “gaming,” its euphemistic marketing mame — has spread throughout the US, and that lotteries are an important source of state government revenue. And let’s also not forget that nonprofit arts institutions are, more and more, going down profit-making paths to fund themselves. And that casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City have been in the performance biz for years, offering glittering shows by superstars. Pavarotti sang in Atlantic City. So is gambling at the Met really so far-fetched? 

The fountain was putting on a show — dancing, playing, shooting high, falling back to nothing at all, making walls of water, so much fun. Here’s a video (from my iPhone), complete with dancing little girl. (It’ll take a while to load. And clicking the arrow on the right won’t show it.)

All this was completely unheralded. Nothing advertising the fountain dance, unless you count a guard coming around to warn people (like me) sitting at the edge that we might get wet.

A triumph. Such an adornment for Lincoln Center, and, I could wish, everything that goes on there.

But what was happening at the three surrounding big performance halls, the Met Opera, Avery Fisher (where the NY Philharmonic plays), and the David H. Koch Theater?

Major fail. The Met Opera should have been triumphant, since they’re showing four big banners, advertising the four operas of the Ring, their splash productions of the spring. But the banners are drab — beyond drab. Almost shockingly drab. And the already drab colors fade even more in the bright sun!

I think they’re ugly banners, too. And mismatched. And hard to understand. I’ve been looking at them for a couple of weeks, and it took some detailed up-close looking before I realized that the Siegfried banner shows Siegfried surging up toward Brünnhilde’s rock, and that the Walküre banner shows a woman. The Rheingold banner shows rippling water, and (like the others) the opera’s name. Except that when the wind puffs it, you can’t see either water or the name.

This completely baffles me. To fail with the Ring production, as I think the Met did, is honorable, if unfortunate and sad. Productions are difficult. But to fail with banners? What could be easier than to make sure your banners burst with life and interest, that they’re clearly visible, and that they look like they belong together? Graphic design, after all, is something our culture does consummately well. How could the Met have failed so badly here?

Avery Fisher Hall? A mostly blank facade, with one drab banner (less drab than what the Met gives us, but still drab) advertising the Philharmonic. At the very top, so you have to crane your neck to see it, is Alan Gilbert’s name (he of course being the music director). At the bottom, much more plainly visible, is something the Philharmonic might care about, but the public doesn’t, and that certainly isn’t anything that makes you want to go to concerts: the name of the orchestra’s big corporate sponsor, Credit Suisse.

The Koch theater? Oh, my. No banners. No sign of life even remotely visible, until you approach the entrance. Then you see posters for the New York City Ballet, which turns out to be starting its spring season…um, nest week! They couldn’t make more noise about it?

And the posters. The two I saw first, the ones right at the entrance to the theater (which surely is where anyone who wanted to know what was going on would first think to look), show each ballet the company will dance, in 65 smallish tiles, with the dates of the performances for each one shown underneath. Only — this is the literal truth — by scanning almost all the tiles did I discover that the season was about to start.

True, when I walked a bit to the left, I found other posters for the company, that more clearly told me when the season started. But would everybody see those? I only saw them because I wanted to be fair, wanted to be sure the posters with the 65 tiles weren’t the only ones on view. If I hadn’t made a point of looking further, I would very likely just have walked away, baffled yet again by how yet another Lincoln Center mainstay doesn’t seem to know how to promote itself.

Maybe you could say that the Philharmonic and the ballet have their own marketing tools, which address their likely audiences, and that these tools generate the ticket sales they’re getting. But that would miss two crucial points. One is that neither company, from what I hear, has  exactly been growing its ticket sales. More like they’ve been shrinking, over many years. So they need to address new audiences. Why not try to do it right where you’re performing?

And the other point is that you’d surely want New York’s most visible arts performance place to be, well, visible. You’d want some sense of action, of festivity, of buzz, of excitement. Something nobody walking through or past the plaza could miss, something to make us feel we’d want to be there for a performance.

Which isn’t happening. While the fountain, all alone, does exactly what’s needed, gives us joy, delight, interest, something to tell our friends about.

I’m a little wary of saying what I’d do if I were in charge, because in some crucial sense, nobody’s in charge of Lincoln Center. The Lincoln Center organization, which I’d assume made the fountain happen, represents only itself, and the performances it itself produces. The constituents — like the Met, the Philharmonic, and the City Ballet — go their own way.

But still, if you’re going to have such fun with the fountain, why wouldn’t the constituents want to join in? By, for instance, having something similar — something visual, arresting, fun, unmissable — going on in or near their halls. They could work out ways to have these things complement the fountain, not compete with it. The point would be festivity — have everyone join in to make Lincoln Center (and the Met, and the Philharmonic, and the City Ballet) feel festive.

And/or you could have a fountain competition. The show I saw the fountain do (the video I made gives only a small taste of how wonderful it was) was expertly choreographed, like the best fireworks displays. It would be fun to have each constituent — including those not visible on the plaza, like the library, the Film Society, the Chamber Music Society — design their own fountain dances. Then advertise which dance was playing, whenever one began, and let the public vote on which one they liked best.

Yes, maybe this would stretch the resources of some of the constituents (even the big ones), and maybe some wouldn’t want to do it. But maybe some would. You could have a special evening show, with lights, with everybody’s fountain fun on display. You’d get attention, and — no small thing — have a wonderful time.  There could be live music, food, a little festival.

The way to get attention is to make some noise. Don’t we want to do that in the arts?

This stopped me dead in my tracks the Sunday before last, when I was browsing through the New York Times.

It’s a photo of Julianne Moore, on the cover of T, the Times‘s fashion magazine. Arrestingly beautiful, I thought. And certainly not an old-fashioned, clear and simple kind of beauty. Hair everywhere. And all those dark spots. Spots of dirt, my wife and I first thought. But in fact they’re some of the freckles that (as Moore says in the interview that goes with the photo) shower her body. 

Contemporary beauty. Layered, deep, not entirely reassuring, grainy, with an undercurrent of focused visual noise. Elements of edge and danger.

There were more photos:

And see how these photos are offered as exemplars of beauty, without any caveats about upset, dirt, or anything even a little bit strange. Moore is the fairest of them all. And the theme of this issue of the magazine, we’re told on the cover, is taste and beauty, with Moore’s photo as exhibit A. 

So now we’re in a world very far from what we usually see in classical music. In classical music, beauty in its older forms still reigns. When we say, as we so often do, in conversation, in marketing blurbs, in classical music advocacy, that a masterwork is beautiful, we mean that its beauty is radiant and pure. Untroubled. The beauty may be threatened. The people who have it may meet a tragic end. But the beauty itself is never questioned. It’s simply…beautiful.

And we glory in that. But that’s not what our culture does now. The threat to beauty, the complexity of its existence, of its unfolding in the midst of many things that aren’t beauty (in the older sense) — all that has mingled now with beauty itself, so beauty now can be dangerous, unsettled, unclear, ambiguous.

As it is in lyrics I quoted years ago, in the blog, from Björk:

Emotional landscapes,
They puzzle me,
Then the riddle gets solved,
And you push me up to this
State of emergency,
How beautiful to be,
State of emergency,
Is where I want to be.

 (From “Jóga,” on the Homogenic album.)

We need to understand this. I read so many eager hopes for classical music: strategic plans, ideas for advocacy, strategies for bringing classical music to a wider world, all based on the sweet but naive notion that classical music speaks for itself, that its power and (yes) beauty will sweep away nearly anyone who has a chance to hear it.

This might be called the “we love it so much” strategy. Because we love it, you will, too. Very sensibly, the people who — with all their hearts — buy into this understand that the presentation has to change, that we have to be less formal, more embedded in the world around us.

But what’s almost never talked about are the people we want to reach. Who they are, how they think, what their culture is. T magazine drops us, with no warning (because in its world none is needed) right into the coldest water in the deepest part of the pool. This is what the people we want to reach are looking at. This is what’s normal in their world. (Those photos weren’t in some obscure art or fashion journal. They were in the New York Times.)

And for the most part we don’t offer anything similar — anything contemporary, anything that fits the world the people we want to reach are in. Album covers for Naive’s Vivaldi series are exceptions:

And also ads on the sides of New York buses, from the Met Opera. And there are others. (I’m talking about mainstream classical music. When get to the indie classical world, then contemporary images are far more common: Sally Whitwell’s album covers, or the recent one from Lara Downes. (To cite just two of our guest bloggers here.)

Of course, we’ll hear that classical music doesn’t compete with fashion (T magazine) or movies (Julianne Moore). Or that it offers, like gentle rain on a junkyard, an antidote to horrid modern culture.

But in fact we compete with everything out there, because people who spend time with us choose to do that, when they could have spent time with something else. And the people we want to reach don’t think — no surprise — that their culture is horrible. As in fact it isn’t.

Besides, who in their right mind — in the world outside ours — would plan strategies to reach new people, without learning who these people were? When I was an editor at Entertainment Weekly, we surveyed our present and potential readers, learning everything about them, even what vegetables they liked. Not the same ones, it turned out, that readers of Rolling Stone preferred. Vegetable research sounds a little silly, and may, for all I know, have been overkill. 

But there it was. We tried to learn about the people we wanted to reach. If we in classical music don’t do that — and we don’t need high-priced research; just open eyes and common sense — our bright and optimistic strategies  may well be doomed.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about classical musicians and creativity recently, following my experience as a performer and composition workshop presenter for teenagers at the Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF).

It was rather shocking to me to hear from various people in the festival management that they found it very difficult to get the classical performers appearing in the festival to do creative workshops as well. A quick skim of the festival program confirmed their fears to me. Apart from a sprinkling of masterclasses aimed at already pretty well heeled classical performers plus the ubiquitous pre-concert talks, there wasn’t anything actually creative going on in the education programs for classical music.

By way of comparison let’s take the Arena Theatre Company directed by Chris Kohn as an example. They created something called The House of Dreaming, a kind of sculptural installation piece, a magical ‘house’ into which no grown ups were allowed. To go along with this piece, they also presented a wonderful workshop Build an Ear-o-polis, described in the festival program thus;

The Ear-o-polis workshop is an innovative interactive theatre and sculptural experience for primary students. With the help of new wireless technology participants create their own strange and surprising worlds where everyday objects emit bizarre and unearthly sounds. Shoes growl, hats sing and balls squeal with laughter!

This makes me want to be eight years old again. Isn’t it wonderful?

On the other hand, the classical music education events were described in this manner “World renowned musicians X&Y demonstrate the magic of Z in a masterclass”. Yawn. I didn’t have the chance to attend any of my colleagues’ workshops, but I’m sincerely hoping they weren’t as dull as their blurbs!

But I digress. The point here is not about the quality of the classical music workshop blurbs, which were pretty uniformly dull and uninspiring (there’s a whole other blog post in that, lemme tell ya!). No, it’s about the fact that creativity and classical music seem to be viewed as separate things. Why is this? Is it because classical musicians just aren’t creative? I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. Is it because we fear that we haven’t the skills to show others how to be creative? Quite possibly. Is all this the result of a gap in traditional classical music education? In short, yes.

I agree wholeheartedly with everything Mr. Sandow has said here about incorporating creativity into the music schools of the world. I’m going to take this a step further by saying this kind of work should start much earlier in a music education, at a Primary School level (translation: “Primary School” is Australian for “Elementary School”). In an effort to fill this educational gap, I have started presenting composition workshops for children. It was a genuine surprise to me that I discovered I had the ability to do this. I don’t have any official training as an educator, nor as a composer. What I do have however is a stack of on-the-ground experience with kids, plus good aural skills and a very decent grounding in harmony and counterpoint.

In mid 2012, I was invited to workshop a new song with junior/intermediate choristers from Woden Valley Youth Choir (WVYC). These kids come from my hometown, Canberra, Australia’s national capital, a city that is much maligned by many Australians because it represents to them nothing but despicable lying politicians. Any local resident will tell you this is far from the truth, but sadly the myth endures. Anyway, WVYC’s powerhouse of a director Alpha Gregory wanted a new song that would be for and by and about the kids themselves and the lives that they live in their really very beautiful city.

My memories of my hometown childhood largely revolve around Lake Burley Griffin, named after the American architect who designed our city.

Lake Burley Griffin by Richard O’Neill

I thought it would be a great subject for a song, and something that all the kids could identify with. They spoke excitedly about the beautiful parklands around the lake, the birdlife, riding their bikes (Canberra has a great network of bicycle paths) and watching fireworks displays etc. We workshopped text for the song by making lists of nouns, verbs and adjectives and then fitting them together into sentences. We workshopped melodies by my giving them a ‘menu’ of notes they could fit together into melodic material. We made some of the resultant melodies into canonic material, we deconstructed them to make cells that could act as ostinati, we made a little whispered soundscape of anticipation using some of the texts we’d written.

The result was something we’re all very proud of! Of course, most of the kids were simply too young to have anywhere near the skills to write down their musical ideas, but that’s what the staff were there for (I even drafted in a local composer Sally Greenaway  and a couple of composition students from the local music school). After the workshop, I took all the kids’ ideas away with me and put them together into a song they could perform themselves. Have a listen:

Alpha, the choir’s director, sent me a happy little email after the first rehearsal of the new song. She described to me the kids’ excited exclamations of “That’s my line!” and “I wrote that bit!” when they saw the song in print and sang it with their friends. I don’t really like speak for the kids because it’s always much better to hear it coming out of their own mouths, but I imagine it’s a very powerful experience for them to see something of their own creation come to life like this, not just sanctioned but encouraged by adult professional musicians and eventually enjoyed by a concert hall full of appreciative listeners.

In my perfect world, all kids would have this opportunity to be creative with music. Kids in school are always writing stories and poems and painting pictures and taking these things proudly home to show their parents and music should be the same. I think the problem might be that there are not enough musicians who have the confidence in their own skill set to facilitate creativity. Perhaps more of us need to take the risk and try leaping into the unknown. Recently there was an article  in Huffington Post by one of my favourite creatives, Tina Fey. In it she encourages the reader to “Say yes, and you’ll figure it out afterward”. I know it sounds hopelessly hippy and cheesy, but this is how I came to presenting these composition workshops, I said yes to the opportunity and trusted in my solid knowledge of music theory and my own tendency to push against the sides of the proverbial box to get me through them.

If I’d had the opportunity to experiment with these kinds of creative skills during my own music education, I’m sure I would have started to do these workshops much earlier on. How can we give today’s young musicians that opportunity?