Wednesday, May 04, 2005
The Non-Death of the Orchestra and Why Programming More New Music Will Do More Harm Than Good
1. I find myself unconvinced by the arguments that the Orchestra is dead or dying -- or, as David puts it, CTD. I expect that there is and will remain a contingent of devoted classical music fans who will want orchestras around and who will continue to buy tickets and give generously. The Orchestra, like much of the rest of classical music, is undergoing a shift in prominence, which superficially looks like death. When costs exceed revenues, something has to change, and while I would be glad to hear otherwise, I doubt that revenues can be increased by enough to solve the imbalance. Most likely, orchestra after orchestra will go so deep into the red that they will have to close up shop, and eventually we will be left with an economically sustainable population size which will remain constant for as long as the economic situation remains constant. And given that I expect classical music to move firmly and permanently into the constellation of subcultures I suspect once orchestras reach the new plateau they will remain there. I don't see the overall shape of the trajectory as changeable, but in the short term the impact can be softened and in the long term the end-state might be alterable. Every day we spend defending the unsustainable status quo is a day lost in planning and preparing for the most desireable possible end-state. I think that is where we need to focus our efforts. Some preliminary suggestions: divert money from failing orchestras into more robust arts education programs; put as much money as possible directly into the endowments of the orchestras we expect to be able to save so that additional decreases in other sources of revenue will be less painful; convert some orchestras into part-time gigs; establish bigger touring schedules so that towns that lose their orchestras get visited by the survivors; take advantage of the burgeoning variety of the cable television market to establish a Classical Music Television station; and, finally, composers might want to consider taking advantage of the excellent orchestra sample libraries out there to make MIDI recordings rather than hoping to be squeezed into the program of an orchestra that focuses on old music.
2. A number of people in this forum and elsewhere have suggested that programming more new music would be good for the survival of orchestras. I dissagree, and here is why:
Orchestras derive their funding from three sources: ticket sales, annual philanthropy, and income from the endowment. According to the New York Philharmonic's website "although concerts are often sold out, they only cover half of the Philharmonic's operating budget." Endowment income fluctuates with the economy, and increases in the size of the endowment are a piece of philanthropic support, so how does programming new music help increase revenues from ticket sales and philanthropy?
Would New Music draw a larger audience? Even if there are a substantial number of tickets left unsold, concerts of all new music are pretty poorly attended as is, and additional new music would drive away some of the more conservative regulars. Given that decreases in turnout can be at least partly attributed to a general decrease of Americans' free time and the increasing number of activities competing for that free time, I suspect that the attrition rate would be substantially larger than the influx of new-music fans -- regular folks would be leaving and the hard-core would be arriving.
As for philanthropy, there's so little money available for new music now that most composers can't expect anything other than token amounts for commissioning fees. Any new-music philanthropy added to orchestra revenues would come out of the already-too-small pool of money for commissions and the support of groups dedicated specifically to new music. At the same time, much of the pro-old-music money currently funding orchestras would be diverted to other causes (donors today are notoriously fickle), and again I suspect that the pro-old-music attrition would outweigh the pro-new-music influx. Furthermore, while I don't have numbers to back this claim up, I expect that analysis would reveal a strong correlation between wealth and conservative musical taste. Remember that most of the money raised by any development office comes from a small number of very large gifts, so the loss of even one major musically conservative donor is not balanced out by dozens or hundreds of people who can't make major gifts.
Two final over-arching points about programming new music. First, most people don't start attending orchestra concerts until well after their musical taste has ossified. Training a new generation of listeners to appreciate contemporary music would be great -- I'm all for increased arts education funding -- but in the modern world by the time any given generation reaches the orchestra concert hall it's too late for conversion. Second, orchestras dedicated exclusively to the performance of new music are exempt from many of my above observations -- the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, for instance, is reputed to be financially pretty healthy -- but I suspect that most of those groups also have substantially lower operating budgets than the major orchestras and that the reduced budgets come largely from not maintaing full-time rosters and not paying seven figures for superstar conductors.
posted by Galen H. Brown
4:33 PM
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