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| Not long ago I committed a sin, or so I was told, against
contemporary classical music. My crime was to praise the New York Philharmonic's Beethoven
symphony cycle, performed at the start of this season, when instead, as one of my
colleagues told me in a friendly but stern tone, I should have been damning the orchestra
for pandering. "The Philharmonic must educate its audience!" my critic cried. In other words, it should play more contemporary music and teach its audience to go along. In one way, my colleague was right: There really is a contemporary-music problem, and it sets classical music apart from the other arts. "There is a relatively robust appreciation for a new creation at the New York City Ballet or for many new paintings," said Jane Moss, the vice president for programming at Lincoln Center. "But there is relatively little interest in a new classical piece." The Museum of Modern Art had long lines for its recent Jackson Pollock show. But you wouldn't see that if Lincoln Center staged a Schoenberg retrospective; nor will you for anything the great modernist Pierre Boulez does at Carnegie Hall next year, when he arrives as composer in residence. So when I answered my alarmed friend, I tried to take the problem outside the classical-music world. Look at contemporary music as a case study in marketing, I suggested. Let's say you're in business, and you've got a product that your customers love (in the Philharmonic's case, Beethoven and the other classical masters). Now you've produced something much less comforting, and more esoteric. Would you try to sell it to the same people? Or think of the pop-music world, where it's taken for granted that audiences come in many flavors. There's a mainstream audience, which loves Top 40 ballads, and there's an alternative audience, which prefers darker, edgier, more difficult music, by artists like PJ Harvey and R.E.M. Is there a lesson here for classical music? Is there an alternative classical audience that can be reached in some new way?
"Your thought about marketing exposes an underlying tension that's
a legitimate issue for symphony orchestras," said John Gidwitz, the president of the
Baltimore Symphony, which, under its departing music director, David Zinman,
enthusiastically has played a lot of contemporary work. "We have an idea of our
identity and our repertory. And yet we can only function if we attract large
audiences." Evidently, then, there is trouble when somebody tries too hard to educate the audience. One possible counter-example is the Lyric Opera of Chicago, which devotes one-fourth of its eight-opera season to 20th-century works, many of them new, and proudly sells 103 percent of its tickets (a trick it pulls off by finding new buyers for seats subscribers can't use). But can its success be transferred? Certainly the Lyric Opera has the will to present contemporary opera, and the readiness to do any necessary extra work. "We have a data base of everyone who has purchased tickets to modern operas in the past," said Susan Mathieson, the company's director of marketing, "and if I have any seats available, I'm going to go after them." But the Lyric Opera has an almost unique institutional verve and, unlike a symphony orchestra, can muster star singers and vivid theater, both of which, Ms. Mathieson stressed, it makes sure to offer whenever it stages anything contemporary. Peter Pastreich, executive director of the San Francisco Symphony, counsels caution. His own orchestra, under Michael Tilson Thomas, programs an admirable amount of new music. But still, said Mr. Pastreich, there's a limit, even in a sophisticated city like San Francisco. "Like all major orchestras," he said, "we're a multimillion dollar operation, employing hundreds of people. We can't go off on a tangent, any more than Harvard or Yale could suddenly devote themselves mainly to African history." Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco: these three major American orchestras play the most new music. If they feel cautious, all of us, including my aroused colleague, should take that seriously. Maybe it's not so easy to educate an audience. What, then, is the contemporary-music audience? For the moment, at least, most of it also goes to standard classical concerts. At the Lyric Opera, for instance, Ms. Mathieson says she has no trouble selling contemporary opera to people who look just like those buying tickets for "La Bohème." Michael Geller, who runs the American Composers Orchestra (which plays only modern works), said the majority of his 800 subscribers were also part of the New York Philharmonic's long-term audience. It's only natural, he added, because "we do a lot of music that grows out of the symphonic tradition." The Lyric Opera, of course, does music that grows out of the opera tradition. If you present contemporary music exactly as you'd present the standard classical repertory, then naturally most of your audience will come from the larger pool of classical-music listeners. Understanding that, we can also understand conservative marketers like Lois Cohn, the director of marketing and public relations at the Philharmonic; David Kitto, the director of marketing at Carnegie Hall, and Paul Kellogg, the general director of the New York City Opera, who say they package contemporary music as only one part of everything their organizations do. Since they expect mostly to draw the same kind of people no matter what they program, why make contemporary music stick out?
But here things get deliciously complicated, because, at an opposite
esthetic pole, there really is an alternative new-music audience, one that is hardly
connected to classical music at all. In Milwaukee, an enterprising contemporary group, Present Music -- which gets up to 700 people at some of its events and impressively sells more than 200 subscriptions to its six-concert season -- has a similar philosophy. "You can look down from the stage, and see the earrings and nose rings and different- colored hair," said its director, Kevin Stalheim. "If I were going for mailing lists, I'd go to the art museum and modern dance companies, not the Milwaukee Symphony." Present Music plays more traditional programs than Bang on a Can, ranging from mildly alternative composers like Henryk Gorecki and Steve Reich to mainstream stalwarts like Joseph Schwantner and Harrison Birtwistle. Why doesn't New York's alternative audience -- the people, for instance, who enjoy going to the Brooklyn Academy of Music -- come to hear similar programs at Carnegie Hall? One big part of the answer is presentation. "We did a piece with black light, and we threw Ping-Pong balls around in the audience" Mr. Stalheim said. "We start our season like opening day at the ballpark, and maybe we'll play 'The Star-Spangled Banner' on a theremin. We try to end our concerts with parties." This is not selling out, Mr. Stahlheim insists, because most of the time the group is serious. But it gives his concerts good press and makes them fun. Nonesuch Records cultivates its own version of this alternative audience, and has done wonderfully, sometimes selling more than 100,000 copies of CD's by Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Astor Piazzola and the Kronos Quartet, and only slightly less of John Adams. This, says Robert Hurwitz, who runs the label, is a market that was already there, one that overlaps with the classical-music audience but is also distinct from it, and which Nonesuch's vice president of marketing, Peter Clancy, described as "people open to the new, different and unusual, who seek out world music, modern and ethnic dance, and performance art." This, perhaps, is a contemporary version of the "intellectual audience" Virgil Thomson identified among classical-music listeners in New York in the 1940's, and the success of Nonesuch suggests that it might be bigger, at least potentially, than anybody thinks. Can mainstream classical-music institutions attract these people? The enterprising Albany Symphony has placed composers in elementary and high schools and also presents an alternative new-music ensemble -- the Dogs of Desire -- at local colleges, thus using contemporary music to give the orchestra new roots in its community. Mr. Wyjnbergen, of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, thinks he might present new music in "rock clubs, art galleries or an old factory that has been rigged up." He doesn't expect to attract younger people to the orchestra's existing programs, but instead hopes to include them by extending the Philharmonic's reach. He also identifies another "niche audience" for contemporary music, made up of "visual people, architects, painters, photographers and graphic artists." These, he thinks, he can attract by asking 40 of them to create visual impressions of contemporary musical works. Mr. Pastreich, too, says he has tapped an alternative crowd when the San Francisco Symphony presents "maverick" composers like Lou Harrison or Meredith Monk. And while he says that 90 percent of his new-music listeners are drawn from his regular audience, he also notes that younger people are now buying tickets, thanks to the informality and commitment of Michael Tilson Thomas. Should we be trying to educate the classical music audience, as my colleague so strongly urged? Why talk as if there's something wrong with it, as if it has a disease that needs curing? Instead, let's arouse it, excite it and draw new people to new kinds of artistic musical events. That way, even large institutions might renew themselves and heal the split between contemporary classical music and the rest of the arts. New York Times, February 28, 1999
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