Classical music needs to find a new audience. But can classical performing groups -- and especially the New York Philharmonic -- learn how to find one?

 

I was walking past Avery Fisher Hall -- and not thinking about the future of classical music -- when I saw it.

Outside Avery Fisher, posters are displayed, usually about the New York Philharmonic, which, of course, performs inside. Normally, these posters are routine, not to say good, substitutes for sleeping pills; they simply state the music the orchestra intends to play.

This time, though, I saw something that stopped me dead. It advertised a program called "Young Friends of the Philharmonic," and it brought the institution -- graphically, anyway -- right into the '90s. "The New York Philharmonic Proudly Presents Life Beyond MTV," the poster scrawled, in wavy green type superimposed on a blurred, pink video image of an ear.

But the text that followed was the real showstopper: "Become a Young Friend of the New York Philharmonic, and discover how live classical music can be as much a part of your musical life as classic rock!"

Now, this was a blunder. The Young Friends program aims at kids 12 to 17. Classic rock (which MTV doesn't play) isn’t part of their lives. It’s music of the '60s and'70s, music their parents listened to, which means (a) that they're likely to hate it, and (b) that the Philharmonic has made itself foolish, linking itself to the one musical style teens might find stuffier than Beethoven.

And the blunder, I thought, couldn’t have come at an unhappier time. The classical music world has been looking in a mirror lately. Even more, it’s been looking at its audience. That audience, on the whole, is exactly what you'd think it is -- elite, upscale, and more than 50 years old. What happens when (to speak bluntly) these people die off? Scary studies sometimes surface -- including one last February from the National Endowment for the Arts (using data up to 1992) -- which proclaim that people in their thirties and forties don’t go to concerts as much as they used to, though they go to museums more. In response to these worries, the classical music world has been reaching out to new listeners. The poster I'd seen looked like the Philharmonic might be doing that -- but it also suggested that they didn't even know who their new audience was.

[Getting Attention]

Of course, I didn't know whether the problem was really as bad as it seemed. So I sat down with Sandy Mandel, the orchestra's associate director of marketing, and Lois Cohn, who oversees all the Philharmonic's marketing and publicity. Their poster, I cheerfully told them, had been a mistake. "And it worked!" Cohn just as happily shot back.

Mandel explained that the Young Friends program met its modest goal, which had been to enroll just 300 members. And while she gamely defended that classic rock remark as merely a "technical" goof, what she really let me know was that the phrasing didn't matter. The Philharmonic hadn’t meant to launch an assault on the MTV audience; it hadn’t even advertised on MTV. The words were only a way, Mandel said, "of getting attention."

And does the Philharmonic face a crisis? No way, said Cohn and Mandel -- we're selling tickets, playing to 93 per cent of capacity. As for the average age of the audience, yes, it’s high, and getting higher, up from 50, a few years ago, to 53, but why should that be a problem? For one thing, Cohn said, these over-50 folks are "an incredibly lucrative market." If their average age is rising, maybe that just means "they’re healthy longer." Now Cohn was on a roll. Quoting the Philharmonic’s executive director, Deborah Borda, she offered a homily: "People get older, people move, people die, and then the next wave comes along." Besides, surveys other than the NEA’s show that, as baby boomers age, their tastes tend toward jazz and classical. "People aren't coming into classical music as young as we'd like," Cohn finished, "but they do come."

As I made the rounds of other major New York classical music institutions, I didn't find anyone so brashly confident. But nobody greatly disagreed. It’s true that subscriptions aren't selling as they did 10 years ago, which means more work for everybody, learning how to sell more single tickets. But at Carnegie Hall, publicity director Jennifer Wada stressed its education program as a way of bringing in new listeners. Marketing director David Kitto pointed out that an average age, however high, can be misleading. Half the audience, he said, with quiet, friendly confidence, is under 50.

And at Lincoln Center -- where three marketers and a publicist, just recovered from the first Lincoln Center Festival, spent two hours with me -- there already is a younger crowd, at the Festival and notably at Mostly Mozart, whose ticket-buyers are, on the average, only 45. "I’m noticing tons and tons of young people," said Jennifer Granozio, associate director of marketing. Then, with a dazzling smile, she offered an example of New York’s unacknowledged, younger classical music audience -- the readers of The Village Voice, who respond to Lincoln Center advertising, even though they're largely 18 to 31.

[Not Young Enough]

But New York isn’t typical of anything. We’re America's classical music capital, and when you add our tourists, especially from Europe (where classical music is more popular than in the U.S.), we've got an audience they just can't count on in, say, Columbus, Ohio, where the marketing director of the local symphony, Carla Hill, didn't hesitate to tell me that she faced a "serious problem. Expenses will continue to rise, and we’ll be saturated in our market." A younger generation, she finds, "is a lot harder to bring in. How do you close that gap with kids who listen to Hootie and the Blowfish? We have not even begun to penetrate that market."

"New York is such an anomaly," sighs Laura Young, public affairs director of Opera America, the Washington, D.C. association of opera companies. And though opera, nationally, does well with younger people -- Young cites "emotion" and "theatricality" as reasons, along with opera's "multitech aesthetic" and even "the MTVness of it" -- still, she's worried for the future. "There’s that fear," she told me. "When you look around the theater, you see a lot of gray heads. How can we make sure we get enough younger people?"

At the American Symphony Orchestra League, the talk was once much grimmer. A 1992 study, The Financial Condition of American Orchestras, painted a bleak picture. And a 1993 report, Americanizing the American Orchestra, bluntly announces, "In the face of shifting community needs and cultural agendas, orchestras are finding that their current missions and programs lack meaning for many people."

This proved controversial, especially the report's very mild suggestion that "orchestras play music that reflects diversity - music with black or Hispanic themes, with pop relevance, with the flavor of jazz. That's certainly happening in places like Detroit, with a majority black population, or San Antonio, where Latinos predominate. Elsewhere -- notably from the New York Philharmonic -- you'll hear doubts about "Americanization," but the spirit of the idea is getting around. The Austin Lyric Opera features pictures of its audience, including (not at all by chance) whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians. The Columbus Symphony looked at demographics and discovered their audience wasn't all that different from people who ride Harleys. So they built a campaign around motorcycle imagery, offering "a thrilling ride."

And when I got the Philadelphia Orchestra's brochure for next season, I almost gasped. I'd already heard they’d experimented with giant, pop-style video screens at concerts and dressed the orchestra in costumes for Halloween. But when I saw, their brochure, I could only think: "This is is not your father's Oldsmobile." Jean Brubaker, the Philadelphia’s marketing director, put it very bluntly. "We hired an advertising agency who challenged us." So the brochure has language -- not to mention type and graphics -- that jumps out at you. "There. That energy. Feel it?" On the cover, the orchestra challenges you to choose it over TV Guide, the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Phillies. (Pictured here -- some of their rock-style posters for Beethoven and Brahms festivals.)

Melinda Whiting, editor of the American Symphony Orchestra league’s publication, Symphony magazine, cites a Harris poll, covering the years since that pessimistic NEA survey; classical concert attendance, it says, is the only kind of arts involvement that shows an increase. So maybe we can rest easy in New York, though I did see signs of Americanization from the New York City Opera, which hypes fall productions with a headline saying "Long Before There was Rent [based, of course, on La Boheme], There Was the Real Thing."

[The American Philharmonic]

Why doesn't the New York Philharmonic take that route? Why should their ads be empty blocks of type, just listing the programs that they play? Mandel objected when I asked her that. "Oh no' she said, You’ll find that now we frequently add a quote!" And maybe that’s a step -- though quite a small one -- toward breaking what Whiting calls the "tuxedo curtain," which separates the classical music world from America at large. But Lois Cohn nailed what’s really going on. From focus groups, the Philharmonic learned that its audience chooses concerts because of what’s on the program. And since they’re selling tickets, why change what isn't broken?

But why not Americanize at least the Philharmonic’s image? I thought of a simple step they might take. When some great jazz musician dies -- like Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie a few years ago -- why not offer Philharmonic players to the media, to praise the artist’s legacy? "But we love things like that!" said Sandy Mandel. "We got the men on Letterman one night!" said Cohn (showing her pedigree; years ago, when orchestras were all male, their musicians were always called "the men"). But as for showing that the Philharmonic musicians care for jazz, well, no. "What our people like to talk about is the fact that they grew up listening to Lenny Bernstein."

There's the contradiction: Tradition says one thing, the need for a newer audience says another. When the Columbus Symphony staged its motorcycle campaign, an outraged subscriber called to say: "You would think you were trying to reach people who didn't know about the orchestra!" For an example of how distant these unwashed masses can seem when you’re inside the citadels of classical music, look at Judith Arron, the executive director of Carnegie Hall. Graciously, she said that she's concerned with newer audiences. But when she spoke about details, she simply said, "I see things from the perspective of my community." What community is that, I asked, expecting she'd tell me 'New York City." Instead, with ingenuous honesty, she answered, "Well, I live in Chappaqua" -- one of Westchester's most upscale towns -- "and work in Carnegie Hall."

At Lincoln Center, by contrast, they've thrown the gates wide open. When I asked about smoother advertising and other ways to create a more lively image, the team I spoke to laughed, and kept saying, "Good question!" Angela Duryea, director of publicity, jumped in to tell me her own complaint, which is that pictures of classical musicians took ridiculously stiff. "The last thing a classical artist thinks of is pictures," she laughed. It’s no wonder, with attitudes like these, that Lincoln Center seems to do the most outreach, advertising far outside the normal classical-music orbit.

[Classic Van Halen]

But here's a final, none too happy thought. As I finished my conversation with Mandel and Cohn, I remember telling them: "Look, the kind of advertising I'm talking about is what Americans expect to see. If you don't use it, these new people you want to reach are going to think you're not a player. They’ll assume you have nothing to say."

Still, that kind of marketing needs some solid content behind it. Pop marketing might look pretty vacant, but behind it is a presumption than an artist has something individual to say, a presumption that, in a surprising number of cases, is actually correct.

Classical music makes a similar assumption. But should it? I tried asking Cohn and Mandel to tell me the artistic difference between the Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony. The question floored them. "I don’t know how to answer that," said Cohn. "They’re both great orchestras. They play the same repertoire."

So artistically it’s all the same? "No," said Cohn, "but you can't tell people the differences until they're sophisticated." Besides, she added, switching now to the Philharmonic’s audience, "I don't know if they could explain to you what the difference is." Eventually – and I have to hand it to her, she really worked on this -- Cohn came up with something: "We have a more virtuosic orchestra."

An Orchestra of Virtuosos! That slogan wouldn’t be inaccurate, describes a quality the audience might really hear, and takes the Philharmonic right up to the level of "Ooo, I love Van Halen, because Eddie plays bitchin' guitar." Unless classical music learns to talk about real individuality, the way classic rock fans do when they fight over differences between Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, even the sharpest marketing looks like decoration on an empty shell.

[from the Village Voice, September 17, 1996; illustration by Matthew Martin]