Jon Silpayamanant

Not Ready For Some Football

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If you are wringing your hands over the difficulty you are having attracting students to your performances and events, you are not alone– university football programs are having difficulty, too.

An article on Inside Higher Education’s website reports some pretty significant drops in attendance by students at football games.

Student attendance at major college football games is declining across the country. By how much varies greatly at each institution, but a recent Wall Street Journal analysis of turnstile data at 50 public colleges with top football programs found that average student attendance is down more than 7 percent since 2009.

In 2013, the University of Georgia’s designated student section was nearly 40 percent empty. The University of California at Berkeley has sold about 1,000 fewer student season tickets this season than last year — a season that already saw a decline from the previous one. Since 2009, student attendance at the University of Florida has dropped 22 percent. Three-fourths of the University of Kansas’ student tickets went unused last season.

The article blames cold weather, lack of cellphone/wifi signals and alcohol in stadiums, along with the option to watch the game on a wide variety of media as reasons why attendance is dropping.

And by the way, none of these problems are new. A little over a year ago, Jon Silpayamanant wrote about the exact same attendance issues facing professional sports. Inside Higher Ed mentions that universities are using many of the same solutions the professional teams were adopting including more robust wi-fi, better access to food and beer, and more promotions and giveaways.

One of the concerns expressed about the lack of student attendance is the poor image it provides on television.

“Fundamentally, students are part of the show and that’s something that folks don’t always recognize,” Southall said. “If you watch a college sports telecast, where do the cameras go for in-crowd shots? The cameras are in the student section. If that section is not there, it’s like having a movie without enough extras to walk in the background of the shots. I always joke to my students, ‘You understand you’re paying to be extras. You’re just there for the show, so everyone else can keep consuming it.’ “

The long term concern is that disinterested students will become disinterested alumni who won’t support the athletic program and the university down the road.

As always when we talk about sports and the arts, there are a number of parallels here. One of the big one being the concern that the lack of interest/exposure as “kids” will translate into lack of investment as adults.

This article made me wonder about the real viability of Tweet Seats programs. If students aren’t motivated to attend a football game by the opportunity to be on television or, at the very least, being able to make “I am here participating” posts on social media sites, then are Tweet Seats programs really valuable as a way to attract and retain young audiences?

Given that many Tweet Seats program segregate social media users to their own section, the participants may feel even less engaged than students in a stadium surrounded by tens of thousands of others. (Though I suppose they could feel like they are part of an exclusive group if the environment is right.)

In the great battle of sports versus arts, among the advantages sports had were the ability to be a loud part of a large group at an event where the outcome was unknown. I found it somewhat worrisome that even with these advantages, sports were losing its audiences. What chance do the arts have then?

If you have been reading the results of audience research studies over the last decade or so, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the answer university athletic departments have arrived at is focusing on the audience’s experience, not on the “performance”.

“…according to a recent survey conducted by Ohio University’s Center for Sports Administration and stadium designer AECOM. The top three priorities for that spending — enhancing food and beverage options, premium seating, and connectivity — all focus on the experience of fans, rather than the players.”

Please j’onn, Don’t Eat Me

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Not to be outdone by Drew McManus’ generous referral last week of donations toward Jon Silpayamanant’s Mae Mai blog, I went to see him perform this week.

It was a dangerous trek across the backroads of rural Ohio. But none of that compared to the peril of meeting Jon himself, as you can see in this picture. (He is the warrior in the back.)

Fierce Klingon cellist and his brother in blood

I assure you, if he hadn’t started to engage a cloaking field which blurred his features, you would appreciate the full terror inspired by his mighty form. In his hand behind me, he is holding a D’k tahg dagger as he muses that the blood of humans, tainted by their cowardice, tastes worse than targ blood.

In other words, I had a great time.

I made the trip to Cincinnati to see A Christmas Carol in the original Klingon. I had seen the show listed before and hadn’t realized this was the first time the production had been mounted in Cincinnati. All the previous productions were (and still are) performed in Chicago and Minnesota. (Video of a Chicago cast here.)

Much honor was earned this month in Cincinnati!

As much as I say that tongue in cheek, even with all the Star Trek fans out there, it isn’t the easiest thing to go to a new city and audition actors who can speak Klingon, or find actors willing to learn.

Jon composed the score for the show and made a special appearance yesterday with members of Il Troubadore to perform during intermission. There were pieces of Klingon opera as well as “Terran folk songs.”

Probably not what you imagined if you read that Jon often focuses his blog writings on “ethnic orchestras,” but like a good writer and musician, he doesn’t discount any potential avenue of exploration.

It makes Western orchestras look silly worrying about what is appropriate to wear onstage. He has to fret over Klingon armour and a Wookie costume (he aims to have one like this by 2015) and face the scrutiny of truly pitiless critics –sci fi enthusiasts.

Arts In Schools Is Only Half The Battle

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Over the last couple months, I have been enjoying Jon Silpayamanant’s series on the WPA Music Project. After reading his entries, I have begun to think that the push to put more arts in schools is may only be half the effort required to really spark an interest and sense of value in the arts.

The WPA projects involved a lot of direct and personal contact with concerts and free classes, each project involving hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of people in a single region each year.

According to the latest statistics released by the Federal Music Project, 2,399,446 students unable to pay for private musical instruction attended the free classes of the project in its 140 music centers throughout Greater New York during the year ending June 30. The number of classes held reached the enormous total of 145,133. (New York Times 1936)

When the federal will and funds were aligned behind the arts, a great deal of activity occurred. But my intent is not to get into the very politicized discussion of why there should be more federal support of the arts.

One thing that struck me from a post suggesting the Depression had a far more devastating effect on classical music and orchestras than seen in current times, is just how integrated into daily life live music performance once was.

Even if you manage to convince large swaths of people to take music lessons and put a piano in their living rooms, our current lifestyles almost guarantee that we will never have such as large proportion of the population that possesses some degree of musical training as we once did. Nor will we likely return to the frequency of exposure to live music people once enjoyed.

In the early 1900s musicians weren’t just performing in concert halls, they were providing music in movie theaters, restaurants, pubs, hotels and even funeral homes. As radio and recorded music become more available, (not to mention Prohibition closing down pubs) thousands of musicians were put out of work.

From the research Silpayamanant cites, it appears that even though live music was no longer as present in everyday life as before, during the 1930s the Federal Music Project brought live performance and practice back into people’s lives pretty personally and directly.

So people of my grandmother’s generation who were born in the early 1900s were exposed to live music on all sides and then had the Federal government validate the value of the arts through myriad WPA programs. They passed these values on to my mother’s generation. My parents passed these values on to my generation, though they were further diluted by the times.

You probably see where I am going with this: these first two generations are dying off as audiences right now.

I am not suggesting that returning arts to the schools won’t be helpful. When I was a kid, it reinforced the perception of value my parents and grandparents passed on to me. Reading Silpayamanant’s posts have just reminded me that not only do arts organizations need to change the way they operate in order to acknowledge changing times, arts education has to do the same.

It is so easy to say, if only we have more of a certain type of activity, things will turn around. It is easy to forget the larger social dynamics have changed. People are no longer surrounded by the same sort of artistic exemplars in their every day life to normalize the pursuit of an artistic discipline. Celebration of those who can create in an electronic medium is more prevalent and likely provides a more familiar touchstone for today’s fledgling creatives.

Expectations Feed The Disease

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Thai-Klingon cellist Jon (J’onn) Silpayamanant commented today on a post I did on economist Tyler Cowen’s discussion of Baumol’s cost disease as it relates to the arts. He quickly followed up with another comment apologizing because he assumed I was talking about piece Cowen did in 1996 rather than a more recent post on his blog where he makes much the same point.

I started to write a slightly snarky response wondering if Cowen had been more efficient writing the more recent piece because he had better technology and 16 years of thinking about it to back him up or if he was subject to cost disease because it took just as long to write four or five as it did back in 1996, inflation has made his time more expensive and he had to distill down 16 years more experience into a thoughtful entry.

At that point it occurred to me that every time people talk about cost disease related to the arts, they do it in connection with the actual performance. Other parts of creating art has actually benefited from greater efficiencies. Computers aid the design of performance elements as well the transmission and discussion of those designs allowing them to be received and acted upon much quicker than in the past. The marketing and advertising of the performances are likewise aided by technology in terms of design and dissemination. LED lights promise to cut electricity bills by an enormous amount once the ability to control and insure the quality of the light improves.

The quality of the performance itself also has much more potential of benefiting from technology in terms of the amount of research the performers, directors, choreographers, conductors, etc can do in preparation. Every aspect of the performance can be informed by concepts promulgated half the world away. In many respects, the audience is getting a much better product than they were years ago and it is made possible less expensively than in the past.

In fact, they are in a position of being far more informed about a performance they are about to see than a person with the same level of experience with the arts 10 years ago might have. Of course, the whole issue we have is whether the audience values that experience or not.

Had Cowen used this approach in support of his argument that the arts aren’t really impacted by cost disease, I might have been a little more receptive to it.

In some respects, I think that non-profit performing arts have done a great job of employing technology to keep their costs under control, (often to the detriment of the artists, orchestra musicians in particular these days), in comparison with the movie industry where technology has resulted in sky rocketing costs. They employ wide spread distribution options like movie theatres, DVDs and streaming as a substitute for economizing.

It is often said there is a lesson in that for the performing arts but just like the independent film maker, the small arts organization would have to depend on a relationship with a big company with the resources to replicate something on the scale of the Metropolitan Opera and National Theatre broadcasts.

Of course, many times audiences demand the spectacle that technology brings to the movies and some of that carries over to even the solo artists that Silpayamanant mentions. While touring solo might have been a cost cutting measure at one time, that often isn’t the case any more with the huge tours many major acts take on the road.

As an aside, I wonder at the economics of J-Pop groups like AKB48 which has 66 active members spread out across four performing teams. Even though they don’t tour, that is a lot of people to support.

But getting back to the discussion of Baumol’s cost disease, even though people cite the fact it still takes as long to perform a particular work as it did X hundred years ago, it probably really isn’t those two hours of performance that is the costliest part of the process, it is everything else that surrounds it. Because of audience expectations about their experience more preparation precedes the performance, much of which involves salaries and benefits.

As I noted above, technology has brought efficiencies and quality to many parts of the preparatory process. What is it coming down to now is balancing the expectations about the quality of the experience and the cost of delivering it with what people are willing to pay. Right now the focus seems to be on how much of the product can be trimmed back before people notice and become concerned with the drop in what they value.

While this is translating into seeing how many musicians an orchestra can cut before people figure the music is suffering, you see the same thing manifesting in other areas of your life as well. Just try to buy a half gallon of ice cream these days. You will find it is 1.75, maybe 1.5 quarts.

I don’t think that is really a sustainable practice. There should be an corresponding push to shift customer expectations too, and not toward accepting less ice cream and music for the same price, but rather expecting a slightly different sort of experience surrounding a quality performance. I am not sure exactly what it would look like. I know I would like it to be less structured and more educational than what we have now.