This is the first in a series of postings about one musician’s desire to bring Classical Music back to the People, by whatever means necessary…
Are you depressed yet? It seems like every time you turn around there is another article about this orchestra cutting costs, that orchestra cutting concerts, the other orchestra in the red, etc. It’s pretty depressing, not least of which because there are a lot of musicians out there who are trying to make a living, and their main source of income is threatened. Let us hope that these institutions make it through these trying times. But here’s the question: how is the classical music business like the economy in general, and what can we do for the future?
Once again the Big 3 are showing up before Congress, hats in hand. If they go down….. then what? A lot of people will lose their livelihoods – the running estimate is that they represent around 1.5% of the total US economy (this includes ancillary companies, pension payouts, etc.). Yet recent information from 2005 shows that small business represent 99.7% of all businesses, and they employ a staggering 50.6% of the entire work force. No matter how you cut the pie the piece comes up the same way – if Big Business goes down the economy will be in trouble; if Small Business goes down it’s time to head for the hills.
Yet it is amazing how many people still pay most of their attention to Big Business. I bet most people reading this can recite with great authority what the Dow Jones Industrial Average has done over the past week or so. That’s what shows up in the headlines whenever you access your home-page-of-choice, whether that’s the NYTimes, CNN, Yahoo, or whatever. We are programmed to use those headlines as a gauge of how our economic world is doing. That’s bass-ackwards and we know it, but we still do it. And here’s the difference between our economic life and our artistic life – at least we know that it’s bass-ackwards when we pay all of our attention to the Big Board. We do the same thing in classical music and no one bats an eye.
For the record I am NOT talking about larger orchestras versus smaller orchestras. An orchestra is an orchestra, and despite the fact that bad administration, poor artistic leadership, and a labor situation rooted in the 1950s is all conspiring to make orchestras completely irrelevant to 98% of the people in this country I can comfortably predict that nothing is going to change in the orchestral world. Everyone is too busy blaming everyone else for the problems. What I am talking about is Chamber Music.
Go back 100 years, when classical music was still the dominant game in town. Back in The Day any family that could afford to had a piano in their living room. Almost everyone played one instrument or another, either formally as part of becoming a Lady or a Gentleman, or informally just for the hell of it. People would get together in their houses to entertain each other and listen to great music as an important part of the social structure. That’s what “Chamber Music” was all about and that’s how most people heard music. Fast forward to today and…… good luck in finding this social model anywhere. Of course we are fighting against the smorgasbord of today’s life – 3,857 HD channels of ESPN; broadband internet in the Gobi Desert; and just in time for Halloween this year the blockbuster release of Saw CLXXIV – but we have almost abandoned the idea of music in the home. Pianos are now considered furniture, and other instruments just gather dust in the closet. The only time you see a string quartet outside of the local fiscally challenged performance series is at a wedding. Yikes.
Part of the problem is Music Education, or the lack thereof. It’s been summarily excised from the scholastic curriculum, and we won’t even talk about the rise of the Soccer Mom. Who has got time to practice scales when that coach from Manchester United is coming to the state playoff game just to watch your beautiful brilliant over-scheduled child? But a huge chunk of the problem is that we’ve put all of our artistic eggs in that Big Business basket called the Orchestra. What we need to do is refocus on the Small Business – Chamber Music. If we start to provide people a comfortable, intimate experience in music that comes to them then perhaps we can start to reverse the bleeding that this business is suffering.
I propose that we spend more time coming up with creative ways to put small groups into familiar and unfamiliar settings as a way to dramatically increase the outreach for classical music. This will necessarily take something away from orchestras, and I think it absolutely should. We need to refocus on getting music directly back into people’s lives and that probably means taking it directly to them rather than bringing them into our halls. How to do this? In no particular order (and this is by no means an exhaustive list):
- Spend more money on chamber music ensembles
- Put ensembles directly into people’s homes – community concerts like National Night Out
- Invest (critical term!!!) in music education, both @ home and in the schools
- Actually compete with the sports industry for the hearts/minds of our youth
- Use the WWW as a tool to promote music rather than fear the WWW as something “New”
- I know it’s a cliché but – Think Outside the BOX!!!
Orchestras, unfortunately, have proven that they are not very good at any of the above. From my own experience I have seen 3 major problems crop up with orchestras trying to branch out like this –
- Conductors don’t play instruments – like it or not, it’s the conductor’s name/face/ego on the brochure. They’re the ones who the public is most liable to recognize and therefore should be the most obvious musical ambassadors. But they don’t play instruments anymore, so they aren’t musicians anymore, so they can’t go into people’s living rooms and do anything except take up space with their big heads.
- Administration is swamped – especially in smaller orchestras there is simply not enough people-power to co-ordinate a program like this, and in a lot of organizations I doubt the creativity necessary to put something together like this exists.
- Money – actual quote from a musician when something like this was proposed: “at the very least we’ll need 1 1/2 times the basic orchestra service rate, plus a travel bonus and time off from the orchestra schedule.” Really? Just to play an hour of music in someone’s living room? Really? When they would probably give you free food and free alcohol as a bonus? Really? Add all this up, times 4 for a string quartet, and we have already priced ourselves out of reality.
I’m sure there are other problems that would crop up but those are the ones I’ve seen myself. I am forced to conclude that perhaps the orchestra is not the best vehicle for putting classical music back into the forefront of society, and I bet starting new chamber music initiatives is simply not going to be anywhere near the top 10 programs initiated by most large ensembles. But enough – sitting here bashing the orchestra world isn’t going to change anything. It’s time to do something directly, the old “put your money where your mouth is” approach.
Next Episode – Bill stuffs all his money into his mouth, and starts to choke on it…..