Take Me Out to the Ball Game

My apologies for the 'sounds of silence' since my June 30^th entry.  My brain’s been seeking but not finding more answers to the decline in classical concert attendance.  In this state of writer’s block I visited Yankee Stadium on September 3.  Sitting with the other 50,000 fans, I was overwhelmed by the thought - obviously, people are still attending certain kinds of live events in large numbers, regardless of the economy!

I know.  It’s not the same.  Attending sports events entails a completely different set of behaviors.  We may not only talk with friends, but we are encouraged to boisterously cheer for the team.  We’re prodded to eat the expensive food during the game.  We may even become, if not overly so, intoxicated with alcoholic beverages!  Vendors yell and scream.  We’re permitted to wander the stadium at will. 

Loud, participatory behavior is also a normal element of rock concerts.  When held outdoors, the same freedom of movement is tolerated as attendees smoke tobacco and other substances.  Contrast that with an event where one is required to sit quietly without moving.  No wonder people don’t want to attend classical music concerts! 

Months of silence have convinced me I’m asking the wrong question.  The compelling issue is: Why does the clear majority of the population not want to quietly sit and listen to classical music – regardless of the setting – neither in the concert hall nor at home?

This leads me to recent comments made by Walter Isaacson, Steve Job’s biographer.  In an interview, Mr. Isaacson spoke of the profound change Edison wrought on all music by inventing the wax cylinder - a favorite theme of mine I call ‘The Edison Effect.’  Our relationship with music has never been the same since Edison's 1878 patent.  It was the beginning of music 'consumption', as some like to call it, as a private behavior…something one could do by oneself without the presence of either live performers or even other live 'audience' members.

Walter Isaacson went on to say that Steve Jobs’s development of the iPod, created a change in our relationship with music every bit as profound as Edison’s cylinder.  The ‘private-ness’ of our music experience was exponentially heightened by the arrival of the iPod.  People can tell me till the cows come home “There is nothing like a live classical concert!”  I think they’re right, but we need to come to grips with the reality that private music listening is now the primary mode of music listening for people in the industrialized world.  Does that, will that gigantic shift in human behavior significantly alter the consumption of classical music as well?

Steve Jobs literally “did his job.”  Daily, millions connect with their custom downloaded music libraries through earbuds.  Sidestepping the viability of live classical performance and the ultimate fate of professional symphony orchestras, let’s assume that more and more people - individuals who have total control over the content of their iPods - will make private music listening the rule.

What percentage will be listening to classical music?  10%?  5%?  3%?  And if someone is part of the 90% or more who are not listening regularly to classical music, I reassert something I’ve said before – it's likely they simply do not know from personal experience just how moved they might be by classical music listening.  So how do we get them to know that? – to experience that?

We frequently ask ourselves at the TDO office: What can The Discovery Orchestra do to encourage an uninitiated person to watch our YouTube Discovery Chats or Discovery Concert DVD’s?  How do we cajole people to visit our YouTube Channel?  How do we  get someone to ‘give us five’?  And if they do, will this visit do the job?  We hope a five-minute encounter might ignite a pleasure response mechanism that can only be achieved by listening with undivided attention. 

We want your suggestions!  All of them!

It's The Money Stupid! Or Is It?

Concert hall acoustics and the effects of continuously dissonant musical compositions definitely have their impact on concert attendance or the lack thereof.        

Another frequently discussed factor is the price of admission.  As we should know, whatever price is being charged for a classical concert ticket, it does not cover the cost of producing the concert.  We have been using the same financial model in the United States for over a century, imported from Europe, in which somewhere between 50% and 80% of concert cost is being subsidized by philanthropic contributions.  So if we meet in the middle at 65% being the contributed portion of concert cost, it means that a $50 average ticket price - prior to any senior, student or group discounts - should have realistically been $145 in order for the concert to break even.   And we need to quickly note that the break-even ticket price may vary up or down relative to the total annual budget, hall capacity and average attendance.

While an avid sports fan or rock concert attendee might happily pay $200 or more for an event ticket, I don’t think we even need ask how many regular classical music concert attendees would be willing to pay about $150 to listen to a live performance of a Beethoven symphony.   We have all been trained to expect the subsidized ticket price.  And even that may now be beyond the reach of some patrons on fixed retirement incomes or younger individuals stretched by current recessionary economic conditions.

This begs the question – should ticket prices be lowered?  A few professional orchestras are in fact doing this and obtaining improved attendance results.  In other instances a single, low very affordable ticket price for every seat has been instituted.  There are those who have recommended that tickets to all classical concerts simply be made available free of charge!  When one arrives at the door there might be a suggested but not required contribution, as is the practice at some art museums.  I have even encountered a 'pay as you exit' strategy.  If you like the concert, pay for your ticket as you leave.  If not – don’t!     

These are intriguing ideas, all to some degree based on the proposition that if so little income is to be recouped from classical music concert tickets in the first place, why not simply make classical music concerts a completely philanthropic gift from donors to the community?   My guess is that this strategy would have to be balanced against such ingrained beliefs as: “If something is free, it can’t really be worth anything.” and “You don’t get something for nothing.”

In this context, a quote from Penelope McPhee, who formerly oversaw the John S. & James L. Knight Foundation’s Magic of Music (http://bit.ly/jsdru5) initiative, lingers in my mind as a haunting prediction.  It still gives me chills to recall it, and it makes me question whether ticket prices have anything whatsoever to do with the decline in classical music concert attendance.

Addressing a group of marketing executives from professional symphony orchestras with budgets ranging from perhaps one million dollars to as much as forty million dollars annually, Ms. McPhee said something like - and I am paraphrasing here: “If nothing changes, in a few years you won’t even be able to give away your product, let alone sell tickets to it.”  A sobering thought to say the least, and one which causes this observer to look to yet other reasons why classical concert audiences are declining.      

Can You Hear Me Now?

I grew up listening to the fabled sound of The Philadelphia Orchestra.  As musicians, we work diligently to achieve a certain sound on our instruments or with our voices.  Here’s the rub.  If one is performing on an acoustic instrument, the room in which we’re performing is part of our sound.

In the early 80’s I took a teenage piano student to a pair of orchestral concerts.  The first featured the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall performing the Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition.  After the bombastic final movement, Jeremy turned and said: “How come my stereo can play louder than the New York Philharmonic?”

The second featured the American Symphony Orchestra playing Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in a pre-renovated Carnegie Hall.   Our seats were in the ‘nosebleed’ balcony at Carnegie where Jeremy was ‘blown away’ by the sound of this incredible work…as one would have hoped he would have been by Pictures.

While there are many opinions regarding ideal acoustics in a concert space, the following are properties I look for as a performer and as an audience member: 

Enough decay time to permit the blending of sounds and ease of playing.  The acoustics of a cathedral may be so ambient that clarity is completely lost.  But if a space is utterly dead, all sounds are unblended and one has to struggle to shape every musical phrase.  It’s far better to play and listen in a space in which sound decays over time rather than stops dead in its tracks!

Some natural boosting of low frequencies.  If a concert hall does not slightly favor the bass end of the spectrum, performances sound ‘ungrounded’ with the high frequencies dominating.  Some people, without knowing why, would say that a hall that favors bass frequencies sounds “rich” to them - as opposed to the sound of a hall that does not, which they might describe as “thin” or “too bright.”

Loudness.  If 110 musicians are playing the final moments of Respighi’s Pines of Rome as loudly as they humanly can, audience members throughout the concert hall should physically feel vibrations in their bodies!   With the help of electronic amplification, people can and do experience this phenomenon at rock concerts or from the car next to them while stopped at traffic lights, or even from their own home ‘stereo’ to quote Jeremy.

Can we really expect people who have grown up with electronically enhanced music to come on more than one disappointing occasion to listen to a large symphony orchestra that – because of the room they are playing in – cannot physically excite them with the very SOUND of their playing?   

Financially, this is one the most difficult matters to address regarding shrinking audiences at symphony orchestra concerts.  Do we build another hall after spending one hundred million or more dollars to build the one we’re in?  Move to another location?  Go back to the old concert hall - if it hasn’t already been torn down?

Short of gutting and rebuilding our new concert halls, what can we do if we do not have the luxury of performing regularly in an optimal acoustical setting like that of the Vienna Musikverein or the Amsterdam Concertgebouw?  I think we must come to grips with at least one option, albeit abhorrent to purists. Sophisticated computerized electronic enhancement  is now available to ‘fix’ our performing art centers and give them the desired acoustical properties. It may be the only cost-effective way to address this issue.   

The Philadelphia Orchestra - Rest In Peace?

How are we to digest the news that one of the greatest orchestras in the United States and the world has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection?  How especially are those of us who grew up listening to this wonderful orchestra perform under Eugene Ormandy and Leopold Stokowski to react?  How might those of us who studied with members of The Philadelphia Orchestra respond?  In a few words…not well.

It is unlikely that The Philadelphia Orchestra will just go away.  I don’t for a minute think that any of the current stakeholders - orchestra members, staff, board, audience or contributors - will “go gentle into that good night.”   We must remember that the word ‘protection’ in a Chapter 11 filing means having the opportunity to reorganize and continue functioning while not being hounded by creditors.

However, The Philadelphia Orchestra that comes out on the other side of this process will be changed.  One group that will certainly be affected by that change is the membership of the orchestra.  Those of us who trained at American music schools and conservatories over the last fifty years and have played in professional symphony orchestras under agreements negotiated by the American Federation of Musicians have enjoyed a generally upward trend in compensation and benefits. This has all taken place within the inspiring but precarious economic framework (see: Is Classical Music Dying?) in which “philanthropically inclined individuals must annually contribute the 50%-80% gap between ticket revenue and the actual cost of producing the concerts.”

Do I think the musicians of the great orchestras of the world deserve to earn very respectable annual salaries with full health and retirement benefits?   You bet I do!  But whether our American society as a whole believes that is quite another matter.  Certainly in the case of Philadelphia, the question remains: Is there locally sufficient annually contributed income to support a full-time symphony orchestra with a 52-week season?

In the current economic malaise, we are told by our political leaders that ‘the state’ or ‘the municipality’ cannot even afford to continue to pay respectable salaries and benefits to policemen, firemen and teachers.  We should be mindful that even though all of these individuals provide invaluable, priceless services to us - policemen, firemen, artists, musicians and teachers do not work in the profit-making sector.  Yet, what monetary value are we to place on one who saves our life or immeasurably changes our life for the good?

Another question is whether there are enough regular concert audience members in Philadelphia to fill the seats over a 52-week season.  Allison Vulgamore, president and chief executive officer of The Philadelphia Orchestra, alluded to this when she cited the "tremendous decline" in audiences over the past five years.  We might blame this on current economic conditions, but the recession cannot be the only stressor in the equation.  In my next blog entries I will write about other factors that have contributed to the decline in symphony orchestra concert attendance in the United States – and what we may be able to do to begin reversing this trend!

 

The More We Perceive...The More We Receive

 My mentor Saul Feinberg once said those words in my presence. I nodded in assent, to which he added, “Feel free to use that.”   I have and I do.  Saul’s distillation of what happens when we give our undivided attention to anything has many ramifications.  I suppose a case might be made that to remain in a constant state of attentiveness could result in sensory overload!  However, the selective use of this behavior can definitely result in a life very rich in pleasurable, meaningful and even important observations.

This adoption of a perceptive state of mind should by no means be limited to sound.  I recall that on a visit to Africa, our tracker, who’d been sitting on a special seat on the front bumper, abruptly relocated himself to a seat safely next to our driver.  He then turned his head toward us and whispered, “Large cat nearby.”  His perceptive eyes, ears and probably sense of smell had obviously detected something we had not!

Think about how important our visual perception of tiny eye movements, eyebrow twitches and lip quivers are as they are projected toward us by our spouses, parents, children, siblings and close friends.  If we do not perceive these subtle signals…

Hearing is, of course, that miraculous sense by which sound waves enter the ear canal, set tiny hairs, bones and liquid in motion and, after being transmitted electronically over nerve tissue, are then “translated” by our brain into things like words and music.  Gives one goosebumps just to think about it!

Listening, however, is paying attention to those sounds being heard by our physical apparatus – an apparatus which percussionist Evelyn Glennie has beautifully shown us extends way beyond our ears!  This state of auditory mindfulness probably has a thousand of degrees of acuity that can be dialed up and down by human beings at will – all the way from ‘barely noticing anything’ to ‘observing every detail.’

We are all capable of applying that full range of mindfulness to musical sounds physically produced in real time outside us.   And, like composers, we can also apply this mindful-state to the details of music “heard” only virtually in our heads.  It really makes no difference whether we are dealing with virtual-imagined music or actual physical sound waves.  The listening all takes place “between our ears” in the brain and simultaneously “amplified” or felt throughout our central nervous and endocrine systems.  

One thing is certain. The more musical detail we perceive…the richer, the more powerful will be the aesthetic experience we receive from listening!

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