Category: Classical Music 2.0 (Page 1 of 3)

Classical Music 2.0 is a 10-part blog series I started a couple of years ago putting forward a possible vision for the future of the classical music industry – imagining a time where we might have larger audiences, more revenue, and play a bigger role in society. (Previously: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5| Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9)

I started this 10-part series a couple of years ago and only had this one part left to go and then life intervened and I never quite got around to hitting publish. I was almost on the point of letting it go unfinished, but no less than Christopher Tin (see Part 9) told me he was still wondering if I was going to finish it. So, look, given Christopher’s music has given me so much joy over the last couple of years (plus got me through the last half of many a Parkrun), the least I can do is finish a blog series for him.

But in looking at what I’d prepared, I’ve now decided this will be better done as two parts, both on the topic of Barriers to Change. Up till now in the series, I have been more interested in putting forward a positive vision of what the classical music industry could look like, rather than critiquing where it is at the moment. Chiefly, this is because I find it is often easier to complain about things we don’t like, rather than find new ways of doing things. Also, many commentators before me (and many to come after me) are already doing a great job of pointing out the faults of the current industry.

However, this being the tail end of this series on Classical Music 2.0, I felt it would be worth tackling about the difficulty in getting from where the business is now to where it could be. So if we imagine the future is one such as I described in Part 8, where classical music organisations are creating programming to scoop up the entry-level audience, while also providing adult education aimed at creating new generations of knowledgeable fans, why aren’t we seeing more of it?

To me, the biggest reason is that there are two questions that aren’t clearly answered by most classical music organisations:

1. What is our purpose?
2. Whose job is it to drive change?

Let’s take them one at a time. In this post, I’ll talk about purpose.

Big Question # 1: What is our purpose?
If you’ve been following along with my train of thought in this series, the upshot of what I’m saying is that it needs to become a major purpose of a classical music organisation both to create programming for new audiences and also actively to work on the education level of those audiences to get them across new works. Why, then, for so long have most organisations a) presented most of their concerts for the established sophisticated audience rather than the new audience and b) acted as if the audience is already fairly knowledgeable? (e.g. pre-concert talks and program notes that assume the audience has several years of music theory under their belt).

The short answer – and the most generous one – is that when most of our existing classical music organisations started, getting new audiences was not part of their core purpose or even perhaps necessary. Go back 50+ years and the audiences were there and desperately keen to hear more live classical music. There was not the need for the presenting ensembles to also be the educational institutions that taught people about classical music. They could pick that up from school, music lessons, playing an instrument themselves or the myriad of books written to nerd people up on classical music.

So from their earliest inception, most of our existing classical music companies could focus on what they do best: producing the highest quality performances possible for a connoisseur audience – an audience that recognised that quality when they heard it.

Not only that, this purpose of excellence became an even higher goal once the recording industry really took off from the 1940s onwards. With the rise of home hi-fi systems, an orchestra stood to make a lucrative extra income stream if it could land some good recording contracts and get their albums out into the world. (As Berlin Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic and many others did during this period, making them household names to this day.) With a highly discerning record-buying and radio-listening public, what was needed to cut through? It was going to come down to the calibre of the players in an ensemble and the skill of the conductors that led it. So in that kind of environment, it made perfect artistic and business sense to invest in employing the best musicians an orchestra could afford and hiring the best conductors.

[Side note: I originally started writing this post this a couple of years ago. Since then, academic Samuel Cairnduff has written an interesting series of eight articles about the history of orchestras in Australia, which unpack this idea of purpose even more specifically for the Australian context and show how we have landed where we are. This is Part 1 of his series to get you started. Sam and I have swapped notes many times in the past on this topic, but his research into the social and cultural forces that created our current orchestras adds a lot of depth to the discussion.]

The Problems of Excellence as an Orchestra
But while it is a key driver of what made our classical ensembles successful in the 20th century, it is this unquestioned purpose of excellence – and the correlating hyper-focus on playing quality and conductors – that has led to some of the problems we’re facing now.

It took me a few years and working for a couple of classical music companies to realise this, but often the core artistic decisions around what gets performed are not made necessarily with audiences in mind. While there will certainly be a subtle pressure to make sure that the entire season isn’t unsellable, on the whole, the goal is usually to create programs that showcase the skill of the ensemble and their regular and guest conductors.

So this means that if a classical music company wanted to suddenly switch over some of its programming to be more friendly for a newish audience, there are all sorts of artistic questions and hurdles that would be encountered, because this pre-commitment to excellence runs so deep.

For example, let’s say that an orchestra wanted to put together a series of concerts that might have, say, a full classical work mixed with a bunch of shorter pieces from film, television and video games. (Which I have argued elsewhere is not too dissimilar to the old 19th century English concerts which featured one or two full works side by side with shorter lollipops.)

As soon as the Artistic team try to put together a concert like this, there would be some questions. First up, who is going to conduct this? To be able to pull off the full classical work, you would need a very experienced conductor. But if such a conductor is primarily from a background where the purpose of an orchestra is to showcase quality, is that conductor likely to want to conduct the populist pieces, which are generally going to be simpler both to play and conduct? Much as modern audiences love a bit of Hans Zimmer, this is simply not considered a challenge to artists who have performed nearly all the Mahler symphonies.

You could go the other way, and find a conductor who is more known for the populist pieces and then let them step up to conducting the full classical works – but then you run a significant risk that the musicians will feel unsatisfied with the whole thing if the calibre of the conducting on the classical work is not what they are used to.

Strange as it might seem, the reality is that classical musicians will usually tolerate playing simple populist repertoire with a less experienced conductor much more than they will tolerate playing classical music with a less experienced conductor.

The only really viable solution is to find a conductor who is both experienced enough to handle full classical works but also has enough enthusiasm for an audience that they are willing to play more populist works as well. But people like this are actually quite hard to find. (At least in Australia.) The more experience a conductor has, the less likely it is that they want to perform concerts with “entry-level repertoire”. (Although most conductors I know would hope that they could put on a good performance for new audiences.)

All of this is almost never spoken aloud, but a quick browse through who is conducting what at various orchestras around Australia will very quickly demonstrate that there are two tiers of conductors operating – those who conduct all-classical serious concerts and those who conduct populist shows. (With perhaps the exception in Australia of Benjamin Northey, but I’ll talk more about him in the next post.)

Lydia Tár and the Worst Thing That Could Happen in the Classical Music World

[WARNING: Spoilers for the movie Tár to follow.] This tension is what made the finale of the 2022 Cate Blanchett movie Tár so blackly comedic. In the film, Blanchett plays Lydia Tár, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic (the best orchestra in the world), renowned for playing the best repertoire in the world (we see her rehearsing Mahler with the orchestra, just to prove it). However, it emerges that she has been essentially using her power to access sexual favours from her protégés and using her influence to ruin their careers if she doesn’t get what she wants.

If the film was made by a director who didn’t understand the business, I would have mostly likely expected her to either end up in jail or maybe being killed mid-rehearsal by someone she had jilted or ruined along the way. Instead, in a movie that might have been mystifying to many, the movie ends with her losing her job with Berlin Phil and ending up somewhere in the Philippines conducting an orchestra in the performance of the music from video game Monster Hunter. Todd Field, the director, even makes the interesting choice of putting two thirds of the end credits up at the front part of the film, so that the actual end credits of Tar are short with Monster Hunter music all the way to the final words “The End”.

The reason?

Because the meanest thing that could happen to Lydia Tár in the classical music world is not for her to go to jail, lose her job, get cancelled or even get killed: it’s for her to end up conducting populist music. Even to leave the end credits with Lydia’s ethno-musical field recordings over the top would have been to give her too much credit for her greatness. For the judgment to be final, she has to go out to the sound of music that most of the industry would regard as banal and unimportant.

Conclusion
To conclude, the issue of purpose is a thorny one: it may well be sensible for classical music ensembles and organisations to alter their purpose to at least spend part of the time creating on-ramps for new audiences. But if those organisations are either explicitly or at least implicitly built around showcasing the excellence of the ensemble, it might mean that many classical music companies would feel that they have do take an artistic step backwards to do so.

And while it might seem obvious that an organisation whose audience dries up is not going to have the financial means to pursue excellence, this doesn’t seem to have stopped excellence being the main driver for the last few decades.

But, let’s say that in general, there was an agreement that things needed to change for classical music organisations. There is a secondary problem: who is actually responsible for and capable of driving that change? Whose job is it? I’ll tackle that in the next part.

Classical Music 2.0 is a 10-part blog series putting forward a possible vision for the future of the classical music industry – imagining a time where we might have larger audiences, more revenue, and play a bigger role in society. (Previously: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5| Part 6)

So if you’ve been with me on this blog journey so far and kept up with my train of thought, you will see that I’ve argued that there used to be a whole pyramid supporting the classical music industry, which has slowly crumbled, as we’ve only focused on the bit at the top – high-level professional music-making. I also spoke about the tyranny of familiarity, where we are predominantly seeing audiences buying tickets to music that they are familiar with, meaning less familiar music gets harder and harder to sell. Finally, I used the example of Brahms’ music to dive into where this “tyranny of familiarity” is coming from – as our audiences (potential or actual) know less traditional classical music theory, they have less of a framework for listening to complex music. Left to the devices of “tune and mood” to determine their musical taste, modern listeners are shaking up the traditional classical canon in ways that we probably haven’t seen in over a century, if at all, in the classical music ecosystem.

The Current Solution

Is there a way out of this? For most orchestras (who have to wrestle with the familiarity problem the most because they have the most concerts to sell in a year) the current method is usually for an orchestra (who have the most concerts to try to sell) to try programming a series of “blockbuster” classical concerts (i.e. concerts with at least one super-famous piece of music in it) alongside more obscure concerts, with a healthy dose of “commercial” concerts (i.e. movie concerts, bands with orchestra, etc) to make the money. The hope is that the commercials and the blockbusters will make enough money to balance out the smaller audiences for the niche works and that the company will come out ahead financially at the end of the year.

This is in the sophisticated companies. Amongst others, there can sometimes seem to be an approach that as long as the music is great and well-played, the programming shouldn’t be tinkered with and that the Marketing team should be able to generate audiences to anything that the Artistic team wants to put on.

Or sometimes companies go through swings and roundabouts – trying the balanced strategy for a couple of years until a new Chief Conductor or Artistic Director comes along, and then they go adventurous for a couple of years until the revenue starts to suffer, and there is a return to balance.

But on the whole, the industry does know, if there is enough familiarity, people will try some unfamiliarity. Put a warhorse on in one half of a concert, you can usually get away with programming something less well known in the other half. Classical music radio will always have a solid amount of famous pieces but they play them side by side with little known gems.

But this “balanced programming” approach seems too risky to me in this new environment. If this problem is being caused by less people being familiar with the music, I’m getting concerned that a day might come where people simply don’t know more than a handful of great classics – which jeopardises the breadth of repertoire that an orchestra can perform.

Populist + Serious

To me, the constraint that rarely gets questions is the persistence in only pairing famous serious classical music with slightly less famous or new serious classical music. Perhaps it’s not obvious (or perhaps it’s too controversial), but I think an obvious solution that is rarely tried is that the industry could push the pairing concept a lot further by deliberately blurring the lines between populist music and so-called serious/art/classical music.

Surely there is almost no more powerful way to introduce people to new music. In fact, I believe this is how it used to be done in concerts a century ago, but we’d lost sight of it by the end of the 20th century.

So I wanted to share a couple of stories where familiarity was leaned into to expand listener’s musical horizons. One is a story from the late 1800s that still has resonance today. The other is a relatively new phenomenon from the last 15 years. But both illustrate a similar point.

1) The story of the BBC Proms

Regular readers of this blog might know that I love reading about the rise of classical music in the 1800s in London because we can learn a lot about how they reached new audiences and grew a following. One of my favourite stories is on the origin of the London Proms concerts (or BBC Proms as they are known now).

According to Wikipedia:

They were inaugurated on 10 August 1895 in the Queen’s Hall in Langham Place by the impresario Robert Newman, who was fully experienced in running similar concerts at Her Majesty’s Theatre. Newman wished to generate a wider audience for concert hall music by offering low ticket prices and an informal atmosphere, where eating, drinking and smoking were permitted to the promenaders. He stated his aim to Henry Wood in 1894 as follows:

“I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Proms

There’s only a brief Wikipedia entry left to tell us about Newman, but what a genius of audience engagement! He recognised in a way that rarely is nowadays – that the programming of concerts itself could, with some work, become a training ground for creating new fans for classical music. But it needed to have a) regularity, b) easy stages and c) start popular. In other words, he was deliberately using familiar populism as the hook to be able to lead people in stages to the serious.

Now, what’ I’m not sure about is the timeframe for this sort of “training” of the public. The original Proms festival lasted for about 10 weeks, so was his goal to get people from popular to serious in 10 weeks? Or was it more the case to have this running over multiple years, and as people came back year on year, their tastes would get more adventurous? I suspect it would have been the latter, but if anyone knows more, I’d love to hear.

2) Spotify Discovery Playlists

This next story I remember hearing, but I can’t find confirmed on the internet at the moment – so I hope this isn’t apocryphal – is that music streaming service Spotify had an issue when they first released their famous Discovery Playlists. (For those unfamiliar with this concept, Spotify gives its listeners a fresh Discovery every week which serves them up about two hours of music that it thinks they will like, based on what they have been listening to before.)

The story goes that when Discovery Playlist was first made, the idea was to show people a list of music that was in genres or styles similar to music they already liked. The idea was to help you broaden your taste and discover new music that you were likely to enjoy. The important thing to note is that at this stage, the music in the Discovery Playlist was designed to be 100% new to the listener.

But the problem was that there was little take-up. Then, apparently, one day – by mistake, in the story I heard – a version of the Discovery Playlist was released where half the music were things that the listener already liked or had listened to before.

All of a sudden, the Discovery Playlist took off. In other words, it was by showing enough familiarity to the listener – which would reassure them that the playlist really did understand their musical taste – that the listener would be encouraged to listen to the newer music in the playlist.

Of course, the dilemma with this kind of playlist is that it is so driven by an algorithm, that it creates musical echo chambers where we only encounter a narrow range of music. But the principle is still there.

So, in conclusion, what might it look like if we used music from one familiar genre to try to draw listeners towards another one (in this case, classical music). In other words, could we push the concept of familiarity a lot further than it is currently used?

I’ll give more thoughts on that next week.