Category: General (Page 1 of 5)

Artists of the Future (Classical Music 2.0 – Part 9)

August 7, 2024 / Matthew Hodge / 0 Comments

Víkingur Ólafsson (L) and Christopher Tin (R)

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 | Part 7 | Part 8)

In this second-last part of the Classical Music 2.0 series, I wanted to share a couple of examples from the current classical music world which I think indicate that we are heading into a new world of how audiences are attracted to music. There are elements of some of these changes that are happening in various classical music companies (for instance, I was contacted by New Bedford Symphony Orchestra who pointed out their Musical Connections program which uses themed Spotify playlists and special events to introduce new audiences to classical music).

But where I am really starting to see traction is in the recording industry. Artists and record producers seem to be getting the idea of the new landscape quite dramatically. So in this post I want to talk about two artists who have broken fairly recently into the classical world, but without necessarily coming up the regular pathways. I think what they have done speaks to how an understanding of the new landscape of music can lead to increased cut-through and audience growth.

Víkingur Ólafsson

Víkingur Ólafsson is an Icelandic pianist, signed up with the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon (DG) label. I first discovered his music back in 2021 or 2022, when Limelight, the Australian fine arts magazine, named his recording of Debussy & Rameau, the album of the month. A few months later, it became Limelight’s best classical album of the year.

I had a listen to the album, and was almost instantly hooked. For background, I grew up learning the piano, but I’ll be honest, I have never fully enjoyed listening to hours of piano music. I don’t know what it is, but after half an hour, an album of piano music just becomes a bit too heavy going for me. But this Debussy / Rameau album was utterly compelling but I couldn’t quite work out way.

I started going down the Víkingur Ólafsson rabbit hole and became equally enamoured of his other albums (which at that time included a Philip Glass album and a J.S. Bach album). It took me a little while to realise why I liked his music so much, but I finally worked it out. It’s because his albums actually function in two ways at once: at a classical level, they are exquisitely performed, so the playing is phenomenal and the programming of fast and slow, dark and light is beautiful. So to the classical music world, he is a pianist with some interesting thematic programs and variety. Going from Philip Glass to Bach to Rameau is quite a feat.

However, at the same time, his albums are doing something else. With their spotless acoustics (they sound phenomenal on a good pair of headphones), they also double as Piano Music for Studying / Piano Chill playlists. In fact, whether it’s a canny choice on Víkingur’s part or his producers – or his musical taste just shakes out this way – but his repertoire largely consists (at least in the three albums I’ve mentioned) of short tracks, where the tempo and volume remain relatively consistent throughout a track. If he was cranking out Liszt or Beethoven albums – the path trod by many other up-and-coming pianists to “prove themselves” – his playing might be musically fantastic, but wouldn’t achieve this extra purpose of being great to chuck on in the background while you’re doing something else.

This means that when it comes to Spotify or any streaming service, Víkingur’s tracks aren’t just found in the classical section – his music features throughout all the relaxation /study / reading playlists.

This is key because it’s been well documented in a few places that the rise of classical music in the streaming world has been massive – particularly among younger audiences. However any time I have read reports on this, the results have always indicated that this is more people listening via mood and genre playlists, rather than, say, thousands of new people getting particularly knowledgeable about different classical composers. In other words, they are not like the old Brahms fans were that we were talking about in Part 6.

So in this environment, Ólafsson has spectacularly managed to play both sides of the market: he is tapping into the new up-and-coming market while also getting rave reviews from the traditional classical crowd as well.

Crossing Genres

Another feature of Ólafsson is how his various projects cross genres – further helping work the streaming algorithm in his favour. Joe Wright, the film director, has used him in a couple of film soundtracks: Winston Churchill bio-pic Darkest Hour and the semi-musical film Cyrano with Peter Dinklage. Ólafsson features in nearly every track of those soundtracks, thus cementing him in the film music playlist world – another common gateway into classical music.

Finally, he appeared on the track “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” on Moby’s recent Reprise album, also released by DG. (The fact that DG, one of the most prestigious classical record labels of all time, worked with Moby to create a crossover album at all already seems to indicate that the label at least sees the future of the industry.) So Ólafsson is now seeded across Spotify in three different genres, a myriad different line-up of mood playlists, while not at all hurting his standing in the classical music world.

The result? Measured by the number of streams per month (around 2.7 million when I checked), it makes him the second-most popular classical pianist on Spotify (second only to Lang Lang, with about 3.5 million). By comparison, every other great classical pianist of note, living or dead, is mostly below the 1 million mark. Having so spectacularly worked the streaming system, it is little wonder that Ólafsson can now pull a packed crowd wherever he goes, and has a following that is now keen to see what type of project he tries out next.

If I ever get to meet him, I’d love to ask him whether he has consciously chosen this path, or whether it is his producers, but either way it is a spectacular achievement!

Christopher Tin

An equally spectacular achievement that is perhaps less well known is the rise of American composer Christopher Tin. I first encountered Tin when his song cycle The Lost Birds was performed with vocal group VOCES8 and Queensland Symphony Orchestra, at which time I discovered that he has been well known in video game circles for many years. In fact, his composition model is quite clever. His most popular song of all time is “Baba Yetu”, an arrangement of the Lord’s Prayer sung in Swahili for choir and orchestra. It was designed as menu music for the video game Civilization IV.

The music became so popular that Tin later added multiple movements for choir and orchestra and turned it into an-hour long choral song cycle called Calling All Dawns. Each movement in Calling All Dawns is in a different language, sung by different ethnic choirs and vocalists, and the end result is something akin to a video game soundtrack combined with world music combined with a classical cantata.

He’s since repeated this song-cycle composition style four times, often taking something that started as video game music, and turning it into a full-length composition.

Thirty years ago, Tin would probably have been dismissed simply as a “crossover” artist – because the unspoken rule used to be that only music for the concert hall or opera or ballet counts as “classical music” and composers who spent most of their time outside those genres (e.g. John Williams) were rarely counted in the same breath as the classical composers.

So in a spectacular reversal of that trend, this year Washington National Opera commissioned Christopher Tin to write the finale for Puccini’s Turandot. And apparently, according to most reviewers, it was amazing. I cannot tell you how much of a reversal this is that someone who could have been pigeonholed as a “video game composer” was allowed to complete the most famous unfinished opera of all time.

Feelgood Countdown

Finally, at the time of writing this, I can’t help but mention ABC Classic’s latest Classic 100 countdown from a couple of months ago, which featured a “Feelgood” theme, which absolutely mixed up the genre’s even more. Go check out the final list for yourself. Classical purists might be sighing at the dumbing down of music, but it is clear ABC Classic sees the future.

These are just a few examples. I could list more. (e.g. violinist Daniel Hope, who has smashed even Lang Lang out of the water with monthly listens on Spotify). But these stories are enough to indicate that in terms of recordings, radio and individual artists, a sophisticated audience-building approach is being utilised.

Which obviously leads to the question: what seems to be holding up the major classical music companies from also adopting such an approach? (And I don’t count just putting on populist concerts as “commercial” shows for money as building an audience of the future.) The answer is a complex and subtle set of barriers, and I’ll talk about them in my final post in this series next time.

Classical Music 2.0 – Part 1: Can we create a new classical music ecosystem?

June 6, 2024 / Matthew Hodge / 5 Comments

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.

I’m no longer working full-time in the classical music industry, but I’m still fascinated to see how it’s going from the sidelines. I started in the business back in 2007, and at the time, I thought I was the only one who was really thinking about the future of the industry, whether the audience would die out, how to grow new audience members. But since then, it’s been great to see that I wasn’t alone. In the last decade, there have been a rising number of voices contributing to the discussion around this, most noticeably Aubrey Bergauer and Ruth Hartt in the US (and occasionally Greg Sandow, who really was the first to sound the alarm on the issue), David Taylor in the UK, Australia’s own Susan Eldridge, the great folks at RasmussenNordic who are working with orchestras across Denmark, not to mention fascinating things happening in the academic world as well. (And if there are more of you out there that I haven’t heard of – hit me up! I’d love to know who you are and what you’re thinking.)

But despite ongoing discussion and commentary, as a whole, we’re still a long way off tackling the issue of organisational and industry change. By which I mean, it’s one thing to say that the industry needs to look completely different to attract new audiences, increase diversity, etc. But how does a classical organisation get there? How do you implement the changes that might be necessary, when you’ve got a bunch of stakeholders with strong thoughts on how things should be – musicians, conductors, the current audience, Board members – PLUS the weight of a couple of hundred years of classical music history and tradition that we’re expected to live by?

It’s a lot.

Classical Music 2.0

So in this series of blog posts, which I’m calling Classical Music 2.0, I want to put forward a positive vision of where the industry might go (either because we choose to go there, or maybe societal forces just drag us there) and the steps that might be involved. Rather than spend too much time pointing out the things we’re doing wrong, I’d like to suggest some things we could do that might be right.

Obviously, any speculation about the future is just that – speculation. And things like COVID caught us by surprise. But I would like to think there are enough general principles operating about how people interact with music to indicate what a positive future might look like.

The Idea of an Ecosystem

But I wanted to start in Part 1 with the idea of ecosystem. Because each classical music company or ensemble is a separate entity (at least in Australia), we can be forgiven for perhaps thinking of them as being independent. Company X has its set of customers, Company Y has a different set of customers, etc. However, there are far more likely to be relationships between those elements.

For instance, in my experience of the Australian scene, a capital city will often contain a major state orchestra, an opera company and a ballet company, and also many smaller niche chamber orchestras and groups. And these organisations, far from being separate, will often share common audience members. Frequently, the way it works is that the more niche organisations – while having a few loyal unique fans of their own – will share most of their audience with the more broad-reaching organisations. In other words, subscribers to see chamber music will often be subscribers to see the symphony orchestra. However, because chamber music is the more niche type of music – sorry, chamber music fans, but it is true! – while it is safe to assume that most of the chamber music fans will be orchestra fans, it’s not at all safe to assume the reverse.

A Pyramid – but how tall?

All this is because, rather than separate entities, we are really seeing a pyramid. In this structure, niche organisations are able to be successful (albeit with a smaller audience base) because they draw on the larger audience base of the broader-reach organisations below them.

But the hypothesis that I want to put forward is that too often the classical music business can think the pyramid goes as far down as, say, the symphony orchestra in a city. But my hypothesis is that symphony orchestras traditionally were part of a much larger pyramid that included populist music for classical instruments, in various different forms. And I believe, whether we like it or not, that relationship between populist and classical music is part of what drove large audiences for classical music.

In my next couple of posts, I’ll elaborate a bit further on the pyramid idea.

A Guy Named George – Part 5: George Grove and Classical Music Audience-Building

February 1, 2023 / Matthew Hodge / 0 Comments

Note: I originally wrote this blog post series about George Grove – legendary classical music audience builder – back in 2016 on an old blog. I’ve lightly updated these posts from their original form. This is the Final Part of Five. It is interesting to reread this article in 2023, after my own work now in the audience-building space and seeing the clever work of others in this area. I would probably be more optimistic in tone if I was writing this now, but I thought I would leave it mostly as I wrote it back then, as most things I still stand by.

If you’re just joining me, here are the other parts:

A Guy Named George – Part 1: The Book That Changed My Life

A Guy Named George – Part 2: The Man Who Changed My Life

A Guy Named George – Part 3: The Engineer Who Brought Classical Music to the Masses?

A Guy Named George – Part 4: Secrets Hidden in the Royal College of Music

In part 4, I talked about my memorable afternoon back in 2016 spent in the Royal College of Music and how I discovered that George Grove’s Crystal Palace concerts turned out to be a canny mixture of education and crowd-pleasing fun (perhaps leaning towards the latter).

There is sometimes an (often unspoken) assumption in modern classical music circles that the secret to getting a big audience is to play the music at a very high standard of excellence. But after those few hours spent in the Royal College, I’m going to be more emphatic: I’m not convinced that was responsible for the massive growth of classical music.

Excellence Organisations vs Audience Organisations

Instead, I think it was the other way around – because classical music became so massively popular, then there was a sophisticated enough audience to appreciate excellence when they heard it. As a result, I believe there are two types of classical music organisations – those that are focused around Excellence and those that are focused around Audiences. While every classical music organisation will strive both to be excellent and to grow audiences – both are necessary – there is often one of these that will win out as the clear central direction, even if it is never implicitly stated.

But some of you might be thinking, surely being excellence-centred and audience-centred is the same thing? Not necessarily.

Nowadays there are many, many recordings floating around of any classical piece. (Who can even count how many complete sets of Beethoven and Mahler symphonies are in existence?) Why is that? This is because classical music enthusiasts, the connoisseurs, are so intimately familiar with the details of these works that they are always looking out for that interpretation or performance that is just that little bit better than any they have ever heard. They’re looking for the most perfect rendition, the one that gets an A+ while all the others get an A.

And this is what the classical music industry thrived on in the 20th century: the existence of the connoisseurs. So a typical modern classical music company [at least when I originally wrote this in 2016] is built around the concept of drawing in the best conductors, the best musicians, the best ensembles, because they are performing for the connoisseurs, that audience who is knowledgeable enough to know the difference between the A performance and the A+ performance.

But for the person starting out with a vague interest in classical music – they have no such level of knowledge. This is why there were so many cheap and nasty CD labels selling classical CDs for $5 in bargain bins at supermarkets back in the 80s and 90s. To the average person, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or the 1812 Overture is the same, regardless of who plays it.

So Excellence Organisations play to connoisseurs, strive for perfection, and the emphasis is geared towards performing a broad repertoire with prestigious musicians. However, by comparison, George Grove’s Crystal Palace series was an Audience Organisation. Perhaps by necessity of being run for a profit, it needed to be one, rather than any great desire by Grove to be populist. But necessity is the mother of invention, as they say.

And so Grove’s Audience Organisation was built around the audience: It had to be entertaining to reach a broad crowd. It had to include not just serious music, but also music the masses would respond to as well. It attempted to use educational tools like program notes to make the audience more sophisticated, definitely, but it always recognised that it had to get them in the door first before any of that could happen.

So what happened? Why did the Crystal Palace concerts die out after Grove died? Why don’t we see concerts like this any more? Why is nearly every classical music organisation today trying to be an Excellence Organisation with virtually no one trying to be an Audience Organisation?

My theory – and I’m now going out on a limb and completely speculating here – is that Grove, quite by accident, had stumbled on the magic formula for growing classical music audiences. If the concerts were just to please the crowds, it would have been like André Rieu – great fun for those who go, but not a bridge to the great classics. If it had been all serious and musicological, it would have been like a modern-day film appreciation class: great for the small number of people who like to educate themselves about culture, but not meaning a lot to the hordes thronging the multiplex. But George did both – he was an entertainer and an enthusiastic teacher – and he taught the lay audiences of Britain to love classical music.

Like MasterChef for Classical Music

The closest thing to which I would compare George’s achievement would actually be MasterChef. Everyone who watches the show knows it’s manipulative, cheesy and aiming at the lowest common denominator in terms of entertainment. Its goal is to have you glued to the TV set every night for an hour. And yet, slowly but surely, as this reality TV show has infiltrated the hearts and minds of Australia (and I’m sure other countries that have the show), what has happened? It has raised a generation of foodies. And that has a flow-on effect for the restaurant industry, for fine-dining experiences. There are more upmarket food experiences to be had in my city of Sydney [and now Brisbane] than ever before. So a show that is built mostly around pleasing its audience is actually doing a service for food culture in Australia, more so than any fine dining guides or food reviewers were ever able to achieve before.

A Victim of His Own Success?

So why do we not see anything quite like the Crystal Palace series today? My theory is that Grove’s experiment was, in the end, a victim of its own success. By the end of the 19th century, as Grove’s life came to an end (he died in 1900), there were multiple new Audience Organisations having a crack at attracting the lay person. (The most famous of which was the London Proms, which is still running to this day.) People were so keen to nerd up on classical music, that Grove was able to successfully put together and publish the Grove Dictionary of Music. (This is still in print but nowadays it’s a large multi-volume work that lurks in Conservatorium libraries. What has possibly been missed today is that the dictionary was intended, not for classical music students, but for the lay person to gain an understanding of classical music.)

Portrait of George Grove by Charles Furse that hangs in the foyer of the Royal College of Music in London.

Also, rather than head off to Europe to learn to play classical music, there were enough talented young musicians that a good music school was warranted in England. And so the Royal College of Music was established and has continued in operation ever since.

In short, classical music was such an in thing to do in London, that really nobody had to worry about trying to persuade people it was entertaining. The peer pressure did that work. Everyone was reading up on it, studying it, and going to as many concerts as they could. The ecosystem was well and truly set up. So in the early 20th century, you can see the extraordinary explosion of public orchestras setting up in London. The London Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the New Philharmonia, etc. If an orchestra could get its A+ conductors and musicians lined up, there was an audience willing to part with their money to hear them.

In short, classical music was now so much part of the popular culture, that it was carried along by its own momentum. It was only when this happened, when the audience was up to this level, that organisations could now focus on being Excellence-Centred to be successful and thus was born our 20th century model of classical music companies, the one we have inherited.

Hereditary Culture

Also – and this would require a whole separate blog post – culture up until the 1960s was hereditary. Back then, you aimed to carry on the traditions and culture of your parents and grandparents, thus why many churches, up until recently, sang the same old hymns from the 19th century and why many classical music audiences over the age of 70 can remember going to concerts with their parents and listening to classical music their entire lives. Why would you listen to anything else? It’s the best that culture can offer!

But in today’s day and age, things are different. At least for the last 40 years, the goal as soon as we hit our teenage years was to discover music that sounded as obnoxiously differently from our parents’ music as humanly possible. [Though it is interesting to see in 2023, that this is not happening with Millennials and Gen Z, who are rediscovering classical music on their own terms but not in the hereditary culture-handed-down way of their great-grandparents.]

Side by side with this generational shift amongst the masses, I think something else happened in classical music circles – we possibly lost sight of how to make people love classical music.

Everybody has been competing in the Excellence space for so long, no one is really sure how to do the Audience-building thing any more. And the reality is, it’s much harder to do now than it ever was. It will look different for every generation, because audiences are always looking for something new and exciting. By the time Grove died, classical music was so popular and the Crystal Palace wasn’t the new and exciting venue that it used to be, that his series of concerts just died out. Unlike Excellence Organisations, which just need to be excellent, Audience Organisations need to be constantly evolving because the audience is evolving.

To build an audience today for classical music – and it’s something that is desperately needed – will require a whole new set of different tricks. I suspect it might need to involve a larger role for film music, which is the most common orchestral music still listened to by laypeople. But no one is entirely sure.

But more pressing even than the mix of music is this question: where are our George Groves today? Where are people who can speak the ordinary language of laypeople, and yet draw them into a greater knowledge of the classical music art form? Where are people so enthusiastic for classical music, that their enthusiasm infects a whole city? (And in this day and age of the internet, one person’s enthusiasm could spread across the globe.)

I’d like to be optimistic, but as the classical music industry faces an uncertain future, I’m not sure whether we’ll be able to return to the Audience focus fast enough to stem the tide of the ageing audience. But there are glimmers of hope. For instance a young orchestra, the Melbourne Philharmonia Project, popped up in an article I was reading earlier this year. They talk about wanting to create “an orchestral experience which was aimed at not the 7 per cent that listen to classic music but the other 93 per cent”. Now that right there is the language of an Audience Organisation. I’d like to think that if enough groups like this appear, following in the footsteps of George Grove (even if we unfortunately just think of him as the guy with the multi-volume music dictionary named after him), maybe collectively we all might be able to make a difference.

After all, if George Grove could change my life and open up the world of classical music to me, why couldn’t the same happen to plenty of other people out there if we gave it a try?

A Guy Named George – Part 4: Secrets Hidden in the Royal College of Music

November 24, 2022 / Matthew Hodge / 0 Comments

Note: I originally wrote this blog post series about George Grove (my classical music hero) back in 2016 on an old blog. I’ve lightly updated these posts from their original form. This is Part Four of Five and I’ll post the rest of the story in coming weeks. If you’re just joining me, here are the other parts:

A Guy Named George – Part 1: The Book That Changed My Life

A Guy Named George – Part 2: The Man Who Changed My Life

A Guy Named George – Part 3: The Engineer Who Brought Classical Music to the Masses?

If you’ve been following along with the previous posts then you’ll know I’d ended up in London in April 2016 trying to work out the secret of George Grove’s success in the classical music field. In the last post, I described how looking at George’s biography and a bit of sleuthing around Wikipedia led to the astonishing conclusion that in the latter half of the 19th century, Grove – a non-musician, from a working class background, running a series of concerts with an (arguably) second-rate orchestra with the same conductor every week, performing for an audience so unsophisticated it didn’t even know to sit down while the music was playing – was able to out-perform his more sophisticated rivals, the Philharmonic Societies (the Royal and the New).

I was madly curious to know what actually happened at these concerts of his in the Crystal Palace to make them so successful. For that, the internet wasn’t helping so much. So there was only one place to go – the closest thing that you could call a “home” for George Grove in London – The Royal College of Music, still regarded as one of England’s best music schools.

The Royal College of Music, defying being photographed in the London midday sun.

I had lined up a chat a few weeks before with Dr Peter Horton, who worked in the RCM library. He was amazingly helpful, and a fount of knowledge on all things to do with concerts in the 19th century. I know musicologists and researchers are probably used to these sorts of things, but as a lay person completely new to any sort of historical sleuthing, being able to chat to people who are full of knowledge and stories about a past era is nothing short of astounding to me.

The beautiful stained-glass windows of the RCM library.

After our discussion, I got to visit the Reading Room of the library. This itself, was a powerful experience. Because as well as being a charming old-school academic reading room right there, sitting on top of a bookshelf overlooking the reading tables – was Grove himself.

The Grove bust, just sitting there on top of a bookshelf in the reading room.

It’s a slightly larger-than-live carved wooden bust (there’s a matching one in the room next door for Elgar) with no name caption – but there is no mistaking those mutton-chops. It was George and it was like he was waiting for me.

I only had a few hours, so I decided to check out a couple of books on Grove and the Crystal Palace days, some of the old Crystal Palace programmes and a couple of examples of Grove’s “commonplace books”.

The commonplace books took my breath away, because I’ve never been connected with someone from the past so intimately before. To look at, a commonplace book is just a small hardbound book with blank musical staves in them. But this was more than blank sheet music – this was the equivalent of George Grove’s iPod favourites playlist. (Substitute whatever personal device you listen to your music on nowadays.)

In the 19th century, when recorded music was still several decades away, what did you do if you really loved a piece of music, especially a symphony or something that required a large number of musicians? You might be lucky to hear it half a dozen times in your lifetime. And so, almost as a way of carrying the experience around, Grove had his commonplace books.

Any time Grove came across a musical idea that he particularly liked, he would make his own copy of the sheet music. Never the whole thing – you would have had to buy the sheet music for that – but maybe a theme that caught his ear. His favourites were clearly Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schubert because they cropped up again and again. So here, for instance, is the majestic French horn opening of Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 (“The Great”). Which sounds like this for those who can’t read music.

I can just imagine Grove, flicking through his commonplace book, seeing that notation of the opening of the Schubert symphony and hearing the French horns firing up in his imagination. It made me wonder how many times he got to hear that symphony live in his lifetime. Did he listen extra closely every time he heard that theme, knowing that it would be several years before he’d get to ever hear it again. And, later in life, did he listen to it wondering if this would be the last time he would ever hear it?

The whole thing was utterly moving.

And there were little quirky things – on one of the blank pages inside the commonplace book, he had written out in full the words to a hymn “Lead Kindly Light”. Why did he do that? Did he like that particular hymn tune? As a man who dug into his faith intellectually (he was a huge enthusiast for Biblical archaeology when he wasn’t doing music) but struggled with doubts, were these words a comfort for him? We’ll never know 100%, but it was fascinating.

And then on to the programme notes:

I love the warning at the bottom – clearly this was an audience that was used to tromping in and out of things, regardless of what was happening on stage.

Very quickly I found out something amazing about these programme booklets. They weren’t just a random copy of the printed programs that had been kept for posterity. These were Grove’s own copies of the booklets. Flick through half a dozen of them and you’d find his familiar handwriting (and the ink of his fountain-pen or whatever pencil he had to hand, still just as dark and clear today as it was 150 years ago) scattered throughout. Holding it, you could just see him sitting in the Crystal Palace listening to the orchestra playing. He would think of a random idea, or perhaps something that he could have said differently in his notes, whip out his pen, and jot down his thoughts. That night, he’d add the program to his growing collection of the little booklets that were the trademark of that concert series.

But the really jaw-dropping fact emerged soon after I started checking out the second page of the programmes – the list of works that were to be performed at each concert. Suddenly, the penny dropped for me; I realised how he had gotten the crowds and grown his audiences. Look at this program – it’s a typical Crystal Palace Saturday afternoon concert program:

Beginning and ending with exciting crowd-pleasing overtures, interspersed with lots of short songs and popular opera arias, and the only major work is the Beethoven Violin Concerto. A concert cleverly designed for newbies *and* classical music fans at the same time.

There were many, many concerts that had this sort of format – they would start with an overture (the opening music, if you like) from a ballet or operetta that was popular at the time. Then there would be a curious 5-minute interval. (Only 10 minutes into the concert!). Then after that a long classical work, like a piano concerto or symphony by Beethoven. Then a couple of singers would appear to do a number of popular arias from operas and others songs that are now long since out of popular rotation. There would be another 5 minute break and then one more final overture, followed by a bit of organ music for the next half hour while you got a chance to walk around (or “promenade” as they called it back then).

For those who aren’t used to classical concerts, let me say right now: this is completely different from how we do concerts today. This is the equivalent of starting a concert with 10 minutes of John Williams’ music from Star Wars VII, playing a major classical work, bringing out some singers to do a bit of popular musical theatre, and then finishing with some all-guns-blazing piece of crowd-pleasing orchestral action – like Thomas Bergersen, for instance. (If you’re sceptical, just listen to the last couple of minutes of that Sullivan “In Memoriam” overture that ends the concert. Totally designed to have the crowd roaring on their feet.)

But lest you think the Crystal Palace just sounds like a glorified 19th century André Rieu concert, flicking through the programme notes, we see that in the middle part, where they did the serious music, they were pretty determined to turn the audience into classical music nerds. They’d play the whole work, and Grove’s notes were thorough and methodical. He didn’t hold back from explaining key changes, sonata form structure and the other musicological stuff. His language was enthusiastic and he was aiming at the lay-person, but he was determined that the lay-person could learn to love this music at the same level as music aficionados.

George Grove having an enthusiastic gush (albeit a musically technical one) about how awesome he finds the Beethoven Violin Concerto. “An art which no one ever possesses, and perhaps no one ever will possess, as he did.”

In short, Grove was putting on a show that attempted to both please the crowds and yet make them more sophisticated at the same time. In short, the whole thing was built around the audience and it was designed to be fun. The dirty little secret of the Crystal Palace and their audience growth was finally out. The reason it took off was because they were giving the audience a good time. No wonder the poor old Royal Philharmonic Society couldn’t compete!

Now in the 1860s, Grove can get away with putting two major works in the concerts – Mendelssohn’s “Reformation” Symphony and Beethoven’s E Flat Major Piano Concerto (which, interestingly enough, is not nicknamed the “Emperor” Concerto, as we would do today). But the program is still padded out with lighter, crowd-pleasers.

And clearly it worked. I looked through programs from the 1850s and then some from the 1860s and in a decade, the noticeable change was that the concerts had moved from having one lengthy major work to having two a decade later. (So an 1860s Crystal Palace would still start with light fluff, end with light fluff and have light fluff in the middle, but it might contain a concerto and a symphony mixed in the middle somewhere.)

I can’t prove this without doing a lot more research, but the evidence points to Grove’s “audience-first” approach starting to pay off. It took time, but gradually, his audience was getting a longer attention span and growing in sophistication.

Next time in this series on George Grove, in my final post on him, I’ll cover off why I think his influence died out, and what we can learn from him in the 21st century.

Category: General (Page 1 of 5)

Artists of the Future (Classical Music 2.0 – Part 9)

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A Guy Named George – Part 5: George Grove and Classical Music Audience-Building