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)
Forgive me if the detour on the topic of familiarity seemed like a long one, but outside of academic circles, it is talked about far less frequently than I think it should be. But if we accept that familiarity is one of the strongest drivers of attendance – at least for the majority of audience members – then we can now understand the importance of the pyramid of the classical music ecosystem.
In the past, the lower-down parts of the pyramid – light music, classical music in popular culture, being taught classical music at school – all these things, far from being separate and unrelated, actually created an interconnected web whereby many people were hearing the same classical tunes over and over again. It made the sound of classical instruments and the music written for those instruments ring in the ears of a large proportion of the population. Furthermore, there was a good chance – and this is important – that a lot of people knew both the names of the composers and pieces that they liked. In the same way that it’s no good deciding you like a certain song if you can’t remember the name of it or who sings it, then the same holds doubly true for classical music. A certain knowledge of the canon is a prerequisite, so that when you see, for instance, your local orchestra offer to perform Brahms Symphony No.3, you have a good idea who Brahms is and what his third symphony sounds like.
From there, the success of classical music companies was more or less a numbers game. If there are so many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people exposed to classical music, then there is a good chance that you can get 100,000 people in a large city who were happy to go hear at least their favourite pieces from time to time. And if you could get 100,000 to do that, then there was probably a good chance that you could persuade 5,000 of them to come several times a year (assuming they had the time and money to do so).
So, to me, in this new age where classical music seems fragile, the way forward seems obvious: the industry needs to start rebuilding the pyramid that used to be the engine that generated new classical music fans.
To do that, work needs to be done in two directions, both of which are quite different, but both necessary for a full ecosystem to survive. In short:
- To deepen current audiences’ familiarity levels, the industry needs to invest in adult educational initiatives that are designed with the sole aim of increasing that audience’s knowledge and enjoyment of classical repertoire. This is not simply about facts for their own sake – all the knowledge needs to be targeted towards creating increased enjoyment of the repertoire.
- To increase new audience numbers, the industry needs to invest in creating programs that will be familiar to them (and I would go even further and argue that there is a need to start commissioning / creating repertoire for that purpose).
Strategy 1: Adult Education
With regards to educational initiatives, I think we need to start with some basic questions: If someone wanted to get into classical music, where would they start nowadays? Is there a book they could read? Is there an online course? Is there a person or two out there known as a guru who can get people into classical music?
These initiatives can’t just introduce audiences to a few favourite pieces – though they should at least do that. But do they give audiences the listening tools to be able to tackle trying new works on their own and have a good chance of enjoying them?
Now, it is true that nearly every large classical music organisation has an educational department that puts on educational concerts for school children. And a lot of organisations have pre-concert speakers at concerts (of which I am grateful to be one).
But to invest most of our educational efforts into concerts for young people on the hope that they will come back in 30-40 years as ticket buyers, seems a very long shot to me. (Especially since I suspect these educational concerts have been running for that long, and I’m not sure how many of those young people have turned into ticket buyers.)
I’m not saying that organisations shouldn’t do these – they should – but what do classical music organisations have to offer to the brand new person on their database who actually stumped up money to see their first concert? Or that the ticket buyer can suggest to their friend or partner who knew nothing about the music, but came along for the night out?
What if classical organisations had an e-course they could offer (perhaps as an extra revenue stream) to every new ticket buyer? What if they had a book they could sell at interval? It would take money and time to set all this up, but once it is in place, it would be a useful resource for several years.
Strategy 2: New Concerts and Repertoire
On the other side of the two-pronged approach, there is still much that could be done in the area of programming and repertoire that might bring in new audiences. Some ideas include:
New Pop Music. The classical music industry could start to work more closely with the pop industry to bring the sound of classical instruments back into pop music (and ideally into pop culture). And I think the impetus for that needs to come from the classical side. There are many talented musicians in the pop sphere, but unless they have a small fortune, they would never consider writing songs for orchestra or classical ensemble, because where would they find a classical group to play with? (Gone are the days when a pop producer might have lined up an orchestra as part of a recording session.)
So is it any wonder that modern pop is going to learn towards using guitars, drums, keys and electronics (including completely digitised orchestras), because how many other instrument combos are affordable? So what if every classical group set aside a week a year to work with a pop group and an arranger to create an EP?
New Lighter Classical Music. I was also going to suggest creating “lighter” classical music, but to be honest the growing mainstream interest in neo-classical composers such as Max Richter and Ludovico Einaudi is showing that there is already an interest in this. But how much of this music is being integrated into concerts put on by the established classical groups?
Mixed Genre Concerts. I owe this idea to Aubrey Bergauer, who many years ago posed the question: who wouldn’t want to go to a concert that features John Williams and Beethoven? In my own years in the industry, I was able to see a few concerts come to light that mixed genres like this and the results were always tremendously popular with audiences, but it still seems a rare thing to see in an orchestra season.
Imagine the Future
The reality is that some of these things are starting to move. But these things are still mostly happening to the side and disconnected from the core classical business and in the case of the Education layer, missing in a lot of cases. However, imagine what it might look like if this was all interconnected.
Imagine, if you will, some time in the future, where popular bands on Spotify regularly team up with classical artists or ensembles to create cracking new covers of their favourite tunes. And where the classical groups, in turn, regularly put out recordings of orchestral fantasias on the most popular pop music, written with classical instruments in mind and showing off the range and technique of these instruments. (Lest you think this is totally blasphemous, maybe think of it a bit like Liszt with his phenomenal piano arrangements of popular songs and arias, or Beethoven doing a theme and variations on things like God Save the King.)
To facilitate this, orchestras and ensembles regularly put aside a week or two to record with local bands. A small army of dedicated arrangers and composers who might otherwise have been considered too crossover are starting to write seriously high-level music for this space.
People start to listen more to these classical covers of their favourite songs and start getting served ads – within whatever social medial platforms are still standing in the future – that their local orchestra puts on a concert of this type of stuff 2 or 3 times a year.
They go to the concert to hear, I don’t know, the Billie Eilish variations or the Taylor Swift Fantasia (or maybe even Brahms vs Radiohead or the Resurrection Mixtape, just to name some that actually exist) and they find that the clever orchestra – doubling as its own warm-up act – in the same concert, is playing other cool stuff – bits of video game music, film music, new compositions and traditional classical music that the new audience now realises sounds awesome when it is played live.
They go home raving to their friends that they’re going to try this again. A day or two later, they get an email and the orchestra wants to know:
- Would you like to learn more about classical music? Because – if you would – they have a book and an online course called How To Get Into Classical Music that you can buy. Plus an online group that swaps favourite tunes.
- Oh yeah, and here’s a $50 ticket to come and try a “regular” classical concert if you haven’t already.
- Or if you’re super-keen, for $X a week (about the cost of joining a gym and pretty much guaranteed to improve your mental health), you can sign up for unlimited concerts. We’ll throw in the book for free if you do.
Now, does it require a lot of work to get to this kind of future? For sure. To create entry-level gateway music, we’d have to dig up the composers and arrangers who have been “languishing” writing music for video games and TV and let them know that we’d be interested in what they could do for the concert hall. For the Education piece, we would need to track down musicologists who don’t mind talking to complete newbies that might not be super-familiar with classical music. And there would need to be organisations prepared to have strategies to tie all this together, so that audiences really can make a journey step-by-step from the music they are currently familiar with to the music that classical musicians would love them to be familiar with one day. In fact, it might require multiple organisations to join together to achieve change on this scale.
Which is why – as I said right back at the beginning – we need to start thinking of classical music as an ecosystem.
And maybe this sounds like no form of the classical music business that you’ve ever known or been familiar with, but to me it sounds very much like the words of Robert Newman who started the Proms concerts in London (that I wrote about in my last post). “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.”
The future may not look exactly like this, but if we can envision a future that looks different, it gives us something to move towards.
I have two more parts to wrap up this series. In Part 9, I will share a couple of examples of artists who have benefited very well from understanding the new cross-genre age that we find ourselves in.
Finally, in Part 10, I’ll talk about some of the internal barriers that are still preventing this sort of change at a large scale.
I’m a former marketer / arts administrator in the Australian classical music scene, and was privileged to work for three of the major classical music companies.
I’m loving your line of reasoning, Matt. There is so much more that classical music organisations could be doing… and not always about incorporating popular genres. The rise in popularity of the HIP groups indicate that many ppl are happy to attend music that “generally sounds familiar”, firmly grounded in tonality and more predictable patterns, matching the way our brains work. Presented in ways that are welcoming, drawing on a breadth of related disciplines, is making this a growth area of interest.
Thanks for your kind comments! Yes, I agree and think we’ll see a lot more movement in this space in coming years. In my next post, I’ll be talking about a couple of artists who are rising stars because of how well they have navigated this new market.