TPT81

Mr. Carroll-

When I attended your seminar at Lake Placid a few years ago, there was a discussion held on the future of the Symphony Orchestras in the United States. That was however, five years ago. With all of the changes that have gone on with contracts, strikes, etc..., how do you feel now about the future that many of us are working towards? I recall your comments five years ago to be very interesting and inciteful, and I hope that you can share them with me, and all of us on TM, once again.

Thanks so much for making yourself so accessible here. Many pros are very hard to reach and learn from.

Zeb

Manny Laureano

Zeb,

Ed is off gallavanting about the globe as is his want and asked us to keep an eye on things. That's why I'm answering in his collumn about this particular subject.

The symphony orchestra is undergoing a set of changes in philosophy. How are they going to approach fund raising, young person's concerts, outreach to an evolving American public and the huge immigrant population that has little knowledge of traditional classical music, programming of new music... many things. The orchestras that are doing okay are looking at those changes and reacting.

As long as we continue to teach our children about classical music and get them involved by putting instruments in their hands along with baseball gloves, slide rules, paint brushes, telescopes, and history books we'll be fine.

We try to compare ourselves with European models and that's folly. Europe is where the bulk of what we play comes from and we relate to that music as Johnny-come-latelies relatively speaking. That music is part of their culture just as jazz is part of ours. The point is, we have to learn to develop our own culture of enjoying, selling, promoting, teaching. It all boils down to financial support. I'm not a fan of supporting professional arts performances through government subsidies. It's artificial and the public doesn't learn to support it other than with ticket sales. That's not enough. Ones heart has to be invested in music for it to thrive not just survive. We need more corporate examples like Texaco who, for years, brought us the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts my MYS students listen to on saturdays after Youth Symphony rehearsals. See what I mean, how it all links together? That's what I mean by selling.

Huge, huge subject and this is just one viewpoint. The bottom line is that I have the utmost faith that orchestras will be around for us to play in but we still have to practice and get the gigs.

ML

TPT81

Mr Laureano-

Thank you so much for your quick and intelligent reply. Also, I can't thank you enough for your contributions to a site like this. We all know you are busy and to take time to help pros and beginners is a great thing.

I agree entirely that we need to keep bringing music to the youth of the US (I don't, however, know too many young kids that would know what a slide-rule is ). I really hope that professional musicians will increase their exposure through outreach programs, and that corporations will increase their funding to the arts.

I am not too old yet, just turned 25, but I was lucky to have great exposure to classical music while growing up. I wish more people my age had the exposure I had. Again, thanks so much for your reply.

Zeb

PS I spent last year at Rice with Greg Haro, a student of yours. Greg is a great young trumpet player, and I expect to hear a lot from him in the future. Congrats!!!

Jimi Michiel

I once heard a German conductor talking about how many orchestras in Europe are almost completely state funded and therefore don't even need to rely on ticket sales for their budgets. The result is that many of the orchestras are adventurous in their programming but often times can't get anyone to show up. It's a situation right out of Milton Babbit's essay "Who Cares if You Listen."

On the other side, many orchestras seem to be bending over backwards to please (and expand) their audience. San Francisco did a rock album with Metallica a few years ago. What started out (I believe) as a one-time concert of video game music in L.A. has been touring the country.

In between are holdouts like New York and Boston, who it seems are still to conservative to program music that your average 18-40 year old would be interested in. The new music that is played (at least in Boston) is some of the most adventurous (read:unlistenable for the un-initiated)music out there. They can do this because they've been around for 150 or so years and have the financial base to do it.

I think thats where it's going to be really interesting and possibly the place where you will see the most change in the next few decades. It's not hard to see that the audience for classical music is aging very quickly. Anybody who goes to a Friday afternoon concert in Boston (many times the most well-attended of their weekly series) can look out into the audience and see a sea of grey hair and shiny domes. What happens when this audience isn't there anymore? What happens when ticket sales go down and the aging benefactors are gone? How much financial pain will the NYP have to go through before they start paying closer attention to younger audiences, and caring who listens?

-Jimi

Manny Laureano

That's where your youth symphony and school programs come in. They have to be at a high enough level to accomplish two things:

1) The kids that are going to go on to one day play need a place to work their skills today playing ferociously difficult repertoire

2) The ones who aren't going on need to learn to love this stuff so much that they can't do without it when they're adults.

In Minneapolis we have a huge number of young people that come to our concerts and I'm happy to say that I see college students like Jimi and the younger high school kids from my youth orchestra going to concerts on a regular basis. When they go off to school and come back on vacation they always fit a concert into their schedules!

I have to toot the MO's horn because they do so much right here. The outreach is neverending, Target is a huge presence as a corporate donor as are General Mills, Marshall Field's, Honeywell, 3M, and many, many others, and we play new music all the time. In fact, the American Composers Forum is based here! So, if I view things with rose colored glasses I suppose it's because of what I see around me.

ML

JackD

I have to say, even though my parents probably listen to more classical music than most, I never got into it until I started my AS level music classes (that's age.. 17? The second last year of school)

Then, having been given some of the tools of how to understand the music I really started to enjoy it and get a LOT more out of it.

At the moment Daniel Barenboim is doing a series of lectures for the BBC ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2006/ if you want to listen) and one of the things he was severely critical of in his last one I heard was the way people are encouraged just to go and sit in a concert hall, and almost ignore the music (thinking of extra-musical things, etc) in order to "get through" the concert, and perhaps absorb something cultural.

I have to agree - if you're exposed to say a Mahler symphony without having any understanding of its context, or the history of the genre, or the history of the symphony orchestra, or even a basic understanding of the forms and structures he inherited, then you're going to be pretty lost at sea.

Bit of a tangent, sorry! I'm just quite interested by this stuff.

Siegtrmpt

Good orchestral music is timeless and will be around for many years to come. I think there will always be a demand for good, full time professional orchestras in the major cities of the US where the population can support it. However, for most other places, the future of orchestral music will be in the schools, colleges and other large institutions that have the resources to finance a large orchestra.

mazzrick

First off:

Zeb, great topic! (you probably don't remember me cause I was 12 at the time you were 17 or something, but I studied with Tom Freas way back when). I've been getting very involved in contemporary music lately so I'll stick mainly in that domain. There's a contemporary music ensemble called the Ensemble Modern in Germany that is one of the few german "orchestras" not funded by the government. They have to fundraise and create business themselves. From what I've gathered, each member of the ensemble is personally financially invested in the ensemble. Anyone who knows a member of this EM will tell you that they are the most aggressive advocates of new music you'll find. They are constatly seeking out new compostions and methods of presenting different musics to different publics. I think a lot is there to be learned from this organization. One of Ed's former students plays in the EM now. I'll be interested as well in what Ed has to say once he gets back from Italy.

But regardless, I think the symphony orchestras need to find a more accessable method of presenting "new music" to audiences. Sadly there are so many composers whose works are far to academic for even an educated lister (musicians) to appreciate. Nonetheless, the interesting thing I find is that there is an audience out there (at least in Montreal) for new music and they show up consistently at concerts. However, even orchestras like the MSO (montreal) which program new music and comission new works seem to have a habit of premiering a piece and then letting it dissapear. So much music that is written for the MSO, BSO, NYPhil seems to get its single grand premier and that's it. I'll be in Lucerne (working with the ensemble intercontemporain and Pierre Boulez) and Schwaz (with the EM) this summer and I'm looking forward to seeing a little more dedication towards contemporary music. It will be interesting to see how those two groups handle the presentation of contemporary music differently than the MSO.

In conclusion (if you're still reading), I feel that new music is the medium in which "classical" music will advance. I think it's very important to work with composers and get good, accesable music written for trumpet, quintets, and orchestras. I've had teachers in the MET and the MSO who have asked why on earth I would want to play in an orchestra. They were chidding, but serious at the same time. One said, everything to perform has been done 1000 times and everything to record has been recorded 15 times, there's nothing left to do. While I understand what he meant, I disagree. Everything left to do hasn't been written yet.

I know this post was about US orchestras and more asking about the economic and contractual side, but I don't think the situation is much different from Montreal (which just pulled off a pretty succssful strike). Even if contract problems are resovled and money becomes less of an issue, I don't think that anyone wants orchestras to survive off of video game concerts and pops shows. We all love Mahler and Strauss and Beethoven, but the concert-going crowd has seen it before, many times probably. It's time for something different, I think... (dismount from soapbox)

Matt


PS: Along the lines of youth programs... has anyone seen the classical music program in Venezuela??!! I read that every kid in every school has to play an instrument now and everything seems to be improving with the country's education, and crime and literacy rates. Also, supposedly there are some killer trumpet players coming out of there.

TPT81

Matt-

Great post. While I agree that New Music is important, I don't agree that the problem is that the concert-going audience is looking for something new and different. Of course, people want to hear new sounds, new techniques, and new creations. However, to understand those things, the presentation of the new music must be done the right way. People should be educated before they listen to something new. Remember, several of the pieces we take as "common", were completely outrageous when they were premiered.

My greater concern is not that the concert-going audience is bored, but that it is too small, and in a lot of cases, a little to old. I could hear Beethoven 9 100 times, and never hear the same thing twice, and probably still get chills. But, how many 15 year old kids out there even know what Beethoven 9 sounds like, and if they know what it sounds like, is it from hearing it on a movie or video game? To understand the new music coming out, we must educate people on where it came from. People wouldn't be able to fully appreciate Mendelsson having never heard Bach. Shoenberg's early works stemmed from Mahler. So, in my opinion, what will keep concert halls packed, and orchestras in the black, is education of young people. Yeah, you can dance to Brittany Spears, but does it ever make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, the way that La Mer, Heldenleben, or any number of pieces does? That is my concern.

Again, I agree entirely that orchestras should continue to promote and commission new works, but that doesn't mean we should throw out everything else (I know you weren't saying that either). I will conclude with a story I heard Bud Herseth tell once. There is a famous quote of, I believe, Pierre Boulez saying something to the effect of "All music written before 1950 should be burned." At a reception following a CSO performance of a new commission, Maestro Boulez approached Herseth and said, "Mr. Herseth, what did you think of the piece?" His response, "Maestro, I think all music written AFTER 1950 should be burned."

Obviously, both comments are extreme. My point is, the middle ground between those two quotes is where we should probably be heading.

Zeb

noonan

Zebediach! How's it going? Great to find you here, hope things are going well.

Just wanted to make a few comments about cultivating younger audiences. I had the good fortune, like many here I'm sure, of being exposed to classical music at a young age. A recent study concluded that children under 3 who were exposed to adult conversations (meaning complicated vocabulary, not explicit material ) increased their odds of succeeding in college by 50%. So while these children obviously didn't understand what was said, in some way they were subconsciously formatting their minds. In terms of learning complex systems like music and language, the earlier you start the better. Of course this doesn't mean that learning is impossible after this time. But in our instant results culture we are often not patient enough to let learning take its course. "What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child." G.B. Shaw

My point is that I believe the experience provides the education. And the value in education is not to score high on a standardized test or to be groomed into a valuable consumer of classical music and BMW's. Creating your own contexts and connecting things for yourself is important. Those in outreach are realizing that young audiences are looking at Beethoven in the context of the pop music they are familiar with. Several years ago at Rice, Eric Booth, author of The Everyday Work of Art and consultant for Juilliard's outreach program gave a talk. I inquired whether the best orchestras in this country should really spend their valuable time and talent playing the theme from Disney's Mulan. His reply was that yes they should because film music fits into the comfort zone of many people's contexts. And while you've got them in the seats, find a bridge that connects Mulan to other, less familiar musics. Instead of lecturing about new music to 5th graders, find a way to bridge the familiar to the unfamiliar.
As you let them integrate the new into their current context, you create a much stronger bond in their minds, and yours. This type of learning requires more creativity from teachers and students, exactly what the arts should cultivate.
Using the diversity of musical styles to enrich audience experiences and context will ultimately be more valuable than trying to compete with pop music for market share.

Enjoying the thread and looking forward to more responses!

Carl[/i]