HOW TO KILL AN AMERICAN ORCHESTRA

posted by James Reel

    David Stabler in the Portland Oregonian promotes the utterly wrong-headed notion that the way to lure audiences back to spottily attended orchestra concerts is to stop being innovative, which is supposedly what caused the reactionaries to flee, and bring back the overpriced big-name soloists and paint-by-numbers 3B programming from which people were already drifing away. Worse, Stabler proposes that the Oregon Symphony and conductor Carlos Kalmar should run the audience-development effort like a political campaign:

What Kalmar should do at this point is pretend he's running for political office. Go on the stump. Energize his base. Win back alienated audiences. Convince apathetic citizens that something exciting and provocative might surprise them at the next concert.

    Sounds like a good idea at first (but what’s “exciting and provocative” about the same old celebrity soloists, and sight-reading Beethoven symphonies?). But read his elaboration on this call for action: “What the Oregon Symphony needs is a cutting-edge campaign, led by an ace political strategist. Think James Carville or Karl Rove for the Mozart set.” Stabler is advocating exactly the same lowest-common-denominator audience research that caused the Clinton administration to stall out, and the same practices by which today’s politicians carefully craft their “message” to tell people what they want to hear, whereupon they do something quite different once they’re elected.
    Perhaps the only way to win back the traditional audience is to engage a string of celebrity soloists to play the “Emperor” Concerto in ways that are completely indistinguishable from one another. If so, then it’s time to replace that audience.
    More sensible is this column by William Littler of the Toronto Star:

    Perhaps unfairly, Virgil Thomson used to characterize the standard symphonic repertoire as The Fifty Pieces. Although the active list may be longer now, mainstream musical organizations in general and symphony orchestras in particular still prefer—allegedly for box office reasons—to comfort their listeners with the familiar rather than challenge them with the new. …
    Does constant repetition of the acknowledged masterpieces have to crowd out the works of lesser composers with interesting things to say? Repetition tends to stifle curiosity and it is curiosity that needs to be encouraged in the listening public if our concert halls are to be more than museums to past greatness.

    Read the rest here.