CUBBY-HOLES

posted by James Reel

    Via On an Overgrown Path, here’s an interesting remark by former BBC Proms director and BBC Radio 3 controller John Drummond: “There's no such thing as ‘the music audience.’ They like the organ, or they like chamber music, or they like symphony concerts, or they like opera, or the nineteenth century, or new music. But they don't like each other. There is a mass of different audiences. So any (radio) schedule you put together is going to displease more people than it pleases.”
    There’s a certain amount of truth here, although Drummond is of course grossly oversimplifying. I see some of the same people in the audience for the Tucson Symphony as I do for the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, Arizona Opera, the Arizona Early Music Society, and so on. These are musical omnivores. But I’ve also observed a significant compartmentalization of audiences, which can be most easily judged by how many people drop away—it’s much less crowded at early-music or new music organ concerts than at the symphony.
    Opera, I think, has the highest percentage of attendees who shun other kinds of music performance. I’m not just referring to the “opera queens” who, between swoons, can dissect every performance Maria Callas gave from her debut to her career’s wretched end. I also mean those people who don’t really know much about music, but who attend opera for the spectacle—the singing, the acting (such as it is), the scenery, the costumes, the live orchestra in the pit, the whole impressive package. Some of them, I think, have absolutely no curiosity about music; otherwise, they’d show up at non-operatic concerts from time to time. Perhaps it’s rather like people who watch a lot of television, but would never think of going to see Shakespeare or Ibsen or even Tony Kushner in an actual theater.