EXCEPTION TO THE RULE?
posted by James Reel
In trying to bust what he calls myths that encourage a rosy view of the health of classical concerts, Greg Sandow finally does what few other participants in this discussion bother to do: look not just at orchestral attendance, but at chamber-music series as well:
If we look at established chamber music series over the past 20 years, we'd almost certainly see a drop in ticket sales. I say "almost certainly" because I don't know if anyone has collected any data, but in many conversations with people who run chamber music series, I hear about the audience declining. One venerable institution that I know about has lost from 10 to 20 subscribers, approximately, each year for the past decade. That doesn't sound like much, until you add up the numbers. This group has around 700 subscribers now, and they used to have 800. That's a 9% drop over 10 years, and there's no sign that it's ending.
You can read Greg’s full post here. I’d just like to point out that my organization, the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, isn’t having any attendance or budget trouble at all. For the main series, there’s still a long waiting list for season tickets, and when seats are empty in the main part of the hall, that’s usually because season subscribers haven’t shown up, and haven’t released their seats for resale. True, the few extra seats down by the stage are often empty, but those are set aside for walk-ups and school kids (who generally do not take advantage of our free ticket offers). Again, those are “extra,” temporary seats that don’t even officially exist on the hall’s seating chart, so I shed no tears when they’re not filled—and they usually are for the big-name ensembles, like the Emerson Quartet. The winter festival in March sells very well—the Sunday and Friday concerts generally sell out, and the midweek concerts come close. There’s still room for growth in the Sunday Piano & Friends series, but that series features little-known performers, and the audience has been building steadily over the past few years.
How do we do it? Well, first, unlike a lot of American orchestras, which have gotten over-ambitious in the past 20 years, we know our limitations. We operate in a 550-seat hall (counting those temporary chairs), which is really all you want for an intimate genre like chamber music. Chamber ensembles are fairly inexpensive to engage (top rate is about $18,000, and most are $8,000 to $12,000 these days), so we don’t bust the budget with overpriced superstars. The atmosphere is welcoming and informal, but we don’t treat the audience members like uncultured idiots. We have a strong mix of old favorites and contemporary music, and we’ve commissioned much of the latter ourselves—with money donated by individuals from the audience, not culled from grants.
Yes, it’s almost impossible to get college-age people to show up, but that was true even when we operated on the UA campus, and music students barely can be rounded up for recitals by their own friends and professors. We have a substantial nest egg, but I suspect that’s been seriously cracked by the recent market decline, so we will have to be careful with our money. But all in all, we’re doing fine, and even if students aren’t lining up at the box office, we do have more than a hundred people queued up for season tickets when they become available. We’re in great shape, and I really can’t figure out why other chamber presenters aren’t. I suspect it has less to do with the music’s lack of appeal or demographic/sociological issues than clumsy management.
