The following is taken from the end of Mr. Sandow's article. Please read and leave a comment below, if this topic interests you:
… There really is an alternative new-music audience, one that is hardly connected to classical music at all.
The beacon for this view of contemporary music would be Bang on a Can, a sharply informal New York group that is presented by Lincoln Center (and might even play thoroughly classical music by Elliott Carter), but does not look, feel, taste or smell like a classical institution, and in fact refuses to think of itself as part of the classical-music world. It draws 1,000 people to its annual new-music marathons, and these, said its director of development, Christine Williams, are in their 20's and 30's, attracted in part by aggressive marketing aimed at lovers of downtown dance, jazz, visual art and performance art.
In Milwaukee, an enterprising contemporary group, Present Music -- which gets up to 700 people at some of its events and impressively sells more than 200 subscriptions to its six-concert season -- has a similar philosophy. "You can look down from the stage, and see the earrings and nose rings and different- colored hair," said its director, Kevin Stalheim. "If I were going for mailing lists, I'd go to the art museum and modern dance companies, not the Milwaukee Symphony."
Present Music plays more traditional programs than Bang on a Can, ranging from mildly alternative composers like Henryk Gorecki and Steve Reich to mainstream stalwarts like Joseph Schwantner and Harrison Birtwistle. Why doesn't New York's alternative audience -- the people, for instance, who enjoy going to the Brooklyn Academy of Music -- come to hear similar programs at Carnegie Hall?
One big part of the answer is presentation. "We did a piece with black light, and we threw Ping-Pong balls around in the audience" Mr. Stalheim said. "We start our season like opening day at the ballpark, and maybe we'll play 'The Star-Spangled Banner' on a theremin. We try to end our concerts with parties." This is not selling out, Mr. Stahlheim insists, because most of the time the group is serious. But it gives his concerts good press and makes them fun.
Nonesuch Records cultivates its own version of this alternative audience, and has done wonderfully, sometimes selling more than 100,000 copies of CD's by Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Astor Piazzola and the Kronos Quartet, and only slightly less of John Adams. This, says Robert Hurwitz, who runs the label, is a market that was already there, one that overlaps with the classical-music audience but is also distinct from it, and which Nonesuch's vice president of marketing, Peter Clancy, described as "people open to the new, different and unusual, who seek out world music, modern and ethnic dance, and performance art." This, perhaps, is a contemporary version of the "intellectual audience" Virgil Thomson identified among classical-music listeners in New York in the 1940's, and the success of Nonesuch suggests that it might be bigger, at least potentially, than anybody thinks.
Can mainstream classical-music institutions attract these people? The enterprising Albany Symphony has placed composers in elementary and high schools and also presents an alternative new-music ensemble -- the Dogs of Desire -- at local colleges, thus using contemporary music to give the orchestra new roots in its community.
Mr. Wyjnbergen, of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, thinks he might present new music in "rock clubs, art galleries or an old factory that has been rigged up." He doesn't expect to attract younger people to the orchestra's existing programs, but instead hopes to include them by extending the Philharmonic's reach. He also identifies another "niche audience" for contemporary music, made up of "visual people, architects, painters, photographers and graphic artists." These, he thinks, he can attract by asking 40 of them to create visual impressions of contemporary musical works.
Mr. Pastreich, too, says he has tapped an alternative crowd when the San Francisco Symphony presents "maverick" composers like Lou Harrison or Meredith Monk. And while he says that 90 percent of his new-music listeners are drawn from his regular audience, he also notes that younger people are now buying tickets, thanks to the informality and commitment of Michael Tilson Thomas.
Should we be trying to educate the classical music audience, as my colleague so strongly urged? Why talk as if there's something wrong with it, as if it has a disease that needs curing? Instead, let's arouse it, excite it and draw new people to new kinds of artistic musical events. That way, even large institutions might renew themselves and heal the split between contemporary classical music and the rest of the arts.What do you think?
_____________________
If you like Mr. Sandow's writing, please check out some of the many links to his other articles on his home page.
_____________________
See my next post, Marketing Contemporary Music (2) for my thoughts on this topic.
_____________________
UPDATE: Both links above have been fixed (Jan, 2023). I also considerably expanded the portion of Mr. Sandow's original article quoted above.
Posts
