SYMPHONIES

Future of the Orchestra Does the orchestra have a future in the United States? Kurt Andersen and his guest, writer and composer Greg Sandow, ask what needs to change in order for orchestras to survive. by Kurt Andersen

Kurt Andersen: This is Studio 360 from WNYC in New York and Public Radio International. I’m Kurt Andersen. In 1842 a small group of musicians formed the Philharmonic Society of New York and opened their first concert with these familiar notes. (music) It was the first professional orchestra in the new world. The New York Tribune later wrote, "The musicians almost went wild with delight. They threw themselves into each other’s arms, laughing, weeping and applauding in a breath. The effect on the public was similar. The enthusiasm was indescribable."
Fast forward a century and a half. The country’s first orchestra is still going strong today as the New York Philharmonic and symphonies in Philadelphia, Chicago and other big cities are selling tickets sometimes at record levels. But no orchestra manager in America right now is likely to feel very comfortable because over the past couple of years especially in communities all across the country, a pretty grim trend has emerged. Just look at the newspapers.
The Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, the largest performing arts organization in the state, announced Friday the firing of all its musicians.
The New York Chamber Symphony has cancelled its upcoming season.
Earlier this year, the 49-year-old Savannah Symphony Orchestra called off the rest of its season.
Does the orchestra have a future in the United States? Today in Studio 360, we’ll ask that question and more of musicians, audiences and some of the country’s leading conductors. San Francisco’s meistro Michael Tilson Thomas will reveal one way he is building new audiences.
Michael Tilson Thomas Clip: This is also, I have to tell you, my dog Shana’s favorite piece of music.
KA: And some members of the current New York Philharmonic deconstruct the power of 100 instruments playing together.
NY Philharmonic clip: Ba ba ba, ba ba ba ba – I have to play it as if it was a sentence or as if I was saying something and be aware of what’s happening in the orchestra, weave with them...
KA: My guest to talk about all this is Greg Sandow who reviews classical music for The Wall Street Journal, who composes, and faces audiences in his concert series called Symphony with a Splash, with the Pittsburgh Symphony. Greg Sandow, welcome to Studio 360.
Greg Sandow: Kurt, I’m happy to be here.
KA: Now, tell us about what you do with your Symphony with a Flash concerts. From looking at your website it looks fairly mad.
GS: Well, it could probably be madder. I think it’s very nice of you to make it so. Just to be brief about it, most orchestras are trying to reach a new audience. They devise a new kind of concert. In Pittsburgh, the idea is that we play shorter selections and we talk to them. We try not to dumb it down. We try to keep it serious, we also try to have fun. We succeed. And I think one of the best things I did was roll back the clock to the 18th century. I loved that quote you read about the first performance of the New York Philharmonic, and of course I’m probably not the only one who thought, oh, why can’t it be like that now? So you go back in history, you discover that in those days, people in the audience applauded the moment they heard anything they liked, like you hear a solo in a jazz club, you clap. So Mozart left a letter about the premier of his Paris symphony in which not only did he describe that happen, but said how he bought into it. You know, he said – he’s writing to his father – Well, Dad, there was one theme I knew they were going to like so I made sure to repeat it and I brought it back at the end and sure enough they clapped. So we did that piece in Pittsburgh and I told the audience, this is what Mozart said happened. Your job is to clap the moment you hear anything you like. And I thought the concert hall was transformed. You don’t maybe want to have that for every piece. You’re doing a very serious slow movement from a Mahler symphony, probably everybody wants to listen to that, but it’s interesting – many straws in this wind — you know if you go back to the great days when classical music started, you don’t find the formality and the iciness that you get today.
KA: So there’s something to learn from, for instance, the spectacle of the Rolling Stones playing Brown Sugar or Street Fighting Man and having the audience go crazy.
GS: Oh, absolutely, and since you mentioned the Rolling Stones, one of the most interesting facts about the orchestra world today is that orchestra musicians are now younger than their audience. Fascinating. It shows there’s no shortage of young people who want to play classical music, though there appears to be a shortage of people who want to listen. But when the Rolling Stones came to Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a sassy little box in the arts section showing that the Philadelphia Orchestra was younger on the average than the Stones.
KA: That wouldn’t be hard.
GS: Yeah, right, but maybe they haven’t learned the lesson completely of their youth.
KA: So do you try to have fun at these concerts? I understand drinks are served.
GS: Well, yeah, they have jazz and drinks and food in the lobby beforehand and we absolutely try to have fun. We crack jokes. In the future, we’ll probably get the orchestra musicians to carry on. The conductor talks and the audience is tremendously responsive, not just to the jokes but also to the music. When they clapped for Mozart, I was fascinated by how different their applause was at different moments. It was far from random.
KA: What do you personally love about orchestral music?
GS: Well, two things about orchestral music. There is just the sheer power and variety of an orchestra. When all of these people cooperating start moving together, it can be just exhilarating, it can just sweep you out of your seat. Plus the sheer volume and variety of the sound is something... but then about classical music in general, this is to music what a novel and a film are. It’s art that goes somewhere over time. A thought is developed. You are not at the same place at the end where you start. It’s amazing to me that this is kind of dying out in music, that people who are graduate students in English literature don’t understand the power of that anymore, although their pop music taste is fabulous.
KA: And were you always a big classical music fan or did you come to this as an adult?
GS: I was brought up in it, which does seem to be one of the useful prerequisites for being hopelessly in love with it. I came from a family actually where I had to learn about pop music on my own. So I’ll tell you one little seminal experience and in a way, purists would say it’s very primitive, but I heard the Mahler Second Symphony –this is an awe-encompassing piece that shakes the heavens (music) and I had never heard anything like it, and people didn’t know the music back then, so it’s a revelation for everybody in Carnegie Hall where they played that. And in the last movement, Mahler striving, reaching to do everything he can possibly do to pile on the effect he wants, he has the tympani play a scale. And at that point, I was reading orchestral scores of Beethoven and Brahms so the tympani would play two notes the way the New York Philharmonic guy did in the segment that you played before, but to see one timpanist with drums all around him, playing an actual scale on it, this flipped me out. I’d never heard or dreamed of anything like that.
KA: The conductor Daniel Barenboim tries to give people in his audiences those flip-out experiences. He leads the Chicago Symphony and back in February, he surprised Chicago and everybody in classical music I think when he announced that he was going to step down as conductor two years from now. At the time he said he could just no longer deal with all the non-conducting duties that he’d been given, like fund raising, and he said that it’s not just the orchestra that’s in trouble but all of classical music.
DB: One talks about the audience. Why audience? Not long ago, I made a speech and everybody laughed at what I said, but it’s actually very sad. Just imagine somebody being born in the Chicago area, in a middle class family, neither of his parents play any instrument, they don’t go to concerts, there is no record – they don’t hear any music. The child goes to kindergarten, has no idea of music. Goes to school, primary school, high school, nothing. It’s just not part of his life. He goes to university, gets a degree, becomes a lawyer or a doctor, whatever, comes back to Chicago. Now he’s 33 or 34 and he is one of the most successful lawyers or doctors in town. And he goes to dinner, to a wonderful restaurant, one good restaurant in town, with friends and somebody says hey, have you been to the Chicago Symphony? He says, Chicago Symphony? No. Oh, you should go, it’s the greatest orchestra in the world! Really? Yeah. And besides it would be good for you to be seen there. You know it’s really very good. And this guy has the misfortune to come on a Thursday when I conduct a symphony of Bruckner or Mahler. (music) What can he get out of it? This is the problem. The problem is not the audience. The problem is not what they write in the newspapers. You know, the radio stations or the records... the problem is that our society has neglected music as an integral part of society and this for at least half a century. (music) You know people think of music as something completely outside their lives. They don’t see any relation between music and painting or music and literature, or music and politics or music and human feeling and this is the problem. The real problem is this, and we are never ever going to cure the illness because we’re only treating the symptoms. The real problem is how to get music education to really be installed in the school and therefore make music part of the society.
KA: Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, who’s been principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony for 15 years and will be quitting in 2006. I’m Kurt Andersen in Studio 360 today with Greg Sandow who reviews classical music for The Wall Street Journal among many other classical music endeavors. We’re talking about the future of the orchestra. And Greg, what do you think about what Daniel Barenboim said, and the challenge to music.
GS: Well, people wonder why classical music is in trouble. Daniel... I just would like to shake him. He ought to go and do some community outreach because then he would discover the things he left out of that lawyer’s biography, the bands he played in in high school, his fabulous collection of Bob Dylan bootlegs, his guitar on which he plays blues to this day, his great connoisseurship of Miles Davis. It’s ridiculous. And the idea that he’s going to come and he should get into a Bruckner symphony which after all was written well over 100 years ago – why exactly is this person supposed to devote more than an hour of his life in deep contemplation from something in the 19th century? Now, maybe he should do that occasionally but for that to be a central activity – there’s something a little weird about that. If Daniel had said, okay, 20th century something, or 21st century something, something that actually sounds like the America we live in today, which by the way is not the new music that Barenboim chooses to play, although such new music does exist, then we would have something to talk about. But if Barenboim thinks that this person he invented has some weird difficult-to-explain gap which has to be fixed by, excuse me, brainwashing in school, I would say that Barenboim also has a gap in that he has no idea of what the real musical life is, not just of America which is one of his many countries, but all the countries in Europe that he lives in and Israel for that matter, his home country.
KA: So the idea that we’ve had for certainly the last 100 years of this classical repertory, and by God and our grandparents and our parents, these are the pieces of music that’s important to know, to listen to, we should just let that fly out of the window and adapt to new times?
GS: No, I don’t think that we should let it fly out the window. Just for example, you have people who are passionate about Jane Austen, people passionate – this is dating me, but in the ‘50s everybody was into Dostoyevsky. So there are musical equivalents of these things. I don’t think that culture should die, but I think that it should take its place in some sort of classical music culture of today. Why are they playing the old stuff? There are routine ways to put together programs, you see them a lot. The same collection of masterpieces gets recycled over and over again. Why? They’re unable to say at this point, which I don’t think would be the case, let’s say, of a book group reading Jane Austen. They could probably talk you under the table with what they get out of it, and the classical music world is not finding ways to do that for Mozart and Beethoven and Bruckner.
KA: Is that changing? Are there places where it’s beginning to work? I mean the effort to make programming more eclectic and understand that there are those who want to read – want to listen to Mozart and Bach but there are also those who want to listen to Kernis and...
GS: I would say along with many people that the San Francisco Symphony is one of the places and ...
KA: That’s Michael Tilson Thomas?
GS: Michael Tilson Thomas and also the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I’ve also heard the former executive director of the San Francisco Symphony warn against doing too much of that, that a certain part of the audience just wants to hear the old masterpieces over and over again. That is a bind that classical music gets in. I can just say this in two ways. Number one, basically you are selling your tickets and raising your money from people who like it the old way. They may be diminishing. There may be fewer tickets sold. There may be less money raised. It’s still the biggest chunk so you can’t eliminate that entirely. Number two, and this is a little scary, all the surveys that have been done recently about the orchestral audience show that people go there for a vague but very powerful sense of inspiration, very spiritual, very uplifting. It doesn’t seem to matter exactly what music is played, as long as it’s not unpleasant. Alex Ross did a fabulous piece in The New Yorker in February about the state of classical music and its future and one of his premises was that classical music is not refined and is not civilized. That some of it is vulgar and some of it is insane and some of it hits you over the head, as all great art does. A radio classical music host in Madison, Wisconsin, for Wisconsin public radio e-mailed me back and forth about some issues in the field, including Alex’s piece that she said she wanted to have a T-shirt made: I don’t listen to classical music to be civilized. So, you know, one of the things we’re doing next year in Pittsburgh is we’re doing a program of composers who were crazy and one of them is going to be Beethoven and we’re going to take the last movement of the Seventh Symphony at an absolutely impossible speed, just to show that Beethoven went over the edge sometimes.