Classical Music News

Classical's popularity points to a challenge on concerts

May 7, 2002

Like a stepchild with an inferiority complex, classical music in America has for several decades perceived itself as overlooked, and the sentiment has grown only more deeply felt with pop culture's clear dominance of mass media.

Classical music has become so marginalized that Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's dashing music director, recently said that, in his city, classical is the new counterculture.

But that's not the tune the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation hears Americans singing. Nearly 60 percent of 2,200 adults polled at random said they have some interest in classical music, and about 27 percent make classical music a part of their lives "pretty regularly," according to a study commissioned by the foundation.

Nationally, 17 percent said they attended some kind of classical-music concert in the previous year. About 18 percent listen to classical music on the radio daily or several times each week.

Clearly, the Knight study argues, Americans have a strong involvement with classical music. But orchestras often go about harnessing that interest in the wrong way.

The Miami-based foundation claims that the snapshot is the most comprehensive ever of American classical-music consumers, collecting impressions from a total, random and nonrandom poll of 13,500 adults in 15 markets, including Philadelphia. Its findings cheered classical-music leaders.

"I take it as a very positive sign," said Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington. "So our job is clear, which is to find out what is keeping that 27 percent from coming to our concerts."

That's exactly the response that Penelope McPhee, the Knight Foundation's vice president and chief program officer, was hoping for. More than that, she wants orchestras to reconfigure the concert experience itself, and to rethink why audiences aren't as easily captured as they used to be.

"It's been very easy for orchestra management and marketers to say it's because everybody out there is a rube, but it just isn't so," McPhee said. "People actually cherish this music, but there is something else we have to do if we want them to be loyal" to their orchestras.

What that something else is, is closely tied to an agenda the Knight Foundation has been pursuing and refining for eight years. Through a program called "Magic of Music," Knight has spent $10 million encouraging orchestras to develop ways to change the traditional presentation of classical music. In Philadelphia, that meant adding video screens to the concert-hall experience for a time. The Oregon Symphony developed a program called "Nerve Endings," in which conductor Murry Sidlin talked with the audience from the podium.

The study, conducted by Audience Insight, a consumer data firm specializing in the arts, was released April 19 in Portland, Ore., at a meeting of orchestra leaders from the 15 cities whose audiences were studied in detail. The conclusions boost Knight's basic argument that classical music has inherent appeal but tradition-bound orchestras aren't presenting it in a way listeners want.

To wit, despite the professed connection many Americans feel to classical music, less than 5 percent of adults in the 15 communities are regular patrons of their orchestras. The discrepancy is what interests the Knight Foundation.

Among the clues provided to researchers:

Many potential classical-music consumers resist buying subscription packages, the traditional selling tool of the orchestra, and prefer buying last-minute single tickets.

Orchestras may think they are selling repertoire or big-name guest soloists. But many consumers go to concerts for a special occasion, to spend time with a friend, or to seek "spiritual renewal."

The ambience and architectural setting are important parts of the experience for many listeners.

"We've been saying for a long time people go to the concert hall for something more than the music - therefore, you need to be presenting them with something more, whether that is talking to the audience, musicians interacting with the audience with a different way, a Valentine's Day concert, a concert for Mother's Day, something above and beyond," McPhee said.

The study leaves aside at least three important questions. It makes the assumption that anyone interested in classical music will be interested in orchestral music. But the classical listener is often partisan to one genre. Operagoers are not necessarily orchestra-philes. And chamber music is an increasingly popular ticket in many cities.

Another wild card - and this is a major one - is the term classical music. Which classical music did Knight mean to measure? Andrea Bocelli? Charlotte Church? Or more traditional core repertoire? Knight's researchers let respondents define the term themselves. A clearly defined genre would have likely made an enormous difference in the findings.

The Knight study did not focus on money as a factor keeping audiences from music, despite steeply escalating ticket prices. Tickets to the Philadelphia Orchestra in the 1987-88 season, for instance, were between $8 and $45. Next season, tickets start at $10, but could top out above $130 - three times the price of 15 seasons ago, an increase that sure beats inflation.

McPhee hopes that if the Knight Foundation board approves a next phase of the "Magic of Music" program, it will focus its energies - and funds - on retooling the entire mission of a single symphony orchestra somewhere in America. It's time to think big, she said.

"It's a question of, is the orchestra there to serve the community, or is the audience there to support the musicians?" McPhee said. "As long as there is enough of an audience to pay the musicians their salaries, they play what they want to play. It's only when there is a financial crisis that they think about how are we going to get more people in to listen to what we play."

Copyright 2002 Philadelphia Inquirer