The numbers tell a very different story: for all the hand-wringing,
there is immensely more classical music on offer now, both in concerts
and on recordings than there was in what nostalgists think of as the
golden era of classics in America.
In the record business, for example, it can be depressing to compare
the purely classical output of the major labels now with what the
industry cranked out from 1950 to 1975. But focusing on the majors is
beside the point: the real action has moved to dozens of adventurous
smaller companies, ranging from musician-run labels like Bridge,
Oxingale and Cantaloupe to ambitious mass marketers like the midprice,
repertory-spanning Naxos.
Similarly, someone shopping anywhere but in huge chains like Tower or
Virgin might conclude that classical discs are no longer sold. In
reality the business model has changed. Internet deep-catalog shops
like arkivmusic.com offer virtually any CD in print, something no
physical store can do today. The Internet has become a primary
resource for classical music: the music itself as well as information
about it.
On Apple’s iTunes, which sold a billion tracks in its first three
years, classical music reportedly accounts for 12 percent of sales,
four times its share of the CD market. Both Sony-BMG and Universal say
that as their download sales have increased, CD sales have remained
steady, suggesting that downloaders are a new market, not simply the
same consumers switching formats.
In their first six weeks on iTunes, the New York Philharmonic’s
download-only Mozart concert sold 2,000 complete copies and about
1,000 individual tracks, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s two
Minimalist concerts, combined, sold 900 copies and about 400
individual tracks. Those numbers, though small by pop standards,
exceed what might be expected from sales of orchestral music on
standard CD’s.
Other orchestras are catching on: the Milwaukee Symphony and
Philharmonia Baroque in San Francisco offer downloads on their own Web
sites. And the major labels are planning to sell downloads of archival
recordings that will not be reissued on CD.
In concert halls, season subscriptions have plummeted in favor of
last-minute ticket sales. That doesn’t mean the business is tanking,
however, just that audiences have shifted their habits. As two-income
families have grown busier, potential ticket buyers are less inclined
to commit to performances months in advance (or as ticket prices
climb, to accept predetermined concert packages). But as much as
orchestras and concert presenters would prefer to sell their tickets
before the season starts, the seats are hardly empty.
Neither are the stages. The American Symphony Orchestra League puts
the number of orchestras in the United States at 1,800 (350 of them
professional). The 1,800 ensembles give about 36,000 concerts a year,
30 percent more than in 1994. And in the most recent season for which
the league has published figures, 2003-4, orchestras reported an 8
percent increase in operating revenues against a 7 percent increase in
expenses, with deficits dropping to 1.1 percent from 2.7 percent of
their annual budgets from the previous season.
Meanwhile corners of the field generally ignored in discussions of
classical music’s mortality — most notably, early music and new music
— are true growth industries. When Lincoln Center presented a
10-concert celebration of the composer Osvaldo Golijov this season,
there wasn’t a spare ticket to be found. The Miller Theater’s Gyorgy
Ligeti series packed them in as well. And though the Los Angeles
Philharmonic’s Minimalist Jukebox festival sold slightly fewer tickets
than its regular programming, it drew a younger crowd: 25 percent of
the audience was said to be under 45 (compared with 15 percent
normally), and 10 percent was 25 to 34 (compared with 2 percent).
By relying heavily on contemporary programs and concerts of
Renaissance and Baroque works, Miller has achieved an 84 percent
increase in ticket sales since 2002, and this season’s box office
receipts have exceeded last season’s by $100,000.
Zankel Hall, the newly built, high-tech, adventurously programmed
addition to Carnegie Hall, has produced a steady increase in sold-out
houses, from 57 percent of its concerts in 2003-4 (its first season)
to 63 percent in the first third of the current season. At Carnegie’s
main hall and its smaller Weill Recital Hall, ticket sales have been
fairly steady since 1982, with 565,000 tickets sold in a slow year and
635,000 in an exceptional one (most recently 2003).
The classical music world has even found a silver lining in the
reports about its imminent death. Fund-raising letters now allude to
classical music’s parlous state as a way of shaking larger donations
from supporters. And when EMI needed a marketing hook for Plácido
Domingo’s “Tristan und Isolde,” it jumped on predictions that it would
be the last studio recording of an opera.
Finally, concert halls are sprouting like mushrooms. New symphony
halls are about to open in Miami, Nashville and Costa Mesa, Calif.
(not far from the newly opened Disney Hall in Los Angeles), and
Toronto is opening a new opera house in September. Clearly, someone
sees a future for this music.
UNDERLYING many of the jeremiads is what might be called golden
ageism: the belief, bordering on an article of faith, that everything
was better, both artistically and commercially, in the relatively
recent past.
To a degree, the golden ageists have a point. From the 1920’s through
the 70’s, classical music was plentiful on the radio and on nascent
television. Variety shows like “The Bell Telephone Hour” and “The Ed
Sullivan Show” presented both top names and newcomers, and networks
offered symphony concerts, opera and seductive introductory shows like
Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” in prime time.
There was a vogue for films built around classical music and musicians
as well: “100 Men and a Girl,” with Leopold Stokowski (1937), and
“They Shall Have Music,” with Jascha Heifetz (1939); “Humoresque,”
with Isaac Stern on its soundtrack (1946); biographical films like
“Rhapsody in Blue” (1945); and extravaganzas like “Fantasia” (1940).
All this made classical music’s reigning stars — from Toscanini to
Bernstein, from Heifetz to Stern, from Horowitz to Van Cliburn —
household names in a way that only Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo
and Yo-Yo Ma are now.
But the disappearance of this exposure is hardly a lethal wound.
Though classical radio stations have become scarce in most cities, the
Internet offers a global radio dial. The Internet radio audience is
said to be small at the moment, but people who want it will find it.
When the BBC offered a Beethoven symphony cycle as a free download
last year, 1.4 million people took up the offer. And if classical
music is now scarce on television, with even PBS cutting back, DVD
labels are pouring out everything from long-forgotten TV performances
to newly produced symphonic, chamber and recital discs.
The golden age of concertgoing, meanwhile, is at least partly a matter
of idealized memory. Organizations did not collect demographic
information then, but musicians and critics who attended concerts
during those years remember the audience as always middle-aged (and
concert videos bear out those memories). And despite the music’s
greater visibility in daily life, it was a niche market even then. The
pianist Gary Graffman said recently that when he began attending New
York Philharmonic concerts at Carnegie Hall in the 1940’s and 50’s
empty seats were plentiful. And among the great soloists, he added,
only Heifetz, Rubinstein and Horowitz could expect to sell out
Carnegie Hall.
At the time Carnegie was undisputedly the city’s premier hall, with
Town Hall, Hunter College and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the
principal chamber music and recital halls. Carnegie Recital Hall (now
Weill) and the Frick Collection offered chamber concerts as well, and
McMillin (now Miller) Theater at Columbia University was a hot spot
for new music. When Lincoln Center was planned in the late 1950’s,
Carnegie Hall narrowly escaped the wrecker’s ball. It was thought,
however briefly, that two large halls were an extravagance New York
didn’t need and couldn’t sustain.
Consider how things have changed since Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher)
Hall opened in 1962. Carnegie, until then a rental hall, began doing
its own presentations, and it now offers about 200 concerts a year.
Lincoln Center — with its two opera houses, Avery Fisher Hall for
orchestras and star-turn recitals and Alice Tully Hall (opened in
1969) for chamber music — quickly undertook its own presentations as
well: some 400 annually now, extending to halls and churches beyond
its campus.
The 92nd Street Y revived its long-dormant concert series in 1974, and
Merkin Concert Hall went up in 1978. Carnegie added Zankel Hall in
2003, and Lincoln Center opened the Rose Theater and the Allen Room —
intended mostly for jazz but sometimes used for new-music concerts —
in 2004.
Meanwhile the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection remained
committed to classical concerts. Small- to medium-size halls at the
French Institute/Alliance Française, Scandinavia House and the
Austrian Cultural Forum have opened since the late 1980’s. And the
Morgan Library and Museum opened a new chamber music hall this month.
That’s in Manhattan. Just across the rivers, the same period brought a
revival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the construction of the
Tilles Center on Long Island and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center
in Newark and the advent of small but successful enterprises like
Bargemusic.
In the deficit column? Town Hall and Hunter College have largely
abandoned classical music, although each offers a handful of concerts.
But apart from the old Metropolitan Opera House, demolished when the
Met moved to Lincoln Center, no halls have closed in New York since
Lincoln Center opened.
The concert world has expanded in other ways too. Through the 1950’s
the music season ran less than 30 weeks. But in 1964 the New York
Philharmonic negotiated a 52-week contract with its players. Other
orchestras quickly followed suit, and the season grew longer. The
Mostly Mozart Festival cropped up in 1966 and spawned similar series
around the country. And in 1967 the Ford Foundation began giving
orchestras grants for even greater expansion, in most cases, more
concerts each week.
The nightly offerings in classical music are immensely more plentiful
and varied now than during the supposed golden age. The wonder isn’t
that audiences fluctuate from night to night or that empty seats can
be spotted. It’s that so much competition can be sustained in a field
usually portrayed as moribund.
One way to keep the gloomy reports in perspective is to understand
that the rumored death of classical music has been with us for a very
long time.
The Metropolitan Opera was in almost constant financial peril between
1929 and 1944, and there were dicey moments in the 70’s. The orchestra
world’s 1960’s expansion caused anxiety as well. In an essay in The
New York Times on Sept. 3, 1967, “Do We Have Too Much Music in
America?,” John O. Crosby, the founder of the Santa Fe Opera, worried
that the audience was insufficient to support the blossoming 52-week
orchestra contracts.
Those worries were soon born out. In “Dip in Concert Audiences
Troubles Impresarios” (Dec. 21, 1968), The Times reported that
classical music ticket sales had dropped as much as 40 percent. The
reasons included everything from the distractions of television and
recordings to street crime, parking difficulties and high ticket
prices, meaning a $15 top at the Met and “as much as $8.80″ for “other
prestige events.” Young people reading these reports would have had
little reason to expect the classical music world to exist in 2006.
But now that those same people have begun “graying,” are they joining
it? Demographic information over the couple of decades institutions
have been collecting it suggests that they are. For whatever reasons —
changes in taste, a desire to expand their musical experiences, a lack
of interest in current pop — middle-aged listeners continue to join
the audience. And the generational shift is coloring both programming
and performance.
Listeners now in their 50’s — the core classical audience — were the
baby boomers who grew up in the 1960’s and 70’s. For those already
interested in classical music during their student years,
Shostakovich, Ives and Mahler were musical obsessions, and the
early-music boom was a campus phenomenon. All that music, marginal in
the 70’s, joined the mainstream as those listeners became performers
and ticket buyers.
Classically inclined boomers were also new-music agnostics, at home
with the rigorous atonality of the previous generation but also open
to a trippy avant-garde scene that ran from Cage to the Minimalists.
That has had a telling effect too: witness the standing ovations
Elliott Carter’s music now gets at symphony concerts and the rock-star
popularity of John Adams and Philip Glass.
At the same time this generation’s fascination with pop has influenced
its composers (and younger ones), who draw on the energy of rock. They
have also left behind their elders’ bias against amplification and
sound processing, which they use not simply to increase the volume but
also to expand their palettes of timbre. A fascination with world
music, which also has roots in the 1960’s, has stretched those
palettes further.
All this is changing the classical repertory, and to judge from the
comparatively young audiences to be seen at concerts by daring groups
like the Kronos Quartet and Alarm Will Sound, it is more likely to
rejuvenate classical music than kill it.
Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” observation about relationships and sharks
— that both must either move forward or die — also works for culture.
In classical music, lots of people really just want the dead shark.
They pine for the days when Bernstein, Reiner, Szell and Toscanini
stood on the podium, with Heifetz fiddling, Horowitz at the piano and
Callas and Tebaldi locked in a perpetual diva war. Most of all they
want their repertory dials set between 1785 and 1920.
You can send those people your condolences.
For the rest of us, the shark is still moving. We’re getting our
revivals of Machaut and Rameau along with vigorous reconsiderations of
Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler and a varied gallery of
contemporary composers. We may be hearing much of this in small,
high-tech halls instead of cavernous temples of the arts or finding it
online instead of in shops or on the radio. But it’s all there,
constantly renewing itself. You just have to grab onto the dorsal fin.
