As I noted earlier, my involvement in Take A Friend to The Orchestra Month this year took little effort on my part since the Symphony came to me. For the first time in a long while, the Symphony came to perform a school outreach on my stage. Many of the musicians commented on that fact and hoped they would be returning for future events.

The program certainly had a greater reach than anyone anticipated as mothers showed up with infants in hand while accompanying the older siblings. We had ten strollers parked in the lobby during the first concert. Four people used our stage as a diaper changing area prior to the performance which left us concerned some of the babies would roll off.

I didn’t get to watch the whole thing, but the concert started with a short sample of John Williams’ “Theme from Superman“ and the ended with the full work.

What really stuck out from the whole experience was the audience’s reaction to the second piece they performed. Because they were trying to demonstrate varying tempo, they performed Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”

Before the piece was over the entire audience was clapping along in time with the music. I am guessing this isn’t a common response from the way the conductor commented on how the audience had really gotten into the piece. The symphony had sent CDs of the program to the schools in advance so they could prepare so the students could have been introduced to the idea of clapping along in the classroom. Though honestly, if you listen to the music, it doesn’t take much impetus to get you clapping.

Some of the volunteer ushers the symphony brought along commented how great it was that the kids enjoyed the music so much that they were getting involved with it.

I couldn’t help but wonder how old the kids would have to be before that sort of behavior was no longer tolerated from them. There is already a debate about aplause between movements, clapping during the performance would certainly be sacrilege. Certainly, social conventions require that you stifle such impulses to allow other people the opportunity to listen to the music.

On the other hand, symphonies often talk about how composers were the bad boy rock stars of their day so I suspect that people might have had a less restrained reaction to the music than they do these days. I came across a reference to children following Grieg around the streets of Bergen whistling tunes from his Peer Gynt Suites. If you followed the “In the Hall of the Mountain King”link earlier (or right here) you will see that the popular appeal of Grieg’s music lives on today. (Though in some cases, it seems to be a mutant life form.)

As I was re-reading the Knight Foundation Magic of Music report last week as part of my entry and comments on Bill Harris’ Facilitated Systems blog, I realized there were a few topics I wanted to address.

Back in November, my entry on the report essentially deferred to my assumption that Drew McManus could provide greater insight than I could on the subject. As I expected, he wrote two entries with some great analysis.

However, it is a long report with plenty to comment on. One part of the report that seemed pertinent to the arts world in general was the “Lessons Learned” section on pages 49-50. The problems facing the orchestra world seemed to be the same faced by all the arts disciplines. In some cases the problem may not be as extreme for other disciplines as it is for orchestras, but is still something that bears scrutiny and effort for improvement.

Though summarizing a summary doesn’t do much justice to the material, I wanted to cite the lessons here in the hopes that arts leaders will be inspired to tackle some of the issues in upcoming seasons and set things in motion now with staff before summer vacation dilutes ambition.

As I said, replace “orchestra” with your discipline and see if it doesn’t ring true even a little bit.

1) The problems of orchestras stem not from the music they play but from the delivery systems they employ.

For orchestras the problem lies in the fact many people enjoy listening to classical music but don’t see any attraction at the concert hall. Part of the problem for all disciplines might be, as Andrew Taylor suggested awhile back, that audiences are less interested in being relegated to a passive role.

2 The mission of an orchestra needs to be clear, focused and achievable. An orchestra can no longer afford to promise all things to all people. A mission
statement that promises a world-class touring and recording ensemble,
extensive local outreach, broad public-school education,…may be promising far more that it can deliver and end up doing many things badly.

3 Orchestras that are not relevant to their communities are increasingly endangered. …The more orchestras peel off 3 to 4 percent of an economically elite, racially segregated fraction of the community, the less they contribute to the vital life of a community.

4 Transformational change in orchestras is dependent on the joint efforts of all members of the orchestra family – music director, musicians, administration, and volunteer leadership and trustees.

This last one seems to echo a sentiment on Donor Power blog-“Marketing-No Longer a Department” Where the point is that everyone involved needs to be part of creating the story about the organization that is appealing to the patron and donor and not assign those functions specifically to a department. (And those departments can’t reserve those functions for their exclusive use.)

5 No single magic bullet will address the many serious problems that orchestras face.

Says it all. (Though the report says more if you are of a mind to read it!)

The next three were pretty fascinating. The implications of Nos. 6 & 7 may cause you to reconsider assumptions you hold about the effectiveness of similar programs you offer.

6 Free programming and outreach do not turn people into ticket buyers. If the Knight program dispelled one myth, it was the long-held axiom that the way to develop new ticket buyers was to give them free tickets or programming. Free and subsidized outreach can be valuable for its own sake and is part of an orchestra’s service to its community. But it is not a technique to market expensive tickets. Similarly, new audiences can be attracted to orchestra programs using various methods. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that significant numbers of them can be retained without more sustained followup strategies.

7 Traditional audience education efforts, designed to serve the uninitiated, are often used primarily by those who are most knowledgeable and most involved with orchestras.
Over and over again, Magic of Music orchestras chose to abandon programs designed to attract new audiences because it was the subscribers who took advantage of them.

8 There is a lot of evidence that participatory music programs – including instrumental lessons and choral programs – are correlated with later attendance and ticket buying at orchestral concerts. Traditional exposure programs, such as orchestras’ concert hall offerings for children, seem to have little longlasting effect on later behavior.

The meaning of the statistics cited to back this up in a earlier part of the report was the crux behind the questions I posed Bill Harris. I don’t believe anyone I have spoken/written with on this point felt that experiential education was going to guarantee increased attendance down the road. My feeling is that this does support the idea that we should have music/dance/theatre in the schools because it makes people more positively disposed toward the arts later in life.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this finding meshed exactly with education studies that conclude things learned through experiences are more strongly retained than things learned through more passive methods like pure lecture.

Lastly,

9 Orchestras need to do more research on those who do not attend their concerts. Despite extensive research conducted on audiences and people who have been audience members, orchestras do very little research on nonattenders…

Some logic behind this. You need to not only know why people are attending but why others are not. The report openly admits that this is a costly proposition and really only viable with resources like those possessed by large institutions and foundations.