From the Classical Vault Dept.: I’ve grown much more hopeful about the state of large orchestras in the 32 years since I wrote the piece below. For one thing, the survivors are holding their own. Adventurous programming has very much increased, and the efflorescence of social media and alternative music distribution systems have, so to speak, spread the word. On the other hand, as the pandemic years proved, salaries for orchestral musicians are abysmal and some of those players are hanging by a thread. As for the Albany Symphony, my daughter is now working for that outfit, so I’m glimpsing more of its viscera than had been the case before, and I like what I’m seeing. And hearing, of course.
WATCHING A LARGE ORCHESTRA fold up and die is like seeing a stately old mansion collapse: You know it’s irreplaceable, and that with its demise goes a taste of the era in which it was built.
And it’s hardly surprising. Federal and state arts support has long carried the burden of supporting these musical behemoths, and that support has all but dried up. The audience for these orchestras is small, and even though it comprises an area’s wealthiest, to carry the brunt of the financing would force these folks to pay, in effect, hundreds of dollars a ticket to see their favorite ensemble saw through another all-Tchaikovsky evening.
In other words, the orchestras are now being forced to confront the fact that nobody—no appreciable majority, that is—really wants to hear them. The sooner they acknowledge this and bow out of existence, the sooner classical music stands a chance of coming back to life in this country.
As any fan of the more popular stuff will tell you, musical stylings change quickly. Even the stodgy world of the classics has gone through its share of upheavals. Something happened early in this century, however, that got in the way of a necessary change. It’s no coincidence that this occurred at the same time phonograph records appeared. While records became the medium that brought music to the masses, orchestras got stuck in a groove.
During the end of the 19th century, orchestras grew to the size we still expect to see (and hear) a hundred years later. Composers like Hector Berlioz pushed that size increase by writing pleasant but massively scored works, and later symphonies by Brahms, Mahler, and Tchaikovsky were written with 70 to 80 instrumentalists in mind.
But those works only gained familiarity among musicians or those concertgoers wealthy and footloose enough to follow a piece from concert to concert. Back in the pre-phonograph days, the best chance symphonic works had for mass exposure were arrangements for parlor ensembles that allowed skillful fans to play them at home.
Then we became a nation of listeners. Recordings started it and radio drove it home. Music lovers metamorphosed into music puppets, hiding behind the safe and familiar. As contemporary composers pushed music into unheard-of (and largely unheard) directions, the audience clung to Tchaikovsky.
Insecurity also helped. Although we’re proud of ourselves as a nation of mavericks, clinging to a notion of classlessness, it became only too all-American to reject anything that smacked of snobbery. Reject? To fear it and ridicule it. During the 1930s and ‘40s, Hollywood rarely showed us classical music without making mean-spirited fun of its people and players, even as the most gifted composers in this country cranked out scores of scores in California.
The American musical voice sang in the cadences of jazz, which the old, European-trained guard rejected even as Gershwin and Bernstein thrived on the language. This helped further musical compartmentalizing, originally invented to suit the demands of record-company salesmen. Classical music never even had a name as such before there were record stores.
Large orchestras ground out more Brahms, more Dvořák. Symphonies by Mozart and Haydn, written for parlor orchestras, were bloated to fit the big groups. Stokowski arranged delicate Bach fugues for the Philadelphia Orchestra. All of which helped foster the illusion that large orchestras served the cause of classical music. They didn’t. They don’t. They served the desires of a small, wealthy segment of the population that has grown smaller and poorer. The music of Schumann and Tchaikovsky, pleasant enough as antiques, has little meaning to younger listeners today. Nor should it.
Contemporary classical music (an odd juxtaposition of terms, but that’s the shortcoming of available labels) has gotten way out of touch with its audience, current and potential. The demise of the orchestras is the best sign yet that this is changing. It’s a signal that government and foundations and corporations and rich people aren’t willing to keep those dinosaurs alive.
Orchestras aren’t an end product. They’re a vehicle. People don’t line up to buy the latest Chicago Symphony release the way they queue for the new Springsteen album. Why, then, aren’t they lining up for the latest release of a Michael Torke concerto? Because the orchestra has for too long been touted as the star, and the star gets grumpy when forced to play the new and unfamiliar. Who has the chance to hear the Torke piece in a concert hail? (More on that in a moment.)
Nobody will argue that economics have changed so much in the past hundred years that the expense of the large orchestra is prohibitive, and no living composer except the very well-funded is crazy enough to try to write for such an ensemble. Sixty to 70 years ago, when Stravinsky was changing the sound of orchestral music, he also was writing for smaller groups that traveled more fleetly. Typically, he saw the future.
Big metropolitan areas, where large orchestras live, are now also giving us independent chamber groups. The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and New York’s Orpheus Ensemble are good examples; close to home it’s the St. Cecilia Chamber Orchestra. These will be the models for orchestras to come. They’re the right size to play everything written since the 17th century except for a few decades’ worth of bombastic 19th-century stuff. If it’s absolutely vital to play that Brahms symphony, extra players can be jobbed in for an individual concert. Otherwise the worst we’ll suffer is a relief from those ubiquitous Tchaikovsky symphonies.
All that’s missing is an audience.
Consider that the most popular classical ensembles today are small groups like the Kronos Quartet, in which young performers ignore the artificial boundaries of categorization and concentrate on playing good music that’s well suited for their sound. In their case, they’ve proven that any tune with good harmonic, melodic and rhythmic structure can sound good as a string quartet, and they’ve spun off a host of imitators (the Turtle Island and Greene String Quartets, for example) who also are filling the concert halls with a young, enthusiastic crowd.
Programming, obviously, is a key—programming that doesn’t ignore what’s popular in the other so-called categories, but that also doesn’t pander to the listeners. The Albany Symphony Orchestra has long had the right idea, with many works by living composers scheduled from season to season. David Alan Miller, the new music director, has included three world premieres in next season’s lineup (including a piano concerto by Michael Torke) as well as a commendable number of 20th-century works.
It’s a bold move in a lousy climate. It ignores the state of arts funding. It pretends that some manner of audience development will increase faltering attendance. It overlooks the most important part of the problem: As long as orchestras like this one are maintained at their present size, they’re committing the worst kind of pandering. They’re continuing to stroke the Tchaikovsky crowd. To these people, classical music is a background sound. It’s murmured by a quiet radio. It floats across the Tanglewood lawn.
These people are not listeners—they’re music consumers. There’s a lifetime supply of recordings available for them to practice this habit at home. What’s needed in the concert hail, on the other hand, is something lively. Music-making that brings the work of living composers to the stage and before the public. One of the other nasty side-effects of compartmentalization has been the retreat to academia, allowing the university-funded to write music solely for the purpose of impressing one another and intimidating their students. What else can explain the cruel-seeming hoax of the rarefied work of the likes of Sessions and Babbitt?
Music is a celebration, and needs an audience to share it. A good audience will help determine the viability of what’s being written, or, to put it more bluntly, they’ll hoot the dreck right out of the hall. Music requires such interaction.
When the big orchestras have finally vanished and a fleet of leaner ensembles takes their place, we may have the opportunity, finally, to share in the excitement of helping shape the music of our culture.
– Metroland Magazine, 9 April 1992
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