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NYT: Classical Music Attracts Older Audiences. Good.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/arts/music/classical-music-opera-older-audiences.html
By Anthony Tommasini
The coronavirus pandemic poses a grave challenge to all of the
performing arts. There are few ways to mitigate the risk from
packing performers and audiences tightly together without
fundamentally altering the experience of these art forms, which
thrive on crowds.
Yet classical music has been singled out as being especially
vulnerable at this challenging moment. Why? Because of the
perception that its audiences lean toward the senior set. "In many
places in America," David Rohde wrote recently in The Wall Street
Journal, "the classical audience is a snapshot of the most
vulnerable population for bad Covid-19 outcomes."
It's true that classical music tends to attract older patrons, and
that seniors are indeed the most vulnerable to the virus. The
average age of the audience at the Metropolitan Opera last season
was 57, the same as at the New York Philharmonic. About 62 percent
of the Philharmonic's audience was 55 and older. (By contrast, the
average age of the Broadway audience has hovered between 40 and 45
for the past two decades.)
The relative scarcity of younger people is discouraging. Especially
the fact that just 24 percent of the Philharmonic's audience was
younger than 40, people who may well have developed habits around
the culture they do (and don't) consume that could last the rest of
their lives.
But the current fretting over classical music feels all too
familiar: Yet again, aging audiences are pointed to as an ominous
indicator that this art form continues on a slow, inexorable death
spiral. The support structure for any of the performing arts cannot
be sustainably based on older patrons and subscribers; at least
that's the assumption, for which the only answer entails elaborate
efforts to court new and younger audiences. In recent years, the
Paris Opera inaugurated an ambitious program to catch the attention
of people in their 20s with edgy promotional videos and to bring
thousands of them to preview performances at discount ticket prices.
"You have to find your public by taking risks," the company's
general director, Stéphane Lissner, said in 2018.
Of course he's right. And the company has had success with the
campaign. Still, elements of dismaying ageism run through the
chronic bemoaning over the graying of classical and opera audiences,
something that bothered me even before I entered this older
demographic myself.
For one thing, audiences for classical music have always tended to
be older. Demographic surveys from earlier eras are spotty. But
images and television broadcasts make plain that even back in the
1960s, when Leonard Bernstein was galvanizing the Philharmonic and
attracting young people like me to his concerts, audiences were
dominated by those in their 50s and older. Yet, year after year,
devoted older fans continued to appear. This suggests that the
over-50 demographic keeps reproducing itself inside concert halls, a
sign that at a certain point in their lives, many people start
attending classical concerts, even if they did not when they were 20
or 30.
A study commissioned by 15 orchestras and published in 2002 found
that about half of those ensembles' subscribers were 65 or older,
and that 17 percent were 75 or older. Things haven't changed much in
the past 20 years: Last season at the Met, the average age of
subscribers was 65. (These days, few people of any age want to
commit to buying tickets many months in advance, so the overall
numbers of subscribers are widely decreasing--which is worrisome
for organizations that have based their business models on this
system.)
Classical music should do its best to cultivate new listeners--to
be accessible to anyone who might want to participate. But having an
aging audience is not necessarily dire.
At classical events, you tend to encounter more people with walkers,
and to see older couples steadying each other as they make their
ways to seats. Yet isn't that a testimony to the devotion of loyal
patrons? It may take some doing to get to a performance, but they
make the effort; they're not at home watching television. During a
recent online panel sponsored by the League of American Orchestras,
several artists and administrators commented that classical music
attracts passionate fans, including older ones, and that
institutions should cherish and serve that passion.
Many institutions seem to tie cultivating younger audiences to
presenting newer repertory. But it's hard to generalize by age group
about what kinds of music will bring in which audience members. I've
argued for years that orchestras and opera companies inordinately
beholden to standard repertory are not speaking to younger people
who are instinctively curious about new, more adventurous work in
all of the arts.
And it's always heartening to see many younger people turn up when
an ensemble presents something new and bold, like the Philharmonic's
2019 premiere of Julia Wolfe's searing, multimedia oratorio "Fire in
my mouth." Those coveted millennials have been ever-present, in my
experience, at the Philharmonic's Sound On concerts of contemporary
music.
But the whole story, I've found, is more nuanced. It's easy to
overstate the instinctive curiosity of young people for new music,
and unfair to assume that older people are conservative in their
tastes and resistant to contemporary work. True, over the years the
majority of notes I've received from readers complaining of some
awful new piece they had to endure--"another 20 minutes of my life
that I can't get back," one person wrote recently--have come from
those who cite many decades of concertgoing to back up their
assessments. But you can't attribute such close-minded attitudes to
age. Lots of young people are similarly resistant.
Programs of ambitious contemporary fare still draw plenty of older
people--many of whom, from my observations, seem eager to be
there. This was certainly the case last summer for the premieres of
two wrenching and timely operas on racial themes: "Fire Shut Up in
My Bones," at Opera Theater of St. Louis, and "Blue," at the
Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y.
For some time now, I've seen the main challenge of engaging new
classical music audiences--of all ages--as related to
diminishing attention spans in an era of nonstop connectivity.
Whether a piece you're hearing is a compact Haydn string quartet or
a teeming orchestral work, an audience at a concert has to settle in
and really pay attention to a performance that, for all the dynamic
involvement of the musicians, offers only so much visual
stimulation. Classical music should embrace this reality and promote performances as rare opportunities to disconnect, at least for a
while, from the digital life outside. Seated in an inviting hall
with good acoustics, you enter a musical realm that a composer has
created, passed on through the artistry of superb musicians.
This isn't necessarily a generational issue. Philip Glass's opera
"Akhnaten" asks listeners to give themselves over to music that on
the surface may seem strangely repetitive and hypnotic, starting
from the first ripples in the orchestra. It's long and unchanging--
and it had a sold-out run at the Met last fall, with lots of young
people in the audiences.
Whether old or young, if you have the patience to embrace such
experiences, you are primed to love classical music. If you're too
fidgety, then this art form is probably not for you. It may be that
simple, whether you're 25 or 75.
At this challenging moment, when new social protocols are being
worked out and a deadly pandemic lingers, there has been a
disturbing undercurrent in America, an exacerbation of existing
societal trends, that marginalizes older people. This reached its
zenith when the lieutenant governor of Texas said in March that
"lots of grandparents" would be willing to sacrifice themselves to
facilitate the opening of the economy. The implication of this
disturbing argument is that old people are expendable.
In working so hard to engage younger people, classical music
institutions must be careful, now more than ever, not to take older
members its audiences for granted. These veteran music lovers keep
showing up--something for the field to celebrate, not fret over.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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