In the second part of this series, I introduced the theme of Creativity as perhaps the most persistent of the ideas inspiring the reformation of our institutions of higher music education. The fact that “music study has long been predicated on the subordination of creativity to technical proficiency and interpretive performance” masquerades as an accusation – or at least as weighty criticism. And it’s hurled as thoughtlessly as it is effectively because we rarely question the assumption that hides behind the mask – if we even notice that it’s there at all. If we do question it, we’re generally at a loss for an answer. Is it a bad thing to subordinate creativity to technical proficiency and interpretive performance?
As the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds said in his presidential address to the Royal Academy when it opened in 1769,
I would chiefly recommend that an implicit obedience to the rules of art, as established by the great masters, should be exacted from the young students. That those models, which have passed through the approbation of ages, should be considered by them as perfect and infallible guides as subjects for their imitation, not their criticism. I am confident that this is the only efficacious method of making a progress in the arts; and that he who sets out with doubting will find life finished before he becomes master of the rudiments. …Every opportunity, therefore, should be taken to discountenance that false and vulgar opinion that rules are the fetters of genius. They are fetters only to men of no genius….1
The discipline and pursuit of technical proficiency, of course, is not antithetical to creativity and was the rule throughout the periods of history that produced our civilization’s greatest art. Juliette Aristides notes that, “Historically, the practice of master copying was a central component in the methods of training painters; it started at the very beginning of a student’s training and often lasted long after the individual had reached mastery.”2
‘Copying,’ [Eugène] Delacroix wrote, ‘herein lay the education of most of the great masters. They first learned their master’s style as an apprentice is taught how to make a knife, without seeking to show their own originality. Afterwards, they copied everything they could lay hands on among the works of past or contemporary artists.’3
It was the same, of course, for the musical training of history’s great composers. “Interpretive performance,” a form of “copying,” has been the central component of a musical education from the very beginning. And there is one more, very important reason for that fact: music, unlike art, only exists when it is being performed. It is not like a painting, which only needs to be painted once in order for us to experience it fully. The composition of a painting never changes; when we come back to it, it is always exactly as it was, and only we change. But music only exists when we are hearing it. It must be “copied” again and again and over again; and every copy is different like every human fingerprint is different. It changes and we change, each time we hear it. And if we cease to play Beethoven’s symphonies – or if we fail to cultivate in the next generation of musicians the skills and the love necessary to faithfully “copy” them – then in a very real sense they will cease to be.
What the revolutionaries and reformers, in their zeal, also seem to forget is that the vast majority of musicians – that majority they profess to have always in mind – even in Bach’s, Beethoven’s, Mozart’s, Liszt’s, or Schumann’s time, were interpretive performers. Though they’d like to imagine it otherwise, we can safely say that virtually none of us are born with creative powers even remotely equal to those of Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart. In fact, we’d be lucky to have one such genius in our midst during the course of an age. And I think that even today, most of the students who enter our conservatories do so, not because they believe they are in line to be the next Mozart, but because they love performing the music that has found its way into our canon – and the time and energy they’ve invested in learning to be worthy of playing it attests to that fact. It’s part of the great miracle of classical music that the preponderance of musicians who have come and gone throughout the long course of its history were interpretive performers inspired to play “repertory created in, and for, another time and place” – overlooking for the moment the sophistry already mentioned, and taking that phrase to mean instead “music composed before one’s lifetime” – because if they weren’t, we’d know little or nothing about the music of Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart today. Perhaps that’s fine with the Modernists, but I think the rest of us would object loudly.
It seems to be a triumphal bit of amnesia that confidently injects the modern reformer’s rhetoric with that “false and vulgar opinion” that “the subordination of creativity to technical proficiency” is somehow a detriment to the development of a student’s creative genius. But it’s an argument that is as popular as it is unexamined. A former music critic who is now one of the Internet’s most popular bloggers on the future of classical music – and who admittedly would “like to run a music school” – weighs in:
Music schools don’t encourage creativity. …I’m not saying that their teaching might not be on a high level, but mostly it’s on a high level of doing what the rest of the classical music world does, making music the way your teachers, your chamber music coaches, and the conductors you play for expect it to be made. …But art students, I’m going to guess, are doing varied, original things, because that’s what they see in the art world.
We are invited over and over again to compare our conservatories to our art schools. And it’s a useful comparison, though not in the way the reformers think it is. Art schools already and thoroughly made the mistake that the musical academy is being encouraged to make:
In our arts climate, historical education and art training are often considered antithetical to genius. Rising artists are frequently expected to tap their knowledge directly from the ether, disconnected from history and labor. However, when the instincts of the individual are elevated above education, the artist can become stuck in a perpetual adolescence where his passion outstrips his ability to perform. A far more powerful art form is created when artists seek to first master the craft of art and then use it to express their individuality.4
But it is hard to convince us of this because we really want to believe that technical proficiency – which concerns itself ultimately with Beauty, Truth, and Goodness – is a dictatorial grey area eclipsed by the shining genius of innate creativity. And after all, if four and a half minutes of silence can stand next to one of Bach’s fugues as a work of creativity, why do we need to bother with technical proficiency? Of course, when faced with this absurdity, we realize that there is something that precedes creativity, just as we know that there is a way for creativity to reach beyond technicality. Sir Joshua Reynolds described it this way:
How much liberty may be taken to break through those rules, and, as the poet expresses it,
“To snatch a grace beyond the reach of art,”
may be an after consideration, when the pupils become masters themselves. It is then, when their genius has received its utmost improvement, that rules may possibly be dispensed with. But let us not destroy the scaffold until we have raised the building.5
The problem is that the project of our art schools, and the project of reforming our conservatories, has become rather to raze the building.
Art Schools and the Atelier Movement
The critics are not wrong about the differences between our academies of art and of music. Music conservatories have until now largely resisted the impulses that have so effectively reformed our art schools. And the nation’s very best music schools continue to ignore the din and still reliably produce the world’s top musical talent.
But art schools long ago succumbed to the delusion that sets creativity and originality ahead of discipline. They long ago embraced the widespread cultural rebellion against tradition in all its forms; generations ago they rejected the practice of “teaching as it was taught to me.” They have effectively broken with the past. They’re even wildly successful at turning out entrepreneurs: modern artists are now rolling their “art” off of assembly lines straight into museums.
Alexander Gorlizki is an up-and-coming artist… [whose] work has been displayed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Denver Art Museum and Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, among others, and sells for up to $10,000. Mr. Gorlizki lives in New York City. The paintings are done by seven artists who work for him in Jaipur, India. “I prefer not to be involved in actually painting,” says Mr. Gorlizki, who adds that it would take him 20 years to develop the skills of his chief Indian painter, Riyaz Uddin. “It liberates me not being encumbered by the technical proficiency,” he says.6
We don’t have to squint to see where this road that our reformers are rushing down ends. Indeed we are fortunate to have such an explicit example to study. Before we bid our conservatories follow our art schools into the great modern experiment, then, we ought to ask ourselves – and consider carefully – whether or not the experiment has been successful.
There is a growing movement of students and artists who are convinced that the answer is no. And they are flocking to ateliers that continue to spring up all over the world. The modern atelier movement is the correction to the art schools that first abdicated their responsibility to teach technical proficiency and tradition – and subsequently lost the ability to do so altogether. But if the art schools themselves are responsible for the rise of the ateliers, they are not at all to thank for the possibility that they could even exist. Modern ateliers exist because,
Against all odds and facing ridicule, a handful of artists who were still academically trained managed to preserve the core technical knowledge of Western art and to continue the process of teaching another generation. There is now a growing movement of artists demanding to be taught the classical methods. They are part of a new Renaissance that has brought the atelier method full circle and back into the art world of today.7
The atelier is an artist’s workshop, set up much as it was 150 years ago and with its roots in the guilds of the early Renaissance. It is the place where a student trains for many years under the careful, meticulous, and demanding eye of a master artist. Often, only a handful of promising students are accepted at any one time, and they are immersed in the intensively slow and steady process of acquiring technical proficiency, of mastering foundational principles, and of realizing the historic artistic achievements upon which the tradition of Western art has been built. Juliette Aristides was trained in an atelier and now trains her students the same way:
The atelier movement attempts to rebuild the links between masterpieces of the past and our artistic future. As such, it sets a different course than the one prescribed by the arts establishment of the modern era. By reinvigorating arts education we can give the next generation of artists the tools that have been lost or discarded over the last one hundred and fifty years.8
As serious students of art begin to realize that they do have the option of learning the tradition and the disciplines that art schools cannot – or do not – offer, art schools in turn are starting to realize that serious art students are willing to forego the accredited college degree – along with the possibility of a university career, a steady salary, and tenure, to say nothing of the approbation of the art establishment – in exchange for the opportunity to learn the craft, to master technical proficiency, and to spend their time tediously copying history’s masterpieces. Their ambition is fired by love for, not resentment of, the canon and its creators – and by a burning desire, which perseveres in the face of failure, to participate in the long and living tradition that is our Western heritage. As Peter Trippi, Editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine points out,
[A]telier enrollments have continued to soar nationwide…. These enrollments have slowly been “stealing” business from mainstream university art departments, so some are now responding by creating their own programs in this vein.9
It is very possible that the music academy, if it harkens to the shouts echoing all around it and proceeds in the proposed march toward reform and “progress,” will pass by the art academy as it hastens back to that crossroads where it took a wrong turn. It is very possible that, by chasing “relevance,” our conservatories, like our art schools, will make themselves irrelevant.
Can we say, then, that all is well in the world of higher music education on this side of the pond? For now, we continue to produce an ample supply of musicians that rank among the world’s best, with the technical proficiency, confidence, and maturity to faithfully perform the great works that were handed down to us. Occasionally – no more often than we might expect it to happen – a creative talent rises visibly from the cohort, perhaps one day to join the canon and the masters at whose feet he studied.
If our music schools are in danger, the danger is a knowable one that rumbles predictably and pharisaically. The course of man, like the labor of the student, was always fraught with mistakes. But the tale of higher art education is ultimately a hopeful one. For there will always be those students who, hungry to participate in that transcendent experience that is the miracle of classical music, will seek out and heed the advice of Cennino D’Andrea Cennini, imparted to us in Il Libro dell’Arte at the dawn of the 15th century – ever as fresh as the day he inscribed it:
You, therefore, who with lofty spirit are fired with this ambition, and are about to enter the profession, begin by decking yourselves with this attire: Enthusiasm, Reverence, Obedience, and Constancy. And begin to submit yourself to the direction of a master of instruction as early as you can; and do not leave the master until you have to.10
Endnotes
1 Sir Joshua Reynolds, “A Discourse Delivered at the Opening of the Royal Academy, January 2nd, 1769, by the President”, published in Seven Discourses Delivered in the Royal Academy by the President (London 1778) 13.
2 Juliette Aristides, Classical Painting Atelier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice (New York City 2008), 6.
3 Quoted in Juliette Aristides, Classical Painting Atelier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice (New York City 2008), 6.
4 Juliette Aristides, Classical Drawing Atelier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice (New York City 2006).
5 Sir Joshua Reynolds, “A Discourse Delivered at the Opening of the Royal Academy, January 2nd, 1769, by the President”, published in Seven Discourses Delivered in the Royal Academy by the President (London 1778) 14.
6 Stan Sesser, “The Art Assembly Line” in The Wall Street Journal (June 3, 2011). Accessed 9/28/15: www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303745304576357681741418282.
7 Fred Ross, Chairman of the Art Renewal Center, in his Foreword to Classical Painting Atelier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice (New York City 2008).
8 Juliette Aristides, Classical Drawing Atelier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice (New York City 2006).
9 Peter Trippi, “Ateliers Today: A New Renaissance?” in Fine Art Connoisseur (November/December 2012), 79.
10 Quoted in Juliette Aristides, Classical Painting Atelier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice (New York City 2008), 1.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the address delivered by invitation to the Academy of Philosophy and Letters at its annual meeting in June, 2015.
It may be that the greatest challenge facing those who love classical music in our modern age is the one facing those who do not also love Beauty. Those who reject the idea of Beauty, who deny its value, or who relegate it to meaninglessness – as in fact so many of today’s most vocal proponents of classical music emphatically do – are at a loss to explain what it is that music offers us. What makes it worth conserving? What gives it meaning or makes it relevant to our lives? If classical music is not about beauty, then what is it about?
We might convincingly characterize all of classical music’s present struggles, as well our orchestras’ persistent failures, to find a place in today’s Brave New World as attempts to answer that question, avoiding a commitment to Beauty at whatever the cost. Our orchestras are in this predicament because they are, for the most part, run by those who do not admit or understand the nature of Beauty – or else who cannot or will not defend it. And let’s face it, it’s a dangerous thing to defend Beauty today. You’re likely to be assaulted with the Ugly stick. Many of those who would have stood up for Beauty very probably learned along the way that it is better to keep your head down and your mouth shut; it is far pleasanter, in many ways, to just go along with the rabble than to oppose it. And for the rabble, it’s now an unassailable given that music is not about Beauty.
Of course, the most obvious efforts to deny Beauty in classical music are the attempts to make the music itself ugly, or else to make it ridiculous. With that tactic alone orchestras have managed to drive away a great many decent people during the course of the last century. Music, the Modernists told us, has to be ugly because modern life is ugly. Webern and his Modernist pals may have been quite certain we’d all one day be whistling their horrendous atonal “tunes,” but they’d be hard pressed to find anyone today who could recall one. The Postmodernists tell us music must be ridiculous because life is ridiculous. They brought us stunt-men like John Cage, and pieces like the one I recorded with a European orchestra recently that included a part in the score written for an inaudible dog whistle. To drive the point quite literally “home,” Modernists house our orchestras in brutalist buildings of rust- and algae-streaked concrete, and Postmodernists impose on us concert halls that look like crashed-landed spaceships. Well, perhaps much about the way we live now is ugly and ridiculous, but we have only to look around us to be convinced that it’s largely the crackpot theories of the Modernists and Postmodernists that make it so.
Still, perhaps in the wake of the sickening devastation of the First and Second World Wars it was difficult not to sympathize with the Modernists’ sentiment. And that’s when the idea first seriously took root in the international music community. The horror that broke upon the world with the dawn of industrialized warfare must have seemed to suggest that the modern condition was one of an abject and novel ugliness. What the argument depends upon, however, is the assumption that, in an ugly world, Beauty is no longer relevant.
And it’s a losing argument. The ugly and the ridiculous in musical composition have been largely defeated in our concert halls because they have been rejected unequivocally by the human ear. When they do appear in a concert program today they are not-quite-ingeniously sandwiched in the middle of the evening, because programmers know that audiences will arrive late or leave early to avoid them. And it’s no good scorning the audience for its “philistine” appreciation of Beauty. They’ll just elect not to show up for the scorn or for anything else, either. In fact, not surprisingly, that is exactly what has happened as naturally conservative audiences abandoned their symphony orchestras.
It’s the source of much consternation for those who expect classical music to go the way of art, where fame and fortune reward offensive scribbles, mindless drippings, pickled sharks, and giant balloon animals. David Goldman, writing as “Spengler” about the phenomenon, wondered at the fact that art galleries devoted to ugly modernist art should be full while concert halls featuring the musical equivalent are empty:
When you view an abstract expressionist canvas, time is in your control. You may spend as much or as little time as you like, click your tongue, attempt to say something sensible and, if you are sufficiently pretentious, quote something from the Wikipedia entry on the artist that you consulted before arriving at the gallery. But when you listen to atonal music, you are stuck in your seat for as long as the composer wishes to keep you. It feels like many hours in a dentist’s chair from which you cannot escape. You do not admire the abstraction from a distance. You are actually living inside it. You are in the position of the fashionably left-wing intellectual of the 1930s who made the mistake of actually moving to Moscow rather than admiring it at a safe distance.
Music, perhaps for precisely this reason, has resisted the ideological uglification that the Brave New World order has imposed more successfully on its cousins Art, Poetry, and Literature. Music is still an unconquered repository of Beauty, standing like a fortress above the onslaught, built on a canon to which we still respond and always return. Orchestras, however disheartened they may profess to be at the prospect, will always perform Beethoven’s Fifth because audiences will always want to hear it. In fact, they will be more inclined to hear it the uglier our world becomes.
And that is because beauty does not deny the ugliness, the pain, the torments, the sorrows, or even the ordinariness or baseness of existence; it transforms them. Writing at the turn of the century about the push to make poetry vulgar, Samuel McChord Crothers put it in much the way any normal, decent person might. He called this person The Gentle Reader and he gave him these words:
When the poet delves in the grossness and the slag, he does so as one engaged in the search for the perfect. …So I say, when drain pipes and cross-cut saws and the beef on the butcher’s stalls are invested with beautiful associations and thrill my soul in some mysterious fashion, then I will make as much of these things as I do of the murmuring pines and the hemlocks. When a poet makes bank clerks and stevedores and wood-choppers to loom before my imagination in heroic proportions, I will receive them as I do the heroes of old. But, mind you, the miracle must be actually performed; I will not be put off with a prospectus.
In the canon of classical music, the miracle is often performed, and we attend concerts precisely to witness it – to take part in the miracle. Bank clerks and stevedores and wood-choppers alike realize in Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater – or in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Wagner’s Liebestod, Britten’s War Requiem, or the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony, for instance – at once both the commonality and the peculiarity of their condition and its woes, and they participate in the transformation of the slag and sorrow that accompanies their journey through the world into something transcendentally beautiful that shines from beyond it. When we reject Beauty – when we insist on wallowing in vulgarity and ugliness – what we ultimately reject is this possibility of transcendence. It might be even more accurate to say that we reject Beauty because we first reject the Transcendent Himself.
Without a way to reach beyond it, we are left to wander for a lifetime through the earth-bound desolation of our material reality, after which there is simply nothing. We retain, nevertheless, our deep need to escape from the bleakness of existence. But our only option now is to create our own heaven right here in the dust. We must shape our physical world into Utopia, by ourselves, with just the strength of our wills.
So what next for those who insist that music is not about Beauty? If music cannot, through Beauty, transform our relationship with or transcend the ugliness of reality, then it must change physical reality itself in order to eliminate ugliness. It must transform society. Next comes the insistence that we attach classical music to an ideology – to “change we can believe in.”
Orchestras, desperate to be relevant now that Beauty has been declared ir-relevant, get busily to work on everything except that one thing which they essentially exist to do. Sure, they play their concerts every week, but they’ve become a little apologetic about that part – and, on top of that, a little ironic about the fact that they’re playing Beethoven again. Like the hipster who wears dirty flannels with his carefully-coifed mustache lest you mistake him for someone “fashionable”, orchestras today want you to focus on their plans to bring about social progress lest you mistake them for the inheritors and champions of an art form created by dead, white, privileged, Christian, heterosexual, European men. They, after all, the consensus seems to assure us, are the cause of everything we need to change about society.
And this is where most efforts to describe just what it is that classical music is about are concentrated today: it’s about making our world a better place. Musicians are styled as ambassadors of change and sent out into their communities to show everyone that they are somehow more important, or at least more relevant, than they are willing or able to argue that Bach and Beethoven are. Orchestras clamor for anything written by or celebrating life’s “victims”, hoping to refute their historical association with life’s vilified “winners”. They set their hands and their instruments heroically to the task of bringing an end to inequality, poverty, injustice, and environmental abuse, to repairing our broken families and our failing schools, and to curing all kinds of systemic “-isms”, depending on who you talk to. Of course, all these things are easy to count even if they are difficult to measure. But they are nigh to impossible to achieve.
What will happen, we have to wonder, when orchestras and the canon of classical music inevitably fail to bring about world peace, the end of poverty, environmental balance, and homogenous diversity? Like the purveyors of the ugly and the ridiculous, orchestras selling social progress are on a collision course with reality. How many more decent, ordinary people will our orchestras alienate with their gross misunderstandings of both the nature of classical music and human nature itself?
Well, if it can’t cure society’s ills, then maybe it can do something for us as individuals. There’s a frenzy of interest that surrounds advances in neuroscience and nano-technology that promise to explain how music enhances our brains, how it facilitates our synapses, how it makes us better at math, and ultimately how it makes us more successful in our careers. After all, it must have some use in the material world. What can it profit us?
Anyone familiar with the struggles facing the long tradition of classical liberal education in today’s cynical “diploma market” will recognize this lamentable tune. And it reminds me of an amusing account that Kitty Ferguson shares in her book, The Music of Pythagorus:
When someone asked what the practical use of one theorem was, Euclid turned aside to his slave, sniffed, and muttered, ‘He wants to profit from learning, give him a penny.’ The Pythagorean aphorism was ‘A diagram and a step (an advance in knowledge), not a diagram and a penny.’
It’s quite a slippery subject, and difficult to tackle in our utilitarian age. There is a valuable little university that I frequently come across in my travels that always vividly reminds me of this challenge. And that is because, in passing by, one can’t fail to notice its slogan, finger-painted as it is in gigantic letters all over the windows of its most prominent building: “Knowledge that works.”
Of course, there is knowledge that works, and it’s very important: knowing how to construct a Gothic arch or how to decipher an MRI scan, for example. But music was never that kind of knowledge. During the Middle Ages, it was an essential part of the Quadrivium, the second tier of the seven Liberal Arts – distinct from the Practical Arts such as medicine and architecture – and prerequisite to studies in philosophy and theology. All men whose station in life freed them from the necessity of learning a craft or trade studied music. It is not at all extraordinary that King Henry V composed some very respectable pieces himself – a Gloria and a Sanctus both survived the ravenous fires of the Reformation.
But even without knowing any of that, we might look around at the audiences in our concert halls. It’s becoming something of a cliché to remark on the grey hair. We wring our hands and wonder what would bring the young people to concerts? What do they want out of the experience? More fun? More excitement? More sex? But our obsession with youth and Youth Culture aside, what might we suppose our elders are hoping to “get” from the music? Do we ever ask ourselves why they make the considerable and ever-increasing effort to attend concerts? Why are those who contribute most generously to our institutions of classical music also the ones have so little time left to enjoy them?
The wisdom of age might consist largely of the ability to appreciate finally the value of things because there are simply fewer opportunities to use them as means. Striving gives way to circumspection; we draw nearer to the threshold that separates this world from the next. As we approach our natural end, perhaps we also approach an intimacy with ends.
Obviously, our elders come to concerts not because they hope the music will make them better at math or more successful in their careers. There is no use to which they plan to put the music they come to hear, cleverly plying it to realize their five- or ten-year plans. I think if we asked them, we would find that classical music for them is only about Beauty. I think they would sympathize with John Ruskin, who said, “Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.”
And maybe this is the real reason that audiences for classical music are aging: that it takes so much longer for us to shake off the utilitarian mindset that pervades our modern world, so well-rooted it has become in our unexamined ways of thinking and being. It is harder and harder for us to find our way through our inherent materialism to that space in which we value a thing for itself alone. And until we can sit with classical music and value it in that way, then we don’t really value it at all.
As James Matthew Wilson reminded us at our conference last year, “Aristotle proposes that something is a good in itself when, in being done for or valued for itself, it is actually valued for the sake of beauty.” And what is classical music if it’s not this thing: a good in itself, valued for the sake of Beauty? All the for-sake-of-whiches that we try to attach to it fail to justify its existence and explain its value because they begin by precluding the thing which classical music essentially is.
Many of those who have abandoned classical music to its painful Modernist and Postmodernist contortions, including many of the conservatives who should have been its natural allies, have taken refuge in popular or rock music instead. And while that is understandable – because the pop and rock genres never abandoned the tonal language that makes music intelligible, and on top of that borrowed much of what works best from the classical tradition – it is also not a fair trade.
Classical music is almost entirely unlike pop or rock music. It belongs in a different category altogether. It is not something to be overheard, but something to which we must give our full attention. It is not entertainment, but something much more like a religious experience. In fact, the birth and history of classical music is inextricably joined to the history of the Church. And the completeness of their affinity is reflected in the traditions of the concert hall, in the way we approach the music and the way that we hear it. As Roger Scruton explains,
You entered both the church and the concert hall from the world of business, laying aside your everyday concerns and preparing to be addressed by the silence. You came in an attitude of readiness, not to do something, but to receive something. In both places you were confronted with a mystery, something that happened without a real explanation, and which must be contemplated for the thing that it is. The silence is received as a preparation, a lustration, in which the audience prepares itself for an act of spiritual refreshment.
The music, like the religious mystery, draws us into it and holds us in its enchantment. It opens for us a door into a space that exists beyond our physical world, and what we hear moving in the music through that space is us. The symphony takes us on a journey through the secretive shadows and the uncertain vistas of our human condition. It touches those things of value within us, and it invites them to witness the miracle of transubstantiation wherein the dross of our daily existence, however trivial or tragic, is changed into the possibility of our salvation. “Your feelings at the end of a great classical symphony,” Scruton confirms, “have been won from you by a process which involves your deepest being.”
Nothing like this happens at a rock concert. To begin with, we do not approach the music with the same preparation of stillness and silence. Instead, we are animated by a noisy sort of excitement that anticipates, in Scruton’s words again, “participation, rather than contemplation.”
If the classical concert is more like a religious experience, the rock concert, Scruton explains,
is more like a collective celebration, in which everyone joins in and there is no mystery at all – only life, expressed and accepted for what it is. In the usual Rock concert, the excitement, and the message, are contained in the very first bar. Rhythm, tonality and the main spurt of melody are thrust immediately into the ears of the listener. There is a ‘let’s go!’ feeling to the music, and an invitation to leave aside all those long-winded and difficult emotions that have hesitation as their initiating mark.
There is, of course, a certain exhilaration that this kind of raucous musical release brings us. But it is not like the transcendence that classical music offers us, either in its durability or its depth.
Johann Sebastian Bach said that “The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.” That is another way to say that the aim and final end of all music should be Beauty, for it has always been with beauty that we glorify God just as it has always been beauty that refreshes our souls.
Bach’s is an unpopular notion in our secularist age. That the truth of it shines through all our willful and accidental corruptions and corrosions testifies to the fact that classical music is still indisputably and essentially about Beauty, even for those of us who do not believe in God. Beauty falls like the refreshing rain on all our souls alike.
But classical music will need champions in the camp of conservative thought to survive for the benefit of future generations. For those who might think they love classical music, but who detest Beauty or the God it traditionally glorifies even more, the only thing left to do is to silence the music in order to forget the God. And that, I suspect, is the greater part of the battle we’re facing next.
“[A]nd the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” Genesis 2:7
Rhythms, melodies, harmonies speak to us of immaterial things
The modern world is full of false dichotomies. There are divisions between reason and revelation, fact and value, and male and female that require careful definition so that the desired joining of the two is possible. The division between the material and the immaterial, that is, the body and the spirit, is one of these. Genesis 2:7 speaks of forming Adam from the ground, and breathing into him the breath of life, or the spirit. Two things indeed, but curiously, the result of the combination of these two is the living soul. The one thing that seems clear here is that the soul is alive, and that it somehow is the combination of the two elements of matter and spirit.
The manner in which one walks can show the point of intersection between the physical and the spiritual – that is, the interface between the sensation of literal movement in sight and sound and the conclusions drawn about the intangible personality, mood, and emotional state of the walker. When the tempo of the walk is varied, observers draw different conclusions about the walker’s state of mind. What does tempo have to do with intangibles such as intention, friendliness, or confidence?
Plato’s famous lines in the third book of The Republic speak of how the musical modes are linked directly to the various character traits he is either for or against in his ideal City.
‘And which are the harmonies expressive of sorrow? You are musical, and you can tell me.’
‘The harmonies that you mean are the mixed and tenor Lydian…and such like.’
‘These then,’ I said, ‘must be banished…’
These modes are the basis for both melody and linear harmony, and when combined with rhythm made a place for music that was far larger in scope than that we offer today. That scope is nothing short of soul-shaping. In the conclusion to the Preface of his thoughtful book on musical aesthetics, philosopher Roger Scruton sees this scope:
It came as a surprise that so dry a question as “what is a sound?” should lead at last to a philosophy of modern culture. Had I thought more about the Pythagorean cosmology, and the true meaning of harmonia I should perhaps have known beforehand, that the ordering of sound as music is an ordering of the soul.
Plato seems to be recommending nothing short of government-run musical censorship. Our present-day enlightened embrace of all musical expressions is not so much the result of a hard-fought battle for individual freedom as a belief that music has no such powers to shape and affect the soul. If we really believed that music had the effect of training the next generation to be dissolute, irresponsible, and cowardly, we might find ourselves censoring music.
Listening to music is not the same activity as listening to sounds in general. The difference between them is that we listen to sounds in order to know the thing making the sound (the sound of a car or the sound of a baby crying), but we don’t listen to the sound of music to hear an oboe playing, or a guitar strumming. Rather, we listen to hear the sound it is making. We may recognize the sound comes from an oboe, but we want to hear what the oboe is playing. There is the source, but there is meaning in the order of the sounds themselves. The goal, when we listen to music, is to hear what it is saying: the contours of the melody, the harmony, the rhythm speak to us of a musical event. These elements are the medium by which the communications come – these elements are the language of the composer/performer.
Beauty is partly the correspondence between the material and immaterial
When we do hear these elements, we verbalize the experience in terms that are similar to other aspects of life. We describe personality traits, emotions, ideas, moods. Often unconsciously our minds are looking for patterns, symmetries, orders, and expressions that will speak to us of meaning. These physical sounds correspond to these intangible aspects of human experience. If there is a shape or trajectory to the experience of hurt in a broken heart, or the experience of awe before a King, it may be that composers can capture something of it in the various elements of a composition. The beauty of the work is partly the result of this perceived correspondence. There is something fitting, right, correct, or profound in a successful work that is beautiful, but to be able to perceive this correspondence, we need another element.
The imagination exists not so much for the purpose of making things up, but for recognizing correlation, relation between things – seeing connections. It is not by accident that we agree that the rhythm discovered in a brisk walk to the podium reflects confidence, or urgency, while a broken rhythm implies indecision, distraction, anxiety. We have experienced the connection between these things so often that we have learned to become fluent in this language.
Imagination is an organ of perception with which we can make this correlation: it pairs the physicality of a perceived music with human moods, characteristics, states of mind or personality. Just as we have linguistic metaphors, we also have musical metaphors. We describe the aspects of music in non-musical terms all the time: loud sudden outbursts may imply anger; melodies can be described as languorous, angular, smooth, tender, demanding, or questioning. These are by their linguistic nature metaphoric – the sounds themselves have none of these characteristics. Music is by its nature disembodied so if we are to speak of what it expresses, we are forced to use metaphoric language. The imagination grasps these relations. Could it be that our imaginations are not “making things up,” as much as recognizing a truth in correspondence? When we find just the right metaphor, when we hit on the right combination and communicate it precisely, it is part of the experience we call the perception of beauty.
The telos of music
Music is thought to be an entertainment, a diversion, a mood-setter, or a time-filler. But for the ancient and medieval scholars, music was a window through which one could see the created order, as well as a way of training the soul toward integrity.
The beauty of music is one of the sources of Plato’s hierarchy of love in the Symposium and in The Republic:
And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar…
…Thus much of music, which makes a fair ending; for what should be the end of music if not the love of beauty?
Plato taught that a love of music instilled a love of beauty that spilled over into all areas of life, leading up the hierarchy to love of justice. Roger Scruton has written, “…beauty is not simply a redundant addition to the list of human appetites. It is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition as free individuals, seeking our place in an objective world.”
If the telos of music is beauty, how then do we teach music? By training our students’ imaginations, starting with how to hear the elements of music. The elements of Adam were matter and spirit, fused together to make a living soul that reflects the Imago Dei. The elements of music are: rhythm, melody, harmony, form, texture, and timbre, fused together to make a composition that can reflect the ideas, experiences, the very humanity of both composer and listener. Knowing what to listen for, we begin a new way of listening for the student. The ability to discern, to distinguish, to perceive the language of music is the beginning of genuine taste about music, and taste is a facet of wisdom. So music is forming our souls; it really does matter what we listen to, and what we offer in our services, just as it matters what our churches look like, and how our liturgies are designed, not only for didactic purposes – to have our theology correct – but to link the harmony of the Trinity with our daily lives.
So where does music come from? Is there more to music than emotional expression or mood setting?
II. Inspiration
“…I have called by name Bezalel…and I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge…” Exodus 31:2
The Greek Muses
Many of the Greek writers mention the Muses. Homer, Socrates, and others speak of them, but Hesiod is the one who speaks of the specifics that are commonly held. There are nine:
Calliope – eldest, epic poetry
Clio – history
Erato – love poetry
Euterpe – music
Melpomene – singer of tragedy
Polyhymnia – sacred poetry and geometry
Terpsichore – dance
Thalia – comedy and pastoral poetry
Urania – astronomy/astrology
These nine sing their inspirations. The Muses inspired far more than the subject of music only. Their subjects include all of our human artistic and intellectual pursuits, and the inspiration for each was conveyed by way of song. The very word music is taken from Mousike Techne (“the work of the Muses”). Nearly everything that we today refer to as “the arts and sciences” were, in the Greek mind, inspired through song by the Muses, and that inspiration leads Homer to compose The Illiad, leads Thucydides to write The Peloponnesian Wars, leads Sophocles to write Oedipus Rex, and leads Pythagoras to discover musical harmony and the music of the spheres. What comes is an approach which is so inspired, that is, that resonates with the truth to such a degree, that it will feed philosophers, scientists, and artists for millennia: the prerequisite for beauty is harmonia – the fitting, right, and mathematically sound interrelations of disparate objects. These Nine Muses were the keepers of the secret knowledge of harmony, and the significance of this knowledge and its power and influence over all of life are symbolized by the fact that they are the daughters of Zeus himself.
Beauty can be reflected in painting, sculpture, photographs, but there are arts such as plays, films, and music that include another aspect of human experience: time. As soon as you introduce the element of time, one’s perception of the work requires the ability to remember what has already occurred. Memory thus becomes a significant aspect in the immediate apprehension of these arts. To lose your memory is to lose yourself. If you can’t recall your identity, every effort must be made to rectify the situation. Memory is essential to identity. It is also essential to apprehending music, for exactly the same reason.
Music traces a pattern in the mind that lingers after the music moves on. The memory holds that trace, and the composer counts on our capacity to do so in order to describe the pattern fully. Like words in a sentence, we encounter music as moments in linear succession, but musical patterns are made without words; that is, the pattern is not literal but rather more like patterns in architecture or a garden because they too are each apprehended in succession. The Greeks gave one answer for both the questions: Where does music come from, and what part does memory play in its perception? We know that the father of the Muses is Zeus himself, but we seldom hear about their mother: her name was Mnemosyne (“Memory”). So, for real inspiration, great knowledge, for our right creative gifts to be released to do their jobs, to comprehend the nature of tragedy, epic, history, science, dance, even theology, we need the authority of Zeus, but we also need the knowledge of what has gone before – we need memory. This memory is not only of the previous words and notes in the artwork to which we presently attend, but the knowledge of our own history. What have great artists of the past done? How are we inheritors of their wisdom?
How then do we teach music? History. We need to remember. But there is one more thing to consider.
III. Excellence
“Finally, brothers, whatever things are true,… honest,…just,… pure,…lovely,…of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be anything worthy of praise, think on these things.” Philipians 4:8
Our day is as much the product of history as any other day. We are the inheritors of a relatively new field of study called aesthetics. It is a modern word, first coined in the 18th century, and discussed at length by Immanuel Kant and others until eventually the whole line of inquiry was relegated to the subjective world of values, to join her sister faith in that limbo. As a result, in the last 225 years, our culture has assumed that beauty first is only a matter of individual experience, and eventually, a matter of purely personal preference. Once the goal is mislaid, it is impossible to gauge whether a work is growing closer to it, so the loss of a telos requires the loss of a concept of excellence. Innovation and technical ability soon take the place of real imagination, correlation, and beauty.
Thus, the loss of what the ancient Greeks and Christians, as well as the Medieval Christians, thought of as excellence in art in general and music in particular is really a modern loss of confidence. The literal meaning of confidence suggests acting con fide (“with faith”). A lack of faith in God leads eventually to a lack of the ability to produce “simple predication” (as Richard Weaver would say). At first we lose the ability to say, “This is the point of art.” Then we lose the ability to say, “That is beautiful and that is not.” Then “that is art and that is not.” And eventually we find we can only say, “There is nothing more to art than the shock of the new; the expression that forces an audience to respond.” Reinstate faith, and we find ourselves led back to a definition of beauty that finds its source in the perfect character of God, and once He is our standard, “better” and “worse” are meaningful categories again. Beauty is the goal of art – I don’t say “prettiness” is the goal – I say beauty.
Then what is this beauty? How many philosophers have run aground making rules about beauty? What we need are not so much cultural standards by which to retroactively judge the beauty of an object; what we need is a useful foundational principle and definition of the word “objective.”
Objective beauty is simply that which is found in the object rather than in the response of the viewer/listener. Thomas Aquinas held that beauty was defined both by the characteristics of the object and the effect that object has on the viewer/listener. Ultimately, the Christian view of beauty will include both aspects in imitation of higher models, but when one’s day is dominated by the subjective side of the spectrum, as we are today, a reintroduction of the opposite side is welcome. We must reintroduce the study of form. When one describes the contours of the piece of music itself, the way it is composed, the way it is performed, the form it offers for contemplation, the meaning of the words chosen, one is describing the object itself, and the resulting opinion offered based on these things should be called “objective.” Don’t make the mistake of hearing “objective” as a synonym for “truth” as some will assume. The truth is far more illusive, and we have hardly scratched that surface with this approach. But what we have done is regained a category for musical discussion that requires thought. What we need is a definition of objective that leads to a fuller understanding of the work instead of considering a work based solely on whether or not we are moved by it. Teaching objectively about music means that we will address three aspects (at least):
Performance (an evaluation of the virtuosity of the performer)
Composition (an evaluation of the means of musical expression)
Content (an evaluation of the message or statement of the work)
All three of these require study, and that study will not only reveal what there is to know about the piece of music in question, but also will hone the sensibilities of the listener to be increasingly able to discern and explicate music. Over time, exposure to this sort of approach feeds our starved imaginations on excellence, and we find that instead of having to tell students not to listen to music that we might consider bad for them, they find they simply aren’t all that interested in the trivial, the base, the coarse. There would be nothing more encouraging for a music teacher than to hear a singer screaming his one-dimensional song of pain and passion, longing to be taken seriously, only then to see his student yawn and change the station.
A Theological basis for excellence
What then would be a basis for a Christian school intent on teaching excellence? We teach that taste is more than personal preference; it is a facet of wisdom. Taste is the ability to discern between what is good and what is excellent. Discernment comes more by way of regular exposure and experience (as a master trains the wine-taster’s palate or the piano tuner’s ear) than with rules and requirements. What is needed is a master teacher who can not only know music but make connections from music, by the imagination through metaphors, to the realm of human experience, and finally to real theology.
Any work of art requires an element of unity and of diversity combined. The Greeks debated about the one and the many, but great works have both elements. The reason is that the Creation itself reflects both unity and diversity in each of its categories (such as tree, fish, man), and we find we are only satisfied when the two are present. Too much unity? Tedium. Too much diversity? Chaos. Why should it surprise us that both the Creation and our tastes are created by a God who is ultimately both perfect unity and harmonious diversity in His Trinity?
The basis for the work of art-making is found in the doctrine of the Incarnation. We are taking invisible things such as ideas, experiences, feelings, and making them perceivable through the various physical media we use (clay, film, stone, paint, music).
Even the basis for an understanding of why we need musical education is theologically based. Our imaginations are damaged by the Fall as well. Through the study of music (or art in general) we grow in our abilities to see connections between things. In modern thought the damage done to our tastes is ignored by simply relegating the entire category of beauty to the dustbin of subjectivity, but a kind of human maturity can come as the result of taking the claims of beauty seriously. The reality is that we are aesthetically damaged as well as in every other way, and the only way back to fuller humanity is through prayer and a rethinking of the definition of taste for His glory.
Education is more than teaching about subjects; it is the training of the sensibilities to love that which is worth loving, attaching the heart to the good. Music has been taught in the Classical and Medieval worlds as a means of shaping the soul to live the good life. We need to rekindle an appreciation for music in that way, rather than offering either standardless popular music or esoteric academic music. I am convinced that if we were to take the connections to our theology seriously we would find we could reintroduce the general public to the concert hall again, as the music there would be relevant again.
So, how then do we teach music? We do it by way of comparison. Compare the works of our composers in the past and the present, and offer the foundation of criteria to evaluate the object, beginning with the performance, the composition and the content. Then, include the aspect of making music, by piano, orchestral and band instruments, and choral singing. The composition makes use of the form and elements of music, and that, with a sense of what the music is saying, leads the performer to his interpretation. It is what makes music meaningful to all concerned.
IV. Conclusions: a sacramental view of the world
“For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who claim to see shall become blind.” John 9:39
The Naturalism that disallows serious consideration of the supernatural has led to many unforeseen consequences, not the least of which is the loss of the spiritual purpose of material things. When Jesus calls himself the vine and us the branches, he has opened our eyes to an aspect of the Kingdom of God, but in speaking so, he has also given a great honor to vines. Without the supernatural dimension in our thinking, we may still have vines, but on closer inspection, we will find that vines have lost something in the transaction. They are somehow less grand.
In the same way, a sacramental view of music grants a special honor and significance to music – a position that allows us insight into the mind of God and his Creation by way of harmony.
The combination of a sacramental view of the world with a holy imagination can feed the soul with visions of the transcendent through the details of the world. This is beauty – the correspondence of the material object with the transcendent spirit – a resonance of harmony heard through the din of the fallen world. Please note I do not say in spite of the fallen world – although it is that at times – but even by way of the fallen world. This is the power of God: to show His harmony even through the elements of brokenness around us.
A sacramental view of the world suggests a metaphoric relationship between the physical and the spiritual, and this in turn gives rich depth to metaphors of all kinds, including musical ones. It also gives us a purpose for art and music: beauty. Beauty is at least in part the recognition of the correlation of matter and spirit, and we need to teach the next generations to unpack those metaphors – to see sacramentally. This requires the inspiration of God the Holy Spirit, the true Muse the Greeks could only guess about, and the gift God gives us of an imagination.
Beauty has lost its way in the 20th century in that we have lost our connection with the transcendent – that is, you cannot have the experience of seeing through the objects of this world into the next if you no longer believe there is a next. Naturalism, that seemed so optimistic in the 18th century, now appears a dead-end intellectually. Nature apart from her Creator becomes meaningless matter, and sadly, human enterprise can aspire to nothing higher than that same soul-less existence. The modern man (and I include the post-modern man in this) is haunted by his own humanity, seeing the ghosts of meaning, significance, ecstasy, profundity, joy, in the daily grind of his life. When he stops to reflect, he senses the musical rhythm in his breathing, his heartbeat, his walking pace; sometimes there seems to be more to eating meals than sustenance; he catches the notion of harmony in a well-run football play; perhaps a momentary glimpse of unity where he most expects diversity, say in his marriage; or diversity where he most expects unity, say in his twin children; he may even lift his head from anxiety long enough to find a certain joy in the rhythm of sleeping and working, or maybe looking back on a long life, discern even a kind of melody in his days, a certain beauty in the rise and fall of his fortunes, each connected in a line to the others in ways that couldn’t be seen while going through them.
This is what music is for. More than simply a means of distraction from the hard aspects of life – like a sort of emotional drug used to deaden us or entertain us while we rest – music has the ability to outline something of the actual experience of living. It speaks of the human condition because it is, like any metaphor, the use of the physical material of this world to draw attention to that which transcends our present moment. It has the ability to both reflect our experiences and shape the way we see them.
Music education then, has the ability to remind us of the relation of this matter and spirit, shaping our souls to love the beauty of harmony. This is why the ancients educated by way of music and gymnastics. This is why music has always held the position it does in the Quadrivium. Musical education leads to a love of harmony in all things.
How do we teach music? The elements, the history, the comparisons of excellent works, and finally the extension of this harmony – which is the beautiful relation of disparate things – to all aspects of life: to justice, to marriage, to virtuous business relations, to love of those who are different than yourself, to math, science, philosophy, and ultimately to the Triune God Himself. The beauty of harmony tunes our affections to virtue, love, and the mind of God.
Music rightly understood cannot save our souls, but what writer and critic Donald Drew has said about great literature applies to music as well, “after experiencing it, there will be more of a soul there to save.”
Works Cited
Plato. The Republic, Book III.
Scruton, Roger. Aesthetics of Music.
_______. “Beauty and Desecration,” City Journal, Feb. 2009.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece, though it may at first glance appear unrelated to our work, is nevertheless both relative and highly important because it raises the challenges presented to classical music and its institutions by the reining cults of Originality and Youth, and it suggests also the answer to them. It is reprinted here with gracious permission of the Asia Times, where it first appeared.
Much as I admire the late Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who turned his horrific experience at Auschwitz into clinical insights, the notion of “man’s search for meaning” seems inadequate. Just what about man qualifies him to search for meaning, whatever that might be?
The German playwright Bertolt Brecht warned us against the practice in The Threepenny Opera:
Ja, renne nach dem Gluck
Doch renne nicht zu sehr
Denn alle rennen nach dem Gluck
Das Gluck lauft hinterher.
(Sure, run after happiness,
But don’t run too hard,
Because while everybody’s running after happiness,
It moseys along somewhere behind them.)
Brecht (1898–1956) was the kind of character who gave Nihilism a bad name, to be sure, but he had a point. There is something perverse in searching for the meaning of life. It implies that we don’t like our lives and want to discover something different. If we don’t like living to begin with, we are in deep trouble.
Danish philosopher, theologian, and religious author Søren Kierkegaard portrayed his Knight of Faith as the sort of fellow who enjoyed a pot roast on Sunday afternoon. If that sort of thing doesn’t satisfy us, just what is it that we had in mind?
People have a good reason to look at life cross-eyed, because it contains a glaring flaw – that we are going to die, and we probably will become old and sick and frail before we do so. All the bric-a-brac we accumulate during our lifetimes will accrue to other people, if it doesn’t go right into the trash, and all the little touches of self-improvement we added to our personality will disappear – the golf stance, the macrame skills, the ability to play the ukulele and the familiarity with the filmography of Sam Pekinpah.
These examples trivialize the problem, of course. If we search in earnest for the meaning of life, then we might make heroic efforts to invent our own identity. That is the great pastime of the past century’s intellectuals. Jean-Paul Sartre, the sage and eventual self-caricature of Existentialism, instructed us that man’s existence precedes his essence, and therefore he can invent his own essence more or less as he pleases. That was a silly argument, but enormously influential.
Sartre reacted to the advice of Martin Heidegger (the German existentialist from whom Jean-Paul Sartre cribbed most of his metaphysics). Heidegger told us that our “being” really was being-unto-death, for our life would end, and therefore is shaped by how we deal with the certainty of death. (Franz Kafka put the same thing better: “The meaning of life is that it ends.”) Heidegger (1889–1976) thought that to be “authentic” means to submerge ourselves into the specific conditions of our time, which for him meant joining the Nazi party. That didn’t work out too well, and after the war it became every existentialist for himself. Everyone had the chance to invent his own identity according to taste.
Few of us actually read Sartre (and most of us who do regret it), and even fewer read the impenetrable Heidegger. But most of us remain the intellectual slaves of 20th century existentialism notwithstanding. We want to invent our own identities, which implies doing something unique.
This has had cataclysmic consequences in the arts. To be special, an artist must create a unique style, which means that there will be as many styles as artists. It used to be that artists were trained within a culture, so that thousands of artists and musicians painted church altar pieces and composed music for Sunday services for the edification of ordinary church-goers.
Out of such cultures came one or two artists like Raphael or Bach. Today’s serious artists write for a miniscule coterie of aficionados in order to validate their own self-invention, and get university jobs if they are lucky, inflicting the same sort of misery on their students. By the time they reach middle age, most artists of this ilk come to understand that they have not found the meaning of life. In fact, they don’t even like what they are doing, but as they lack professional credentials to do anything else, they keep doing it.
The high art of the Renaissance or Baroque, centered in the churches or the serious theater, has disappeared. Ordinary people can’t be expected to learn a new style every time they encounter the work of a new artist (neither can critics, but they pretend to). The sort of art that appeals to a general audience has retreated into popular culture. That is not the worst sort of outcome. One of my teachers observes that the classical style of composition never will disappear, because the movies need it; it is the only sort of music that can tell a story.
Most people who make heroic efforts at originality learn eventually that they are destined for no such thing. If they are lucky, they content themselves with Kierkegaard’s pot roast on Sunday afternoon and other small joys, for example tenure at a university. But no destiny is more depressing than that of the artist who truly manages to invent a new style and achieve recognition for it.
He recalls the rex Nemorensis, the priest of Diana at Nemi, who according to Ovid won his office by murdering his predecessor, and will in turn be murdered by his eventual successor. The inventor of a truly new style has cut himself off from the past, and will in turn be cut off from the future by the next entrant who invents a unique and individual style.
The only thing worse than searching in vain for the meaning of life within the terms of the 20th century is to find it, for it can only be a meaning understood by the searcher alone, who by virtue of the discovery is cut off from future as well as past. That is why our image of the artist is a young rebel rather than an elderly sage. If our rebel artists cannot manage to die young, they do the next best thing, namely disappear from public view, like JD Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. The aging rebel is in the position of Diana’s priest who sleeps with sword in hand and one eye open, awaiting the challenger who will do to him what he did to the last fellow to hold the job.
Most of us have no ambitions to become the next Jackson Pollack or Damien Hirst. Instead of Heidegger’s being-unto-death, we acknowledge being-unto-cosmetic surgery, along with exercise, Botox, and anti-oxidants. We attempt to stay young indefinitely. Michael Jackson, I argued in a July 2009 obituary, became a national hero because more than any other American he devoted his life to the goal of remaining an adolescent. His body lies moldering in the grave (in fact, it was moldering long before it reached the grave) but his spirit soars above an America that proposes to deal with the problem of mortality by fleeing from it.
A recent book by the sociologist Eric Kaufmann (Will the Religious Inherit the Earth?) makes the now-common observation that secular people have stopped having children. As a secular writer, he bewails this turn of events, but concedes that it has occurred for a reason: “The weakest link in the secular account of human nature is that it fails to account for people’s powerful desire to seek immortality for themselves and their loved ones.”
Traditional society had to confront infant mortality as well as death by hunger, disease and war. That shouldn’t be too troubling, however: “We may not be able to duck death completely, but it becomes so infrequent that we can easily forget about it.”
That is a Freudian slip for the record books. Contrary to what Professor Kaufmann seems to be saying, the mortality rate for human beings remains at 100%, where it always was. But that is not how we think about it. We understand the concept of death, just not as it might apply to us.
If we set out to invent our own identities, then by definition we must abominate the identities of our parents and our teachers. Our children, should we trouble to bring any into the world, also will abominate ours. If self-invention is the path to the meaning of life, it makes the messy job of bearing and raising children a superfluous burden, for we can raise our children by no other means than to teach them contempt for us, both by instruction, and by the example we set in showing contempt for our own parents.
That is why humanity has found no other way to perpetuate itself than by the continuity of tradition. A life that is worthwhile is one that is worthwhile in all its phases, from youth to old age. Of what use are the elderly? In a viable culture they are the transmitters of the accumulated wisdom of the generations. We will take the trouble to have children of our own only when we anticipate that they will respect us in our declining years, not merely because they tolerate us, but because we will have something yet to offer to the young.
In that case, we do not discover the meaning of life. We accept it, rather, as it is handed down to us. Tradition by itself is no guarantee of cultural viability. Half of the world’s 6,700 languages today are spoken by small tribes in New Guinea, whose rate of extinction is frightful. Traditions perfected over centuries of isolated existence in Neolithic society can disappear in a few years in the clash with modernity. But there are some traditions in the West that have survived for millennia and have every hope of enduring for millennia still.
For those of you who still are searching for the meaning of life, the sooner you figure out that the search itself is the problem, the better off you will be. Since the Epic of Gilgamesh in the third millennium BC, our search has not been for meaning, but for immortality. And as the gods told Gilgamesh, you can’t find immortality by looking for it. Better to find a recipe for pot roast.
As I sat on the front steps of our downtown row house writing this piece, police and National Guard helicopters circling overhead, several dejected neighbors came by to chat with me about the sorrowful setback our city has suffered. This week, as riots and demonstrations ravaged parts of Baltimore, business-as-usual came to a stop for practically everyone in the city, including the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO). The orchestra’s members were left wondering, like so many of their neighbors, what we could do in the face of the upheaval and heartbreak of a city in turmoil, especially since our schedule had been cleared for the near future. To everybody’s mind sprang that quote of Leonard Bernstein’s, familiar to nearly all classical musicians:
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
The BSO musicians decided that our best response to such dismal darkness would be for us to turn on our brightest light – to perform an impromptu concert, and to do so as soon as possible. It did not take long for us to reach the conclusion that the best way we could help was to do essentially what we do every week.
Businesses are boarded up just a block from our home in Baltimore – and only several blocks from the city’s concert hall.
But this week the BSO had had to cancel its children’s concerts as well as a program aimed specifically at technologically fixated Millennials – namely, a concert of the music of Pokémon. While children’s concerts have always been an important part of our 100-year history, the Pokémon program was a stretch. In wandering out of the usual territory of our huge, sophisticated repertoire, we were making an attempt to ameliorate our greatest fear and insecurity: that we and what we play are not relevant to people today.
So in place of these canceled concerts, we decided simply to perform in the driveway of the hall in the middle of the day and to spread the word via social media, to which most of the city was understandably glued. The very next day at noon we assembled outside, surrounded by roughly a thousand eager listeners – some with strollers, some from day care centers with throngs of children, some neighbors and friends, some just passersby, many familiar faces and many new ones, too, all eager for a glimpse of something that could transcend the very tense situation we found ourselves in. As we played, we were enfolded by the gratitude of our audience; and afterwards they showered us with words of heartfelt thanks, some even assuring us that this impromptu concert was one of the most moving things they had ever been a part of.
This kind of event is not unusual for orchestras. Throughout history, when entire societies have been at war, even at the very apex of conflict, people want to go to hear a concert of classical music. The Israel Philharmonic (IPO) has long been the healing salve for generations of emigrants from war torn Europe, a great consolation for those who lost their families in the countries they left and later lost even their own children during Israel’s wars at home. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, the IPO and Daniel Barenboim immediately assembled a concert just days later in his name. For many people including his family, Beethoven’s Heroic 3rd Symphony and Egmont Overture were the proper way to remember one of the IPO’s greatest supporters.
There is a famous recording of Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in Berlin during the Second World War that includes the sound of bombs dropping on the city, killing its people. What on earth moved people to attend a concert in a large, domed building during a bombardment? Shostakovich saw his city’s premier of his 7th Symphony during the siege of Leningrad, surrounded by the German army, performed by musicians who were literally starving to death – some of whom did succumb to starvation between its rehearsal and performance.
These are just a few examples. It seems that, in Western culture, with war and tragedy comes classical music – a most non-material yet profoundly meaningful response where words and physical circumstances fail. It would seem that transcendence is in fact one of our basic human needs, felt all the more when circumstances conspire to chain us to our miseries. It has long been observed that from history’s worst periods some of the best art sprang forth.
Baltimore’s recent events remind us of war, both in their scope of destruction and in the long-term effects they will have on life inside poor neighborhoods. Our orchestra has long searched its soul – like others in Detroit, St Louis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and London – for a way to relate to these wars within our cities. If some people’s lives are so full of suffering, where are we in relation to that suffering? Do we just fiddle while Rome burns? What real thing can we offer our community if we accept our critics’ characterizations of classical music as merely “pretty sounds for rich people”? Hollywood, ever the counter-culturist, never tires of portraying immoral, upper class twits as being steeped in classical culture, set to the sound of Mozart’s string quartets. Indeed, our critics who advocate progress have demanded that, unless we can directly impact the pressing problems of material poverty and childhoods that result in an utter lack of preparedness for gainful employment, we are not only irrelevant to our communities but we are actually a standing mockery of material poverty itself.
When we look at the long-term decline of the underclass and now the demise of the middle class, we see an abandonment of what worked so well for so long. There was a time when the hallmark of American achievement was the fact that we had a robust and growing middle class as well as a tradition of public education that distilled the best writings, disciplines, and knowledge of the past into a transmitted inheritance for future generations. And the founding fathers of our cities not only established bedrock institutions such as universities, hospitals, libraries, and museums, they also founded symphony orchestras. For them, art and music were a vital dimension of the fully developed human being. To be wise and learned was the great goal of the common man. To be successful was to be cultured. Only in the last half-century did we decide to make a utilitarian beeline for success and cut out the hard-won holistic learnedness that temporarily delays access to material gains.
The people we might call the quantifiers in the American arts sector are the people who are always looking to measure outcomes and impact. And unless we can justify ourselves by their measures, they assure us, we risk being branded “irrelevant” either by outsiders who prefer other music or by insiders whose work is driven by administrative mandate. The situation is utterly frustrating for the arts administrators who fight for their organizations’ survival simply for the sake of all the beauty they sow.
What was most magical about the BSO’s impromptu concert this week was not that it was “free,” but that it was offered as a salve for frayed souls. While the circumstances and emotions surrounding it were extreme, I feel quite certain that the offering itself was not substantively different than what the orchestra offers on a weekly basis. How can we know what has happened within the minds and hearts of the millions of people who have listened to the BSO over our 100 years of concertizing? Where did their imaginations take them? What personal tragedies did Mahler help them immeasurably transcend? What new untapped inspiration did they discover in Berlioz? What have children dreamt up during their first experience of Pictures at an Exhibition? For many people I talk to, including those who continue to meet me on my front step while I write this, classical music is one of those most lovely things that make life worth living – ranking higher in meaning and fulfillment than even anything basic material goods can offer. Certainly, for those starving musicians in Leningrad and their audience on the brink of death, it mattered as much as bread.
But when it becomes a game to prove our “relevance” through altruistic opportunism and grandstanding, we lose the very thing for which our supporters love us. We risk deserving the scorn reserved for shallow sentimentality. As our friend Roger Scruton reminds us, sentimentality cries two tears: one for the object of its pity and one for its own exquisite sensitivity. We will not move people with our sentimentality, but rather with our music – the music itself that has moved mankind through history’s tragedies as well as its triumphs. Music is a salve for the soul and when it’s great music, it points us towards transcendence.
What people were rioting about in Baltimore was certainly more than a few bad cops. It was, if I can venture to characterize the hardships of other people’s lives, about a sense that some things in our society have gone completely wrong, off the rails, and are unconscionably unjust. The lives of the poorest of Baltimore’s children – even the ones who manage to stay in school – are indeed devoid of order, beauty, harmony, and truth. In our work at FSI, we are deeply concerned about the fact that our society has lost its way. What’s more we are raising a lost generation. And that is the much larger problem to which classical music, like classical education, is part of the solution. Questioning the relevance of our orchestras is like discarding the legend to our map of Western civilization and still expecting to find our way again.
Orchestras share the plight of many of the struggling in America: we are searching for meaning. We think that our meaning pulled out of the station a long time ago and we have to catch another train. Perhaps what really happened is that we left our meaning at the station behind us. We are at a loss to understand ourselves without it, and yet we know in our bones what we don’t have the ability anymore to explain.
Postscript
Tonight in Baltimore there are celebrations in the very streets that were set ablaze several days ago, and at their center are our city’s marching bands.
Published with special thanks to Hilary B. and Kate Miller who made it possible.
The ear is a biological phenomenon; but the human ear is also a cultural product. It has a history, a perspective and an interest of its own. The ear of the modern concertgoer is unlike the ear of a medieval chorister, and both are distinct from the ear of the pop fan who never takes his speakers from his ears. Until we understand this fact we will not be able to address the question that is of such importance to classical music today, which is that of the renewal of tonality.
Some people listen to music; others merely hear it. The assumption on which our musical culture has been built is that people will listen to musical sounds, and listen to them for their own sake, treating them as intrinsically significant. All music lovers listen in that sense, regardless of their taste. This does not mean that listening is a single phenomenon, or that it cannot be changed through education. Just as you can educate the eye to look for the meanings that painters endeavour to put on the canvas, so you can educate the ear to listen for, and to hear, the effects that composers intend.
Animals too listen: they prick up their ears and stand still, attending to the ambient sounds. But they are doing something different from what we do, when we listen to music. They are seeking information. It is not the sounds that interest them, but the things that cause the sounds. Like us, they use their ears to gain knowledge of the world, and the sounds that they make are signals of other things – their emotions, desires and responses. Even bird-song is to be understood in that way. Birds neither sing nor listen for the sake of the music: they are expressing their territorial instinct, and taking note of others doing the same.
When we listen to music it is also true that we are interested in information – who is making the sound, where it is coming from, why it is sounding now, and so on. But those interests are extraneous to the musical experience. A completely unmusical person could be interested in music for those reasons, as could an animal. When we listen to music as music, we are focusing on the sounds themselves, hearing in them a particular kind of life and movement. And this is a far more mysterious thing than at first it seems. Often, if you focus too closely on the causes of the sounds, you lose track of the music. Brahms’s 2nd piano concerto opens with a phrase on the horn, followed by a rising arpeggio on the piano that breaks into an answering phrase. To hear the musical line you have to think away the physical location of the sounds, to forget the man blowing in one corner of the orchestra and the woman striking keys in the other. You must hear the horn summoning that arpeggio, which rises up in the same space as the horn’s melody, but from somewhere below it, presenting its answering phrase in the space vacated by the horn. Where is this space? Nowhere in the physical world. And when we listen to these sounds as music we are focusing on a movement that does not occur in the place where we are.
Only because we human beings are capable of certain special acts of attention do we encounter music in the sounds that we hear. Maybe the tone deaf hear only sounds, and cannot perceive the order that reveals itself to the musical ear. But musical people are listening in another way from the unmusical. They don’t hear through the sounds to some mysterious cause that eludes those with less acute hearing. What they hear lies in the sounds themselves. It is not a hidden cause or a faraway commotion. It is as present in the sounds as a face is present in a portrait. But it is not identical with the sounds, any more than the face in the picture is identical with a collection of pigments. The order we hear in music is an imagined order, and it is only because we attend to the music in a certain way that it is revealed to us.
Listening is not the whole of musical appreciation. There is also playing, singing along, dancing. But in all those activities we find some equivalent of the mysterious process that occurs in the soul of the musical listener: the process that fills a sequence of sounds with movement, life and order. It is in these terms that we should understand our tonal tradition, and also the interest that we bring to it in the concert hall. When playing an instrument you might be the sole audience. Nevertheless, it is your nature as a listener that governs how you play, and even if your body responds to the rhythm so that the movement of the music takes place also in you, this happens because you are a listener, someone who can hold sounds together in his imagination and who can hear the order that binds each sound to its successor.
Undeniably, listening has a history, and a pre-history too. Just how the habit of making and listening to music arose is a deep question, and evolutionary psychologists have offered various not very plausible theories in response to it. In its first occurrence, it is natural to assume, music must have been a social phenomenon – a form of ‘joining in’ through which the tribe experienced in heightened form the solidarity on which it depended for survival. When people sing and dance together they have an experience of ‘belonging’ which depends on no family ties or prior affections, and which therefore can be used to incorporate strangers into the community, to prepare otherwise mutually suspicious people for combat or hunting, and to mark the rites of passage in which the community as a whole has a stake. Not surprisingly, therefore, singing and dancing are universal features of tribal societies, and occur at just the places and times where the need for solidarity surfaces.
This does not, however, tell us very much about listening. The very fact that listening can occur in private, without the experience of ‘joining in’, might lead us to think that it is a late arrival on the human scene, a mark of the separation of the individual from the community, and of the growing ability of humans to put observation in the place of participation. Even if the performer and the dancer must listen to their music, the art of listening without joining is, it might be suggested, a later development, something that did not have to occur, and which supposes a new and more sophisticated attitude to the collective life of the tribe.
Whatever its pre-history, however, listening in silence brought with it not only a new attitude to music, but also a new kind of music. Music began to be written down and worked over; it became established as an art whose products could be repeated and admired in other places and at other times. The movement heard in sounds was now isolated for study, and understood in terms of its inner logic. New complexities arose as people began to distinguish separate but harmonising voices, and in due course there emerged the instrumental, choral and vocal music of our classical tradition, which demands acts of attention that can occur only if the audience maintains a posture of collective silence, and only if the urge to dance or to sing along is suppressed.
It is from those developments that the symphony and the concert arose. And it is not too fanciful, I think, to compare the rise of silent listening to the advent of silent worship in church, temple and synagogue. What must originally have been a collective dance or song in honour of the god became in time a largely silent ritual, in which the presiding priest conducted the ceremony, performed the sacred actions or recited the holy words, whether or not with the aid of a choir. The congregation could join in from time to time, but only in ways specified by the rite. For long moments the ordinary worshippers remained motionless in silence, their eyes and thoughts fixed on the ritual at the altar. The priest mediated between two worlds, the everyday world, and the world beyond, the spirit-world, to which the thoughts and hopes of the congregation were directed. And in due course the question arose whether such mediation was necessary, and whether people could not put themselves immediately in the presence of God, and receive his blessings through pronouncing prayers of their own.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the history of instrumental music and that of the cult of listening are interwoven with the history of the Church and the priesthood. You entered both the church and the concert hall from the world of business, laying aside your everyday concerns and preparing to be addressed by the silence. You came in an attitude of readiness, not to do something, but to receive something. In both places you were confronted with a mystery, something that happened without a real explanation, and which must be contemplated for the thing that it is. The silence is received as a preparation, a lustration, in which the audience prepares itself for an act of spiritual refreshment. This is perhaps one of the most important differences between the concert-hall experience and the Rock concert, in which the audience falls silent, if at all, only because it cannot compete with the noise from the stage. Like a football match, a Rock concert takes place in an atmosphere of excitement. Even if the result is a kind of listening, it is one in which participation, rather than contemplation, is the background sentiment.
In our attempts to understand the place of the symphony hall in our society today we should be aware of that great difference between the symphony and the Rock concert. The first is more akin to a religious service, in which a mystery is repeated in silence, while the second is more like a collective celebration, in which everyone joins in and there is no mystery at all – only life, expressed and accepted for what it is. The music of the concert hall tends to start from small beginnings and work to a climax. It is a kind of reasoned extrapolation of a primal thought, in which the listeners are invited to move and develop with the music, much as they are invited to move and develop with a religious service. Your feelings at the end of a great classical symphony have been won from you by a process which involves your deepest being. In the usual Rock concert, the excitement, and the message, are contained in the very first bar. Rhythm, tonality and the main spurt of melody are thrust immediately into the ears of the listener. There is a ‘let’s go!’ feeling to the music, and an invitation to leave aside all those long-winded and difficult emotions that have hesitation as their initiating mark.
But there are also significant similarities between the two events. In both there is a centre of attention – the people who are making music for the sake of the audience. And in both there is, or has been, a shared legacy of rhythmic, melodic and harmonic devices. While the symphony is more akin to a religious mystery, and the Rock concert to a tribal dance – although a dance that is constrained by the space and by the focus on the stage – both depend on musical movement, melodic progression, rhythmic beat and harmonic closure. The chords that occur in the Rock concert could also occur in a tonal symphony, and while, by the standards of the concert hall, the melodies of Rock music are for the most part truncated and ephemeral, they work in the same way – by bringing the listener into their movement. They work towards closure, and usually the melodic closure is a harmonic closure too, a coming to rest on the tonic of the key.
I don’t say that all Rock music is like that. But such is the paradigm case, from which the many experiments depart. And it is built around the same basic grammar as the great classical symphonies – the ‘common practice’, which extracts repeatable and recognizable harmonies from the diatonic scale. That is the thread by which young people today can be brought to enter, with experimental footsteps, the sacred place of the symphony hall. But first they must take off their ear-phones. And how do we make that happen?
It is not a question of replacing one musical taste with another – something that often happens through education and an expanded acquaintance with the repertoire. It is a question of replacing addiction with discrimination. If you look back at the critiques of tonality articulated by Schoenberg, and subsequently by Adorno, Bloch and others, you will find a repeated emphasis on the ‘banality’ of the common practice. This banality clings not only to melodies and rhythms, but also to individual chords. The diminished seventh, Schoenberg tells us in the Harmonielehre, has ‘become banal’. You just can’t use it any more: its once thrilling effect has gone from it; the chord has lost its aura through too much and too predictable use. (Though people went on using it nevertheless – there are three diminished sevenths in a row in Berg’s great Lyric Suite for string quartet.) It is as though a groove has been worn in musical space, and if you slip into it you are trapped by it, sliding along with no escape. All the effects of the common practice, Adorno argued, have become like that.
The same kind of groove is chiselled in the human psyche by addictions. When rewards are too quickly and too easily obtained, the path to them becomes entrenched and closed against divergence. The addict slips into the groove unresisting, and is carried to the goal without the possibility of escape from it. This happens with substance abuse, with pornography, with the anger-addiction of the Islamists, who slip into the God groove at the first hint of an excuse. And it surely happens with music too. When rhythms, harmonies and melodic lines are taken from a predictable repertoire and offer no resistance to the person who nods along with them, and when the experience is available at the push of a button, a groove is chiselled in the listening part of the brain, and the entrance to that groove lies always open. How to close that entrance? And if we cannot close it, what then?
The first step in the cure of addiction is well known: the addict must confess to his condition and express a desire to be released from it. The various ‘12 step’ programs that have been proposed, in the wake of the pioneering work of Alcoholics Anonymous, all depend upon this first step. And it is this first step that is the hardest to achieve. The pop addict must first be brought to listen to something other than his addiction. And how can that be achieved without removing the earphones? Only if he can be brought into a shared space, and encouraged to listen, with others beside him, to another kind of sound than the one that lies along that open groove, will the process of recovery begin. For this reason, it seems to me, music education must begin in school. It should be one task of a symphony to organize school-day concerts, to show children that there is another and more grow-up way of listening to another and more long-range kind of music.
It is for the same reason that we should refuse to go along with those who disparage the common practice, who say, with Adorno, that tonality is a dead language, which should be learned only as Latin is learned, in order to appreciate the beauties of a world that has gone. We must be prepared to show young people that the coal face from which their addictive songs have been chipped contains other, more beautiful and more interesting seams of meaning, and that behind the glittering surface lie treasures that are worth far more than the superficial dross.
American composers have made their own distinctive contribution to this enterprise. From Gershwin to John Adams it has been normal to take some aspect of the popular music of the day and to show its connection to other and more long-term ways of musical thinking. Just as Gershwin rewrote jazz sequences in the language of counterpoint, so does Adams lift the ostinato four in a bar of the Rock group into an orchestral empyrean, where the flat-footed dance gives way to a gravitationless rhythm that moves and develops with the harmony. Adams uses the tonal language, not to make the kind of profound statement of a Beethoven or a Bruckner, but nevertheless to lift the young ear out of its groove and to make it listen.
If those thoughts have any merit, then they suggest a program of musical education that is still available to us, and in which the American symphony, and the American tradition of democratic openness, can play a vital part. But they also suggest that we should not let ourselves be bullied by the avant-garde into filling the concert hall with original noises and inexplicable sound effects. New music is of course necessary if the symphony is to live. But it should be music in which each note is joined to its neighbour, so that life can move between them and we the listeners move in sympathy too. It is that experience of moving in sympathy, yet without really moving, that is the ‘real presence’ in the consecrated space of the symphony hall. And to lead young people towards it is not only our duty, but also their salvation.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an edited transcription of the address delivered by Richard Bogomolny at our inaugural The Future of the Symphony Conference in September 2014. View the video of this presentation in its entirety.
I just want to begin by saying what an honor it is to appear on this program with such highly credentialed speakers, and I don’t take this lightly. I’ve been asked to talk about how the Cleveland Orchestra operates, focusing more on the practical side. But along the way I have to tell you those things we believe in and those things we don’t.
My own personal history is that I grew up in the supermarket industry, and I retired from that business. I wouldn’t mention that except for Andy’s comments yesterday concerning potential problems when you bring too much business discipline into an arts organization and what the potential is for that, both good and bad. I’m glad I had the business experience to apply to it, but historically, when you become the president or chairman of this organization, you never lose sight of the fact that the art is the most important thing. Music is number one. We’d like to say that the musicians are number two and everything else is number three.
I grew up during the George Szell era. This was the era during which the orchestra became known far and wide for artistic excellence. There were two elements of pride for the community in those days. They were the Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Browns – that’s where my head was when I was growing up. My mother studied at the Damrosch School in New York, which later became Juilliard, and my brother and I each studied music and grew up loving classical music. He played the clarinet and French horn and now plays classical guitar, and I the violin and viola. We both studied with prominent members of the Cleveland Orchestra and attended the national music camp at Interlochen for two summers. It was at Interlochen that I realized I was never going to be good enough to play at the level where I would like to play.
Similar Problems
Here is a kind of disclaimer: while I think the kinds of things that impact orchestras today are fairly common among the orchestras, the solutions, in my view, have to be local. What works in Cleveland may or may not work elsewhere, and there are reasons for that. So I’m not here to say what things other orchestras ought to be doing simply because we’re doing them – it’s not that at all. And we make as many mistakes as the next organization does. Cleveland itself is a major part of what and who we are. But I think we have four issues in common.
It’s fairly obvious that financial resources – or the lack thereof – are a major issue in the industry. The development of audiences – their age, their size, and their demographics – is another thing. That leads to the third problem, which is lack of true diversity on the stage, in the boardroom, and in the building. The fourth thing is that none of us suffers from a lack of qualified musicians. The world is continuing to produce more and better musicians than the major orchestras of the world can possibly support. Unfortunately, on the issue of diversity and inclusion, because of years and years of trying and failing, I don’t think that I have much that is useful to provide for you other than a long study of things that didn’t work. So I’m going to talk about history a little bit.
History
The orchestra was founded in 1918 by Adella Prentiss Hughes. She had two things in mind, both of which have remained central to our existence ever since. Firstly, she wanted Cleveland to have a great orchestra and to avoid the need of always having to import touring orchestras for classical music. And secondly, she hoped the orchestra’s musicians would form a cadre to teach in the Cleveland public school systems. And for most of this time, this has been true.
Cleveland Orchestra, 1931
In 2018 we will celebrate our one hundredth anniversary. We are planning a celebration not of the orchestra but of our community, which has supported us for all of these years. In addition to the Orchestra, we run the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, and the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus. We involve in these organizations as many people from northeastern Ohio, and some from even further away, as we can.
Severance Hall was opened in 1930. At the time it was called America’s most beautiful concert hall and I believe that it was. In 1956 or so, George Szell completely revamped and improved the acoustics by changing the concert stage and removing heavy carpeting and drapes, but in the process he buried the six-thousand-piece organ in the ceiling, making it impossible to play. This was at the beginning of the era of high fidelity, and Szell believed that we would be able to play the organ and broadcast it through very large speakers that were installed in the back wall, but that never happened.
Severance Hall
Later, we revamped the whole Severance Hall again. We renovated it, we added to it, and we brought the organ down to the concert hall level, where it now stretches around three sides of the stage and is very playable. The hall seats two thousand people, all with an unobstructed view. And the acoustics are really quite good. I think the acoustics are one of the reasons for what is referred to as the ‘Cleveland Orchestra Sound.’ It’s a stage where the musicians hear each other better than anywhere else they’ve ever played.
In 1968 we opened our summer hall at the Blossom Music Center. It sits on 200 acres in the middle of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It was completely renovated in 2002, and the serious work of providing better accessibility, not just for the handicapped but also for the aging population, is being completed in phases over the next couple of years. The pavilion seats 5,700 and another 13,500 can sit on the lawn, all with good visibility. The stage is at the bottom of a natural bowl, with seating and access from the hillside. Touring soloists and guest conductors tell us that it’s the most beautiful and best acoustical outdoor classical venue in the world.
Franz Welser-Möst has been our music director since 2002. He is under contract through 2015 and we’re in the midst of negotiations to extend that now. He just recently resigned as the music director of the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic. I think he had the second longest tenure of anyone there, but when he took the job he said, “I’m not going to complete my term; nobody does.” And he didn’t.
The Cleveland Factor
Cleveland skyline
I want to talk about the Cleveland marketplace. In 1955, we had one million residents residing inside of the city’s legal boundaries. Today we have 390,000. The city went from a manufacturing powerhouse for cars, steel, and oil refinement to a service economy where the largest current employer is the Cleveland Clinic. We were long ago a top-tier economy, and we became a second-tier economy in the 1970s and ’80s. By the recession of 2007–8, we’d become a third-tier economy. Last week the US Census Bureau released new numbers that give Cleveland the distinction of being the second poorest city in America. Detroit beat us out for the distinction of being the poorest.
But surprisingly, for all these years, the Cleveland Orchestra has been supported by our community as a top-tier orchestra with all the associated costs that go with it. We’re the smallest city in the world to have such an orchestra, and it would be easy to conclude that the people leaving Cleveland moved into the suburbs, but the numbers don’t really back that up. It means that our funding base has deteriorated and that support for all of our area nonprofits has fallen to fewer and fewer sources. Many of the area’s Fortune 500 companies have moved elsewhere or have merged – several major banks among them. In 2007, after a very large campaign, the city created a pool funded by a tax of thirty cents per pack of cigarettes for the use of the performing arts organizations in the area.
There’s one other factor besides the economics to be considered, and that’s the historical generosity of the community. In the words of Fiddler on the Roof, I’m speaking about Tradition. In Cleveland, the tradition of philanthropy has origins in the early 1900s with Andrew Carnegie, the Rockefellers, the Severances, and others. It has continued to this day, measured by what the Cleveland Orchestra raises, what United Way, Jewish Federation, Catholic Charities, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and a mass of others have raised annually. I believe that the United Way was originally the Community Chest and it was founded in Cleveland. And the Cleveland Foundation, which was the first community foundation in America, is currently the second wealthiest behind New York City. That’s all going on while people are leaving the area and the economy turns from heavy-duty manufacturing to mostly service and medicine.
But one of the things of interest is the fact that the Cleveland Orchestra had the highest market penetration for both ticket sales and per capita donations in the industry. No other orchestra has developed even half of what we have achieved in their marketplaces. Yet balancing the budget has always been a struggle. And here is why: the nature of the industry. My predecessor as president of the orchestra, Ward Smith, defined a nonprofit as the symphony orchestra. Why? Because the revenue earned from ticket sales and sponsorships never covered, even in the best of times, more than 47 or 48 percent of what it cost to operate. In recent times, that number has been closer to 40 percent than to 50. Covering the other 53 to 60 percent of the annual operating budget depends totally on fundraising – whether you called it endowment, annual bridge, special, or by any other name or combination of names.
On the business side of the symphony orchestra, I believe this is all one really needs to know in setting priorities. Next to governments, for which most boards easily possess the talent – whether they have the will is another story – fundraising is where it’s at in terms of financial success or failure. Every one of our trustees has a fundraising plan to which he has agreed and assists in solicitations for the annual fund drive.
There are some broad principles. It’s often suggested that if the board does the job of fundraising the musicians will be able to keep up with their compatriots in other cities in terms of pay, benefits, and retirement. Conversely, any lack of resources to pay for these increases is generally the board’s fault. And I believe that this argument may in fact be true in certain instances, but it certainly isn’t in every instance and it’s way too simplistic – it’s just not true in many cases, and in others it’s true only by degrees.
Figure 1: A new, more comprehensive way to measure what it actually costs to live in metropolitan areas where 12 major symphony orchestras reside (Sept 2, 2014).
I created the chart in Figure 1 not with the purpose to compare orchestras, but to talk about marketplaces. There is new data released by the US Department of Commerce that measures what it really costs to live – not what the CPI is, but what it really costs to live – in each of the areas marked in the left-hand column. The ranking is the regional price parity score from highest to lowest. One hundred is the average, so for anything listed as above one hundred you can assume the cost of living is higher than zero. Those listed as the bottom three, all less than one hundred, are the more impoverished cities. You can say that it costs less to operate there. In the last column you’ll see the actual percentage difference between the scores of Cleveland and the other cities. Cleveland is listed at the bottom as zero; New York is 37 percent more costly, based on this federal study, than Cleveland; and Baltimore comes in somewhere in the middle at 22.6 percent more costly than Cleveland. There’s one other thing that you can deduce from this information. For a dollar spent in Cleveland, you’d have to spend $1.37 in New York to buy the same market basket; $1.19 in Chicago to buy the same thing; and, surprisingly for me, $1.22 in Baltimore. The purpose of the chart is just to show you generally the economics of the twelve major orchestras that I listed there.
What that means is that Cleveland was the eighth-highest paying orchestra in terms of actual dollars, but its musicians had more purchasing power than all the others because of the marketplace in Cleveland. As I said, one dollar spent in Cleveland would buy $1.37-worth of products in New York City. Based on purchasing power – which none of the union players wants to hear about and so, to that extent, what I’m talking about is highly sensitive – the Cleveland Orchestra musicians clearly are able to afford the nicest standard of living compared to the musicians in all the other cities we’ve looked at. And that is, unfortunately, because Cleveland is one of the poorest areas.
But we also adhere to a legal principle: to agree to pay more money than what the figures tell you will be available – as many orchestras have tried to do over the years – is a breach of our fiduciary responsibility to the organization and to the community. And that’s how a lot of orchestras have got themselves into deep trouble, betting on the if-come, which in fact rarely does come.
Musicians like to look at how they stack up against their peers in terms of base pay as a pure number. I think this is certainly a psychological issue; it’s a feel-good issue. They want to be paid as well as Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and New York, and the reason for that is the fact that they can, in many cases, logically say that they play as well. I would argue that these other things show much more than the relative base pay. But none of these arguments are the real reason for showing you these numbers. That, I will discuss in a couple of minutes. I just want you to keep in mind the background of these numbers.
What We Believe In
This is based on both personal and institutional experience. Let’s begin with Excellence. We believe that everything we do – every plan we form, every expenditure that we make – must be tested against what that action will do for or against the standard of musical excellence that we have followed for decades. In times of financial difficulty, only those activities not related to what we call being a world-class orchestra may be cut without consent of the board.
The other thing we believe in is the fact that it’s very hard to play an instrument at the level of the members of our orchestra, how very good the musicians have to be in order to get in in the first place, and how hard they must work in order to stay at that level and to uphold our artistic traditions. While growing up, many of these musicians were thought of as child prodigies in their own communities. It’s been my objective over the years to make sure that the trustees understand and believe that our musicians are special and that they, collectively, are the reason we’re in business.
We also believe that classical music is not dead, nor will the ability to hear any amount of music free on the Internet bury us. Our unwavering belief is that the live concert experience, with the audience being emotionally involved and connected to music, is enduring. You can ask our musicians and you’ll find that none of them buy into the proposition that classical music is dead. In fact, they’ve been asked that question by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which for the last few weeks has been doing vignettes on each of the members of the orchestra, and one of the questions they ask is about the death of classical music.
Blossom Music Center
Last summer we set attendance records at the Blossom Music Center for most attendees, highest average attendance per concert, highest number of age 25-and-under attendees, and the highest revenue – even with ages 18-and-under being admitted free with an adult ticket buyer. And we achieved this in two fewer concerts than we had the year before. Some of this is programming – and some is weather and that’s accidental – but it’s nonetheless true that what we’re doing is not dying.
We believe that we are the most efficiently run of the major orchestras, based on statistical comparisons of operating size and budget – currently around $50 million – and considering the fact that we operate both Severance Hall and the Blossom Music Center. Very few orchestras own and run their own venues. The trustees understand that, operating as tightly as we do, it is no longer possible to save the orchestra from a financial crisis by significantly cutting overhead. That’s already been done and we don’t permit mission creep in this area. We recognize that investments, by definition, must often be made in advance of actually achieving desired results. We also understand that some initiatives will fail or be far less than hoped for.
We believe that it’s neither possible nor desirable to save money by trying to balance the budget on the backs of the musicians. In a crisis caused by events outside our control, we do expect them to participate in sharing the sacrifice, and they have done so in the form of freezes, slower increases, and extra services – within the whole organization, including the music director, the executive director, and the senior staff. It’s very interesting that when Franz Welser-Möst took the podium to be our music director in 2002, we were getting right into the first recession of the decade, and he volunteered 10 percent of his total compensation before he had even conducted his first concert.
We do believe that musicians and staff need to be fairly paid, recognizing and taking into consideration their highly developed talents and level of skill. Here is the reason for the chart introduced earlier showing the relative economies of the twelve orchestras. I know that what I say next is controversial, but I believe it to be true nonetheless. We believe that our employees’ pay and benefits need to be negotiated based on the situation in the Greater Cleveland marketplace, not on what’s going on in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. Why? Because there is a fundraising reality. As I told you earlier, we’re always having to raise between 50 and 60 percent of our operating budget one way or another, and it’s Cleveland where we raise our money. It’s Cleveland where we do business, where we sell tickets; and it’s not possible to separate these functions from the Cleveland marketplace. The economies of other cities are not relevant to our ability to cover expenses in Cleveland. We cannot raise funds based on population numbers or the strengths of Boston or New York’s economies. And, as you can see, we have no ability to influence the buying power in these other areas. It’s often been proposed that we won’t be able to hire and keep the musicians unless we pay competitively, based on what the other major orchestras pay. For many decades we followed this path. This may or may not become a problem in the future, but as of now it isn’t and it hasn’t been. It’s currently a specious argument. It looks okay on the surface but fails in real life.
We believe that the number of musicians in orchestras must be set by the music director, not by economic issues – even though each open position can easily save more than $150,000 annually. In the early years we might have talked about this kind of thing, but I believe today’s board would not even hold a discussion on the subject. We understand that, even though we’re likely to have 250 musicians from around the world wanting to audition for a single open position, reducing the actual numbers of musicians in the orchestra, forgetting what the impact might be on sound balances, is a very slippery slope towards disaster. During contract negotiations, if there were a showdown on an impasse, we and the musicians all know that we could easily hire a whole new orchestra and replace the musicians with other talented musicians, but it would never again be the Cleveland Orchestra, where we have a tradition of hiring the best players who audition. And those players are then taken under the wings not only of the music director but also of the current members of the orchestra, who help teach them the style in which the orchestra plays Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, or Brahms. This remains a part of the George Szell tradition, and it’s been self-perpetuating. It’s kind of amazing to watch.
The orchestra does not like to go on stage unprepared – for either educational concerts or regular concerts. The musicians expect to work hard during rehearsals. They are skeptical if they don’t. They do not appreciate guest conductors who are so impressed or so overwhelmed that they coast in rehearsals. They complain to management not for being overworked but for not having enough rehearsal time. On tours, if you’ll walk the halls of the hotels as I’ve done many times, you’ll hear them practicing in their rooms instead of sightseeing. This is an experience that I’ve had many times, not just once or twice.
Every orchestra I know describes itself in terms of excellence – a term that is almost completely subjective and quite un-measurable. What is clear to me is that most orchestras in the top ten or fifteen largest American cities are very, very good. Why? Because their musicians are highly trained, highly skilled, highly dedicated, and substantial members of their local communities. They care about their job, their artistry, and their audiences. The orchestras themselves have usually good to great artistic leadership. Any one of these orchestras is capable of giving great concerts.
However, to my chagrin and the chagrin of others, playing great music and wonderful concerts ceased years ago to ensure the success of major orchestras. While that should be enough, the fact is that it isn’t and it hasn’t been for a while. This has certainly been the case in Cleveland. If it were enough, there would be no need for conferences like this one, the Philadelphia Orchestra would not have gone into bankruptcy, and the Detroit and Minnesota orchestras would not have had financial troubles. All of them play very well. On the flip side, though, I’m convinced that not playing great concerts of great music will ultimately ensure failure.
During both the recessions of 2001 and 2007–9, many of the things that hurt were predictable, even if out of our control. The endowment and pension funds got blasted by the market decline, creating unfunded liabilities in the pension fund that would require large cash payments over years to fix. Even if the market were to bounce back hugely, money in the endowment would never be able to ride the market back up because all of us were using principle to fund the operations. The donor base at all levels of wealth dried up because people were scared and their advisers were telling them to perhaps pay off their existing pledges, but certainly not to get any more heavily involved.
If you were like us, something else happened that I’ve never heard mentioned anywhere else in the industry. Each orchestra went into survival mode with key members of staff and board leadership involved day and night in trying to save the institution rather than in building the artistic side of the business, which is where our organizational leadership ought to be spending its time. In my view, there is only one way to avoid that trap, and that is to build a large enough endowment – roughly six times the annual budget – which can help an organization ride through inevitable business cycles. We’ve been trying to do this, with our goal to be there by our centennial in 2018. As of now, we’re not on track to do it but we may end up close.
This experience told us, though, that we really had to change. The change would likely have to be transformative rather than incremental. We had to look at things differently in order to do things differently. The Committee on the Future of the Cleveland Orchestra was formed and met for a solid year. It was made up of trustees, senior staff, and non-trustees who were important in the community, including elected officials and business leaders. They looked at every line of the financial statement and thought through every idea, crazy or not. It was during this time that we considered downsizing.
Because of the extreme hits to the market value of both the endowment and the pension plan and the resulting implications, we seriously looked at downsizing from a world-class orchestra to a truly regional orchestra. This was precipitated by potential large future operating losses based on loss of attendance and donors. Even though we already had the smallest operating budget of the other big ten orchestras except for Washington, we found that we could save millions of dollars annually by eliminating those costs which were directly attributed to being what we called “world-class” – that was union contract and benefits, touring, publicity, and so on. But there wasn’t one person in that room willing to propose such a step.
Since fundraising was crucial to any plan, we went out and spoke to our major donors, corporations, and foundations – particularly to our most generous individual donors, myself included. We asked them directly if we could count on their continued financial support for the downsizing plan to become a regional orchestra. The results were unanimous: nobody would give us the same amount or anything close to it for a lesser orchestra. Most wouldn’t contribute anything at all. We were built on excellence and that’s what we needed to be. Even when faced with the choice of going out of business versus survival by downsizing, the results were clear.
Strategic Imperatives
The turn-around plan was a five-year plan. Most of us had been operating traditionally with five-year plans and we were caught in that trap in those days. We looked at strategic imperatives, the excellence of the brand, and this might have been hubris but we believed, based on what others were telling us and what we saw ourselves, that we had established a kind of brand recognition that, if marketed correctly, could help us to develop residencies. The term “The Cleveland,” as we were known in Europe and Asia, often results in the need to answer the question, What is a Cleveland? But the last time we were in Japan, for example, the emperor and empress came to one of our concerts – something that no one at the hall could remember ever happening before. This evoked a huge response, with the audience standing and applauding loudly with much pride.
Well, the obvious part of the turnaround plan was that we cut nonessential overhead and reassigned work. We cut non-musicians’ labor with one-time reductions of five percent; music directors took another ten percent cut; the senior staff, including the executive director, actually voted themselves a ten percent reduction. The not-so-obvious idea was that of having to pursue excellence and innovation.
The goal was to remove six to eight weeks of total overhead from the Cleveland operating statement. This was based on the underlying reality that the economy of northeastern Ohio was too weak to support us as they had done in the past. We would have to look elsewhere in order to solve our financial problems. The target was to replace the lost ticket sales in Cleveland with ticket sales and donated funds from residencies outside the area. We would either strike out in a new direction with high risk or wait until the problem of our market ran us out of business. Even so, such a plan would take years to develop. We would no longer tour in a situation where Cleveland donors had to pay for the cost of the tours. We had to create a plan where, if we toured, the tours had to pay for themselves. Otherwise, we couldn’t afford to go. We defined residencies as a creative way to enhance the program of playing great concerts.
Knight Hall, Miami
Miami would be our first opportunity because they were nearing the completion of both the new concert hall and the opera house and because of friends in their marketplace willing to help us. Miami’s hall was scheduled to open in 2006–7. We began negotiations and flew important individuals from Miami to Cleveland on multiple occasions so they could see what we were doing in our own marketplace, hear concerts and operas, and see initiatives in education at all levels. We reached an agreement to have the Cleveland Orchestra be the Orchestra in Residence at the Knight Concert Hall when it opened. The plan worked and the residency commenced in 2007. We started spending two weeks each season in Miami, then three weeks, and currently we’re spending four weeks in Miami, beginning in January and concluding in March of each year.
The activities in which the orchestra and musicians participate there are constantly evolving and expanding. Residencies require the building of strong relationships with existing organizations in the community – with schools and universities, cultural and education groups. First we were going to play two concerts each week at the Knight Concert Hall. The music and guest artists target the broad population of ethnic groups residing in Miami. The repertoire is often different from what is performed in Cleveland. We do side-by-side rehearsals and training sessions for musicians wanting to play in orchestras. We do that with the New World Symphony and with the Frost School of Music orchestra at the University of Miami. Our musicians and Franz Welser-Möst lead master classes and conducting sessions. We do chamber music, concerts and coaching, children’s concerts, family concerts, Musical Rainbows, and everything else we know to expand the geography beyond the Adrienne Arsht Center and the Knight Concert Hall. In some cases, in order to raise funds not covered by earned income from the sale of tickets, we set up and operate fundraising departments in residency areas. In Miami we set up the Musical Arts Association of Miami to fundraise. Every year Franz Welser-Möst opens the season down there, and we now have Giancarlo Guerrero as our principal guest conductor. He’s also the conductor of the Nashville Symphony.
Musikverein, Vienna
Setting up residency is a huge investment in time and money, which are in particularly short supply during a recession. Currently we’ve established residencies in Miami, at the Musikverein in Vienna, the Salzburg Festival, the Lucerne Festival, the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, and the Lincoln Center Festival. Some of these we do in alternate years. We expect that a major new residency in Europe is likely to be announced shortly. We have established a brand. The marketplace sees that we know how to operate with flexibility during these residencies, to give value for the money and for the people we attract. We’ve not yet solved the problem, which is serious, of having our musicians away from home during residencies. In the case of Miami, it’s a four-week period, and it’s a difficult situation for all concerned. I’m not sure we’ll be able to solve it in the near term, but we’re all working on it.
One of our imperatives is what we call ‘Communicate and Align.’ Its intent is to have musicians, trustees, staff, and audiences engage with each other in new ways with no agenda other than getting to know each other on a different level. The musicians show up and socialize after ‘Fridays@Seven’ concerts, during which we host world music presentation parties. On another occasion, the Development department and the Fundraising committee of the board hosted a thank you lunch for members of the orchestra, most of whom came from rehearsal and stayed for two hours. We now have members of the orchestra on certain board committees, like the Total Concert Experience task force, the Fundraising committee, the Facilities committee, and the Technology task force. They have become valuable, contributing members. One string bass player, Henry Peyrebrunne, asked for and received a year’s sabbatical from Franz to work in our Development department and learn what fundraising is all about. He has recently completed that year and has joined the staff part time while going back to playing in the orchestra full time. There are many examples of dinners and after-concert events, open rehearsals, and such where we try to get the four constituencies together.
Just before the recession of 2007–8 hit, which closely followed the one in early 2000, we solicited a grant of $20 million from the Maltz Family Foundation to fund audience-building initiatives. After the recession hit, they honored the gift but spread it out over several years. With these funds we created the Center for Future Audiences. It had several goals, made all the more necessary by the second economic crash in the decade. We needed to rebuild our audiences and also to admit that lost subscription sales would be hard or impossible to rebuild. We would be fighting a universal, nationwide downward trend in subscription sales. We needed to concentrate on individual concert ticket sales and marketing. We needed to identify once and for all the existing impediments to concert-going and to set about removing them – things like the presumed dress code and concert etiquette. Does it really matter and to whom? There were winter and summer transportation issues. We targeted ticket packages that included busing from the various neighborhoods for our older population, particularly in winter, and out to Blossom, which is geographically halfway between Cleveland and Akron.
We needed to look at supply and demand, also. In terms of the numbers of concerts being presented and the demand for tickets created by current audiences, there were huge differences in the way we were operating now and the way we operated in the nineties, when the number of concerts was expanded because demand was high and good seats were simply unavailable. After 2001, we believed it was important to reduce the number or concerts and the corresponding number of available tickets. Really, the strategy was to set up a shortage of tickets, if possible, and increase the demand.
Figure 2: Winter Subscription Season
The chart in Figure 2 shows the number of subscription tickets – it’s the top green line that becomes dotted and trends downward – and it crosses the blue line, which represents individual ticket sales. Much of the overall ticket sales figures are the same. But what’s happening is that, with the demise of subscription purchases, many people are buying fewer concerts and so it takes more people to buy the same number of seats. That’s pretty obvious. What’s really happening is that we’re selling more tickets to more households today than in any other time in our history, but they’re buying fewer tickets because they’re not subscribing to multiple concerts.
We did a considerable amount of research on the question of ticket prices, which had gone up industry-wide at a rate twice that of inflation. There was a price-value reorientation that we thought was different, and we looked at the strategy by audience segments: 25 and under, 25 to 40, 40 to 60, and above 60. We found little or no resistance to the cost of box seats or the dress circle seats, always in big demand, with few seats available. We did find price concerns for most of the other audience groups.
We had tried many programs in the past to bring in younger audiences, particularly college students, but with little luck, even though Severance Hall sat in the middle of the Case Western Reserve University campus. The Maltz Family and the new grant were tied to this effort at every step of the way. First, we created a multimarket ticketing plan, dedicated to building the youngest audience in America by 2018, our centennial year. We tested an under-18-free flagship program at Blossom, and a year later we brought the under-18-free program to Severance Hall. With each free ticket there needed to be an adult ticket purchased. We created a student advantage pricing program for college students and a fan card program where $50 buys the student unlimited concerts, based only on the availability of tickets. We introduced the ‘Fridays@Seven’ concept, in which the orchestra plays probably two-thirds of its regular program of Thursday and Saturday that week, but with no intermission. Afterward there is a world music festival with food and a party in the Grand Foyer. And it was hugely successful! Last year we created the Total Concert Experience task force and populated it with people from all over the community to give us a fresh look at how to do things better.
The 25-and-under program has been hugely successful. All of the programs I mentioned earlier have helped, but the student program attracted 110,000 students since its inception – 40,000 during last winter’s season alone, which means that last season 20 percent of the Severance Hall audience was made up of people age 25 and under. Saturday night has become date night again, and we had twenty-three sellouts on Saturday nights during the season.
The backbone of success has been our focus on social media and the Web. In raw numbers, we went from attracting 13,000 hits in 2012 to over 100,000 last year. Most importantly, we focused on engagement, which is the number of people who actually participate once they get to the social media interface, and we found that ours is an industry-high at 17 percent.
We know we haven’t reached our full potential, but we also know the results have been very positive. In Cleveland, this means pursuing innovation with staged or semi-staged operas. Last season we created a fully staged production of The Cunning Little Vixen by Jánaček. We do ballet partnerships with the Joffrey and Miami ballet. We do a couple of concerts each year using the original music to movie scores for ‘Fridays@Seven’ programs, and we have adjusted the way we concertize around the world, only going where we cover our costs. And, as I said, where we have residencies, we don’t just drop in and play concerts; we do master classes, we do chamber music coaching; we spend a very intensive period of time – a week to two weeks at a clip – making very intensive use of the musicians.
We have residencies at home, where we go into particular neighborhoods and for a week play concerts in venues there – it could be a barber shop, a small café, or a supermarket. We play concerts in those, and at the end of the week it all culminates in a full Cleveland Orchestra concert at one of the big venues in that area, maybe a church or a school auditorium. Three or four months before the residency week begins, we go into the school system and we have over forty visits to each of the schools by our musicians. There they do what they do best in terms of trying to turn on the students to the kind of music that we play. For some of the younger students, this may mean showing them how to play the instrument, letting them touch it or hold it, and playing it for them. Attention span is relatively low, so we’re in half-hour segments there. But for older students, usually we plan an hour with a theme. And in the themes we select, we try to relate the music to the classes they’re being taught. Music becomes a way to teach those classes.
We do that because we learned over time that the first place a school system goes to get rid of budget costs is to the music program. And that’s because it’s usually a distinct program – they know how many teachers they have, they know how many dollars are budgeted, they know what getting rid of it all saves. We’ve taken a different tack, which is that when we go into the schools we try to teach the curriculum using music as examples. And we’ve had a great deal of success with that, but, as you can imagine, it’s very intensive. There are some orchestral musicians who have been doing this now for close to fifteen years and are really good at it. There are some musicians who don’t do it, but we’ve never had a shortage of musicians to go in and work this way in the schools.
To diverge, we played an orchestra concert under Franz at, I think, Saint John High School in Cleveland – an inner-city school. There was no music in the school at all. The principal tried to get the audience to order – we were all in the gymnasium – and he could not do it. I said to our orchestra’s president at the time, who was sitting next to me, “This isn’t going to go well.” We were scheduled to perform Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and that was the whole program. But the school’s principal couldn’t get the students to quiet down.
The minute Franz took the podium, without turning to his audience and without saying a word to them, he just started to play. He played the beginning, cut us off, and then started to speak. You could hear a pin drop for the rest of the hour. These kids – most of them were black and all from the inner city – came up afterward wanting different things: they wanted to talk, wanted autographs, wanted to know how certain things worked or didn’t. It took us three hours to get back on our buses to Severance Hall. I had thought, “We’ve got an uneducated audience and this isn’t going to go well.” But the reverse was true. They were fascinated by the music, by the rhythms. There was no hint of disinterest or boredom. It was amazing to watch.
Communicate and Align
Well, I could talk for hours on this subject, but the only other thing I will say has to do with board leadership. It’s my view that boards matter. It’s my view that board leadership is necessary for both artistic and financial success. These things need to be board-driven. And to my view, failures and successes, by whatever definition you use, ultimately fall to the trustees. It’s our collective responsibility to fix things and to see that things work.
In the nonprofit world, I think everybody will agree that decisions have to be made more by consensus than in the corporate world, where the CEO can just make a decision and edict that it happen. You can’t really do that with volunteers because the volunteers can leave at any time. And for the most part they didn’t bargain for problems. They don’t like to find themselves in the newspapers – they don’t want the institution involved in publicity they consider inappropriate. And if and when they do, they can walk.
You have to engage the board in a way that it’s willing to make the decisions, and the only way that works is by constant involvement. We have a rule at Cleveland that we never vote on a major issue the first time it’s presented. By the time it’s presented the first time, it will have worked its way through several committees, depending on the subject matter. The only exception is if something has a time limit imposed from outside the orchestra so that we have to vote on it at a particular meeting. But they get a chance to make the tough decisions, and for the most part we’re able to give them the decisions to work on when it’s still timely.
So things have worked for us in that way. It’s not that we don’t have the same kind of problems you find elsewhere. We are as bound to the community and its financial structure as any institution could be. It’s why I like to make the point that says that when you arrive at a contract, whether it’s for labor or for buying lights or music stands, it’s the market in Cleveland that matters and it’s there that we have to convince our musicians that they are better than fairly paid. But they have to consider the purchasing power of the community when they make that decision.
