Panel discussion: The Orchestra's future

I'll be honest: While I've attended hundreds of plays and concerts, I never went to a symphony orchestra concert until this year. As a caretaker to an elderly relative, I found myself at the Bryn Athyn Orchestra's spring matinee performance. I'm in my late 20s, I was certainly one of the youngest people in attendance.

The same held true at Broad Street Review's panel discussion on "Saving the Philadelphia Orchestra" at the University of the Arts' Hamilton Hall on November 30. I've never been to a Philadelphia Orchestra performance, but I was interested in the larger questions the evening promised: about an arts organization's continued viability in the modern world.

I'm no stranger to Classical music, though my instrumental training was limited to a few squawky months on a plastic recorder in fourth grade. My brother took up the cornet for a few years, and his practicing reverberated throughout the household.

During those years, my grandmother, a watercolor artist, gave me a VHS copy of Disney's Fantasia for Christmas. My dad called it Boring-Tasia, but I watched it repeatedly. To this day, The Rite of Spring or Dance of the Hours never fails to evoke a misty primordial world or ballet-dancing ostriches. Now I learn that the Philadelphia Orchestra played many of the pieces in that 1940 film.

Today, Vivaldi, Mozart, Handel, Strauss, Bach, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky are my frequent companions"“ on my iPod, that is. I doubt I could write anything without them.

Emulate the Eagles?

But why haven't my peers and I been to the Philadelphia Orchestra, especially when it so desperately needs a new generation of patrons? Broad Street Review brought seven panelists together to attempt some answers.

Clarence Faulcon, BSR contributor and former chairman of Morgan State University's Music Department, unleashed a litany of public relations failures, including the Orchestra's lack of outreach to local minority groups with a rich history in Classical music. Despite the obvious differences in business models, Faulcon urged the Orchestra's marketers to look to the multicultural, multi-lateral campaigns of Philadelphia's sports teams.

Other questions of marketing included just how much of the onus for promotions should fall on the musicians themselves. Should they be out "on the stump" in the community? Musicians have already played in the mall, streets and subway to little effect on ticket sales, insisted panelist Davyd Booth, a Philadelphia Orchestra violinist.

Seizing new technology

Someone in the audience countered that the Orchestra's musicians have failed to create a social media presence to promote their performances on Facebook, blogs or Twitter— an essential move to engage younger audiences. That's an unfortunate irony, because the Philadelphia Orchestra has been ahead of the pack as far as access through technology. As was pointed out by panelist Juliet Goodfriend, president of the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, the Philadelphia Orchestra was the first to record performances on disk and to live-stream over the Internet"“ though, due to lackluster marketing, few people know this.

Faulcon insisted that the Orchestra must begin marketing beyond its own self-interest and pay more attention to social initiatives, like sports teams who've donned pink apparel for breast cancer awareness. But "Painting it pink isn't going to help," Goodfriend replied sharply.

Many audience members agreed with her fundamental suggestion for maintaining Orchestra attendance: Support music instruction in public schools. Market research has shown that the most consistent factor among today's orchestra-goers is that they played an instrument in school. No wonder orchestra attendance is declining all over the country, as music programs are among the first to be cut when schools are strapped for funds.

What empties a concert hall?

The question of youngsters begs another thorny issue: Should orchestras reach out to the next generation of ticket-buyers by performing contemporary works?

Nothing empties a concert hall faster than contemporary music, insisted Booth. People who advocate the performance of living composers' music are a tiny but overly vocal segment of the audience.

But others panel participants countered that many leading orchestras do perform new music, even at the risk of alienating older audiences (who won't be around forever in any case). Who will take their place, if orchestras don't reach out with new material now?

Booth was reluctant to agree on the merits of new music. All of the great Classical music the world will ever know has already been written, he argued; Richard Strauss was the last truly worthwhile major composer.

From the audience, BSR contributor Jim Rutter disagreed. Contemporary Classical music albums have sold millions of copies among young people, he noted, but in an unconventional form: They're the full orchestral scores that accompany many wildly popular video games. Orchestras that deign to perform these modern composers often pack their houses with a new generation of music-lovers.

What's on my iPod?

As for me— call me naÓ¯ve, but the assertion that there will never be another great classical composer strikes me as incredibly arrogant. The future may be unpredictable, but that's no reason to assume it's hopeless.

Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart et al have plenty of company on my iPod: Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore, Yann Tiersen, John Williams and Philip Glass, to name a few. I'd certainly consider attending live performances of music by these and many other living composers.

The discussion wouldn't have been complete without some hearty vilification of allegedly destructive music critics. Some attendees blamed the Inquirer's Peter Dobrin for driving Christoph Eschenbach out of Philadelphia.

That sinking feeling

At this point I began to feel a little like Alice in Wonderland. The older generation represented in this room, which cares so passionately about saving symphony orchestras, is also the only generation that still reads newspapers and takes them seriously. To most people my age, complaining about Peter Dobrin is like complaining about the wine steward on the Titanic.

Is old music played for old audiences that read old media a recipe for failure? Not necessarily. As the panelist and critic Peter Burwasser declared, the Orchestra and Classical music will be saved if only because the alternative isn't an option.

At the end of the day, all I really know about it is that nothing brings me to a standstill in the train station"“ or brings a bill out of my purse— more effectively than a good cellist parked by the platform stairs. So I hope Burwasser is right.♦


To read other reactions to the panel, click here.
To read a reply by Victoria Skelly, click here.