Portrait 2: Audience Development in Orchestras

Friday, February 27, 2009, from 2:30 pm to 2:45 pm

With Katherine Carleton — Executive Director, Orchestras Canada (Toronto)

(The following is the complete talk, provided by Katherine Carleton)

I’m going to start this presentation with the words of four people far wiser than I.

Clive Gillinson, former managing director of the London Symphony Orchestra and current CEO of Carnegie Hall: “anyone who embarks on education programming today in the hope that they’ll sell more tickets tomorrow is going to be bitterly disappointed. This cannot and must not be why you do this work.”

Alan S Brown, an American arts researcher who has been behind some of the most thought-provoking work being done today on the nature of the relationship between artists and performing arts audiences, in a report to the Knight Foundation’s Magic of Music Initiative: “There is a lot of evidence that participatory music programs — including instrumental lessons and choral programs — are correlated with later attendance and ticket buying at orchestral concerts. In fact, 74% of audience members surveyed in the largest ever piece of research done on orchestra audiences in the US reported that they had been or were still active makers of music. Traditional “exposure programs”, such as orchestras’ concert hall offerings for children, however, seem to have little long-lasting effect on later behaviour.”

From a paper entitled Mission Unaccomplished: the place of education and learning in our national and regional performing arts and cultural organizations, by UK thinkers Sara Robinson and Teo Greenstreet:

“Why is it as producers and presenters of art, we choose to make clear distinctions between those events and activities that sit under the education banner and those that don’t? The distinction raises some fundamental questions about art and its audiences. do some of us need educating more than others? Are our core or main stage programs devoid of educational value? Is it beneficial to separate art from learning? And is this separation merely an issue of language and terminology, or is there a cultural hierarchy in play, creating the distinction?”

And finally, from critic, composer, blogger Greg Sandow, from a recent blog posting:

“I’ve noticed that, broadly speaking, people take two positions on the future of classical music. Classical music is fine, some of us think, but the culture around us needs to be taught (or re-taught) to understand it. This view has some clear advantages. Classical music, if this view is correct, doesn’t have to change. In all the things that matter most -- the repertoire, how the repertoire is played, what concerts are like -- it can continue just as it is. But we’ll need to do more education. This is the remedy this view proposes, the plan for fixing classical music’s problems, the way to find a new audience. We need to teach people to understand classical music. We need to explain its complexities. We need, in short, to teach people how to listen. Once we’ve done that, the music will speak for itself. Its value will be obvious to everyone.

This position has disadvantages, of course. It’s hard to change an entire culture. There’s a danger that we’ll sound preachy, or superior, even patronizing. If we hold the hardcore version of this position -- the version in which we think that the culture at large is mostly crap, that people don’t think, aren’t creative, have short attention spans, and listen to music that’s little more than junk -- then what can we say to them? Do we go out in the world, and tell people that their musical taste is terrible? That’s not likely to work.

The second approach is more or less the opposite of the first. In this view…the classical music world has created all the problems it might face. The culture around it has changed, not for the worse, and classical music hasn’t kept up. The repertoire hasn’t kept up, the way concerts are presented hasn’t kept up, the way we relate to our audience hasn’t kept up, the way we talk to the world hasn’t kept up. So what we offer, as time goes on, appeals to fewer and fewer people.

The advantages of this approach should be obvious. It gives us power over our future. Or at least it puts the means for change in our own hands. If you take the first view, and want to restore music education…that’s a brave and noble goal (which those of us who hold the second view would happily support). But it’s not something we can control. We need school systems, government, parents, and the public to join our campaign. We need government and school boards to come up with some money. Maybe they’ll do that, and maybe they won’t. There’s always a chance that we’ll mount a fabulous campaign, and not get very far. But if we decide to change the way we ourselves do things, who can stop us? Our changes might or might not work, but if they don’t work, we can tweak them, or try something else. What we do is entirely up to us.”

There: having shared those thoughts from people far wiser than I, let’s talk about what some forward thinking Canadian orchestras — and the musicians who are at the heart of the work they do — are actually doing in the area of community engagement programming these days. Warning: this is a highly selective report, I’ve not been able to identify every program offered by every Canadian orchestra. And I’m also focusing on the programs that seem to contain the potential for an authentic reciprocity of exchange between professional artists and the citizen-artists they engage with. As a result, I’m focusing on two major programming modalities: Creative Music programs and Performance Oriented programs.

Here’s a small sample of the programming initiatives I’ve turned up

Creative Music Initiatives

The Victoria Symphony is now in the third year of a program they call VSNew, where a small ensemble of Victoria Symphony musicians and the composer in residence (previously Tobin Stokes and Anna Hostman, now Rodney Sharman) work with a group of generally high school-aged composers to workshop and polish new pieces for the ensemble. It’s a highly interactive and iterative process, with everyone having the opportunity for feedback over a period of weeks as the new pieces are developed. Ultimately, a recording is created of the final version and they’re also performed as part of a pre-concert presentation at a selected Victoria Symphony concert.

The Niagara Symphony’s associate conductor Laura Thomas leads a series of composition workshops with grade 5 students in the Niagara region each year, that involve 6 classroom visits, encounters with Niagara Symphony musicians and the creation of a short piece of music that is ultimately scored for the full orchestra and performed for the student audience.

A number of musicians of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra lead creative music workshops over a period of several weeks in Toronto area schools through the TSO’s Adopt a Player program, designed for grades 4-6. The students start with simple rhythm games, and move on to melodic development, and ultimately create and perform a 5-10 minute work with their adopted player. One TSO member, bassist Tim Dawson, is now targeting his creative music workshops to corporate audiences, selling them as fun lessons in careful listening, teamwork and creativity.

Performance Orientation

There are some traditional models of performance oriented engagement activities. For instance, many of our member orchestras (or at least their musicians) have close relationships of long standing with youth orchestras, universities and conservatories in their regions.

A number of orchestras and orchestral musicians have taken this a little further in recent years.

The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra offers four different performance oriented programs as part of their annual education offerings:

1. Adventures in Music (education concert series)

   500 — 1500 grade 4-6 students perform with the WSO in a choir / recorder group / string group / movement or choreography / artwork / composition. The choir and movement aspects switch off from year to year and the other aspects are almost yearly

2. River East Transcona School Division Outreach Concert

   (An annual concert presented with the schools in the division) Involving a 200-voice Grades 4-6 choir, a 400-voice Grades 10-12 choir, the Senior High School Band (30 students), and various student soloists from the division

3. Rising Stars Concert

   (This just happened last night!! — The feature piece being Carmina Burana.) Involving a 300-voice high school choir, 57 youth orchestra members, and 3 students soloists

4. University Orchestra Mentorship Program at University of Manitoba

   About 10-15 of our musicians are involved in the mentorship program with the university orchestra, attending regular rehearsals and working with the students

Since 2007, the OS de Trois-Rivières has offered a master class day to secondary school music students in their region. The day is coordinated by a musician member of the orchestra, and here’s what they say about it: Cette activité a pour but d’encourager la relève en offrant une journée intensive de formation à des élèves de niveau secondaire (4^e et 5^e) qui sont inscrits à un programme de musique. L’optique est d’offrir cette activité comme une reconnaissance du talent et du travail assidu des élèves, une sorte de prime au mérite. Les participants ont ainsi l’occasion de travailler la technique de leur instrument et l’interprétation de quelques extraits du répertoire symphonique.

Les élèves participants se répartissent en section, selon leur instrument, avec un maximum de huit élèves par groupe. Chaque équipe est animée par un musicien de l’OSTR qui propose aux élèves un programme de travail adapté afin de les faire progresser dans l’apprentissage de leur instrument. À la fin de la journée, tous les élèves se réunissent en orchestre et jouent ensemble une pièce qui a été arrangée spécialement pour eux.

My final example of a performance oriented program is about a program that has little or nothing to do with the school system or with school-aged people. It’s also only indirectly connected with the local orchestra — although it’s hard to see how you could operate one without the other.

It’s a program in my home town of Peterborough Ontario, population 70,000, where approximately 300 seniors — led by resident professional musicians and retired school music teachers — take part in a franchised not for profit music program called New Horizons, which originated at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester New York and has inspired programs for seniors who want to play a band or string instrument right across North America. My mother, at age 71, is a keen participant in the New Horizons program, playing her French horn and double bass in a wind ensemble, concert band, adult string orchestra, brass choir, and horn quintet, and performing in solo recitals from time to time. As well, she’s taking a sight reading class, a jazz rhythms class and a course on “unpopular music, from medieval to contemporary.” When I phone my parents, my father now answers the phone, and he usually tells me that my mother is out at a gig. I’m heading back to Toronto right after this session because my mother is performing tonight at a concert in honour of International Horn Day, an event invented by the Canadian Opera Company’s principal horn player, Joan Watson, that brings assembles high school and university horn players, the horn sections of most of the professional orchestras in Southern Ontario, and a wild array of adult amateur horn players as well. I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen, or what it’s going to sound like — but that might not actually be the point.

The point is: we are, almost all of us, hardwired for music. And if we, the people who “care” about it most aren’t also its biggest exponents, then this living thing risks being lost.

Sure, there are restrictions facing any orchestra that wants to explore this work:

• the perceived tensions between artistic excellence and excellence in community engagement work;
• the fact that few if any North American orchestras actually assess musicians’ interest in or capacity for their skills in leading community engagement work before they are hired;
• the issue that relatively few music schools provide any kind of training that would help young musicians acquire the skills necessary to lead this work effectively;
• the reality that it can be hard to lead change in the midst of a global economic meltdown.

But it’s my suspicion that the orchestras who invest in this work now will simply be in a better place in the future.