San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

Orchestras set sights on new audiences




By Mike Greenberg

from the San Antonio Express News 6/20/99



Imagine that America's best symphony orchestras were competing against each other in the championship playoffs.

The San Antonio Symphony, under Christopher Wilkins, beat the Minnesota Orchestra, then swept the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Oregon Symphony to meet the New York Philharmonic in the finals.

How much attention would the playoffs get? Would they rule the front pages and the airwaves? Would the stores be flooded with commemorative T-shirts and banners? Would guys in bars second-guess Wilk's tempos?

Probably not. To speak bluntly: Symphony orchestras are marginal to American culture.

Very few American orchestras have tried diligently to engage the larger culture and contemporary ideas in recent years, and the San Antonio Symphony under Wilkins has been conspicuous among them, but the task is far from accomplished.

At least the industry is thinking about the issue. When the American Symphony Orchestra League met in Chicago recently, the convention's theme was "Music for a New Millennium."

The major sessions dealt with the programming and marketing of new or unusual music to appeal to listeners with their "antennae up," as keynote speaker Michael Steinberg put it.

Several speakers urged orchestras to make a big deal of their new-music programming, not to hide it in the middle of a "Brahms sandwich."

Gillian Moore of the London Sinfonietta said audiences can be won even for music with an off-putting reputation if it is marketed honestly and interestingly, and if concerts are accompanied by technologically astute educational materials to help audiences understand the creative process.

Robert Spano, music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, said, "We seek theatricality in the belief that anything that heightens the experience of the theater is to our advantage."

John Rockwell, a New York Times critic and former director of the Lincoln Center Festival, said that new music should be presented in special festivals and non-traditional formats, such as the New York Philharmonic's fondly remembered "rug concerts," as well as being integrated into orchestras' standard programming.

Laying special stress on the problem of high ticket prices, Rockwell said orchestras should "make an enormous effort" to seek grants specifically for the purpose of lowering ticket prices.

Marketer Michael Buckland of the Toronto Symphony urged orchestras to develop a better understanding of niche markets.

Architects, for example, are "a high-response list for new music." Programs aimed at young, wired audiences should be promoted in the kinetic visual and verbal language of cutting-edge media, especially the Internet.

Concerts during the conference underscored the variety of music that can appeal to audiences.

The Chicago Symphony's Shostakovich festival drew rapt audiences and full houses, even for B-list music in lusterless performances led by Mstislav Rostropovich.

In a concert by the young Chicago Civic Orchestra, Christopher Rouse's dark, self-indulgent Symphony No. 1 was the audience favorite, but Aaron Jay Kernis' hip, fun, pop-inspired "New Era Dance" was the better piece,and more likely to represent the culture of the new millennium.

Orchestras will alwasy and properly be museums, presenting the most important work of past centuries.

But even a museum needs a strong contemporary wing.



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