San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

To rescue symphony, change the way it does business




From the San Antonio Express-News 12/26/99

By Mike Greenberg



After a successful year of reorganization and debt reduction, it appears that only one piece is missing from the puzzle of the San Antonio Symphony's long-term prospects - an audience.

I've heard all the reasons why the classical concerts seldom play to respectably filled houses:

• Some traditionalists dislike music director Christopher Wilkins' penchant for contemporary and unusual repertoire - even though, objectively, the standard works still dominate the season.

• Some suburbanites resist driving downtown to hear the symphony. They'll drive downtown to see the Spurs or "Phantom of the Opera," at two or three times the price, but the symphony? No way.

• The symphony doesn't book big-name, overpriced guest artists. It does book first-rate musicians who have something to say about the music, but a lot of people still insist on hearing Horowitz. If a dead composer is good, a dead soloist is even better.

  I have come to the conclusion that all these reasons are hogwash and that nothing the symphony attempts, within the assumptions of its current business model, will appreciably increase the paying audience over the next 20 years.

  There's a limit to how many buggy whips you can sell to people who don't drive buggies - and the ranks of buggy drivers are shrinking rapidly.

  The problem is not the symphony's marketing, or its product, or its location. The problem is a business model, little changed since the 19th century, that makes no sense today.

  Like most American orchestras, the San Antonio Symphony operates on a business model that is a relic of a period when musicians would fully support their concert series by selling subscriptions to people who wanted to hear the music.

  The support base spread to include grants from individuals, businesses, foundations and governments, but the underlying mission of the business remains the same - to play concerts for a smallish circle of knowledgeable people with money, taste and leisure time.

  Institutional success today, as 100 years ago, is measured by the number of patrons who buy tickets at prices comparable to those for other professional entertainment and sporting events.

  Seats that remain unsold at "market" price are offered to students for a nominal fee.

  That's good for the students, and it makes the Majestic Theater a little less empty on concert nights, but in the context of the traditional business model the presence of those students is a sign of failure. If the orchestra were successful, those low-priced seats wouldn't be available to them.

  I propose turning that business model upside down.

  The symphony should junk the old mission of providing art for people who already have a matured taste for it and the money to pay for it, because in 20 years most of those people will be dead.

  Instead, the symphony should think of itself as a public-education resource whose mission is to establish a firm and living connection between young San Antonians and the best, most intellectually stimulating aspects of their musical patrimony.

  Students and other groups outside the traditional audience should be the primary audience for classical concerts.

  Institutional success should be measured by the number of such people who regularly attend concerts - at least four times a year, say - and who learn to say "Aha!" to the music.

  The symphony should seek funding to support the attendance of at least 1,000 students at every classical concert. Watered-down "student" concerts don't cut it; the kids need the hard stuff.

  The symphony should work with school districts to make classical concerts a seamless extension of the arts and humanities curriculum for as many students as possible - certainly for student musicians and others with academic potential.

  Beethoven, Mahler and Shostakovich should be as fundamental to education as Shakespeare and Sophocles.

  More than that, young people need to be shaped as a critical and engaged audience for new American music rooted in the European classical tradition.

  Only then can the American orchestra be once again, as it was in the first half of this century, a vital part of a living and growing tradition rather than what it has become - a mausoleum of fading reverence for an increasingly distant and alien past.

  In a column last month, I wrote about the Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities, a program in which the poor people engage in intensive, critical study of great literature, moral philosophy, art history, logic and American history.

  Let me repeat a passage from that column to remind you how the program's founder, Earl Shorris, arrived at the insight that undergirds the course:

  "The impetus for the course came from Viniece Walker, an inmate at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York. While doing research for a 1997 book on poverty, 'New American Blues,' Shorris asked Walker why she thought people were poor. Her answer:"

  "'You've got to teach the moral life of downtown to the children. And the way you do that, Earl, is by taking them downtown to plays, museums, concerts, lectures, where they can learn the moral life of downtown.'"

  If there is a crisis in morals and intellect in this country, the reason is that we have done a lousy job of connecting young people with the cultural foundations of Western moral and intellectual values.

  The symphony, and other arts institutions as well, can play a crucial role in drawing young people into the great conversation of our cultural traditions.

  Our arts institutions and their supporters should take on that role with missionary zeal, as their primary purpose.

  And if they don't, the institutions deserve to die.

  

  Back to the Symphony Archives.