Forever Young: America's Symphony Orchestras Nurture Their Future Audiences

By Robin Tabachnik

"Astonishingly generous!" That's how Peter J. Meyer describes one of the best student-ticket deals in the country. He and his wife had taken their son, a freshman at Boston University, to Symphony Hall for a Boston Symphony concert. "There was a brochure in the lobby for what they call a BSO Card. For only $25 he could attend 20 concerts or open rehearsals. Justin got to hear the Mahler Sixth with Haitink and many other concerts. This was even better than 40 years ago when I was in college and the New York Philharmonic had $1.50 rush tickets," Meyer exclaims.

The Philharmonic still has student rush tickets (now priced at $12) and--along with all the country's major orchestras--a host of other programs aimed at picking up the arts-education ball dropped by the public school system. We all know the reasons why orchestras had to become more involved.
 
"It's part of a general decline in American life that's been going on since Sputnik and the space race,-- says Deborah Borda, President and CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. "The arts, an area of less quantifiable measurement, were de-emphasized in favor of the sciences, whose benefits are more tangibly calculable."

And then came technology. "Students today face a bewildering array of high-tech stimuli which in the future will only edge upward," says Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony. "As it does," he continues, "the need for balance and spiritual nurture also increases. Music is that low-tech path to some of life's great highs--uniquely challenging and rewarding and as basic a requirement as food, air, or love."

"It's the "American Paradox," says James Conlon, music director of the Ravinia Festival, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's summer home. "The amount of talent and professional standards in classical music are higher in this country than anywhere else, but only a small fraction of our population is interested. The nation isn't doing its job!" concludes Conlon passionately.

Lorin Maazel, music director of the New York Philharmonic, thinks he has the answer: "One shot of classical music and they're hooked for life! Everything else sounds tawdry, thin, and shallow in comparison. Rock suddenly sounds tired."

But how to get them hooked?

Many of the major symphony orchestras now have a School Partnership Program based on that created by the New York Philharmonic, the mission of which is to make their music part of mainstream American culture by maintaining intensive relationships with New York City public schools. "This is our most distinctive educational accomplishment," says Theodore Wiprud, the orchestra's director of education. "It's a deep relationship that infuses a small number of schools with the culture of the New York Philharmonic. Each child has a three-year curriculum that we do in tandem with their teachers, which includes studying great works of music, attending the orchestra's performances, musical literacy, performance skills--it's our most effective way of reaching kids because it's sequential and in context.

"Its outgrowth," Wiprud continues, "is called the Very Young Composers Program, in which a small number of kids work with a composer after school and compose music that will be performed by the full orchestra on a Young People's Concert. We've reached those kids profoundly. In addition, we've been reinventing the famed Young People's Concerts made popular during the Bernstein era. We're recapturing Bernsteinesque values while making them a series of four concerts instead of the one-shot deals they were. We want to evolve them into the "cool event" for New York City kids. We've also added and are expanding Very Young People's Concerts, which were very popular last year."

Washington, D.C.'s National Symphony Orchestra boasts a wealth of educational riches. Music Director Leonard Slatkin is actively involved with all its numerous programs and has himself created several. "I do a new set of programs that incorporates storytelling into music, and we have major composers writing new works for the young audiences who attend. A very important part of what we do is to spend money commissioning new works for this--not just for our subscription concerts," he emphasizes. "We have to make this relevant to today's young people, and part of that is having new music. Composer Portrait, " continues Slatkin, explaining another of his creations, "is a three-part event: a biography, a demonstration of excerpts from a work followed by a performance of the piece in its entirety, and a question-and-answer period. We see both young people and adults here, and the questions are wonderful."

In addition, the National Symphony Orchestra does not restrict its programs to its home turf. Through The American Residencies, the NSO brings music all over the country. "We spend eight or nine days in a different state each year," says Slatkin, "and we get a real feel for what is going on in the country. It's never a problem getting young people to the symphony once you've exposed them to music in some fashion. The issue is an educational system which simply doesn't prepare young people for what they might experience."

The beauty of a fine regional orchestra is that a formulaic student program can take on the distinctive personality traits of its music director, giving it a color all its own. That is precisely the case with the children's concerts of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. "Our earliest experiences of music are so formative," says Robert Spano, music director of the Atlanta Symphony. "The future of a vital musical culture depends on it." Spano is a creative, dynamic, innovative force on the podium, good at communicating and bringing a score to life. Accordingly, the orchestra's Family Concerts children's series are real events: "A Magic Halloween" (10/29/06) includes in-costume performances by the orchestra of appropriately scary numbers--Night on Bald Mountain and The Sorcerer's Apprentice--while "Orchestra From Planet X" (2/4/07) has the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra joining forces with a mime company to present the musical tale of an alien invasion in Symphony Hall!

Brilliant, precise analytical thought is the hallmark of Saint Louis Symphony's music director, David Robertson, so not surprisingly he applies these attributes to the Kinder Konzerts (grades k-3), a program he cites as one of his orchestra's most successful ventures. He says, "We are making them more participatory so that the youngest children can be part of the concert through clapping, singing, or speaking. I hope to add a visual element," he says proudly, "so we can begin to address the idea of notating sound."

If technology is the thief that is stealing the attention of the young, two major West Coast symphony orchestras have expertly used that very thief to steal back their young audiences, both in the marketing and educational arenas. The Los Angeles Philharmonic's forte is keen strategic planning due in large part to Deborah Borda's forward-thinking ideas. "People need to start conceiving of their symphonies as institutions in the 21st century that are not based on a single person, philosophy, or policy." The result is a strategic plan with many component parts: artistic, programmatic, marketing. Discussing their Minimalist Jukebox Festival, Borda describes how they attracted their younger audience. "Here we had a festival that was all 20th- and 21st-century music, so we marketed almost exclusively over the Internet. We did e-mail blasts to alternative music lovers and special fine arts lists which we located with online search engines, and we partnered with a radio station that is not the classical station out here. We created a unique musical identity in tune with the way our younger demographics looked."

In Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony has a music director who is, by upbringing and sheer force of personality, a born pedagogue/audience builder. He has actually made it "cool" for San Franciscan teenagers to attend the symphony. With characteristic passion he has thrown himself into SFS's most innovative educational project to date: Keeping Score, a multi-component initiative whose recent development, an interactive website, explores a piece of music in great depth; history, background, information on the social mores of the time, as well as integrated looks at the score. Its most attractive feature is the lively, engaging tutors: Maestro Thomas himself and the virtuosic San Francisco Symphony players, who make a trip to a live performance the next logical step.

College students pose an immediate concern to symphony orchestras. Past the age of school programs and family concerts, they will, very shortly, become the new audience--provided sufficient exposure and intellectual stimulation have been there. Zarin Mehta, president and executive director of the New York Philharmonic, remembers when the university was an integral part of the performance life of major orchestras. "Many New York universities used to have major concert series in which the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra appeared; it was an important part of our tours. Lack of funding has caused that to disappear, and we need to get back to that!" he declares.

Most orchestras agree that it is necessary to link more actively with the universities in their resident cities. A tangible link is making tickets more financially feasible for students. "High ticket prices are a hindrance to many young people in the United States and Europe as well," says the Philadelphia Orchestra's music director, Christoph Eschenbach. "I would like to see drastically lower ticket prices made possible through youth-oriented sponsors." To that end his orchestra has established its Campus Classics program. "Through Campus Classics, a student has several excellent discount ticket options," says Sarah Johnson, the orchestra's director of education. "One such option is an advance booklet of coupons for $6 per ticket. Students come on the night of a concert, sign in, and just prior to show time they can sit in any empty seat," smiles Johnson. "At 8:00 p.m. on a Friday or Saturday night, I sometimes see 110 college students and that's exciting--lots of young people sitting in some of the top seats! We've also just piloted our College Performance Program at the University of Pennsylvania--a performance series on campus in the residences, where the students hang out."

The Boston Symphony's long tradition of education, most notably through its work at its summer institute for young professionals, the Tanglewood Music Center, prompted it to make student ticket access a priority, and their BSO Card, mentioned earlier, is only part of the orchestra's program. (The Card offers fewer concerts for $25 this year, by the way, but it's still quite a bargain.) "In addition," points out Education Director Myran Parker-Brass, "we have a Young Musician's Card for high school students, which offers 15 concerts for $12. We also hold symposia and seminars in various colleges, which bring musicians, conductors, and artists onto their campuses, bridging the two institutions." Robertson is already beginning a collaboration with Saint Louis University, and the Baltimore Symphony's new music director, Marin Alsop, is looking into tapping university relationships as a vital means of insuring future audiences. "It's a lost opportunity not to use them," she says, "because music can provide a snapshot into history, politics, and human emotion."

As to the young music student and college-level music student, the Cleveland Orchestra under Music Director Franz Welser-Möst has reached out to this group using the orchestra's greatest asset, its famed "personality." Utilizing family concerts, study groups, and pre-concert lectures, Welser-Möst has striven to impart the musical values of the Cleveland Orchestra--virtuosic, balanced precision and a sense of ensemble pride--to Cleveland's young musicians. The Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra players regularly attend the Cleveland Orchestra's performances, and the youngsters work and perform alongside their senior musicians and conductors. Welser-Möst has established collaborations with the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, coaching and conducting student ensembles, using Oberlin graduates in the Cleveland Orchestra subscription concerts, and embracing open rehearsals. "Education," says Welser-Möst, "only means exposing someone to something. Don't underestimate your audience--the younger its members are, the less you should underestimate them. Give them the best because quality is addictive. Taste a wonderful wine, you try to find it again; wear cashmere, and you can't wear the rough stuff. Hear great music, especially with an orchestra of the Cleveland's quality, and you will go back to it."

For adults who must play "catch up" with classical-music education or those who want to enhance their knowledge, most orchestras have intellectually stimulating programs that can be enjoyed by a wide range of listeners. They involve lecture/performance/question-answer combinations illuminating the score, the composer, and the music's historical "climate." The Chicago Symphony excels at such programs, a recent addition being Beyond the Score. A three-concert Sunday afternoon series, the first half uses visual imagery, narration, and live musical examples to examine a single orchestral masterwork. After a brief intermission, the work is then performed in its entirety. Pierre Boulez and Esa-Pekka Salonen both conducted performances in this series last season, recognizing that such programs put the music into a broader social/cultural context, enhancing its relevance to listeners.

But many conductors, conscious of the fact that their role today as opposed to that of their predecessors includes audience building, engage in non-structured versions of these programs that require no funding: talking. Of his summer performances with the Chicago Symphony, James Conlon explained, "I spoke at the beginning of every concert, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. I heard this from patrons who've been attending the Ravinia Festival all their lives and from young people who were coming to their first concerts. You can pack an enormous amount of information into five minutes, and people appreciate learning about the broader implications of a piece. The result was rapt audiences, for this amazing symphony's stellar performances."

Many conductors are nurturing the correlation between new works and young audiences--another naturally occurring program that simply fits in with the season. "Children are the best audiences for contemporary music," says Alsop. "They have no preconceptions and enjoy sounds for their own sake." "They are a natural match," agrees Eschenbach. "They are receptive to new sounds and benefit most when the conductor or preferably the composer speaks directly to them beforehand." "In my experience," says Robertson, "young people naturally gravitate towards recent repertoire, and the excitement of introducing them to older music comes through that connection with more recent fare. Also, it affords the music director an opportunity to dialogue with younger audience members. Stokowski had a club," he points out, "open only to people under 30, through which he got young people very excited about modern repertoire."

In the final analysis, all agree that the best way to garner young audiences is the symphony orchestra's raison d'être--fascinating concerts. Says Borda, "In the middle of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's yearly subscription series we build specific moments of real focus; special events to build excitement with musical and intellectual threads connecting everything we do." Mehta agrees: "I think the New York Philharmonic should do more special events, including visuals. The two nights we did of film music were laden with young people. And our parks concerts: Just walk through and see who's picnicking. It's young people," he smiles, "who've been there since 6:00 a.m.!"

Music and theater journalist Robin Tabachnik enjoyed a career as an opera and concert singer before turning to journalism. She writes program notes, historical pieces, reviews, and most frequently interviews and biographies for such publications as WHERE, Town & Country, Playbill, The New York Times, Opera News, Elle, More, Showmusic, and New York magazine.