What are Interactive Concerts?

By Philip Kennicott

For years now the self-diagnosis has been the same: a graying audience, an apathetic public lured in the wrong direction by popular culture, a missing generation of young patrons. Without a new crop of well-monied converts, the concert as we know it will die.

The music world now supports a whole subsidiary industry of consultants, grant writers and grant givers, public-relations experts, professional panelists and facilitators, nonprofit service groups, and so on, devoted to solving the problem. Orchestras and opera companies turn to younger and younger marketing experts to somehow draw in people in the preferred age groups, variously defined as anywhere from 25 to 55. They schedule concerts at strange hours, load the season with special “events,” convert their lobbies and ballrooms into upscale meat markets in hopes that the lonely who come in search of companionship will leave instead with a subscription.

Ironically, the struggle for new ideas has produced a certain sameness across the country. Orchestras in Texas copy the efforts of orchestras in California, hoping to find a new formula for success. Rush-hour concerts, informal Saturday morning series, Brunch with Brahms, singles nights, and pre-concert discussions are today the norm rather than the exception. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Oddly, very few organizations actually spend the necessary money to track the success in tangible terms—ticket revenues, subscription sales—relying instead on more subjective criteria.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the times is the change within the organizations that funnel money into the musical coffers. Increasingly, projects with an extra-musical approach—couched in such buzzwords as outreach, education, accessibility, and bridge-building—are given preference over projects with a purely intellectual or artistic purpose. Although no one is yet writing the epitaph for the old-fashioned formal concert, the self-diagnosis of pessimists is now a basic assumption of some of the most important and prestigious foundations distributing money to the arts.

Three slow and hidden changes are worth looking at in particular. First, to capture new audiences, marketing experts are importing the educational techniques originally formulated for children’s concerts into the regular concert hall; the “interactive” concert of the future will probably be a traditional children’s concert adapted for adults. Second, musical organizations are moving away from the subscription-based concert season, producing more one-time events and attempting to draw more single-ticket sales. Finally, the skills necessary to survive as a musician are expanding . . . to include a wide spectrum of nonmusical “communication skills.” The musician of the future will be part educator, part showman, part public-relations expert. The anonymous and patrician orchestra player may be headed for extinction, to be replaced by faces and personalities that suffer well the scrutiny of camera and lights.

An interesting chapter in this story is unfolding right now. Convinced that something must be done to save classical music, the Knight Foundation has made a commitment to fund the unknowable new wave of ideas. With $50,000 planning grants, and promises of millions more down the line, the Foundation has encouraged eight orchestras to completely rethink what the concert means. The answer to the problem, the Foundation believes, lies not in tweaking the traditional format to be a bit more user friendly; instead, something more radical is called for, something that doesn’t look like what’s already been tried. The proposals submitted by the eight organizations are a comprehensive catalogue of what is considered cutting-edge thinking in the concert business.

The changes proposed cover a wide spectrum, but all of them begin from the same starting point: an assumption that there is a “fourth wall” separating today’s audiences from today’s musicians. The Miami Beach-based New World Symphony is considering redesigning its concert space, to which end it has enlisted the services of acoustician Lawrence Kirkegaard. Chris Dunworth, the orchestra’s president, insists that all of this is in the planning stages, but gives a hint of the kind of space he’s looking for: “We are in a space that is more reminiscent of the lifestyle of a hundred years ago. We need a space that is 2010, not 1975. The space of the future has to be interactive in some way, plugged into computers, Web sites. It may be a magical black box of some sort wherein all different sorts of things could happen. Perhaps the orchestra will move around or be in the center of the audience.”

The Philadelphia Orchestra has proposed the use of video cameras and screens to project close-ups during live performance. The orchestra’s artistic coordinator, Ed Yim, who helped develop the proposal (and who moved on to a similar position with the Cleveland Orchestra soon after this interview in fall 1995), says: “People talk about today’s audience being MTV-ized, as wanting more visual stimulation. We want to be sensitive to the integrity of the music, but we also want to experiment and see if we can enhance the music for the younger audience." Philadelphia plans a trial run of four programs, with two large video screens placed in second-tier boxes. It anticipates relatively traditional telecast-style direction and editing; the audience will be polled after the performance.

“Interactive” is a word that runs through the various proposals, but it is widely defined. For the San Antonio Symphony it means sending out program notes with audiocassettes before its Casual Classics family series; for the Brooklyn Philharmonic, it means elaborating and expanding its popular thematically programmed weekend concert and lecture blitzes, known as “Interplay.” The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra uses one of the widest definitions, contributing a proposal to “demystify” the music through video, art works, narration, conversation with orchestra members, dramatizations, and dance. To juggle all the possibilities, it intends to hire a scriptwriter.

Although there are few clear ideas yet as to how to use the possibilities of the Internet, “on-line” is another word that sets the marketing mouths watering. The Los Angeles Philharmonic plans to establish an Internet site called Symfonix, which will include audio and video samples of their concerts. Don Roth, president of the Oregon Symphony, wants to have terminals available for audience use in the lobby: “There is quite a lot of high-tech activity here—we call this area the Silicon Forest—and we want to use that expertise to give the audience more ability to interact with the performers. E-mail is the big thing right now—people love it. So in the lobby we might have terminals where people can E-mail backstage to the conductor during intermission and get answers back immediately.”

Innovations of this kind are not limited, by any means, to the eight groups selected by the Knight Foundation. Chamber musicians at New York’s Symphony Space have, under the direction of Allan Miller, experimented with video program notes, producing a set of short visual vignettes to precede each piece. Composers working with electronic music have explored giving the audience members control over the manipulation of live sound. Composers writing for a children's audience often incorporate their young listeners into the music. Even something as familiar as opera surtitles can be given an interactive twist: In a well-publicized reversal of direction, the Metropolitan Opera has instituted seat-back titles that can be turned on or off at the viewer's discretion.

Interactive might also be applied to much of the mainstream. Baltimore Music Director David Zinman has been an “interactive” conductor for years, combining humor and schtick with a creative but easygoing educational approach. Conductors who address the audience are, in the new American generation of 40-something conductors, not at all uncommon. A number of pianists, spanning a wide stylistic range from popular improvisationalist John Bayless to classical fortepianist Robert Levin, make it a practice to take themes from the audience and improvise upon them. Even the pre-concert lecture could be deemed interactive.

What makes the effort of the Knight Foundation striking is the high quality of groups chosen and the level of support they've been given. “The idea of using video in the concert context has been around for a while,” says Penelope McPhee, the director of the Knight Foundation’s Arts and
Culture Programs. “But we wanted to experiment with it using an orchestra such as the Philadelphia—which has a relatively traditional audience—and see what their response would be.” And while McPhee speaks in terms of “experimentation,” she says the Foundation is willing to back implementation efforts quite handsomely. “We’ve pretty much said that we’re prepared to commit five to six million dollars over the next three years.”

The Knight Foundation’s grants are also important because a tangible way, the word made flesh. Much of what has been funded by the Foundation bears an uncanny resemblance to the ideas that were collated and proffered to the world by the ASOL in its 1993 report titled “Americanizing the American Orchestra.” Several executive directors from the eight Knight Foundation orchestras sat on the taskforce that produced the report, and Thomas Wolf, the ASOL’s consulting author and adviser, also mediated some of the Knight Foundation sessions that led to their program decisions. Obeying what might be called the trickle-up theory, the ideas that went into the ASOL’ s report have gravitated to the foundation level, where there is the will and financial power to make them reality.

The real question, of course, is whether the ideas put forth will be successful. There is both precedent for questioning their success and an ample number of roadblocks to cause concern. Many of the ideas have been tried before in children’s concerts and pops programs. Most experts have long since given up any hope that pops programs will create a significant crossover audience for the regular subscription season. And the irony of using video, commentary from the stage, dance interpretation, shorter programs, and other similar techniques on adult audiences is clear: It’s quite possible that some organizations will try to lure the generation now in its twenties with much the same tools that failed to reach them when they were 10-year-olds.

Everyone involved with interactive programming admits that many of the ideas are quite expensive. Video is particularly they are, in costly, as are changes to physical space being considered by some groups. Even one-time mini-festivals tax an organization’s resources much more than a regular concert program. Thematic programming, if done well, can be expensive too; the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s executive director, Joseph Horowitz, notes a 75- percent increase in ticket revenues since adopting a thematic approach but admits that higher costs are inevitable for “our very labor intensive events.”

Across the country, one sees a shift away from the traditional subscription series toward a series of costly, highly marketed, widely promoted mega-events, aimed at the single-ticket buyer. Brent Assink, president and managing director of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, sees his group heading toward a much more targeted, focused, and niche approach to luring listeners. “It’s become a cradle-to-the-grave approach,” he says, while insisting that this doesn’t imply a breakdown of the belief that music’s appeal transcends generational differences.

Don Roth, of the Oregon Symphony, has been trying to find new audiences through events such as Mozart to Midnight, which offers a marathon all-evening concert during which the audience is free to come and go and partake of a wide variety of music programmed with an emcee. The concert is supplemented with catering, a Mozart-mobile, and other enticements.

“This audience is about one-third subscribers,” says Roth. “We market back to those people, but I can’t give the rates. A lot of people who go aren’t ready to subscribe—they have children—or they don’t have the monetary resources to subscribe. We’re happy to get them back, but one of the things we need to think about is perhaps we shouldn’t worry that everybody buys a subscription. Our mission is to bring the music to as many people as possible, not just to sell subscriptions.”

At the same time, Roth and many others in the business readily admit that the subscription-based system has given orchestras unprecedented financial security. “It’s certainly a much better situation financially when orchestras can sell large subscriptions,” says Catherine French, executive director of the American Symphony Orchestra League. “But we’re seeing a lot more competition from other arts organizations and a big change in lifestyle. A 24-week subscription probably isn’t realistic anymore.”

Much of what is adventurous and new on symphony programs is there because of the subscription system. “Obviously it allows you to think about other things than just tonight’s box office,” says Roth. “It gives you the freedom to do things artistically that might not happen if every concert had to rely on straight box office.” It might not be going too far to say that contemporary music owes its existence on mainstream concert programs to the subscription system—that many a 20th-century composition wouldn’t have seen the light of day if it hadn’t been rolled up into a mostly Brahms subscription package. Janácek sneaks into the opera house on Verdi’s coattails.

Also worth considering is how interactive concerts will affect the life of the musician. The proposal put forth by the New World Symphony concentrates on training young musicians to communicate in nonmusical ways. “We believe that while everybody is out there talking about their marketing efforts, we’re the only group to be focusing on our musicians,” says Dunworth of the New World. “We want to have our musicians out there in the community, enlightened by interacting with the broadest kind of audience in new and different ways. We want to make them better communicators from the stage.”

The subtext here is that charisma matters, and, in an age when video cameras project the facial expressions of the English horn player at five times life size, many formerly irrelevant details of appearance and onstage behavior may suddenly become important to a musician’s success. Are we heading into an era of photogenic second violinists? Will those musicians who are temperamentally inarticulate about their art suffer compared to those who can “communicate”? And, although video projection doesn’t currently incur any new costs under most union contracts, one wonders what the musicians’ unions will say as their members are coaxed into more expanded roles as communicators. When it comes to charisma, an interesting case in point is that offered by Baltimore’s Zinman and his Casual Concerts series. Mark Volpe, currently executive director of the Detroit Symphony, was in Baltimore when Zinman created that series. “He is unique in many ways,” says Volpe. “He is able to deliver in terms of musical content, and he’s very comfortable with the microphone. Not everybody can do that.”

In Detroit, Volpe now works with a conductor, Neeme Järvi, who is decidedly not comfortable with a microphone. But the Detroit Symphony is nonetheless enjoying a remarkable period of audience popularity. “Neeme’s got a very strong personality,” says Volpe. “But he’s not going to turn around and give the audience an analysis of the piece that has everybody chuckling.” Yet the Detroit programs work because, in Volpe’s analysis, the group has managed to tap into—or create—a strong sense that the orchestra is important to the city. “Part of the marketing here is that we are in another glory period,” says Volpe. “People remember [former music director] Paul Paray, and they think of this as another era like that one was. Major cities define themselves in terms of their cultural institutions, and I think people look to the Symphony now with a sense that it defines what Detroit is, and can be.”

The lesson to be learned in Detroit—and in cities such as Chicago and Cleveland—is that the sociology of different generations may not be so important as the local sociology of a particular audience. The Knight Foundation’s McPhee notes that when the Cleveland Orchestra was asked to submit a proposal to rethink the concert format, it politely declined. “They felt they were very successful doing what they were doing and weren’t interested in the program,” says McPhee. Henry Fogel in Chicago, who has introduced plenty of “interactive” elements (“when we felt they were necessary”) takes the same approach. “We gave 112 subscription concerts last year and sold 94 percent of our tickets,” says Fogel. “The first inclination is not to tamper with success.” Clearly audiences are still being reached in relatively traditional ways, and these successful orchestras offer a laboratory as valuable as the orchestras undertaking major changes.

It’s also important to remember that concert traditions that are considered stuffy and off-putting nevertheless have a certain charm for dwindling audiences of gray hairs. The etiquette of the old-fashioned concert is not so difficult to learn. “Young people may feel there is a fourth wall there,” says Henry Fogel. “But it takes some time in life to get used to the traditions of the concert, and the same person who goes for 10 years probably doesn’t feel that wall is there.” It may also be true that, for some portion of the audience, the current concert format is pleasantly different from the” easier” informalities of popular entertainment; by making classical music more like movie-going or a rock concert, do we risk losing what makes classical music distinctive among the various entertainments available today?

Ultimately, successful music organizations are the ones that produce concerts tailored for their audience. In large cities, such as New York, the Brooklyn Philharmonic can flourish by offering relatively esoteric, thematically programmed fare because there is a demand for that kind of programming that is not being met by the city’s “other” orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. The orchestras in Chicago and Cleveland flourish with an essentially conservative approach because the social habit of concert going has been successfully transmitted to a new generation of listeners. Not every city is so lucky, and, in the words of Chicago’s Fogel, “necessity generally produces change.” The real challenge for music organizations faced with the necessity of change is not only to pass classical music on to a new generation, but to pass it on intact.

Philip Kennicott is classical-music critic for the Detroit News, a former editor of Chamber Music magazine, and a freelance contributor to Opera News, Newsday, The Christian Science Monitor, and Pulse.