NEW AUDIENCES FOR THE 90s

By Charles Fowler

The time has come when our symphony orchestras, opera companies, and other arts presentation enterprises should realize that they are not going to thrive, perhaps not even survive, by continuing to operate in the same old ways. The world, our values, our educational priorities, and our culture have been changing, and art organizations, by and large, have not. The result, not surprisingly, is that audiences for our many opera, ballet, and symphony presentations appear to be shrinking.

But the problem is bigger than the performing arts, and therefore more sinister. The proportion of Americans who read serious contemporary literature is dwindling, and museum attendance is down. It is as though Americans by the thousands are deliberately turning their backs on the arts, certainly in their classical forms. A 1989 Washington Post-ABC poll reveals that federal aid to public television and radio and assistance to the arts and music are at the bottom of America’s shopping list. Fewer than one out of five respondents favored higher spending in these areas. Apparently, there is no longer enough public interest or support to sustain all these cultural institutions. Consequently, many of them are threatened with financial strangulation.

Some observers would have us believe that our lack of audiences is due to the anarchy of today’s art, detached as much of it is from public purpose, meaning, and understanding. Certainly the fact that art has gone its private way has not helped it in the market place. Nor does it serve the interest of the marketer, in this case the opera companies and symphony orchestras that try to relate to the 20th century by occasionally performing works so socially defiant that they offend conservative patrons.

But the artist’s anarchy, as damaging as it is to the vibrancy of these institutions, is not the crux of the problem. What we must remember is that, when subscription seasons were sold out, the new art then was no more or less hospitable to the public. What we are facing is cultural upheaval. Our values are in flux. As public taste embraces the sensational, the commercial, and the gross, aesthetic quality is being trashed in favor of the expedient-fast food, quick fix, and easy entertainment.

The world of America looking into the 1990s is an increasingly barbaric place, with slaughter on the streets, drugs perverting lives in almost every family, and constant revelations of deceit and crime in high places. It seems to be growing cruder and more insensitive. The arts are fundamentally at odds with these conditions. They reside in a society that seems increasingly hostile to their presence.

In light of these devastating circumstances, what are our arts institutions doing to save themselves? Museums do their blockbuster retrospective on Van Gogh or Tutankhamen, but contemplate adopting theme-park approaches in order to attract more regular attendance. Ballet companies, intent on keeping themselves financially solvent, stage lengthy runs of The Nutcracker every Christmas season. Similarly, the National Symphony gives not one but two performances of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with cannons at Wolf Trap Farm Park every July to accommodate all the fans. This past summer, the orchestra performed Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky in synchronization with a resplendent print of the classic Russian film to an overflow audience, a standing ovation, and rave reviews. These tactics show, unequivocally, that there is an audience out there yet, whose interest can be tapped by certain kinds of events. But is it enough? Do we pander when we give the audience what it will support? Or asked another way, do we risk a dilution of quality more by serving a broader audience or an ever-diminishing one? Just what do we do to assure audiences for the future?

Experimentation
What seems to be needed is a whole set of new approaches that can attack this complex problem simultaneously on multiple fronts. If opera has benefitted from English surtitles, what more might be done? Perhaps the arts would be wise to instigate a massive redevelopment effort designed to look freshly and thoroughly at our own ingrained habits and practices to see where they may be hindering us. For example, one reviewer of Alexander Nevsky suggested that it “could easily become [Tchaikovsky’s] counterpart each August.” This may be precisely what is wrong with the whole mentality of the classical arts. They are continually in pursuit of tradition. When we find something that works, we repeat it until it wears out its welcome. We tend to inundate people with sameness. The symphony orchestra suffers from bankruptcy of the imagination. What it needs to command audiences is not two unusual ideas that excite public interest, but dozens of them. It needs change.

The symphony orchestra can no longer afford to have a bad performance (not that it ever could). One bad performance can kill all interest in live music for all newcomers for all time. The symphony orchestra must seize every opportunity to recapture music’s vibrancy, to return the art to a form of communication, not just a personal expression. Effective communication today commands and sustains interest, excites the emotions, awakens the spirit, and engages the mind-all at the same time. And the challenge is to succeed with people who are deluged with communications of all kinds.

Today’s audiences reach ennui faster. It seems to take more to attract our interest, to captivate us, and to sustain our attention. We tend to be restless and increasingly impatient, maybe because the world is moving at dizzying speed. Why should we not expect our arts and entertainment to keep pace? Our expectations today demand constant action, diversity, fascination, stimulation, and revelation—in compressed time. The ideal of delayed gratification has been telescoped to embrace immediacy. The balance between unity and variety has tipped in favor of variety. Beauty as an ideal has been replaced by adventure. Perhaps something about communicative technique can be learned from films, television, and pop music that play successfully to contemporary audiences in the tens of millions. These mass entertainments leave nothing to chance in trying to reach potential clients. If nothing more, there is an attitude and a determination that might beneficially be applied to the serious arts.

To be willing and eager to experiment in music may not be as easy as it sounds. Collectively, musicians are among the most obstinately habitual of all professionals, with the possible exception of arts managers. Suggest such simple devices as relighting or reseating the orchestra, or warming-up offstage, or moving the orchestra to another venue, and you will hear grownups whimper like infants. But the threat of going out of business can make even musicians more receptive. Like the union workers at Chrysler, they may have to take some cuts until such time as they improve their product (repertoire), their performance, and their ability to sell to the public.

Changing our habits is not selling our souls. Let the champions of authenticity, of “this-is-the-way-it-is-done,” sit this one out. Maybe when the arts are flourishing again, they can remind us of some of the good old ways that we might reconsider. And let’s rid ourselves of any hint of elitism. The penchant for feeding our own egos by feeling that we are the only ones “in-the-know”—the musical literati—has alienated us from the people we need to befriend. To turn around this public indifference and disregard, the real communicative importance of music must be reasserted. To do this, the audience must be moved. It must come first.

The National Endowment for the Arts can help to lead this redevelopment effort by requiring grants in music, opera/musical theater, and the other arts to support new ways of operating, programming, and presenting. In music, grants should give some priority to innovation in such areas as repertoire (including new music and the ignored repertoire of well-established composers), presentation format, new venues, educational initiatives, and outreach. The NEA has not done the field of music any favors by shoring it up, as is, for the past two decades. If anything, it has made musical enterprises less resilient to the need to adapt and alter practice to fit our changing times. The handouts have insulated the field from the vicissitudes that would have necessitated adjustments and corrections along the way. Now, with lessening attendance and higher costs, the shoring up is not sufficient to overcome two decades of evasion. But the fact of the matter is that these problems are not altogether new. The NEA would have been of far greater service to orchestras and opera companies if it had made them face the music all along. Perhaps the bottom line is that the arts must reclaim their own leadership.

Redevelopment efforts, new leadership, and changes born of experimentation and innovation, important as they are, are short-term adjustments and gains—band-aids in the face of an epidemic. To deal realistically with cultural upheaval, we will have to apply long-term solutions as well.

Education
Let us give education a chance. Those of us who count the arts important believe in a value system beyond materialism, beyond pop culture, beyond crass commercialism. We believe the arts generate the mechanisms of human perception and understanding, of creativity and communication, of thought and feeling that are essential to the conduct of life and society. How did we come to such a notion? We learned it.

Education is a component of the arts that can be called upon to help, but music and music education suffer the same difficulties. Neither is valued sufficiently. When the arts lack respect in the public sector, there is little support for them in education. Likewise, when music counts for little in schools (as is the case for the most part today), it is meagerly valued in society. To have credibility in schools, arts have to have credibility in society. And the reverse is equally true. The two-education and arts-go hand in hand.

As it is today, our public schools, by and large, are no longer developing enough interest in, respect for, or understanding of music to provide the quality or quantity of public support that is necessary for the arts to be sustained as an essential and fundamental ingredient of our culture. In many public schools, vast numbers of children are being denied access to their musical heritage. In some of our largest cities, the numbers of music specialists at the elementary level have been eroding for the better part of two decades. String programs and orchestras are becoming extinct. In secondary schools, music programs are notoriously deficient in reaching all the students. As a result, a downtrodden army of cultureless children is marching toward a barren and depleted adulthood and taking the future of our civilization with them.

As increasing numbers of children are growing up with little or no experience, knowledge, and understanding of music, our public performing arts are becoming an ever more exclusive reclusion for a dwindling educated elite. Where are the new audiences going to come from, if not from our schools?

With the demise of music programs, we are losing a major civilizing force. Not that study of the arts makes people more moral, but it does put them in touch with some of the highest achievements of humankind. It shows what can be done. It teaches students to reach, to live up to something. Encounters with music and the other arts permit students to unlock some of the great stored wisdom of the ages. They invite minds to burst the confines of the simplistic true/false and right/wrong litanies that prevail in most American classrooms.

Music is part of what makes people well educated. Take it away, and they are inevitably less well educated. There is no replacement for it. You either acquire the capacity to unlock these insights and meanings or you are deprived of them. Children made to do without are inevitably impoverished. That is why every young person, without exception, should be given access to the study of music: not for becoming a musician, but for being better educated.

We have made this serious error for many years: we concentrate all our efforts on the talented, on those who already have been won over. In the arts and certainly in music, we cannot afford indifference from any quarter. We must reach the people who are the future cab drivers, salesmen, plumbers, politicians, school administrators, and lawyers. This means that symphony orchestras, opera companies, ballet and theater companies, and all the other public arts enterprises have to take greater responsibility. Who is going to persuade schools, if not those most affected? Who is going to take the leadership, if not those who have understanding of the arts and commitment to them?

Revitalization
How can arts education be revitalized? Certainly not through the token efforts of the past—one-shot student matinees, school assembly presentations, artists visiting schools, and special events for very talented young performers. While these approaches may be useful, they do not begin to do the job. Building real understanding of the classical arts among the great mass of youth is going to take a wholly different and far more comprehensive commitment. Opera America, the professional organization representing more than 100 opera companies in North America, is attempting to break through by developing a series of materials to teach opera at every grade level. With these materials in hand, opera companies can become a promulgating resource for the ongoing, in-school arts education program. Faced with annihilation, opera companies and orchestras will have to assume far more educational responsibility. They are accountable. It is their world. In contrast, science does not sit by the wayside when it comes to taking educational responsibility and action. The National Science Foundation is deeply involved in education and thoroughly committed. It assembles the troops and assumes major leadership.

Unless we can re-persuade schools to take on the responsibility of passing on the culture to the younger generation, to think beyond just employability as the goal of education, then we are forced to turn totally to private-sector alternatives. That prospect poses far more difficulties than do new coalitions with existing state and local educational agencies. Again, we must turn to the National Endowment for leadership. This, too, will call for some major adjustments.

The reason that the NEA in the past has focused its support on artists and arts institutions and not on education is that artists and arts institutions have not, until recently, connected the wellbeing of their own enterprises significantly with education. This schism is unfortunate and shortsighted, and the arts are beginning to bear the brunt of it now. The crass neglect of music in American schools is already having serious residual effects on our performing arts institutions and our culture as a whole. In truth, there can be no art or artists without some form of education, nor would there be any arts institutions in American society without the infrastructure of education to sustain them. The well-being of our cultural enterprises depends directly upon the effectiveness of education in the arts. And the reverse is equally true: the place and pertinence of the arts in education depend directly upon the well-being of the arts in society. If there were no arts in society, there would be no need for any in education. The two are therefore interlocking and interdependent components of the same universe. The arts and education are allies—two sides of the same coin.

The lack of status afforded education at the Endowment is also due to some artists and arts organizations thinking of the NEA as “their” nest egg. They have not connected arts education with their need to solve their always impending insolvency, nor do they see arts education programs as nearly good enough to make a difference. But if the latter is the case, which it certainly is in many school systems, is this not sufficient justification for federal and state initiatives to make them better? Some say that education should be the responsibility of the Department of Education, but there are no provisions there for involving arts enterprises in the effort, and such involvement will not happen without them. Indeed, the Department should also take part, but the arts lobby must persuade the Department to do so. That lobby, which has shown glimmers of effectiveness only when the Endowment’s budget or prerogatives are threatened, now needs to mobilize on behalf of arts education. This is a call to leadership that goes well beyond business as usual.

High Stakes
What is at stake is nothing less than a whole way of life. The classical arts represent a value system which should be prized but increasingly is not. If we do not gather all our forces, scant as they are, and join together in a massive effort to reverse the current trends, we stand to lose a precious part of our cultivated human existence. The world could get coarser, crueler, and more uncouth. We could lose altogether our mechanisms for communicating both the ennobling and the starkly revealing purviews of human life. We could cease to value the “languages” of civilization through which we express our feelings, dreams, outrages, and intuitive understandings. Science does not and cannot provide us with this insight.

In this technological age, music and the other arts are needed more than ever to reaffirm our humanity. With satellite TV transmission encircling the globe, and jet aircraft placing us within 24 hours of the farthest reaches of the human family, the peoples of this planet grow closer daily. Our pluralistic culture requires more, not less, cultural understanding. Music can bridge ethnic differences and open the avenues of human understanding. It can give American youth and society, now charged with a dehumanizing and primitive machismo, a balancing dimension of humaneness. These are powerful reasons to fight for its survival and to make certain that American schools prepare the youth of the nation to understand and value it. The future of our civilization and the quality of our culture depend on the health and vibrancy of our performing arts and their counterpart in our schools. In this regard, concerted efforts on both the artistic and educational fronts by everyone involved in the arts, including the NEA, are imperative. They alone will determine whether these forms of communication count for much just around the corner in the 21st century.

Charles Fowler, author of Can We Rescue the Arts for America’s Children? (American Council for the Arts) is a Washington (DC) based freelance writer on the arts and director of National Cultural Resources, Inc.