Oregonian classical music critic David Stabler just wrote an entry on his blog which talks about the recent Crosscut article and his take on the state of the orchestra.
He comes out swinging on the merits of the piece:
Stephen Beaudoin is right about one thing in his doomy Crosscut piece about the Oregon Symphony. The orchestra is struggling, but his ideas are so superficial and generalized as to be almost meaningless . . . All this stuff from Beaudoin and others about programming is tired, old thinking: “mixing popular and vernacular genres,” initiating “mini-festivals around relevant historical/musical themes,” commissioning world premieres.
Wake up, folks.
And he puts his finger on the crux of the problem facing most symphony orchestras in the country today:
Look, the symphony isn’t going away. The repertoire is here to stay and people will always want to hear it. What needs to change right away is the orchestra’s relationship with the community. The problem is, orchestras don’t know how to change. They have this thing, this music, this product and they don’t know how to adapt it to today’s market.
Stabler then goes on to talk about alternative venues, ways of formatting concerts, the nights/times that we play as areas that can be changed to better reflect the desires of our current and prospective audiences. All well and good, but to take the Sunday matinée example for a moment: we tried some Sunday matinées for classical subscriptions, and the attendance was terrible. Now, I don’t know why it was terrible – was it the fact that these were add-on concerts to fill out a series – i.e. the subscribers mostly got Saturday nights, but for one or two concerts of their series they got a Sunday afternoon, so they just didn’t go to a concert on a day they didn’t really want? Or do people in Portland just want to spend their Sunday afternoons outside and not in a stuffy concert hall? The problem is that, unless we try the idea as its own series, we’ll never know. The half-hearted, tentative way of introducing the matinée practically doomed it from the start.
It goes back to the issue I talked about some time ago: orchestras are risk-averse institutions, because if you risk it all on the wrong idea, you may never get back to even the poor place where you started. Taking smart, educated risks is the way to go, but then you’ve got to embrace the risk and go for the strategy 100 percent. A prime example is when the symphony started playing Saturday nights (back in 1995-96 or so). Instead of saying that we’d take one concert out of both the A and B classical series and try them on Saturday nights – and royally pissing off our existing ticket holders who wanted to go on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday night – management decided that to be competative with other arts organizations we need to stake out Saturday night for every series, and get rid of Tuesday nights. All at once. We lost a lot of “Tuesday nighters” as Jimmy called them, but many returned, and new subscribers came as well, and now it’s the one night on which we almost never have “comp” tickets available for orchestra members. An educated risk was taken, the long view was held, and we gained our best selling night. This is the way decisions should be made – a bunker mentality only means that you’re cut off from the community that you serve, the musicians you employ, and the ideas to which you aspire.