Maybe my understanding of this isn’t sufficiently nuanced, but I thought both of those were specific legal definitions and not matters of opinion.

I’ve actually been exploring the idea that the NEA (2009) report on the SPPA charting the supposed decline of classical music is simply charting how closely tied classical music audiences are to the White population, which is “declining” relative to the population as a whole (though oviously actually increasing in absolute numbers) in the U.S.

The one organization that has successfully bridged the ethnic divide is probably the Chicago Sinfonietta. A book from 2008 (Entering Cultural Communities) states that fully 55% of its audience are ethnic minorities. The ensemble itself (in 2006) included 21 African Americans, 4 Latinos, 2 Asians, and one Native American. 50 percent of the board is comprised of African Americans (as is the Conductor) and four to five works per year are written by composers of color and performed by guest artists of color.

How this has translated into audience figures–as well as the racial demographic composition of the audiences, these are some of the other numbers given:

* Its subscriber base of eleven hundred has been augmented by five thousand to ten thousand single-ticket sales annually, a number that is likely to increase dramatically as the organization expands its repertoire to reach a broader audience
* Its subscriber base has grown 24 percent from 2004-2006, and the goal is to keep that base growing by 8 to 12 percent every year.
* Creative collaborations like the one with Chicago-based Rock group in 2005 in original and remixed performances of Dvorak’s new world symphony attracted a significantly younger audience of rock fans or the collaborative performance with Fareed Haque and Zakir Hussein which melded Jazz, Classical Indian Music, and Classical music which brought in a new audience of South Asians, “99 percent [of whom] had never been to a Sinfionetta concert before” (Hirsh interview 2005)

Executive Director, Jim Hirsh, says their goal has been:

to stretch how people perceive orchestral [music]: what orchestra music is and [what it] can be, and trying, hopefully, to open some doors so it becomes relevant for a broader range of people…We have one foot in the traditional orchestral world–we did Tchaikovsky’s Fifth [but we had] the first half of the concert with [Chicago's Mexican folk band] Sones de Mexico and this young, African American cellist, Patrice Jackson, who kind of blew the doors off the place….We just want to explore [new musical combinations]. (Hirsh interview 2005)

And ironically, given the recent NY Phil incident with the nokia ring tone, the Chicago Sinfonietta commissioned a Concertino for Cell Phone and Orchestra for the 2007 season–which required audience cello phone participation!

I think they’ve earned their self-description as “The nation’s most diverse symphony orchestra [that] shatters traditional boundaries through its collaborations, creating synergies between classical, dance, theater and other musical styles including jazz, rock, and world music.”

The problem is, obviously, how far do you go in creating these innovative collaborations before you can no longer consider the organization a classical music ensemble?

The other route, as I mentioned in my second blog post link is to just stop worrying about attracting a more diverse audience since there are already Traditional Chinese Orchestras, Arabic Orchestras, and art ensembles modeled after many non-European groups that are becoming much more prevalent in the U.S. that will more easily take up the slack. This might be a bit defeatist, but I don’t think we can continue to believe in the universality of European/Western Classical Music institutions as being the only ones that can claim the title of “high art” above and beyond the dozens of art music ensembles and genres that have, in some case, existed for a longer period of time.

Can I get an “amen?”

The classical music “emergency” is primarily a funding issue for organizations whose mission is to present live music. Higher education institutions aren’t suffering in the same way and don’t really fit the profile of the collapsing musical “establishment.” They don’t have lockouts, strikes, bankruptcies and a steady stream of news reports charting their demise.

I can’t write with authority about the levels of interest or apathy for “entrepreneurship” within the academy’s walls. But I do know that in the “real world” there is heightened fear of “collapse.” There is a steady hum of talk about new thinking and new business plans.

There are a few things that I wish were different about my time in conservatory but that experience more-or-less taught me what it intended to. However, those lessons did not include what it really meant to enter and be successful in the workforce, in my case an orchestra.

Music schools don’t really prepare students for that job description as it has existed for decades. So never mind preparing students for the uncharted frontiers of “new models” and entrepreneurship. Those maps will be drawn by the people on the ground doing the work.

I believe there is a trap in mixing all classical music institutions and their “experiences” in the same pot. Classical Music takes many forms and its institutions serve different masters. Since this is on Polyphonic, the elitism question is implicitly seen through an orchestra lens. So I think asking: “Is Classical Music too elitist or not,” is a different question than asking whether or not orchestras are.

This is probably why your values clash with Lebrecht’s. He may have interesting ideas for some classical institutions, but certainly not all. As far as I can tell, Lebrecht is largely unconcerned with the entirety of what modern American orchestras do. His opinions, while informed and articulate, are about only the music and the people that make the particular slice of it that he is concerned with. And for many orchestras, non-classical performances make up much of the pie.

From my position, you and NL are speaking virtually two distinct dialects. Healthy orchestras vs healthy art. While both have rich vocabularies, his words don’t plausibly translate in any workplace I’ve known as an orchestra player.

The idea that more elitism is what the orchestras need is laughable. But the idea that there are audiences willing to pay higher prices for an even more exclusive experience is almost certainly is true.

It is a reflection of the divergent mandates of different ensembles.

On one hand, orchestras are multi-million dollar community institutions, that inhabit landmark halls with thousands of seats and downtown addresses. They have their city or state right in the name. Added elitism is antithetical to their public-driven mission.

On the other hand, there are groups like the Arditti String Quartet (albeit an extreme example) who serve a very different purpose. Their audience is probably willing to pay an astronomical price to hear them live or buy their recordings.

However, there is little overlap in the audiences and I doubt that there is much that one group can learn from the other.

The problem comes when personal artistic agendas, no matter how passionate, wash up on an orchestra’s shore as solutions. On the classical music map, orchestras have the biggest landmass. Their large audiences and budgets are magnets for more cultural/civic attention than their smaller cousins; and they attract more interest and opinions from classical music insiders.

But rarely do they speak directly to orchestra-centric audience/revenue questions that don’t explicitly or implicitly have retraction at their core. Some want to re-enforce the classical castle walls while others want to replace one inadequately sized audience with another. These and the variations in between more or less ignore the programming and “experience” issues that apparently matter to the largest orchestra audiences: pops and parking.

Maybe orchestras haven’t embraced the “middle” enough?