Orchestras, Opera Companies, and the Tech Mogul’s College Roommate
Quick, how many concert halls are named after Bill Gates?
The global health ecosystem that includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is about to come to the rescue of the performing arts industry. Worldwide vaccinations against the coronavirus and billions in new pandemic research are critical to getting audiences back into concert halls and making sure the next shutdown of live music and theater is another 100 years off.
But orchestra and opera company budgets and endowments were already under strain before the pandemic. Previous waves of strikes and lockouts, aging halls in need of structural and acoustical updates, and in many cases shriveling box offices have taken their toll.
Even a fraction of the hundreds of billions in tech wealth could shore up America’s classical arts establishment in a jiffy. But one after another, the country’s famous tech titans pour their massive wealth into hospitals, medical research, environmental causes, and global education and anti-poverty efforts. High cultural pursuits tend not to be top of mind for today’s new mega-wealth holders.
It wasn’t always this way with the nation’s most prominent fields of business. Throughout the 20th century, industrialists, bankers, and consumer-goods manufacturers generously funded the live performing arts. A look around the country at the names of major cultural centers illustrates this history.
The Kimmel Center in Philadelphia is named for an apparel manufacturer. Powell Symphony Hall in St. Louis is named for an executive of the Brown Shoe Company. Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth is named after an oil tycoon. Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore is named for a builder of shopping centers.
At Lincoln Center, the New York City Ballet performs at the David H. Koch Theater, named for one of the conservative activist Koch Brothers who made their mark in such basics as asphalt, plastics and fertilizers.
The beautiful Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, Maryland may not be named for an individual but for a turn-of-the-century mansion that is still standing on the property. But the performers in the 1,976-seat hall sing and play from the “J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Concert Stage” after the founders of the hospitality giant that grew from its 1927 origins in a root beer stand in Washington, D.C.
So what’s the solution to getting tech titans involved in funding art and music? Bigger, bolder PowerPoint presentations to put before mega-wealth holders on the merits of donating to museums and symphonies? Articles from local newspaper columnists shaming their area’s tech mega-millionaires and billionaires for failing to bail out arts organizations?
Neither of those things, of course. Newly minted philanthropists contribute their money for the psycho-social benefits that the act brings them. This legitimate and natural impulse is hard to override with external, even rational, considerations that pinpoint a meritorious recipient on fully objective grounds. The largess needs to trigger a constructive feeling of virtue that the donor can express on a daily, conversational basis.
All around the Capital Beltway in Washington are office buildings whose logos shining from the top floor tend to rotate out every five years or so. The disappearing logo often reflects the buyout of a specialized software or other IT vendor by a much bigger tech company, leaving a mid-career founder/entrepreneur with the stash of a lifetime.
What would work better to separate these newly super-rich individuals from their money? A clever presentation about the theoretical benefits to “the arts” of a mega-donation? Or an excited story from the entrepreneur’s old college roommate about having actually attended the symphony or opera company in question several times in the last couple of years?
San Francisco-based classical music consultant Aubrey Bergauer would recognize the paradox. She has become known in the world of symphony orchestras for her “Long-Haul Model” of audience relations. The core of the model is a disciplined plan for every patron based on his or her trail of activity with the concert presenter. The most controversial part of the model bans any request for donations until after the patron’s third concert attendance.
Why does Ms. Bergauer demand such a practice? You could say it’s to avoid sending the wrong message to attendees of moderate means that classical music is only for people with money to burn. But it’s equally important for all new attendees. A concert attendee who comes once and never comes back is of no use to the arts organization, no matter how much discretionary income they have or how many begging emails they get before they unsubscribe to the list.
And you never know who that new concert attendee may be. It could be a nobody, a somebody, or a tech-savvy friend or relative of the ultimate financial savior of the organization.
Of course, the pandemic has helped ruin much of the willpower around this issue, as every cultural organization has stuck their hand out for emergency funds multiple times to probably everyone they’ve ever touched. But after the pandemic is over, it’s going to take a lot of discipline for arts presenters to put fannies back in the seats and new, major contributors on their rolls.
Most often the question of ticket sales and donations are said to be opposing, as one makes up for the other. The sooner that performing arts organization realize that it’s the same question — that major donors and even builders of the next concert facility can’t commit to it without music and the arts first becoming a regular, conversational part of their own social lives — the better the prospects for the serious arts to recover and thrive after the catastrophe they’ve endured.
David Rohde is a theater music director, pianist, vocal coach and arts writer based in Washington. He previously worked for a global telecommunications consulting firm.
