Six things that classical music can learn from Broadway after the pandemic
It’s a good thing that global pandemics come only once a century. Once every 50 years and Broadway might look entirely different today. It was booming when the curtain came down last March. But it was widely viewed as dying in 1970 and might never have recovered if a Spanish flu or coronavirus hit back then.
Now classical music may be the live performing arts genre at the highest risk of permanent damage from the pandemic. Yet it could be booming in 2070 if it follows the right path out of the crisis, a lot of which is charted by Broadway’s recovery and big growth over the past 50 years.
Of course all of the live performing arts are going to have a long time picking themselves off the floor from the current calamity. With almost everything on hiatus, now is the time for classical concert presenters and opera houses to reconsider their ingrained practices and narrow assumptions that lead to some of the same negative habits that musical theater learned to overcome. Here’s a sketch of some of those lessons and the path forward.
Create repeat buyers, not a mailing list to beg donations. The difference in how I usually hear about a concert or a show is striking. For a musical, typically a friend tells me I have to see it. For a classical concert, typically the concert presenter themselves tells me in an email or Facebook post. Although there’s a huge marketing machine behind it, the real sellers of Broadway tickets are the public themselves.
Classical music presenters hobble themselves by placing every new attendee on the same mailing list that is likely to be used the next five times to beg for donations. They don’t realize that it’s fresh, original social media posts from the audience members themselves who are genuine influencers that will expand the circle. And a lot more talk in bars (whenever it’s wise to be in bars again) about the personalities involved in classical music is worth a hundred times what can be accomplished in any mailer or desperate email blast about meeting an orchestra’s budget deadline.
Sell the experience, not just the music. Classical music presenters tend to view the audience experience as starting when the conductor gives the first downbeat. Theaters tend to view the audience experience as starting when the patron walks through the front door. Part of the fun of attending a Broadway show is opening the playbill to the inside front cover and seeing ads for a luxury car or fancy jewelry. At an orchestra concert or opera, the first ad in the program is more likely to feature a deceased individual whose estate plan had fortuitously established an annual grant to the presenting organization. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that all adults should have a will. But I doubt that asking millennials to arrange to donate their stocks and bonds to an opera company when they die is really a winning marketing strategy.
Part of this means that a new-audience outreach program can’t just be pasted on top of concert presenters’ marketing. They have to sacrifice something if they really want new, predominantly younger audiences. That means no buzz-killing pre-concert speeches by orchestra executives with no public speaking skills implying that any audience member who only paid the price of the ticket without adding a big donation is an ingrate.
Use pop culture to acknowledge and solve classical music’s social isolation. High school theater teachers have worked hard over the last 20 years to broaden the cachet of musical theater and show choirs beyond their traditional appeal more to girls than boys and other imbalances. The status of these activities was tackled head-on by the High School Musical film franchise and the TV series Glee. The latter did not hesitate to portray singing and acting as low-status activities and then show, entertainingly, how both adults and kids could work to pull up the field’s social status.
Perhaps there should be a new series called French Horn Follies or Band Kids Unite. That could have more permanent impact than outreach programs that simply plop captive students into concert halls otherwise filled with white people their grandparents’ age.
Develop authentic local followings instead of counting on perceived global prestige. At the end of a show, Broadway stars head to the stage door to greet their fans. At the end of a concert, orchestra conductors often head for the airport. That happens even if the star conductor holds the title of music director of the local symphony orchestra. Why? Because the orchestra board often thinks that hiring a globally celebrated classical conductor with many other jobs boosts their own prestige, even if the conductor only spends eight weeks a year in that town and his or her name is unknown to anyone in the local community outside the concert hall.
Build natural diversity in classical culture, not diversity “efforts” that don’t stick. Nobody likes paying $175 a seat for Broadway tickets — or says that they do. But the fact is that there’s a paradoxical benefit in earning revenue organically rather than the culture found throughout classical or “serious” arts of hammering home the idea that most of their revenue comes through grants and charity.
Under their breath, some classical presenters and composers complain that the extensive paperwork they’re forced to undergo to obtain grants only encourages the ostentatious “papering the audience” habits that rarely carry through after the concert is over. Right around Halloween, the innovative San Francisco orchestra consultant Aubrey Bergauer especially picks on symphony orchestras’ habit of scheduling Día de Los Muertos concerts and thinking that’s anywhere near enough to get Hispanic audiences through the door the rest of the season.
Far better than an obvious split between paid and free tickets at classical concerts would be a dynamic pricing model that forces everyone — yes, including younger and minority audience members — to pay five or ten bucks for their investment of time and interest in tremendous music of any kind at all. That needs to be followed up immediately by aggressive promotion of even free streaming options of the same music by other ensembles, since classical recordings are in fact rising during the pandemic. Admittedly the challenge in implementing dynamic pricing is the mismatch between the size of many concert venues — especially a wave of beautiful but overbuilt concert facilities on college campuses from about 25 years ago — and any realistic size of current demand from even a diverse audience. But this more Broadway-oriented approach of perceived scarcity and “everybody pays something” can still be simulated via creative means.
Memo to composers: You’re no Beethoven, so accept changes. Paradoxically for a field built over centuries on written and spoken public opinion, classical music still needs to learn to take criticism. I don’t mean the performers, who expect to be pummeled by reviewers, competition judges, and various hangers-on. I mean the creators of music. Classical music could stand to drop its ridiculous habit of labeling the first performance of anything anywhere a “world premiere.” The equivalent moment in musical theater is called “a tryout in Hartford.” New shows are workshopped, torn up, reassembled, show-doctored, and subject to real audiences’ laughter and applause — or paucity of either — long before opening night on Broadway.
In the classical arts in general, creators will often object that their entire original work must stand on its own, much as da Vinci wouldn’t alter the Mona Lisa, Beethoven wouldn’t change his late string quartets, and Stravinsky wasn’t fazed by the riot at the 1913 Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring. But today even the classical performers themselves often know that a great deal of new music is really quite awful, and soloists and orchestras alike don’t bother to put these works in their repertoire once they’re disposed of the first time.
Lest any offended composers think that I’m biased against any stylistic approach from neo-Romantic to fully atonal, they can benefit from reading the book The Secret Life of the American Musical. In the book, veteran Broadway producer Jack Viertel makes the surprising discovery that successful shows as musically diverse as Guys and Dolls, Little Shop of Horrors, and Rent all have a predictable dramatic arc and structure based on their key characters’ stated desires and aspirations. By contrast, arguably the single greatest failing in contemporary classical music is its wobbly or self-indulgent structure and the failure to edit things down. Many times in hearing new music, my biggest problem along the way is that I just don’t know where I am — the beginning, middle, or end of the piece.
And take heart! Even Beethoven made changes. When he originally played his Waldstein piano sonata, some friends told him that the middle movement didn’t work. Of course Beethoven flew into a rage at the criticism. Then, the next day, he realized they were right. He excised the movement, which today stands alone as a separate concert piece called the Andante favori, and inserted an entirely different, shorter middle movement that more directly links to the final movement, leading to today’s standing of the Waldstein as one of the principal Beethoven sonatas among the entire corpus of the 32 he composed.
Surely, if Ludwig could allow his friends the “show doctors” to interfere with his composition in what turned out to be its trial run in Hartford before the Broadway opening, today’s composers of serious art music can stand to do the same. It’ll be one step in the right direction for the genre as all of the performing arts gingerly climb out of the catastrophic shutdown of live performance during the global pandemic.
David Rohde is a pianist, vocal coach, theater music director and freelance writer based in Washington.
