The music industry has been charting the decline of classical
market in the United States for at least a decade, attributing it
to aging audiences, crashing CD sales and shrinking private
subsidies. Music lovers beware: there are signs now of an
accelerating downward trend.
The root of the problem, musicians tell me, is a plague of
pirated Internet downloads and a spreading anti-intellectual
climate in the U.S. music world, especially among the young.
Further pressure, as if any were needed, comes from the current
economic squeeze.
Several of the nation’s leading symphonies are wholly
dependent on private donations. As the recession has taken hold,
Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Pittsburgh orchestras are in
dire financial difficulty, and Louisville last month filed for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Honolulu Symphony, the oldest
orchestra west of the Rockies, went broke and shut down in
December. In music-mad New York, many second-tier orchestras,
including the Brooklyn Philharmonic and Long Island Philharmonic
have stopped performing and others are downsizing, curtailing their
season and asking players to take salary cuts.
Highly trained instrumentalists complain that the demand
for their services is eroding year by year as job opportunities
evaporate. Moreover, the arrival of Chinese, Korean and Japanese
virtuosos from the top U.S. conservatories has heated up the
competition both for permanent and freelance work.
It looks like a perfect storm has hit the business of
serious music, so far sparing only the major orchestras in New
York, Boston, Chicago and a few other cities.
Some say they see an end of an era coming.
“It’s a tough time for great music,” says
Melinda Bargreen, a composer and former Seattle Times
critic who was recently sacked in a cost-cutting campaign at the
newspaper.
The New York Times has called it the Classical
Music Recession. This time, however, the recovery may come too late
for city-based orchestras and players throughout the
country.
It is already too late for some. A typical case is a
professional cellist in New York who has seen his income plunge by
two-thirds, forcing him to sell his home to feed his family and
stay solvent. Another musician, a New York percussionist, has gone
public with his plight, calling his once-busy life now haunted with
“long stretches of quiet.”
Even light-hearted classical concerts such as Peter
Schickele’s P.D.Q. Bach have stopped, not for quality reasons but
because dumbed-down audiences miss his wisecracks due to poor
musical knowledge.
A pianist friend, Ivan Ilic, says the pervasive public
ignorance of serious music has been a major factor in the current
crisis. “It is naive to pretend that people will
spontaneously flock to concerts because, say, the harmonic
progressions are worked out in more detail in a Schubert symphony
than those is a song by Lady Gaga.”
People need context to understand the music, he believes,
“and the older the music the richer the context.”
Reaction from residents of the cities worst affected has
sparked emotional debates on the Internet over how much subsidy
makes sense when audiences and benefactors are turning away. Many
residents favor market forces as the main indicator in deciding
whether an orchestra deserves to survive. In Detroit, where a
crippling strike over wages has shut down the orchestra since last
October, one local reader wrote to the Free Press
website:
“Given the high (too high, actually) ticket
prices for the DSO and those high salaries for what basically is
part-of-the-year work, I have almost zero sympathy for a symphony
that has more or less struck itself out of a job.”
Wrote another reader:
“I don’t need an orchestra in town and apparently I am not
alone, otherwise enough paying customers would attend. The DSO
loses money. It is not a compelling value proposition in the
competition for the entertainment dollar of enough metro Detroiters
to justify its survival. Take the pay cut, or shut it down. Simple
as that.”
In Louisville, a Courier-Journal reader
commented:
“Either community support exists or it doesn’t. In this
case, clearly the community support for an orchestra of this size
doesn’t exist and the LO should reorganize into a sustainable
entity.”
As bloggers continued opting for a shutdown, one reader
asked, “Tell me dear sir, what is the color of
your neck?”
France and Germany have largely avoided U.S. problems,
supporting their leading orchestras mainly through government
subsidies. In Italy, however, opera companies and orchestras are
both suffering. In Britain, subsidies are under pressure by
cutbacks in government spending but an innovative economic model
helps them survive.
London, arguably the music capital of the world, “is doing
pretty well,” says leading British music critic and writer Jessica
Duchen, partly by “paying their players one heck of a lot less than
the Americans do — possibly a quarter as much.” The most
successful orchestras — the London Symphony, London Philharmonic
and Philharmonia — do not give full-time salaries. Players are
paid on a freelance basis.
Ms. Bargreen laments the disappearance of the music critic
from many U.S. newspapers. “What was lost was not only the
continued vigilance and critical attention to this field,” she told
me, “but also the ability of classical performers to get their
story out in a way that got more considered attention than the
millions of tiny voices shouting into cyberspace.”
The survival of orchestras has hit players’ private
finances in other ways, too. Demand for private lessons, which
normally supplement their incomes, is dropping off as schools cut
back music education and the entertainment industry floods the
young with other options. One classically trained music teacher in
Britain told me he has been forced to learn, and teach, the
electric guitar to keep his job. Youngsters are not opting for his
music appreciation courses.
Music lessons in British schools are expected to be
chopped further as the government seeks to privatize this side of
education. “It’s as if, rather than just pruning
the tree at sensible points of the branches, they want to pull it
up by the roots,” says Ms. Duchen.
And finally, the once-ubiquitous CD, which started losing
market share about ten years ago, continues to fall in all
categories. “The demand that everything on the Internet be free has
meant that the vast majority of music downloads are illegal, thus
depriving performers and composers of their deserved income,” says
composer-critic Bargreen.
Only in Asia is the classical music industry in
ascendancy. China has built modern concert halls across the country
and implemented an aggressive music-education program in schools.
An estimated 20 million young Chinese have been hand-picked to
study classical piano. U.S. conservatories such as Juilliard and
Curtis are training the best of them.
Many of these young players are technically brilliant but
critics are waiting for signs of deeper interpretations.
Chinese-born Lang Lang, known by critics as Bang Bang, may be the
first of many to grow into this role, and in the process to help
pick up the slack in the Western classical tradition.
Mr. Johnson served nine years on the board of
the London International Piano
Competition.
