It’s All About the Music. It’s Not About the Music at All.

Sigmund Freud said, “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?'”

Despite my thirty-five years of work as a music director, the question I haven’t been able to adequately answer is ‘what does the audience want?’ I do have a couple ideas though, that I reveal at the end of this blog. My apologies in advance that this will take you a little bit of time to read, but the development of my ideas requires a bit of explanation. I welcome your impressions and hope you’ll comment.

Consider these true stories as case histories:

1. The ensemble was amateur, painfully so.  They played out of tune, they lacked balance, cohesiveness and timbre was all over the map. They frequently weren’t together and aside from the wrong notes, there was one number when a couple people finished one tune a measure and a half after the cut-off. The concert went on in this soul-killing fashion for well over two hours. If I hadn’t been getting paid to sit in the trumpet section, I would have taken off at the intermission.  The house, however, was packed.
2. The band was awesome. They had worked hard, knew their music well and played with the confidence of professionals even though they were all amateurs with other ways of making a living. The selections had been carefully chosen to balance so-called “crowd pleasers” with more artistic, but accessible and tonal works. The band outnumbered the audience.
3. The community orchestra Board of Directors had been noticing a little drop- off in audience lately. Nothing significant, but in the period they kept track of the numbers there was definitely a decline. This was a well-established group of volunteers with a handful of paid “ringers” (hired professionals)  that all knew their music and the more facile players at the top of each section balanced out those players who were still working on skills. They were a conservative group that played Standard Repertoire — nothing very modern — because that was the vision of the music director. Audiences always topped out at no more than half-filling the hall.
4. After some study by the Board this same orchestra added a young artists’ competition to their winter concert. For the next successive three years, the Board was satisfied to see their audiences increase about 20%. On the fourth season, they noticed that they kept that increase even in the fall and spring concerts, even though there was no competition. Therefore, they couldn’t say for sure whether the increase in audience was due to the young artist competition or to reasons unknown.
5. Another orchestra saw similar decline in attendance. This group was semi-professional — i.e. made up of avocational musicians who were all being paid, but who had other professions such as doctors, teachers, engineers, etc. They were a high quality group that performed a wider range of material, since they had an endowment and could afford the rental on more modern works. They had also had guest artists in on a regular basis and a strong promotional branch of their board. When their audience numbers began to slip under 2/3 of a full house, they invested in renting a jumbotron to add visuals to their concerts. If anything, the audience slipped a little more.
6. A community wind symphony had a new director who was young, energetic and full of ideas. The group was made up of amateur volunteers with a few paid ringers and a wide facility range; yet they learned the music and played it well enough, in tune and together. The director had a strong background in directing musical theatre, so he brought that ethic to the wind ensemble, adding some theatrics in the way of visuals, a bit of comedy, and performing themed concerts. The audiences consistently stayed the same, just about equal to the band membership — i.e. family members, and close friends.

These are all true stories I’ve encountered in my years of experience, either playing in the ensemble or directing, so I pretty well can surmise reasons for audience density in each of the six instances. But first, here are the reasons I hear from others having a more casual acquaintance with the problem of audience attendance:

“You didn’t play music the audience wanted to hear.” (Said somewhat accusatorily, never failing to make me, the music director in charge of programming, totally collapse inside.)

“The concert was great, but I never saw any promotion.”

“The band in my town always has a full house.” (Permission to smack?)

I included these last three very subjective responses to show how fractious and laden with personal impressions the subject of audience attendance is in our business.  We tend to blame ourselves when our audiences are small, conversely we congratulate ourselves when we score that rare and wonderful standing-room only house. Feelings are so sensitive because performance is a shared experience and we are literally only half an ensemble without our better half: the audience. And this is an issue all over the country — wherever audiences are drifting away.

So, the two areas of criticism tend to be either about the programming (it’s all about the music) or promotion, or thereof (it’s not about the music at all). Blame the director or blame the board, but the truth is that bands and orchestras usually don’t drive away audiences because they’re bad.

The first example is a classic in this regard. That particular performance, despite it being the Gig From Hell for paid ringers, was a big community talent showcase in one of the large North Shore communities in Massachusetts. This had been an annual event for many years, and all the mucky mucks and who’s who in town got up to sing. No wonder the house was packed — it wasn’t about the music at all, it was more about local celebrity.  And because it was such a major town event, it scarcely needed promotion — it was already on everybody’s calendar. And before anyone reading this starts to spout off about Lowest Common Denominator (i.e. blaming the audience), this particular community should be applauded for its ability to bring their town together in a music-related community event. In this case, I doubt that there was a single soul in that audience that thought they were listening to Grand Opera (however, I recall applause being noticeably louder for the singers who had real talent). It wasn’t about the music, it was about Community and an evening of shared musical fun. (And my caveat — I was much younger and my own understanding of this dynamic was undeveloped at the time.)

Much more subtle are the issues facing the three groups in the other examples. Let’s take a look at the good community band with a range of volunteer players that sometimes hires professional ringers to fill in blank spots, and which plays a variety of music, and let’s include some innovations in visuals and theatrics like the group in example 6.

Community bands in general tend to attract a select audience of friends and family, at least here in Massachusetts. Some have built more of a following — youtube and Facebook has helped groups grow. But the packed house is still pretty rare, and even innovative programming has done little to offset the apathy towards the performing arts that seems to exist especially in suburban communities.

The two areas of blame — programming (it’s about the music), and promotion (it’s not about the music) — don’t apply here as easily as you might think. I happen to be one of those innovative directors. I program themed concerts and I’m very careful to keep the music very accessible and when I program something less tonal/familiar, I make sure that it’s well sandwiched. And while our particular outreach is not so much about the traditional Marches and Showtunes style of programming, when we do the audiences don’t change much (an entire blog about that to come soon). I can absolutely verify that our Promotion Committee works their collective tushes off getting the word out to the papers, flyers papering the town, word out to every community bulletin board, Facebook events, etc. etc. It doesn’t seem to make any difference. So we scratch our heads and soldier on.

I have two observations. One is that our little suburban town north of Boston is a very typical bedroom community in that most of the family-oriented focus is restricted to school activities or events around children: school plays and concerts, Pops Warner football and other sports, dance concerts and the like. When we’ve tried to coordinate concerts that include youth or to bring in high school students to play with us, we’re met with a pretty chilly reception. The schools are only too willing to take our money to rent their performance space, but are completely disinterested in helping us build audiences made up of the population central to our town: families.

The other observation is a critique of community music culture itself — not a criticism, mind you, but an observation of the status quo. Community bands and orchestras are social clubs at their most fundamental. They are a healthy way to get together and bring back the fun times we had in high school and college, keep our minds active and our musical skills honed. A way to accurately say that we’re musicians even while we know we’ll never “make it to the big time.” And even though we really want to share our music with the community at large, we still rarely have figured out a way to make ourselves important to that community. The community itself doesn’t seem to know exactly what to make of us, and we shouldn’t be surprised (but we always are) every time we realize how few people in town even know of our existence

A couple exceptions exist: non-church community choirs seem to do well, at least those concerts I’ve attended. And orchestras occupy a slightly different world, even when they are a community orchestra in a suburban bedroom community. Orchestras are taken more seriously. They may still be community social clubs, but the work ethic tends to be a bit more intense and the community at large seems to accord more respect to orchestras. I hear from our local orchestra in the community where I conduct one of my bands that the split between orchestra and the schools is still present, but their audiences seem to typically run 1/2 to 2/3 of the house, a better turn out than the  roughly equal ratio of audience to musicians that concert bands experience.

The situation might be very different in other parts of the country — please let me know! I’m just saying how it is in our corner of New England. And there are plenty of variations on these themes in these parts, maybe depending upon how much is offered in terms of entertainment in the community. The Boston/Cambridge metro area has a lot on their arts and entertainment calendars. If you go out a ways — Hollis, Fitchburg, Greenfield, Sturbridge, Worcester — the offerings are much slimmer. With less to choose from, then a band or orchestra concert may be more attractive to families looking for something to do. But the paradigm remains the same: I’ve been to concerts of excellent music sparsely attended and to concerts of horrible music packed to the rafters.

And that’s my point: it’s all about the music, it’s not about the music at all. We can’t apply reductive reasoning to what’s going on in a very complicated relationship between music performance and the needs of the audience. For us in the music business to approach a solution to what has become a very thorny question that affects our livelihoods and our collective self respect, we must come to an understanding of the dynamic between ourselves and the people we perform for. It’s not about us — it’s about them and understanding what motivates them to get off their couches and come out of an evening or Sunday afternoon.

When I was in college, studying Sociology as my minor, I was particularly  annoyed by what Freud had to say about women in general. I took it pretty personally; I was working on my own coming of age and all the issues therein.  I included that quote at the top of this blog because it really gets down to how much our perceptions depend upon our own attitudes and position in society — and not just about the obvious attitude of sexism inherent in the statement. It speaks volumes about that gulf between ourselves and our perceptions of the “other.” What I really needed Freud to do — who became the last word on defining women — was to really listen to us instead of pronouncing his own laws about our behavior and what makes us functional. Instead of telling us what we as women need to do and be to be normal, he needed to take us on our terms and find a way of working with us. Had he not tried to force-fit us into his strictures, it would have been much, much easier for Freud to have answered his questions about what we want.

If we take our audiences on their terms, respecting their intelligence and cultural savvy and ask them what they need, they will answer. Yes, they’ll answer in concrete terms: “We want more marches and show tunes, we want more Beethoven and Brahms,” because they don’t know any other options. But if we engage them, then they’ll be more open to our request for them to change their perceptions about us.  And somewhere in that gulf that exists between the podium and the first row of seats is a new understanding: that audiences can invest in music that is meaningful to them and to engage in the process of music making, not sitting there like a tabla rasa waiting to be filled with knowledge, but as participants in an exchange. Once invited to a party that has something in it for them, they’ll be more likely to RSVP.