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Things are looking rather grim for cultural activities in 2020. And much like the protagonist of Leoncavallo’s legendary opera, I am looking at the remains of the path the music industry has carved and with no glee proclaiming the tragic arrival of a long predicted prophesy. The uncertainty of when things will go back to normal in concert halls across the world is making orchestras scramble to construct systems and markets that took the Berlin Philharmonic 10 years to decode. Ironically the repertoire and concert experiences that most symphonic organizations have promoted for the last six decades could spell their demise, as online subscribers will have the Gordian task of justifying spending their increasingly hard-earned money to support content creators that market identical offerings. I have long been interested in technology’s impact on concert experience. In the past I have postured that recorded classical music is in competition with live performances: if we can conjure Leonard Bernstein and the Wiener Philharmoniker into our living rooms for free, that is what our local symphonies must compete with to convince us to attend their performances…so far live classical music seems to be losing that fight. Now they must add the complication of asking people to invest in live digital content.
Perhaps I’m wrong, and the leaders of artistic organizations that for years have been on life support have hacked a system that giants like Netflix, Disney, Hulu, and Amazon haven’t. Netflix and Hulu would have a hard time convincing a person to pay for their services if they offered identical content, but by some divine miracle orchestras expect that millions will subscribe to see the Berlin Philharmonic perform Beethoven online, and also pay a fee to see the Los Angeles Philharmonic essentially repeat the same experience a day later. Ultimately this unique historic moment is bringing to light the lack of vibrancy of some of our most valued cultural institutions, their lazy programming, and their irrelevance in 21st-Century cultural outpour. How can these organizations survive? This question weighs heaviest now and its solution is necessary to weather this storm, but ultimately it could be the solution to revitalize a tired and archaic industry in general.
To me, the problem is one of the relevance of the content these institutions are offering and the type of experience they provide. If they could simply offer and program music (and experiences) audiences cannot easily recreate at home then they would create an uncontested market and have less to worry about. Some would argue it is impossible to re-invent the wheel, but there is a clear example of a dying industry where a single company did just that and changed the game forever.
The company in question is Cirque du Soleil: an organization that turned a dying industry into a multi-billion dollar empire by reimagining the way the art form was delivered and by doing away with the elements of it that were dragging it down. The type of shift Cirque du Soleil made was a huge risk, it implied going in contradiction of a model that, although decaying, had remained the same for around 100 years. The classical music industry could learn the value of swimming against the currents of tradition.
By the 1980s the circus faced a lot of the same issues classical music concerts are facing today. With video games and television (including the availability of televised sporting events weekly), the circus no longer held its special status as an important entertainment event in most towns and cities. Circuses folded left and right, and only the strongest and most traditional survived: companies like Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. The way this giant survived longer was by poaching the circus “super stars” from folding circuses, offering them higher wages and guaranteeing that while other circuses would go bankrupt, they would retain top talent. They did this hoping that by monopolizing virtuosity and bulking up their lineups, clients would see them as a rare cultural commodity of unparalleled magnificence and virtuosity. In many ways their model was to avoid change but to do everything at the highest capacity possible.
In 1984, as circuses continued to disappear, two Canadian street performers, Guy Laliberté and Gilles Ste-Croix founded what is now known as Cirque du Soleil. Listening to the climate of their time, in an extravagant decade where spectacles like Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musicals were largely defining the theatre scene, these Canadian revolutionaries saw their window to modernize their industry. Their main interest in the circus came from the theatrical nature of the event itself, rather than the focus on individual extraordinary acts. In essence Cirque du Soleil looked at the traditional circus and boiled down its elements: venue, clowns, jugglers, trapeze artists, animal spectacle and musical interludes. As circuses everywhere opted for rented venues and brick structures, they chose instead to revive the outdated tent, making it larger than life, more beautiful and surreal, and of course adding the comforts it had never had before (AC, proper chairs, and professional theatrical lighting design). They chose to not use animals, which were considered a central part of any circus. This allowed for a significant cut of expenses, gained them favorable public opinion, and allowed for a cost effective touring model. They diverted attention from individual acts by linking them through unifying story lines, accompanied by continuous music, and unconventional costume and stage design. These changes resulted in a unique experience, much more cohesive in nature and infinitely more artistic than their historic counterparts. By the early 90s, Cirque du Soleil was a multi million-dollar company. Today, Cirque du Soleil is the largest theatre company in the world.
What can the “classical music” world learn from the things Cirque Du Soleil did to overcome their condition in a dying industry and become a cultural staple in the modern world? In short: rather than trying to outperform or outpace the competition, it is a far more profitable choice to create uncontested markets where no competition exists. This often implies swimming against the current, valuing integrity above all else, and being willing to commit assets and talent into areas that have no guarantees of securing a return on an investment.
The “survival model” circuses held onto until Cirque du Soleil bankrupted them forever is being experienced in the orchestral world. Orchestras (and schools) routinely poach musicians from one another, offering them ludicrous salaries to contribute to their organizations. These unsound financial practices have often lead to tumultuous collapses of institutional finances and the emergence of a class of musician who believes they are entitled to salaries higher than those of many heart surgeons because they allegedly don’t miss notes (to their credit that’s quite a trick). The ridiculousness of this business model is playing out in real time as the brutal democratization of public attention on online platform is revealing just how unwarranted much of the glorification of these musician has been: they’re providing content and people —other than eager conservatory students— seem to be wholly uninterested. These organizations are failing to realize that, much in the same way most people alive don’t have a favorite juggler, most lovers of symphonic music can’t name any orchestral trumpet player and don’t really need to. In the end, poaching and retaining this top talent through six figure contracts only aids to drain an organization’s coffers.
While these practices have led to the creation of ensembles of undeniable prowess, these institutions have also lost their relevance in society. Much like the circus, musical institutions once held a special place in the unification of cities and communities. Orchestras, chamber ensembles and soloists have sterilized this relationship by establishing rituals that promote a rift between performers and their audiences. Concerts where performers pontificate to audiences through academic speech instead of letting the art speak for itself are all too common in every facet and subculture of the music industry. I once had to endure Kent Nagano’s condescension as he compared Boulez’s Notation to shepherd’s pie, not because he legitimately thought that was the best way to explain it, but because he thought his audience too stupid to understand the apparently complex concept of layering. Some performers and companies understand, like Cirque du Soleil, that people are not quite as stupid as most culture institutions believe they are. Cirque du Soleil has highly conceptual story lines at the center of each of their popular shows.
The wise executives at major opera companies have long deemed the operas of Karlheinz Stockhausen too complex for public consumption. The idea of staging a work like Donnerstag aus Licht, where three different people –an instrumentalist, a singer, and a dancer – play each protagonist is according to them too complex to be understood by their audiences. And while this condescending attitude is applauded and regrettably taught at music schools across the world, Cirque du Soleil has now completed a lucrative tour of their ice show Crystal. Their 2017 show, which grossed millions in cities across the United States and Canada, featured no less than three separate performers of different disciplines embodying a single character often at the same time, a complex plot of self discovery developed entirely through movement, dream sequences of tormented passion, and a choreographed clarinetist/dancer harlequin on ice skates…how much more Stockhausen-eque can you get?
And who enjoyed these performances that the Metropolitan Opera should envy but probably laughs at with contempt? People young and old, lawyers, doctors, and even I; sitting in awe, wondering how a damn circus could be more avant-garde friendly and audience conscious than the academic institutions and non-profits that claim to be the promoters and defenders of culture. Every time I have taken a non-artist to performances I thought “too advanced”, I have found they had better and more memorable experiences than the times I have taken the same people to see everyday symphonic, chamber or operatic performances of “traditional repertoire”. For a long time I have been so fascinated by this phenomenon I have tested it with jovial curiosity.
I took a friend to the American premiere of Stockhausen’s Michael’s Reise um die Erde in New York in the summer of 2013, performed by Ensemble Musikfabrik and trumpet luminary, Marco Blaauw. At the time she was an MBA student in Montreal. Before arriving at the hall, and all through the six-hour drive to New York City, I had warned her that this might be music she wouldn’t like. At the end of the performance, and much to my surprise, she had a million questions and a deep desire to understand what she had experienced. She found the visuals compelling, the acting invigorating, and the trumpet player hanging from a crane playing 45 minutes of memorized contemporary music breathtaking. She would for years tell me how memorable that performance was, which she never said about Nabucco (Mariinsky Theatre), Mahler 7 (Montreal Symphony Orchestra), or any of the other many concerts we attended together.
I have repeated this experiment since then in many cities. Without fail, the concerts I always assumed non-artists might hate they found the most exciting. My friend Patrick Hoff has done a similar thing, bringing non-musicians to concerts of my Carillon Quartet and to Daniel Rosenboom with similar results. This informal experiment has convinced me that the classical music establishment does not think very highly of its patrons, and it shouldn’t surprise them that they are guaranteeing their decline as relevant cultural advocates for the 21st century. Establishing a healthy relationship with audiences is crucial to the future of our art. It is insulting to assume the people you serve are too idiotic to partake in complex artistic endeavors, and to make matters worse these decisions are often made by members of Boards of Directors whose influence is often more easily explained by the health of their wallets than the size of their libraries.
Some artistic institutions have tried to test the waters in an attempt to connect to their communities, and while their explorations have been timid when compared to the full re-evaluation Cirque du Soleil spearheaded in the circus industry, they are indeed laudable efforts. In North America, the only classical institution that has had any success in connecting to a truly broad audience has been the Los Angeles Philharmonic. While the LA Phil has no time or expertise to reach everyone with the diverse musical tastes of their city, they have recognized the importance of being relevant to anyone who could be a potential patron. In an effort to do so, they have not just diversified their own offerings by programming Beethoven alongside young voices like Andrew Norman and Ellen Reid, but have gone further still by funding and supporting those who can cater to the niche musical communities Los Angeles is famous for. Good examples of this practice would be their annual Green Umbrella series, the carte blanche given to Christopher Roundtree to Curate the Fluxus Festival during the 2018–2019 season, their longstanding partnership with jazz legend Herbie Hancock who curates their Jazz offerings, and the brilliant residence of Yuval Sharon which culminated with a memorable production of Meredith Monk’s Atlas. This practice is not unlike tech giants who acquire and sponsor smaller companies that can offer them things they lack.
This advocacy and funding could serve as a model for those institutions that wish to promote and invest in new things while protecting their traditions, as it is never wise to keep all the eggs in one basket. And their explorative and daring spirit should inform how they engage with the Los Angeles and global community during the time of forced hiatus. The LA Phil has a reputation for exploring every possible market and guaranteeing that its clients are as diverse in taste as the population of the city they call home. (One must admit, however, that the vigor and daring of the Deborah Borda era seems to be coming to a disappointing lull. After the groundbreaking 2018–2019 season, their offerings seem to sadly resemble those of all other American orchestras. It is a loss for Los Angeles and a perhaps unwise step in the direction of cementing their course in a dying industry.)
The Los Angeles Philharmonic is no stranger to daring to search for lucrative and successful ventures, and they have discovered more than one such model, most notably their investment in live-scored movie concerts, which they adopted early on at the Hollywood Bowl.
The success of these concerts should not be understated, but the root of their success is rarely scrutinized and often misunderstood. From the ivory tower the explanation seems simple: “give the people candy because their palate cannot deconstruct complexity”. And just like the circuses of old, competing entities have adopted this new “act” and are attempting to compete with this new trick instead of learning from the root of its success. Contrary to what many of its most fervent promoters claim, the success of live scoring concerts has more to do with the intersection of a unique experience and the familiarity with the music (and its subject matter) than it does with the compositional brilliance of much of the music presented. I strongly believe that John Williams, competent as he is, is no Stockhausen and no Wagner (examples used for very specific reasons). With Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and all the different streaming services people no longer even have to leave the house to see a movie, or spend hundreds of dollars to amass a home-video collection, but live scoring concerts offer people an experience that is unique and cannot be had at home.
Orchestral managers, musicians, and promoters have often thought that these movie concerts could serve as a bridge to bring new audiences to the concert halls during their regular seasons, but I believe this to be wishful thinking at best. No matter the amount of trust you might place in the aged boards of directors of artistic institutions, traditional performance practices are not offering an obviously unique experience to most. While some will argue that live sound is fundamentally different to recorded sound, and they are right, clearly this has not proven to be incentive enough to get people to flock into concert halls without the promise of Harrison Ford on a large screen font and center. I would encourage the powers that be to try to track how much crossover they can achieve with their misplaced faith. If my diagnosis regarding the nature of the success of these concerts is correct, it should be no surprise that these concerts fail to achieve the audience-transfer orchestras believe is possible. As any observant dietician worth their title will tell you, you don’t often convince someone to drink water by offering them Diet Coke.
But we can learn that unique experiences attract audiences. In an era where crowds are flocking to any —often inconvenient— cultural event that can offer them a unique immersive experience (i.e. Burning Man), music and cultural organizations should be thriving and supplying enthusiastically for this market. The success of their movie concerts proves that offering people a unique experience can be highly lucrative; it is just a matter of applying that concept to other artistic endeavors. The classical music industry has fallen behind by avoiding analyzing themselves and their practices to determine what aspects of their artistic and business model should be set aside and which parts differentiate them from the competition. Cirque du Soleil dumped the elephants; I wonder what the classical music industry can do away with (cue the trembling of the seven figure conductors and the over-inflated administrative offices). The staunch defense of decaying models is incompatible with promoting relevance in the market. These tough questions should be at the forefront during this forced hiatus of cultural activities, as people will be hungry for new experiences when they are allowed to resume their normal existence and will have to decide how to spend their limited financial resources.
While these innovations would be most powerful if adopted by large companies like the Metropolitan Opera or major symphony orchestras, they are equally applicable to smaller chamber music and solo projects. I was unsurprised by a remark I read in a recent article in the New York Times about piano soloist Igor Levit, written by music journalist Alex Ross. After seeing his season come to a screeching halt Levit began streaming informal concerts on social media. Unimpeded by the programming limitations so often imposed on him by orchestras around the world, he chose to perform “unpopular”/unusual works that meant a great deal to him. The results were unsurprising, and I wonder if concert halls will learn from this:
“During our Busoni chat, Levit mused on what his Hauskonzerte might mean for his future career. “Stevenson’s ‘Passacaglia’ is second to none,” he told me. “It encompasses the entire world—African drums, Scottish bagpipes, outer space, everything. But, most of the time, if I told a concert hall I wanted to play it there’d be a polite silence. Here at home, if I feel like doing it, I do it. And, lo and behold, people are interested.” He checked the archived video. “Twenty-six thousand people have listened to the Stevenson. Some were there only for a few minutes, I know, but it proves something.” (One appreciative listener had posted, “Without this concert my horizons would be smaller.”) If Levit were giving concerts now, he would be playing programs that he had agreed to back in 2017 or 2018. At home, he could choose whatever pieces fit his mood an hour before he turned on his camera.”
If I could propose one potential change that could solve a lot of the issues I’ve discussed —content, relevance, and financial viability— in a single move it would be the reduction of orchestral seasons and the analysis of their yearly offerings. Orchestras in North America often shoot themselves in the foot by thinking their survival depends on presenting fast paced seasons that depend on offering the entire history of romantic and late romantic music every season. In many ways this is what has compelled them to pay six-figure salaries to the elite few that can keep up with the ridiculous pace they have set, often sacrificing hiring more unique voices in favor of high-level executers. This fast pace prevents orchestras from putting on elaborate performances that fail to gain enough publicity within their extremely short runs, and often leave potential audiences saying things like: “that sounds amazing, I wish I had known about it earlier”.
Additionally, it makes arts organizations assume these performances are too expensive to justify, relegating them to become outliers within orchestral seasons. I often wonder what the financial success of such events could be if only they were allowed to live a little longer before moving on to the next week’s concert. Three recent concerts in Los Angeles, presented by the LA Phil will help me prove my point: their 2018 Fluxus Concert, Meredith Monk’s Atlas, and their inventive production of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Each of these constituted an important contribution to the cultural landscape of the moment, and a significant departure from the traditional concert experience. Any incidental concertgoer that witnessed them likely walked away with a memorable artistic imprint. And yet Romeo and Juliet ran for one week with only 4 performances in 2019, Atlas for 3, and the Fluxus Concert was a one-day event. In terms of return on investment these indeed seem cumbersome, costly events, but I would bet good money that their short run has a lot to do with that.
Daring to re-invent is at the heart of Cirque du Soleil. The company never shies away from challenges, and their business model relies on constantly promoting new shows to replace their old ones, no matter how popular these might have been. Their whole business model is based on reimagining a typically repetitive industry. This doesn’t mean they fully re-invent the circus each time they make a new show. A lot of the traditional elements of the cirque are very present: clowns, jugglers, trapeze artists, etc. They innovate in a fashion consistent with Schiller’s giant clock, from his aesthetic letters. This image is presented in his third letter; his vision of innovation in art (and government) is that of a giant clock with unstoppable forward movement. Thanks to its constant march forward, if any changes want to be made, they must be made in motion. These turn out to be easier than resorting to radicalisms or absolute and sudden changes. If no changes happen, the clock eventually stops for good.
“When the mechanic has to mend a watch he lets the wheels run out; but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions. Accordingly props must be sought to support society and keep it going while it is made independent of the natural condition from which it is sought to emancipate it.”
The coming collapse is why educational institutions should also re-evaluate the skills that will truly prepare their graduates for a rapidly changing industry in desperate need of self-reliant artists with truly diverse skills, and strong artistic voices. In a world plagued with self-proclaimed versatile musicians, few have the tenacity it truly takes to be the chameleon artist of the future they claim to be. Whether you are experiencing this in the current music market, which will be unable to provide employment for every staunch orchestral-trained Joe Sixpack plaguing the streets, or staring into the future from the safety of your school orchestra, just know this: Mahler symphonies cost a lot of money to produce, and nobody wants to pay to hear the Kennan Sonata or the Ewald Brass Quintets…in fact nobody wants to hear them for free.
Find out what matters to you and ask yourself: What is it I care about most when making music? What is art for? What is the point of what I’m promoting? What can my industry do without? Distill your answers and find the tools that allow you to carve that path while also being able to be a guest in any other cultural expression that might interest you or opportunity that may arise. Art rewards the daring. We should all take risks to promote and explore what we love. If Cirque du Soleil taught me anything it is that being relevant culturally and financially viable can also mean being daringly bold, uncompromisingly intellectual, and always treating your audience as capable individuals with the capacity of understanding anything we’re willing to express with love and thoughtful clarity.