[This was originally posted at the League of American Orchestra's microsite, R/Evolution, before the June 2010 League Conference in Atlanta]

Everything’s Fine

Everything’s fine in classical music. Let’s celebrate today’s terrific musicians, the best ever.

Professional music-making isn’t a cushioned ride. But should it be? Let’s enjoy instead a wild, passionate, interesting and sometimes painful journey. And end the hand-wringing.

• The United States boasts more than a thousand orchestras. At times you can hear passionate performances with inventive programming and presentation. And in China music is exploding.
• Our constant worry does nothing but bring on suffering and retrenchment. As Michael Kaiser repeatedly states, performing arts require more imagination rather than playing it safe.
• Birth and death are part of life. It’s fine if orchestras go out of business, just as companies fail. Financial failure usually mirrors systemic failure or sudden change. Of course such failures can stem from societal dislocations such as the last two years’ economy, not just organizational shortcomings.
• Orchestras have shown amazing resilience in this climate, given their dependence on endowments and contributed income. Many individuals have absorbed these dislocations through job losses or reduced salaries, and I always hate to see that. Those few orchestras that close typically reconfigure. The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, which restructured several years ago, is today a success story.

Let Go of the Past

Let’s let go of the past. It won’t return. Life exists only in the present.

• Think of each 50-year mark in music history from 1600 to 1950 and you’ll note dynamic changes at each point. Yet from 1950 to 2000 we’ve had stasis. Do we expect to hold back change forever, like Hans Brinker?
• Orchestras as factories of music-making deserve to die. All of us have seen or participated in empty music-making by bored musicians sitting in the back of their chairs. Is that what we want to devote our lives to?
• My local radio station with classical music—yes, I don’t yet have to rely on the Web alone—broadcasts a different orchestra performance each night. Once I heard the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, a piece I love dearly, three nights out of five. I wondered whether the intensity of artistic experience is inversely proportional to familiarity. Such commoditized music is taken for granted because it’s meaningless.
• Meanwhile, new music has been ghettoized in particular ensembles or series. Composition is more exciting now that at any point in my lifetime, yet the best composers are rarely performed. Indeed, we don’t program some of the greatest music of the last century: Webern, Berg, Messiaen, Boulez, Berio, Lutoslawski, Dutilleux, Martinů, Nono and Takemitsu.
• In 1896 the Dow Jones Index consisted of 12 firms. Only General Electric remains in the index. The other 11 were American Cotton Oil, American Sugar, American Tobacco, Chicago Gas, Distilling & Cattle Feeding Company, Laclede Gas, National Lead, North American, Tennessee Coal Iron and Railroad, U.S. Leather and United States Rubber. In contrast, the handful of orchestras in existence in 1896 thrive alongside many others. We’ve lived in a stable environment.
• When I was a child most museums curated the past. Contemporary art was in a small corner, highlighted only in specialty galleries. Today museums live in the present, and they’re thriving. We can do the same in music.
• Sure, the best music of the last fifty years can be thorny. Unlike popular music—what one of the Beatles called innocent music—classical music demands focus and study. Hans Graf once told me that orchestra seasons today are often a constant diet of strudel, delicious but without meat and vegetables.

Leave the Future to Itself

The future will take care of itself. We cannot know what it will be, and we cannot control it. Just when could we predict the future?

• Orchestra managers—even those in my beloved discipline of marketing–won’t reinvent orchestras. They’re neither the problem nor the solution. It’s musicians—composers, performers and conductors—that create meaningful music for audiences.
• In 1975 Sparky Anderson received all kinds of accolades for managing the Cincinnati Reds to 108 wins. In response he claimed that a manager could account for a maximum of just five wins or losses in a season. It was the players that mattered.
• Social technologies won’t reinvent music, either. It’s a significant part of the landscape of our human interaction, though. So composers and performers may incorporate conversation media into a work or concert in a conscious artistic statement to create meaning for audiences.

Our Treasure

Let’s embrace what makes us special, the ability to bring meaning to audiences through live performance of great music. Our treasure isn’t endowments, contributed income and ticket sales. Those are our audience’s response to what matters to them about us.

Music lives in any case. Let’s ourselves live in the music, today, not anxiety about tomorrow.