hey it's a new segment
I mostly did it so I could make this sweet graphic.
So, I was encouraged by someone to start a new segment on this newsletter, one that isn’t Cat Facts (though I can assure you that Cat Facts will return at some point). The friend in question was inspired by a billboard advertisement, which is where so much inspirational art can be found.
So of course I made a graphic:
It is magnificent.
Today’s Spicy Mayo Hot Take™: we need to stop pretending that art and capitalism work well together. And yes, I am aware that this is not a particularly Hot Take to some.
Honestly, this isn’t even about the difference between popular and good. Art can be good, it can be popular, it can be both, it can be neither, and in any case I don’t want to be elitist about it. There’s nothing wrong with art that sells. I do, however, see a few problems with the whole system.
We’re going to do a brief overview of some things that a lot of you already know, because I swear I really am trying to keep this thing accessible to non-musicians, even if I occasionally do a terrible job of it.
As you’ve probably noticed, most arts groups are non-profits. We kind of have to be, because we aren’t sustainable just on sales. Even for the world’s biggest and most popular orchestras, ticket sales typically account for about 30% of their total budget¹, and thus they make up the difference with government funding and donors. I’m not clear on the percentage of each, but I think it’s safe to say that American orchestras lean much more heavily on private donors than a lot of European orchestras, who have governments that traditionally do a better job of funding the arts.
(A notable exception: the UK, which is notorious for underpaying their symphony musicians. I forget exactly what the pay scale is for the London Symphony, but I remember being horrified.)
Does it make a difference? Well, kind of. I remain slightly terrified of the way we fund our orchestras, since we do seem to be leaning on a lot of money from a steadily shrinking pool of wealthy benefactors, and boy do I hate hanging my career on the whims of people with a lot of money. I have heard some things in some orchestra committee meetings, is all I will say.²
One of the side effects of getting a lot of funding from a tiny number of people is that they kind of get to dictate your programming. There is a preternatural fear of challenging the audience, especially in smaller orchestras (coughYakimacough) which can sometimes lead to the feeling that we’re just recycling the top 50 greatest orchestra hits in perpetuity.³
“Sara why don’t they try to make more money from ticket sales”
Well, they do, but as it turns out, you can only raise the price of tickets so much before you make live orchestra music completely inaccessible to all but the most well off. It’s already pretty damned expensive to go hear a symphony play, and it gets more expensive every year, and if you believe, as most of us do, that live music is an important part of the community, you need to make sure the community can actually afford to come.
“Okay, fine, is there an example of a for-profit performing art”
There is! It’s called Broadway. Hey, what’s Broadway been up to during the pandemic?
Ah! Well.
I am not super in the know about how Broadway functions, but my basic understanding is that it’s like this:
do eight shows a week
pack the house to capacity
once you are no longer reliably packing the house, cancel the show and launch a new one
presumably, profit.
Hopefully someone will chime in if I missed a step.
So, this is all depressing. There’s an even more depressing article here that sums it all up pretty well:
This is the way of arts under capitalism, in a culture where the abandonment of government funding results in a void filled only by wealthy donors and bloodsucking companies — it’s not altogether different from when composers and musicians worked as servants for the aristocracy. Nor does this encourage orchestras to play original music by diverse new talents; finance rather encourages them to stick with Beethoven until their reliable, aging patrons finally unburden us with their deaths. Perhaps, for good measure, they’ll throw in an easygoing piece by a minimalist composer in their eighties, or tokenize on of the few African American figures in classical music history — if we’re lucky.
That article goes on to deliberately take a swing at the current attempt in chamber music to innovate: the 501c3 nonprofit. Since Calliope Brass is a 501c3, this burned a little to read, but in our defense, we never claimed to be the future of innovation. Like everyone else in this field, we’re just looking for the best pathway to survival.
None of this is new, but the current health crisis has brought it all into stark relief over the last few months. The entire industry is basically shut down. Many orchestras are trying to pivot to some sort of streaming solution, but it’s mostly a stopgap while we wait for live concerts to be viable again, and isn’t really a replacement for ticket sales in any meaningful way. We haven’t even gotten that far in Yakima, and just recently the majority of our subscribers indicated that they would rather wait until live concerts were possible again than explore a virtual alternative for the tickets they’re currently holding. I can’t imagine that’ll happen before spring of 2021, though I would love to be surprised.
Once again, we are at the mercy of the people with the money, and they care more about the optics of being seen at an orchestra concert than the livelihoods of the people making the music.
Sorry, was that too dark? I do that sometimes. It’s probably also unfair. I am frequently surprised at the number of people in Yakima who don’t have highspeed internet, even though they can absolutely afford it. It makes homestays an adventure.
Anyway. This was all meant to be part one, and it went on a bit longer than I intended, so I think we’re making this a two-parter. And this is a pretty depressing end to a newsletter, so instead I will leave you with this:
Hang on, I'm being told that actually isn't better.
Okay, fine.
¹I am lifting this number from a panel discussion I attended at a League of American Orchestras conference a few years ago and thus have no source to cite, but no one’s ever corrected me on it.
²If you would like to hear more, ask me in private, I’m not putting it in a public forum.
³In my last article for the Yakima Herald, I had a line in there about “I’m getting tired of innovation, when’s my next concert of music by old dead white guys” and was asked to edit it, because “we’re trying to dispel the myth about classical music being just by old dead white men”. Folks, I love you, but the first step to dispelling the myth is to stop actually doing it.