To save S.A. symphony, banish ‘classical’ music
If the San Antonio Symphony survives its present crisis, we can be assured another will follow in a few years, and then another, and another.
Unless.
Not “unless the symphony learns to live within its means.” Not “unless the musicians learn to live without eating.” High costs are not the problem; it would be more accurate to say that costcutting has exacerbated the financial difficulties.
The only path to solvency is a massive increase in contributions and grants, which thus far have hovered between pathetic and pitiful.
A community’s gross domestic product is a rough measure of its capacity to support nonprofit organizations, including a symphony orchestra. How are we doing?
Kansas City, Nashville and Columbus, Ohio, all had lower GDP than San Antonio in 2018. Contributions and grants to their orchestras for the 2018-19 season ranged from $6.1 million (Columbus) to $9.7 million (Nashville), according to their IRS filings. The average of the three was $8.2 million Total contributions and grants to the San Antonio Symphony that season: $3.6 million. If the symphony board can’t scare up annual contributed income of $5 million — still a skimpy number — it isn’t trying.
Suppose donors ride to the rescue and the orchestra isn’t reduced to two violas and a kazoo. If a return to solvency is all that gets done, the rescue will be short-lived. That’s because the one thing the symphony has plenty of, other than musical talent, is empty seats.
For its first season in the brand-new Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, 2014-15, the symphony reported $3.3 million in “program service revenue” — mainly ticket sales — on its tax return. The hall was tolerably close to full for most concerts. For the most recent full season, 2018-19, sales revenue was only $2.3 million, and attendance usually ranged from 800 to 1,000 in a hall that seats 1,700. So empty seats are robbing the orchestra of more than $1 million a year. Worse, empty seats tell potential donors their gifts to the symphony aren’t being used effectively.
People don’t go to symphony concerts for many reasons, but the main reason is this: They don’t want to. The symphony just isn’t for them. It isn’t theirs.
It used to be everyone’s. Recordings, radio, sound films and early television brought symphonic music and opera to the whole country, and the whole country listened to them along with jazz, country and Tin Pan Alley. The great Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad had a cameo in the movie “The Big Broadcast of 1938,” with comedy icons W.C. Fields and Martha Raye. The violinist Mischa Elman appeared on television comedy shows. Arturo Toscanini, Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein and Enrico Caruso were rock stars, so to speak.
But rock ’n’ roll and its more evolved progeny dominated the celebrity space from the 1950s onward. Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” came out in 1956 and foreshadowed the day when rock-star status would be restricted mostly to, well, rock stars.
Some American orchestras have done a good job of restoring a sense of ownership to a wide public. The San Antonio Symphony has not been entirely absent from that field of battle, but neither has it been entirely present. What should it be doing?
First — and I say this only partly in jest — the symphony should make a great bonfire of all the Fred Astaire costumes the men of the orchestra have to wear for concerts. Or maybe keep them, but only for Halloween. After all, this is the 21st century.
Second — and I say this in total seriousness — the word “classical” should be banished from the vocabulary of everyone associated with the symphony. The term is wildly inapplicable to nearly everything composed in the past 200 years, and that’s most of what the symphony plays.
In contemporary American culture, “classical music” is too often derided as an attic trunk filled with dusty relics by dead white European males. That’s just plain wrong. The reality is that living composers and performers of every hue and origin are leading music into a welter of new directions and closing the distance between popular forms and the music that should be formerly known as classical. All they have in common with Mozart and Beethoven is a penchant for pushing against old norms and expanding the expressive possibilities of music.
Third, I will endorse a maxim that has been endlessly repeated, usually in the stern, gruff voice of a banker: “The symphony needs to operate like a business.”
Yes! And what do you call a business that doesn’t invest adequately in research and development, or R&D? You call it a business that’s going out of business. For a symphony orchestra, R&D requires deep intellectual curiosity about all the varieties of music that are meaningful to communities beyond the core symphony audience, and about the musicians who make it. If you listen without prejudice to recent hip-hop, jazz, indie rock, Tejano or whatever, you will discover areas of convergence with the music formerly known as classical. Those convergences can give rise to mutually respectful collaborations.
The communities the symphony needs to connect with are not defined solely by ethnicity. Bleeding-edge fields such as gaming, computer animation and biomedical research also have potential for artistic partnerships.
Bridge-building costs money. At minimum, the symphony needs a full-time artistic liaison developing relationships with those other communities and looking for ways to create something new together. The symphony can’t get by with easy, superficial gestures of inclusiveness.
Fourth, as the symphony considers candidates to succeed Sebastian Lang-lessing as music director, it should favor conductors who are comfortable on varied musical paths and are committed to building on the common ground they share.
One more thing: By the 2018-19 season, the San Antonio Symphony had attained a polish and nimbleness that I wouldn’t have thought possible 30 years ago. The recent music directors — Lang-lessing, Larry Rachleff and Christopher Wilkins — deserve great credit and thanks for significantly raising the orchestra’s technical standard. Bravo to each.
Still, I wonder how much longer the San Antonio Symphony will be the only major orchestra in Texas that has never had a Hispanic music director. Just saying …