You know all those Arts Council inspired initiatives to bring classical music, opera and ballet to a wider audience? Like doing more contemporary work or offering cheap tickets or putting on educational evenings. Do you think they work? A report from America suggests many audience development initiatives may be a waste of public funds.
The James S and John L Knight Foundation spent $13 million in ten years funding schemes to attract new audiences to 15 US Symphony Orchestras. What they found was that free concerts in more ‘accessible’ venues, putting the musicians in jeans or doing educational work, all failed to increase the number of tickets sold.
It’s not that people don’t like classical music. 60% of adults claimed they did, but fewer than 5% went to live concerts. These days classical music lovers prefer to listen to recordings or the radio. Free concerts attracted an audience but didn’t convert them into ticket buyers. It seems the vast majority don’t want to pay big money for a long concert in a large concert hall.
Is this so bad? Times do change and maybe we should accept change. Theatre and Popular Music has coped with the rise of cinema, television and recordings by providing audiences with large-scale spectaculars with a unique ‘wow’ factor and at the other end of the scale small-scale performances of unique intimacy.
Ballet, Opera and Classical Music have an audience and can appeal to newcomers who appreciate their qualities, but all the great ballets, operas and symphonies were written over a hundred years ago and, at least in live versions, they’re limited in their appeal to a 21st audience.
When I worked more with arts companies, it was frustrating to see them spend money on audience development projects that were clearly ‘hoops’ they were being put through to justify their funding, when I wanted to spend it on more marketing to the known audience. Get them to come more often and to spread the word.
I enjoy many pre-20th century works performed live and I’m grateful to the Arts Council for subsidising my pleasure. But I accept I’m in a small minority. Audience development projects are just guilt money because so much public funding is being used to provide entertainment for a well-heeled middle class elite.
1 comment:
There are many great modern composers- Glass, Reich, Birtwhistle, Gershwin, Bernstein, Tippett, Cage, Stockhausen. Need I go on? And there are audiences for them. I think it's you who's stuck in the pre-20th century.
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