[Dixielandjazz] Neither classical music nor jazz are dying.

[Steve barbone]

CAVEAT - Long article - about the health of classical music.
HOWEVER - The points made within may be very similar to the world of jazz.
 
Essentially for the curious minds who want to know as much about where the
music is going as they do about where it has been. Substitute the word
"jazz" for "classical" in the article and get an interesting perspective.

Or, just read the last 3 paragraphs. :-) VBG

Cheers,
Steve Barbone 

Check the Numbers: Rumors of Classical Music's Demise Are Dead Wrong

NY TIMES - By ALLAN KOZINN - May 28, 2006

EVERYONE has heard the requiems sung for classical music or at least the
reports of its failing health: that its audience is graying, record sales
have shriveled and the cost of live performance is rising as ticket sales
decline. Music education has virtually disappeared from public schools.
Classical programming has (all but) disappeared from television and radio.
And 17 orchestras have closed in the last 20 years.

All this has of late become the subject of countless blogs, news reports,
books and symposiums, with classical music partisans furrowing their brows
and debating what went wrong, what can still go wrong and whether it's too
late to save this once-exalted industry. Moaning about the state of
classical music has itself become an industry. But as pervasive as the
conventional wisdom is, much of it is based on sketchy data incorrectly
interpreted. Were things better in the old days? Has American culture given
up on classical music?

The numbers tell a very different story: for all the hand-wringing, there is
immensely more classical music on offer now, both in concerts and on
recordings than there was in what nostalgists think of as the golden era of
classics in America.

In the record business, for example, it can be depressing to compare the
purely classical output of the major labels now with what the industry
cranked out from 1950 to 1975. But focusing on the majors is beside the
point: the real action has moved to dozens of adventurous smaller companies,
ranging from musician-run labels like Bridge, Oxingale and Cantaloupe to
ambitious mass marketers like the midprice, repertory-spanning Naxos.

Similarly, someone shopping anywhere but in huge chains like Tower or Virgin
might conclude that classical discs are no longer sold. In reality the
business model has changed. Internet deep-catalog shops like arkivmusic.com
offer virtually any CD in print, something no physical store can do today.
The Internet has become a primary resource for classical music: the music
itself as well as information about it.

On Apple's iTunes, which sold a billion tracks in its first three years,
classical music reportedly accounts for 12 percent of sales, four times its
share of the CD market. Both Sony-BMG and Universal say that as their
download sales have increased, CD sales have remained steady, suggesting
that downloaders are a new market, not simply the same consumers switching
formats. 

In their first six weeks on iTunes, the New York Philharmonic's
download-only Mozart concert sold 2,000 complete copies and about 1,000
individual tracks, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic's two Minimalist
concerts, combined, sold 900 copies and about 400 individual tracks. Those
numbers, though small by pop standards, exceed what might be expected from
sales of orchestral music on standard CD's.

Other orchestras are catching on: the Milwaukee Symphony and Philharmonia
Baroque in San Francisco offer downloads on their own Web sites. And the
major labels are planning to sell downloads of archival recordings that will
not be reissued on CD.

In concert halls, season subscriptions have plummeted in favor of
last-minute ticket sales. That doesn't mean the business is tanking,
however, just that audiences have shifted their habits. As two-income
families have grown busier, potential ticket buyers are less inclined to
commit to performances months in advance (or as ticket prices climb, to
accept predetermined concert packages). But as much as orchestras and
concert presenters would prefer to sell their tickets before the season
starts, the seats are hardly empty.

Neither are the stages. The American Symphony Orchestra League puts the
number of orchestras in the United States at 1,800 (350 of them
professional). The 1,800 ensembles give about 36,000 concerts a year, 30
percent more than in 1994. And in the most recent season for which the
league has published figures, 2003-4, orchestras reported an 8 percent
increase in operating revenues against a 7 percent increase in expenses,
with deficits dropping to 1.1 percent from 2.7 percent of their annual
budgets from the previous season.

Meanwhile corners of the field generally ignored in discussions of classical
music's mortality ‹ most notably, early music and new music ‹ are true
growth industries. When Lincoln Center presented a 10-concert celebration of
the composer Osvaldo Golijov this season, there wasn't a spare ticket to be
found. The Miller Theater's Gyorgy Ligeti series packed them in as well. And
though the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Minimalist Jukebox festival sold
slightly fewer tickets than its regular programming, it drew a younger
crowd: 25 percent of the audience was said to be under 45 (compared with 15
percent normally), and 10 percent was 25 to 34 (compared with 2 percent).

By relying heavily on contemporary programs and concerts of Renaissance and
Baroque works, Miller has achieved an 84 percent increase in ticket sales
since 2002, and this season's box office receipts have exceeded last
season's by $100,000.

Zankel Hall, the newly built, high-tech, adventurously programmed addition
to Carnegie Hall, has produced a steady increase in sold-out houses, from 57
percent of its concerts in 2003-4 (its first season) to 63 percent in the
first third of the current season. At Carnegie's main hall and its smaller
Weill Recital Hall, ticket sales have been fairly steady since 1982, with
565,000 tickets sold in a slow year and 635,000 in an exceptional one (most
recently 2003). 

The classical music world has even found a silver lining in the reports
about its imminent death. Fund-raising letters now allude to classical
music's parlous state as a way of shaking larger donations from supporters.
And when EMI needed a marketing hook for Plácido Domingo's "Tristan und
Isolde," it jumped on predictions that it would be the last studio recording
of an opera. 

Finally, concert halls are sprouting like mushrooms. New symphony halls are
about to open in Miami, Nashville and Costa Mesa, Calif. (not far from the
newly opened Disney Hall in Los Angeles), and Toronto is opening a new opera
house in September. Clearly, someone sees a future for this music.


UNDERLYING many of the jeremiads is what might be called golden ageism: the
belief, bordering on an article of faith, that everything was better, both
artistically and commercially, in the relatively recent past.

To a degree, the golden ageists have a point. From the 1920's through the
70's, classical music was plentiful on the radio and on nascent television.
Variety shows like "The Bell Telephone Hour" and "The Ed Sullivan Show"
presented both top names and newcomers, and networks offered symphony
concerts, opera and seductive introductory shows like Leonard Bernstein's
"Young People's Concerts" in prime time.

There was a vogue for films built around classical music and musicians as
well: "100 Men and a Girl," with Leopold Stokowski (1937), and "They Shall
Have Music," with Jascha Heifetz (1939); "Humoresque," with Isaac Stern on
its soundtrack (1946); biographical films like "Rhapsody in Blue" (1945);
and extravaganzas like "Fantasia" (1940).

All this made classical music's reigning stars ‹ from Toscanini to
Bernstein, from Heifetz to Stern, from Horowitz to Van Cliburn ‹ household
names in a way that only Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and Yo-Yo Ma are
now. 

But the disappearance of this exposure is hardly a lethal wound. Though
classical radio stations have become scarce in most cities, the Internet
offers a global radio dial. The Internet radio audience is said to be small
at the moment, but people who want it will find it. When the BBC offered a
Beethoven symphony cycle as a free download last year, 1.4 million people
took up the offer. And if classical music is now scarce on television, with
even PBS cutting back, DVD labels are pouring out everything from
long-forgotten TV performances to newly produced symphonic, chamber and
recital discs. 

The golden age of concertgoing, meanwhile, is at least partly a matter of
idealized memory. Organizations did not collect demographic information
then, but musicians and critics who attended concerts during those years
remember the audience as always middle-aged (and concert videos bear out
those memories). And despite the music's greater visibility in daily life,
it was a niche market even then. The pianist Gary Graffman said recently
that when he began attending New York Philharmonic concerts at Carnegie Hall
in the 1940's and 50's empty seats were plentiful. And among the great
soloists, he added, only Heifetz, Rubinstein and Horowitz could expect to
sell out Carnegie Hall.

At the time Carnegie was undisputedly the city's premier hall, with Town
Hall, Hunter College and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the principal
chamber music and recital halls. Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill) and the
Frick Collection offered chamber concerts as well, and McMillin (now Miller)
Theater at Columbia University was a hot spot for new music. When Lincoln
Center was planned in the late 1950's, Carnegie Hall narrowly escaped the
wrecker's ball. It was thought, however briefly, that two large halls were
an extravagance New York didn't need and couldn't sustain.

Consider how things have changed since Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall
opened in 1962. Carnegie, until then a rental hall, began doing its own
presentations, and it now offers about 200 concerts a year. Lincoln Center ‹
with its two opera houses, Avery Fisher Hall for orchestras and star-turn
recitals and Alice Tully Hall (opened in 1969) for chamber music ‹ quickly
undertook its own presentations as well: some 400 annually now, extending to
halls and churches beyond its campus.

The 92nd Street Y revived its long-dormant concert series in 1974, and
Merkin Concert Hall went up in 1978. Carnegie added Zankel Hall in 2003, and
Lincoln Center opened the Rose Theater and the Allen Room ‹ intended mostly
for jazz but sometimes used for new-music concerts ‹ in 2004.

Meanwhile the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection remained
committed to classical concerts. Small- to medium-size halls at the French
Institute/Alliance Française, Scandinavia House and the Austrian Cultural
Forum have opened since the late 1980's. And the Morgan Library and Museum
opened a new chamber music hall this month.

That's in Manhattan. Just across the rivers, the same period brought a
revival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the construction of the Tilles
Center on Long Island and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark
and the advent of small but successful enterprises like Bargemusic.

In the deficit column? Town Hall and Hunter College have largely abandoned
classical music, although each offers a handful of concerts. But apart from
the old Metropolitan Opera House, demolished when the Met moved to Lincoln
Center, no halls have closed in New York since Lincoln Center opened.

The concert world has expanded in other ways too. Through the 1950's the
music season ran less than 30 weeks. But in 1964 the New York Philharmonic
negotiated a 52-week contract with its players. Other orchestras quickly
followed suit, and the season grew longer. The Mostly Mozart Festival
cropped up in 1966 and spawned similar series around the country. And in
1967 the Ford Foundation began giving orchestras grants for even greater
expansion, in most cases, more concerts each week.

The nightly offerings in classical music are immensely more plentiful and
varied now than during the supposed golden age. The wonder isn't that
audiences fluctuate from night to night or that empty seats can be spotted.
It's that so much competition can be sustained in a field usually portrayed
as moribund. 

One way to keep the gloomy reports in perspective is to understand that the
rumored death of classical music has been with us for a very long time.

The Metropolitan Opera was in almost constant financial peril between 1929
and 1944, and there were dicey moments in the 70's. The orchestra world's
1960's expansion caused anxiety as well. In an essay in The New York Times
on Sept. 3, 1967, "Do We Have Too Much Music in America?," John O. Crosby,
the founder of the Santa Fe Opera, worried that the audience was
insufficient to support the blossoming 52-week orchestra contracts.

Those worries were soon born out. In "Dip in Concert Audiences Troubles
Impresarios" (Dec. 21, 1968), The Times reported that classical music ticket
sales had dropped as much as 40 percent. The reasons included everything
from the distractions of television and recordings to street crime, parking
difficulties and high ticket prices, meaning a $15 top at the Met and "as
much as $8.80" for "other prestige events." Young people reading these
reports would have had little reason to expect the classical music world to
exist in 2006. But now that those same people have begun "graying," are they
joining it? Demographic information over the couple of decades institutions
have been collecting it suggests that they are. For whatever reasons ‹
changes in taste, a desire to expand their musical experiences, a lack of
interest in current pop ‹ middle-aged listeners continue to join the
audience. And the generational shift is coloring both programming and
performance. 

Listeners now in their 50's ‹ the core classical audience ‹ were the baby
boomers who grew up in the 1960's and 70's. For those already interested in
classical music during their student years, Shostakovich, Ives and Mahler
were musical obsessions, and the early-music boom was a campus phenomenon.
All that music, marginal in the 70's, joined the mainstream as those
listeners became performers and ticket buyers.

Classically inclined boomers were also new-music agnostics, at home with the
rigorous atonality of the previous generation but also open to a trippy
avant-garde scene that ran from Cage to the Minimalists. That has had a
telling effect too: witness the standing ovations Elliott Carter's music now
gets at symphony concerts and the rock-star popularity of John Adams and
Philip Glass. 

At the same time this generation's fascination with pop has influenced its
composers (and younger ones), who draw on the energy of rock. They have also
left behind their elders' bias against amplification and sound processing,
which they use not simply to increase the volume but also to expand their
palettes of timbre. A fascination with world music, which also has roots in
the 1960's, has stretched those palettes further.

All this is changing the classical repertory, and to judge from the
comparatively young audiences to be seen at concerts by daring groups like
the Kronos Quartet and Alarm Will Sound, it is more likely to rejuvenate
classical music than kill it.

Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" observation about relationships and sharks ‹ that
both must either move forward or die ‹ also works for culture. In classical
music, lots of people really just want the dead shark. They pine for the
days when Bernstein, Reiner, Szell and Toscanini stood on the podium, with
Heifetz fiddling, Horowitz at the piano and Callas and Tebaldi locked in a
perpetual diva war. Most of all they want their repertory dials set between
1785 and 1920. 

You can send those people your condolences.

For the rest of us, the shark is still moving. We're getting our revivals of
Machaut and Rameau along with vigorous reconsiderations of Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven and Mahler and a varied gallery of contemporary composers. We may
be hearing much of this in small, high-tech halls instead of cavernous
temples of the arts or finding it online instead of in shops or on the
radio. But it's all there, constantly renewing itself. You just have to grab
onto the dorsal fin.