George Sandow blogs about how American orchestras don't divulge ticket sales, how sales have been dropping, and this reminds me why I mainly write for the guitar

From time to time I have been asked, when I've presented my music in different settings, but more often this has been asked when I play at a composer salon, if I have considered writing for more instruments than just the guitar.  At one level, I have, often.  I've been slowly working on a set of chamber sonatas pairing up the guitar with woodwinds, strings and brass in duo sonatas since the start of the century. 

But what I have never seriously considered was writing anything symphonic and not because I don't enjoy symphonic music.  Over the last twenty some years I have begun to get the impression that the day of the symphony as the apex of prestigious musical art has come and gone some time in the last century.  As a guitarist I find enough interesting and enjoyable challenges working with just my instrument that even though I love to write chamber music going the next bigger step into something symphonic just doesn't appeal to me. 

George Sandow's recent blogging has reminded me that even if I ever had such a fancy as to write music for orchestra it's not clear that it would ever get a premiere or that it would necessarily make any money.

http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2019/05/something-american-orchestras-dont-want-known.html

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I’ll repeat very strongly what I said at the start of the previous paragraph. Orchestras do not want to reveal their ticket sales. (Which, if the data were available, should be clearly divided into subscription sales and single ticket sales, and into sales to core classical concerts and sales to other events. We should be given both the number of tickets sold in each category, and the revenue from those sales.)

Once at a break at a conference I was at, an orchestra CEO told me outright that the data couldn’t be revealed. I’ll be discreet and not mention this person’s name, but anyone who knows the recent history of American orchestras would  recognize it. This person said to me (in words as simple anbd direct as this): “The public must never be told how badly we’re doing.”

The fear is that if the truth were known — and ticket sales figures would reveal it —donors would be scared away.

Not the best thing to do

Which seems to be a very bad road to go down. Do orchestras really want in effect to lie to their donors, to keep the money flowing in? Surely that’s going to backfire.

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So back to orchestras not — to put it mildly — being transparent about their ticket sales. To me, this is greatly unfortunate. Among much else, it deprives the entire classical music field of data we badly need. We know classical music is in crisis, and has been for quite a while. (I’ve been teaching a course on the crisis at Juilliard ever since 1997. That’s one quick way to measure how long the crisis has gone on, though of course signs of it can be found earlier.)

So our field is in crisis. One part of the crisis is a decline in ticket sales. But how bad has the decline been? By far the largest amount of data on that is orchestra ticket sales. But we’re not allowed to know those. So the whole field is deprived of data that would show how bad the crisis is. Or, for that matter, if ticket sales improved, data that might show how the crisis might be easing.

Orchestras also hurt themselves, I think, by not telling the world how many tickets they’re selling. Because if they admitted they were having a problem, wouldn’t that give them the strongest incentive to fix it? Once you tell the world you’re in trouble, you have to say how you’re going to improve. Which I think would help orchestras greatly, no matter how much of a shock it might be at first.

Some years ago I was shown some of this secret data, and it truly looked alarming. Ticket sales for orchestras’ core classical concerts were headed strongly downward, over nearly 15 years.

I don’t know what the picture looks like now. But all of this would have to be in the book. All the data that orchestras don’t want us to have.

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What is colloquially known as classical music probably has a future but that doesn't mean that future is necessarily going to look like a symphonic future.  As someone whose musical education and life in concert music traditions has been split between choral music and guitar music I've managed to have a pretty happy musical life having hardly any involvement in symphonic stuff, which isn't to say I didn't have a blast performing Durufle's Requiem or Bernstein's Chittchester Psalms.  Those were great experiences for me but they were outliers.  Durufle's Requiem is one of those works that singers can really love and people with more instrumental backgrounds can find exasperating.  I know a flutist who hated the Durufle but her brother-in-law, a cellist, loved it ... of course that the orchestral version of the Requiem has some pretty killer tunes for the cello probably had something to do with that ... 

Still in something of an incubation phase but ... well ... I really like to write even if I'm not necessarily getting my projects done as fast as I'd like.