The best-of-times/worst-of-times quality of today’s media and art is almost shockingly paradoxical: More participation and creation than ever, but agonizingly diffuse attention on the best and brightest. More vacant, banal, hyperactive and tawdry entertainment options than ever in history, but probably the best-written, best-produced television ever as well. News is largely a disaster (I’d wager there are more serious musicians working at serious music in America than serious news reporters doing excellent work), but blogs are becoming society’s watchdog, and documentaries have never been stronger.
Somewhere in between these opposites, where the commercially viable meets the communally valuable, is culture, that slippery but vital idea that seems always on the verge of being snuffed out. And for me, music is the very signifier of culture, the uber-art, the one with the most facets, the most entry points, the greatest accessibility and participation factor. As goes music, so go we the people, is how I tend to think of it. I’m sorry to say it, but if painting or one-man plays just vanished and nobody did them for fifty years, I’d be dismayed but not distraught. Music, however, is on par with food and oxygen.
What brought that on, you may be asking. The answer is a blog-based conversation going on all this week at the beloved ArtsJournal.com news site called “Engaging Art.” After the jump is my slap-dash summary (posted just now to the UNCOVERED blog) of the first slate of speakers at the live session on the issue being held right now at the American Symphony Orchestra League. It’s a timely and vital forum. Check it out.
It's quite a scene here at the American Symphony League's three-hour, interactive session called “Engaging Art: Research, Practice, Innovation,” a grand summit based on the forthcoming book about “the next great transformation of America’s cultural life” edited by Vanderbilt’s Bill Ivey and Steven Tepper. Hundreds of symphony and orchestra executives and musicians are here in a Renaissance Hotel ballroom, many of them with laptops. We’re connected via an ArtsJournal blog that’s been going on for a week. It’s an amazing conversation about a truly bewildering and in some cases threatening array of changes in technology, society and art. In short: orchestras are watching their audiences age and their support thinning out. They see young people diving into their own worlds of media and scarcely if ever giving consideration to the “classics,” including classical music. What to do? What to do?
Ivey started the session by talking about the shift from active to passive participation in the arts that more or less began with the player piano of the late 19th century. It was an inevitable ramification of the invention of the motion picture, the phonograph and the radio. Fine, but he observes that led to a rather warped way of measuring public participation in the arts. Which is to say we don’t measure participation at all. We measure attendance. “Butts in seats” is the industry cliché. The takeaway: Pro-am creation is exploding, and we need to integrate that into our thinking about the health of our arts scene. Consumers, especially younger ones, will demand and expect a participatory aspect to their art.
Vanessa Bertozzi and Lynne Conner offered two perspectives on the concept of participation. Bertozzi offered some powerful anecdotes about teenage creators whose work was self-motivated, self-directed and rooted (in ways that took some teasing out) in classical traditions, whether filmmaking or ancient Japanese fiction. Conner’s talk was wild. She traced highlights of audience behavior from the ancient Greeks through today, and she observed that before a twentieth century “sacrilization” of the arts, audiences were loud, boisterous, opinionated, free to shout back at the work in progress, whether a play or a concert. Not sure we want to go back to that, but it got us talking around our table here about the possibility of a two-night run for a classical program, one under traditional audience rules (i.e. silent attention) and and another with amplification, alcohol and essentially rock venue rules. What might happen? Bertozzi spoke about an idea that bubbled up during the Engaging Art blogfest: “greenhouse” orchestras – a half dozen ensembles supported generously and entirely by philanthropic funding and thus free from commercial concerns. They could try anything.
Steven Tepper focused on discovery, specifically how people learn about new music. It’s not as tech-driven as the peer-to-peer world might imply. Most people learn about new music from friends, and of course radio remains key. But his real emphasis was on the emerging phenomenon of online social networks and the power they have to exploit taste-making individuals or mavens. “Orchestras need to think about how to position themselves in the social networking world,” he said.
Hey, that’s what Uncovered is all about.
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