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Sample Editorial
Critical Convictions Marketing & Its Discontents I have often expressed my disgust with "marketing". I have often said that if an orchestra just plays great music and does it well, people who care will beat a path to their door—no advertising necessary. But the orchestras have inflated their seasons (mostly in response to the musicians' unions, NOT in response to public demand), and as a result there are never enough people at the concerts to pay the bills. And their managements imagine that they can bring in lots of new people with "new" marketing techniques. As I've also said many times, there are no new techniques—it's the same old dumb ideas they've been trying for years. For example, as long as I can remember there have been dopes who thought that the formality of it all keeps people away. It is well known that Americans are informal to a fault, so the marketers are always developing new ways to sound informal. One of the most obvious is the use of first names for conductors. I don't remember being invited to renew my subscription to the Philadelphia Orchestra so I could see what Gene and the boys whipped up. Did Chicagoans go to see Fritz or Georgie? What about Artie and Leo (Toscanini and Stokowski)? Obviously, the use of first names and nicknames would have destroyed the maestro mystique. But now we are invited to join Edo and his band in Milwaukee, Paavo in Cincinnati, Gustavo and crew in Los Angeles. Edo is no kid; he's a maestro. Gustavo is certainly a mistake: why hire a mere boy to conduct a major orchestra? He'll be learning on the job. The musicians are vastly more experienced than he is. The marketing people love him— love the image of hot Latin youth (the marketing people are mostly women, I'd guess). It's easy to market. But what has it got to do with classical music? Nothing. And since when do the marketing people influence the hiring of a conductor? Surely that is a case of the tail wagging the dog. But one almost expects that in LA. And you should see the crap they are putting out in Los Angeles. For his opening concert in October the orchestra hired mariachi players, salsa musicians, jazz pianists, "Red Hot Peppers", etc, etc. We are told "the event showcased [?] artists [??] from varied genres and generations featuring [sic] local youth ensembles" who "kept the box office area jumping". (O, wow! I wouldn't want to have to buy my ticket in silence—or accompanied by Beethoven! O, no!) The first half of the concert was "truly diverse" (buzz word) and "featured" a gospel singer, among other pop "musicians". At intermission a big-screen video welcomed "Gustavo", and at the end there were fireworks (this was at the Hollywood Bowl; Disney Hall is too small for such an extravaganza). Richard Ginell describes it all more kindly in this issue. In another release the publicity people bragged that the LA Phil has "embraced the latest technology". Such a statement is assumed to win our automatic approval, as if "embracing the latest technology" is the only sensible thing to do. But is it? Who says so? The mass culture. In this case the LA Philharmonic has a Bravo Gustavo Online Game (!) and a Gustavo "microsite". An iPhone application simulates the experience of conducting an orchestra (that is, you can speed the music up or slow it down by waving your phone as if it were a baton). Who are you selling this orchestra to? To people who care about "embracing the latest technology" and computer games? Is that your audience? What about people who care about classical music? May I suggest that they are not likely to be thrilled by computer games? Why are all your appeals to mass-bred ignoramuses? Are you still dreaming they will be the audience of the future for the Philharmonic? How stupid can you get? Why would you even WANT the kind of people who would respond to your marketing (shades of Groucho)? If they are fickle enough to respond to that kind of thing they are not likely to be a loyal audience for a symphony orchestra! And as to "formality", like everything else here, it is part of what makes classical music special—no goofball with a microphone talking to the audience like a cheerleader and trying to sound cool and funny, like a TV comedian. (Sometimes I think every American thinks he's a comedian.) No silly costumes. No silly antics. No first names. No "just folks" gestures. These are NOT "just folks", you know; these are real musicians who have worked very hard at it all their lives. They didn't just pick up a guitar, learn three chords, and call themselves "artists". They deserve respect and awe, and we should listen to them in silent amazement and not demand that they be like us or make us feel good or make us laugh. In fact, it is unrealistic to demand that they NOT make us feel inferior! We can't do what they can do; that's why we're there. Yes, there's a whole generation that insists on being flattered and entertained in everything, everywhere. Even their professors must entertain them. Nothing can be demanding or make them realize how little they know, how weak their sensitivities are. We cannot give in to that pattern and expect to educate, enlighten, or enrich people. (You cannot educate people who do not realize how much they need to be taught.) TV has done this to us—probably it has ruined at least a generation of Americans (maybe two) who will thus never be educated or mature. But these people are unreachable; marketing to them is a terrible mistake. We are trivializing our music in almost all our current marketing—reducing it to the same level as everything else that is "marketed". Have you noticed the new fad of "theme concerts"? Every concert is given a "cool" theme or nickname to help sell it. Again, it's a typical sophomoric "bright idea" that is really too silly for words and hardly likely to increase attendance. How embarrassing can you get? If some empty-headed people fall for it and turn up once, they will decide they've been "had" and hate the symphony for the rest of their lives. Hype doesn't work with intelligent people (true, they are few), and the people it does work with (at first) are too stupid to understand classical music and will just end up resenting it. Everywhere in this asinine culture we are faced with informality. Notice that no one talks about mothers anymore—it's "moms"; and people who are probably college graduates refer to "my mom"! People who were once just women are referred to as "moms". And everywhere there is irreverence and sloppiness and juvenile attempts at "humor". Do we have to have this from our orchestras, too? Is there no place to escape the frivolous, the trendy, the brainless, the sloppy? In most of the world beer is marketed to beer lovers and classical music to classical music lovers. In the USA we are confident that we can sell anything to anybody—and the public has shown itself to be pretty gullible. Thousands— millions—of people who don't like beer drink it in the USA. It is made and marketed to appeal to them. It's called "light beer". It has so little flavor that it couldn't possibly bother people who don't like beer. On the other hand, anyone who likes beer can't stand the stuff. So we have the odd situation where beer brewers are making obscene profits selling something that calls itself beer but only distantly resembles beer to people who actually don't like beer. Our classical music marketers aspire to the same glorious end: to sell classical music to people who don't like the stuff. Real music lovers are too few for the industry to survive (as it is) on them alone. Yet anyone else is a fickle audience and cannot be depended on. And trying to sell our product to them will water it down (like that "beer"). Probably what has to happen is a contraction: many orchestras will have to fold, and the better ones that remain can get all the support of real music lovers. But contraction is painful, as we have seen in all other industries. Jobs will vanish. Bankruptcies will multiply. Who ever heard of prices going down? But they must. Amd contraction is the only way if we want quality to triumph. The industry expanded way beyond what was reasonable, and now it must contract. The real American religion is pragmatism; our faith in it is touchingly naive. We'll try anything and see if it works. Add a big helping of gullibility, political correctness, and lack of critical thought and you find that we actually talk ourselves into thinking these things do work. So our pragmatism is no longer tough or skeptical (and thus somewhat admirable), as it once was. It is sentimental. We'll try anything and hope it works—pretend it works—pretend it's brilliant—because we haven't got the guts to say to each other, "that's a really dumb idea". We'll even give everybody at the symphony a standing ovation every week, because we want to think it's "super" and "dynamic" and thrilling. We talk ourselves into feeling thrilled because the tickets cost so much—and we were talked into spending all that money with promises of thrills and chills (from sexy young conductors and pianists—as if that matters!). The common everyday standing ovation is just another example of how marketing has made us lose touch with reality. (Do any of the people who are standing have any idea what a really great performance would be like?) And if the audience helps create the Great Occasion they become even more cynical about truly great occasions. It's like crying wolf too often. The publicity people are wetting their pants with excitement every week, and there are no adjectives left to tell us when something really outstanding comes along. Or does anyone believe in greatness anymore? Is it all hype? Even the orchestras and opera companies do it. They have reduced the great composers to competitors for your entertainment dollars—competing with far inferior but far more popular "acts". In a culture where popularity determines worth, our orchestras haven't got a chance. To fight the battle on popularity is to fight on enemy ground; we are guaranteed to lose. (By definition, of course, popular music is popular; classical music cannot be. But we don't have to worry about that in this country.) And in the process we demean what we are producing. Music is the loser. We're going to end up with light beer. Haven't I said all this already? Yes. So I will stop repeating myself yet again and simply add part of an editorial (on the standing ovation) and another complete one, both from 1997 issues that are out of print (July/August & May/June). The standing ovation is the greatest tribute an audience can give performers. For that very reason it has traditionally been reserved for life-changing performances—occasions when we are shattered, overcome by emotion, stunned speechless, overwhelmed, or inspired with a deeper sense of life's meaning. This can happen in the theatre, opera house, or concert hall; and when it does, we rise spontaneously to thank the performers. It's a special gesture, and a true standing ovation is spontaneous: the whole audience rises immediately as the performance ends. Like everything else in our over-heated, hype-saturated culture, the standing ovation has been losing its value. It is devalued because it occurs all the time for routine performances. It is devalued because it is seldom spontaneous any more. People straggle to their feet over the course of a number of curtain calls—partly, I'm sure to be able to see the stage (because the people in front of them stood up and blocked their view). The standing ovation is like the rosettes in some record guides—if everybody gets it, it can't possibly mean anything. At almost any symphony concert outside New York, if it ends loudly, you can expect a standing ovation. If the artist is famous, you can expect a standing ovation, even if he plays very badly. Obviously it is partly the hype: people think they are supposed to be deeply moved. Perhaps it's also the high ticket prices: people want to feel it was worth the expense, that it was a "great event". Sometimes it's pure sentimentality: let's reward the sweet young thing who just played her heart out (the problem with sentimentality is that it never has anything to do with clear thinking). Very often it's follow the leader: the soloist's family is sitting in the front row, and they get up, so everyone else follows like sheep. But the truth is, very few of these performances deserve standing ovations. More of them deserve boos and hisses—but Americans are much too sentimental to boo and too "polite" to criticize. I can't believe that it's a good thing to limit our range of behavior to degrees of approval! I can't believe what wimps we have become. There must be ways to express disapproval or disappointment, if approval is to mean anything. If we banished standing ovations, I could accept the lack of boos and hisses; but if we are allowed to jump to our feet at the slightest provocation, then we should be allowed to throw tomatoes too. Aren't you disappointed as often as you are thrilled out of your mind? I am. Normal applause is for good performances; tepid applause for only one bow is for tolerable ones (a reward for the effort). Standing ovations are for truly great ones. Booing and hissing are for very disappointing ones, especially if it's the Met and you paid $100 a seat. If it's just routinely disappointing, I leave before it's over. There has to be some way to protest. Audiences should express themselves— even between movements, if what they heard was stunning or terrible. But if an audience has high standards—and doesn't want to appear hopelessly provincial—it will save standing ovations for the rare transcendant experience. Or else it means nothing. VROON We live in a time (and place) when people are casting away great treasures of the past for extremely trivial reasons. Great books are rejected because they were written by "dead white men". Great worship traditions are rejected by many churches in favor of a cheap feel-goodism that meets market demands. Great music is facing the same kind of mindless rejection, even on the part of people who should know better—and would, if education were doing its job. We who have found gold in some of the cultural artifacts of the past are forced into a defensive posture. Why are we defending the past? A reader accused me of glorifying the Victorian Age and wishing I lived then! (I have never wished I lived any other time in history.) Are we racists because we are reading Shakespeare instead of the latest black female novelist? (See, I don't even know the name of one!) Obscurantists are choosing a defensive position, but most of us who happen to care about the past are not. It is possible to love Mozart not because he is old and little known today, but because he says so much to us, touches something deep inside, reaches us at a profoundly human level. In fact, he does that better than any living composer—and certainly better than any "popular" music of our time. We do not love Mozart because we are in love with the past; it's the converse: we have come to respect the past because people like Mozart speak to us so impressively. Thus we find ourselves defending dead white men! But a healthy culture finds ways to bring the best of the past into the living present, because the past has so much to offer the present. The past is a spring that can infuse the present with depth, with a grounding, with stability. To reject the past is to alienate oneself from meaning and happiness. The cultivation of the timeless and what has stood the test of time (has endured) puts us in touch with our eternal origins and brings out the dimensions of our lives where meaning resides. The spirit of man is greater than the spirit of this age! Those who would be "free" from the burdens of tradition risk enslaving themselves to a chaotic present, with no direction signs to guide us thru it. Our current age and its mass culture can supply only the shallowest understanding of reality and humanity. I have read every book I could find for the last 45 years on culture criticism. At the same time I have had a lively interest in the state of Christianity in this country (and my reading has included much on Judaism, too). Sometimes it's hard to tell which field—Christianity or Western Culture—I'm reading in. The prophets sound alike! Both are glorious traditions threatened by shabby imitations and innovations. In both, the burning questions are about relevance, elitism versus popularity, image and marketing, and ritual enactment. The parallels are very strong. Relevance: Does it matter? Who decides? On what basis? Is traditional religion totally outmoded, a dispensable survival of an earlier age, like classical music? Or is there something in it that has made it last for centuries and that assures its future? Is there a reason why some people still love it? Should we seek for popularity? Should we try by every means to win masses of people to our religion (music) for their own good? Or will that change the religion (music) itself beyond measure? If we fill our opera houses with people who have no background or knowledge and don't care deeply about opera, won't it change the whole experience? (I have groaned while audiences wildly cheered uncouth shriekers.) Make Christianity or Judaism easy to understand and you destroy it. You reduce its power, soften its challenge. Sure, we live in a lazy culture: people expect everything to be entertaining and easy, and they won't make the effort if it's not. But classical music cannot be made easy and entertaining. (It is very entertaining to people who have learned it well, but newcomers to it tend to be bored.) An easy Judaism with no law, no ultimate will of God standing over us? A Jesus who never said, "Take up your cross and follow me"? So we make our worship services (ritual enactments) "popular". We use a new translation of the Bible that never gets beyond thirdgrader vocabulary, because that's about the level of most Americans (look at television). We cultivate a "cool" image to appeal to our empty-headed youth. We replace the organ with a rock guitar and the great hymns of the faith with "praise choruses" in a faintly softrock style. Churches are doing this! (I don't know about synagogues.) In the rush to make things seem relevant churches have often abandoned traditional worship and in doing so one of its greatest assets: its otherworldliness. Worship should take us out of this world, out of the ordinary—the last thing it should be is more of the same! And I apply this to the other great traditions of our culture. Plato shouldn't read like USA Today, Beethoven shouldn't sound like rock-nroll. Concert behavior and rituals should set it apart from the ordinary, just as worship behavior should; we are dealing with something far above the ordinary, and to reduce it to what we are used to in our daily lives is to eliminate much of its value and effect in order to supposedly make people feel comfortable. Yet all trendy marketing tries to do this—from symphony marketers to the "church growth" movement— and no one seems to be able to get these people to see what they are really doing. Perhaps it's the perennial American admiration for salesmanship. But as I've pointed out before, salesmanship only becomes necessary when your product is no better than the next guy's. Salesmanship is inappropriate when what you have to offer is vastly superior to everything else. Do you really believe in this music? Then you won't market it like dishwashing detergent. Do you really believe in Jesus? Then how can you sell him like vacuum cleaners? Demystifying the worship experience or the concert experience does not make it more attractive—except to the kind of people who are thrilled by shallow pleasures: the TV crowd, the people who have no culture. To appeal to people who are immersed in popular culture—to make great things "relevant" and "cool"—is a mistake. Great things have their appeal, but a large part of it is their discontinuity with the everyday and the popular. How easily our salesman types give up the historic and the profound in order to "reach new audiences" (church and symphony use the same language). In 1974 James Hitchcock wrote a wonderful book on the subject from a Catholic point of view: The Recovery of the Sacred. Page after page shows us how familiarity breeds contempt, not respect; how chattiness can never substitute for reverence in the presence of something great; how wrong it is to reject the rich and complex for the simple and direct. Part of the richness and meaningfulness of tradition is that it isn't captive to the modern spirit (the zeitgeist). It is a product of something older and wiser that is quite missing in our lives—that we need to be fully human. What a mistake to try to "modernize" it. TS Eliot once said that "conscious attempts to make Christianity believable always have the opposite effect". It is also obvious that a liturgy that appears strikingly relevant one year may seem monumentally stale a few years later. The most objectionable elements are precisely the ones introduced as concessions to the secular spirit of a given age. But the classic liturgy has stood for centuries and never seems to lose its vitality. After all the changes and modernizations, people keep coming back to it. The last stages of trying to save a tradition from obsolescence humanize it to the point where it isn't very different from the surrounding culture—and so it has nothing special to offer. Then it comes to seem arbitrary and is abandoned altogether—the whole tradition is given up. Trying to be "relevant" leads to a loss of lasting "meaning". In my lifetime the "liberal" churches have committed this kind of suicide in their theology, while the "evangelical" ones seem most naive about presenting their timeless message in the garb of a corrupt and debased popular culture. Faith is by definition a state of deviancy from modern culture. To infuse Christian worship with popular culture is to destroy it. It loses power, character, and identity and begins to speak in hollow tones. To baptize the everyday and the ordinary is to proclaim that our mundane, material world is all there is—is to promote its ubiquity. Religion at best makes us aware of a deeper dimension. A liturgy that blends with the ordinary loses its point. Have you ever tried to worship in one of those churches? Rock guitar, praise choruses, overhead projectors, "friendliness" (which has absolutely nothing to do with godliness), cheerfulness (as if life were not a tragic affair), toothy smiles, false intimacy, audience participation, children's sermons, and miles and miles of sentimentality—it's enough to make me ill. It has made many of our readers ill, to judge from their letters. If you go to church to seek the Bread of Life and what you find is the Wonder Bread of American mass culture, you have been seriously let down. But even beyond this kind of thing, American Christianity is mostly awash in a sea of subjectivity— and has been for more than a century. Naturally that affects the development of worship practices, just as subjectivity will affect musical interpretation. In classical Christian worship the worshippers are not primarily interested in self-expression—at least not in the articulation of immediate subjective feelings. Something much larger is at stake. Worship must reflect the nature of God, must be appropriate—and therefore be determined more by the object than the subjects. My grandmother loved me and wanted to give me a nice gift. Since she liked the color pink, she bought me a lovely pink shirt and felt all gooey and cooey as I opened it and tried to appear pleased. My other grandmother also loved me and wanted to give me a nice gift, but she managed to find out that I hate pink and love blue and look great in blue. Who gave me the better gift? Well, if subjective states were all that matters, the one who gave the pink shirt did. But I never wore it. The way we handle great things must be appropriate to the nature of those things, to their essence. I get very angry when smiling airheads get up at a symphony concert and announce the football scores. (Yes, I've seen that!) I don't want a congenial host to introduce the concert! I want the music to emerge out of silence and return to silence, because music expresses things far too deep for words, and words destroy the concert experience. Apart from the ocean, very little can be both broad and deep. Jesus spoke of the narrow way that few will find. It will always be true that the best things life has to offer will be missed—even denigrated—by most people. In a misguided attempt to "broaden the appeal" of classical music, it is being cheapened and its effect is being reduced. The American assumption is that if more people don't come to our concerts we must not be selling it hard enough; we need to find new ways to market our music to the public. Our shallow egalitarianism blinds us to the fact that the fault is with the public, not with our presentation of the music. People in this country are too easily satisfied with the superficial, and "marketing" of all kinds just aggravates the problem by making everything easy and effortless. Evangelical Christianity in America is descended from the great revival preachers of the past—prime examples of the culture of salesmanship. (Read Charles Finney's writings on how to conduct a revival: it's mostly manipulation.) These people are unable to see how destructive the sales techniques are to the deeper truths of Christianity. The way something is sold—put across— changes the thing itself. In their urgent need to put Christ across to masses of Americans, the "evangelicals" have often cheapened him beyond belief. (Yes: made it harder for many of us to believe.) And in the process they robbed it of the very depth and mystery that might attract an intelligent seeker. In other words, the rule applies: if you go for broader appeal, you make whatever you are selling shallower and therefore less appealing to the sensitive and intelligent elite. And our music was almost all written for the elite, not for the mindless masses. It has nothing to say to them. I remember a long argument one afternoon in a Princeton cafeteria. A group of theology students was trying to convince me that Christianity must be translated into the language of our time, because the traditional language no longer communicates with many people. I warned them that nothing can ever be translated without loss, that "translating Christian concepts into the language of our time" will inevitably end up changing and violating those concepts. Any time you change your message to win a wider audience, you dilute the strength of your ideas. Respect for tradition should be enough to keep us from tossing it lightly aside; but if that fails, consider the integrity of your commitments and loyalties. I told them that I had not committed my life to a faith that could be simplified for easy mass consumption—nor do I see Jesus teaching such a faith. The great religions have survived and still challenge even the greatest intellects because they never condescend to our laziness and vapidity. The power of great things guarantees their strangeness in the context of the larger culture. There is no way to eliminate that strangeness without also eliminating the greatness. And the very strangeness can reinforce our commitment to them. And—to carry the analogy about as far as it will go—in the presence of strange greatness we respond ritualistically and reverently, not with chatter and informality. Great music may not be easily understood, but it must be preserved, because there is so much there worth understanding! We who have made the effort have found it eminently worthwhile. Most worthwhile things in life do take some effort—despite what our consumer society preaches! There is no shortcut. There is no easy way to expose yourself—open your soul—to something great. Spirituality takes discipline, whether in church or in the concert hall. Fewer and fewer people in our consumer society are willing to make the effort. So there will be fewer people in our churches and synagogues and concert halls. That's very likely— and there's nothing "marketing" can do about it. Nothing at all. The one thing that must not be done is what some evangelists do: reduce the depth, soften its effect, make it easier for everyone (the "light beer" syndrome). If you do that, you will defeat the whole cause, because you will end up with nothing worth preserving. People have to rise to the great things; that's part of what makes them great. They demand something of us: great books, great music, great religious teachers. If we cannot accept those demands, they have nothing to say to us and we will drown in our subjectivity and consumerism. Integrity comes before real attainment: that is one of the first principles of ethics. The oldline Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans were part of coherent traditions that had a lot to offer. Even in America, competing with other religious groups, they maintained a certain doctrinal and devotional integrity. But even in some of those churches (and in many "evangelical" ones) we are facing today a willingness to give most of it up to win people in greater numbers (marketing is about quantity, not quality). They are letting the people who know the least about the faith—the unconverted—determine the way it is expressed. That amazes me, astounds me, and finally baffles me. You don't plan concert and opera seasons to "win new audiences". That is the same kind of mental confusion we see in the popularizing churches. In modern America entertainment is killing both art and religion. Can it make any sense to turn art and religion into mere (or more) entertainment? Or is this not one of the very ways entertainment kills art and religion? Classical radio stations increasingly turn the music into entertainment—even wallpaper. They are failing us in a misguided attempt to reach more people. The orchestras that are still offering the riches of the repertory to all who take the trouble to seek them out and listen with their brains in gear are doing what needs to be done. It is a mistake to try to make concerts more like TV—the shallowest element of our mindless popular culture. Concert audiences are mostly resisting such nonsense as big TV monitors in the concert hall. But some of the "marketing" people in our orchestra offices are determined to make it happen some day— and foundations give orchestras money to try such experiments. That is just one example. I urge our readers to be vigilant, to resist the popularizing of Great Things, the throwing of pearls before swine. Everything that must be done to assure the survival of our orchestras and opera companies must be done from the other side. That is, the potential audience must be changed. We must produce people who can appreciate greatness if we want great things to have a future. We must not reduce the greatness of those things to appeal to a wider audience— that's ass-backwards! [The book that most stimulated these thoughts was Reaching Out without Dumbing Down by Marva J Dawn (Eerdman's, 1995). As with so much that I read, it was recommended by an ARG reader. Other ARG readers have encouraged me to think about the parallel between religion and the arts. One even said, "they rise or fall together". In wondering what he meant, I wrote the above.] PS: The Jewish-Christian culture is word-dominated. Hearing is believing—not seeing. These are basically anti-visual religions, aware of how the visual fails us, of how pictures lie. Synagogues are pretty plain places compared to Buddhist temples! I was raised a Christian, and I am also inclined to trust my ears more than my eyes, the word (books) more than the picture. So I instinctively distrust television, especially when it pretends to be merely conveying facts! ("News" is the worst thing on television.) The word often translated "obey" in the Bible simply means to hear and respond. It doesn't carry the sense of clout authority our word does. A well-trained Jew or classical Christian has developed his hearing-andresponding faculties! That may explain the importance of music to both traditions. No other culture has developed the art as far as we have. VROON
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