In my last post, I encouraged readers to articulate what they liked about orchestras, so we can have a better sense of what it is exactly we are trying to preserve or pass on to new audiences and future generations. I’ll begin this one by sharing my own answer to that question.

I’ve never played in an orchestra, but I’ve seen a few orchestral concerts in my day. One of my early orchestral memories was seeing the Boston Symphony play at Symphony Hall. The red carpets, ornate architecture, and gold trim made a huge impression on me. In other early concerts at Yale University’s Woolsey Hall, I loved watching the cellos move and lean and moan in unison, the conductor dancing on the podium, the battery of percussion toys, the impossibly shiny woodwinds and brass, four risers’ worth of singers standing up as one to prepare for the next entrance. The spectacle, the grandeur, the pomp & circumstance – they were all integral parts of the experience.

I feel like I’m going to make Greg Sandow’s head spin when he reads this, given that I’m a member of the younger generation who isn’t an orchestral insider, but count me firmly in the camp that says orchestras don’t need to try to be less old-fashioned. The penguin suits – keep ‘em on! The ridiculous rituals – love ‘em! Maintaining silence between movements – contributes to a special atmosphere! As I mentioned, I don’t often go to orchestral concerts, but when I do it’s often in part because the environment is not like the rest of my life, not in spite of it.

It’s not that I’m opposed in all circumstances to orchestras reaching out and trying new things – not by any stretch! But I think orchestras are most effective when they put forth their authentic selves. One non-traditional concert I recall enjoying was the Yale Symphony Orchestra’s annual Halloween extravaganza. The show started at 11:59pm and would feature an original film made by members of the orchestra, arrangements of popular theme music by the students, cameo appearances from the Dean and President of the college, and a hall chock-full of raucous, costumed, mostly drunk undergraduates. It was a PARTY. But it was able to be that party because it was a concert by students, for students. I can’t imagine how awkward it would have been to have a professional orchestra (playing past 11pm on those union contracts? Are you kidding?) try to replicate that fun-loving no-holds-barred atmosphere for an audience it wasn’t familiar with. Similarly, many noises have been made about how orchestras need to get out of the concert hall and into clubs. First of all, concert halls were built for a reason. The acoustics, seating arrangement, and optics are far superior to what you’ll find in a club. Secondly, as someone who has actually performed in a lot of clubs, I can assure you: the economics of small-venue performance are murderous for large or even large-ish ensembles. I mean, jazz is basically dying in this country right now because it is so hard for musicians to eke out a living playing these little shoebox closets with a $10 cover – and we’re talking groups of three, four, five players here. Trust me, the long-term structural issues facing orchestral performance are not going to be solved by a change of scenery.

At the end of the day, I’m skeptical that all that much change can come from the large, established institutions. To the extent that a “new kind” of orchestral experience is on tap, I suspect it will come from newer, youth-led outfits like Alarm Will Sound and Metropolis Ensemble rather than from the big guns. And, honestly, I think the big guns will be all right. People are still going to come to New York and Chicago and San Francisco to hear the symphony. And the experience they’ll be expecting will be the experience currently provided by those organizations: the experience of seeing some of the best musicians on the planet doing what they’ve spent a lifetime training to do. An experience that is tradition-bound and proud of it.

That’s not who I worry about. I worry about the regional symphonies, the semi-professional chamber orchestras, the myriad of youth orchestras. It seems to me that if you’re playing the exact same repertoire as your neighbor across town, just less well, you’re not really giving people much of a reason to come out and see you or support you in any way. I worry that we just have too many mediocre ensembles out there making the same not-very-interesting programming choices. They’re the ones who are most likely to have to decide, in the not too distant future, just what–and who–they’re really about.

If some things in art can’t support themselves in the market place, and need special funding (whether from government or private donors or both), we can make that case, but again by describing the power, value, and meaning of specific art works, the conclusion being (or the conclusion that we try to draw, and hope that others will accept) that these art works need to be available for all of us, even if they’re expensive, and even if not all of us make use of them.

I partly agree with this. Certainly, a central tenet of any arts advocacy campaign has to be that all of us can benefit from the arts even if not all of us actually like the arts. Or, to be more specific as Greg is in this quote, not everybody appreciates the same things—and that’s okay.

People understand, I think — I’ll end with this — that there are valuable things in life that they themselves might not make use of. I won’t hesitate to argue the worth of art like L’avventura, which in fact many people don’t like at all. (As I’ve said before, I like a lot of things that aren’t exactly popular.) What’s crucial, I think, is to admit that it’s not for everyone, but that it still has an important meaning, an important function in our lives.

Here’s the thing, though: I’m not convinced that we can make this case simply by talking about arts experiences that we’re passionate about, but that the listener hasn’t shared. I mean, in his post, Greg summons the wayback machine to revisit his days as a teenager, spending three paragraphs describing why Antonioni’s L’avventura is important to him. Greg’s writing about the film is filled to the brim with passion; it’s obvious that he still wrestles with its aesthetic details today, nearly half a century after he first experienced it and it struck him to the core.

And yet his description doesn’t do a damn thing for me. I’ve never seen the movie. I’ve never heard of the director; frankly, I didn’t even realize that Greg was talking about a film, and not an opera, until I looked up L’avventura on Wikipedia. And I’m all about the arts, for pete’s sake! If anyone should know about this stuff, it’s someone like me. So if I can’t get into it this way, can we really expect that someone with no artistic background will?

In talking to people who make their living in the arts, I generally find that a small handful of formative, extremely intense artistic experiences like the ones that Greg describes in his post end up setting the stage for a lifetime of dedication to the arts. (You can read an account of one of those that served that purpose for me over at the Fredösphere.) Not too long ago, I asked a small group of arts professionals, people whose jobs involve seeing dozens if not hundreds of performances a year, how many transcendent arts experiences they typically have in that time. The pretty-much-universal answer was “one, if I’m lucky.” Now, think about this for a second. Arts professionals have chosen their field out of dedication to the arts, so one would think that they would be predisposed to liking a performance. You might also surmise that they are able to get more out of it because of their expertise. These factors, plus the high frequency of event attendance, would lead you to expect that they would have transcendent, life-changing arts experiences a lot more often than anyone else. And yet one a year seems like a good ratio to them (and to me).

So think about this next time you are mulling how to “convert” people to our side. Think about how you were converted. It wasn’t because someone described to you some work or piece they loved. It’s because you experienced the art for yourself. Indeed, you might well have made the art yourself—or at the very least, participated in the production of it. Maybe it was a high school play. Maybe it was a choral workshop with Eric Whitacre. Maybe it was a concert you saw that moved you so much that you were dancing and singing all the way back home. The arts are a visceral, physical, deeply experiential phenomenon, and people who have never found themselves carried off on one of these unforgettable ecstatic aesthetic journeys are at a fatal disadvantage for understanding the arts’ intrinsic value to their participants. But simply exposing them to the arts for limited engagements is not likely, in my opinion, to produce those transformative experiences, because those transformative experiences are RARE even for people who already like the arts. Is it possible that those of us who make our lives in the arts were just lucky? That we just happened upon transcendence early enough in our lives for us to take advantage of it? Or alternatively, that our parents, our teachers, were already converts and saw to it that we would have those opportunities? And if so, what implications does that have for our advocacy?