If the Tucson Symphony published a list of every piece they have ever played, I can guarantee you that I could provide them with a list of dozens of great orchestral works from past and present times that they have never played that I am certain would be well received by the listening public. And I am sure there are other TSO season subscribers who could also make such a list of never-before-programmed yet accessible works. My point is—and this would apply to any symphony orchestra—that some of us classical music lovers have devoted a lot of time and energy uncovering great music that is not part of the standard repertoire. Yes, we do love the standard repertoire as much as anyone, but wouldn’t it be exciting to regularly hear great orchestral works that our beloved orchestra has never played before?
Composer and musicologist Robert Greenberg speaks frankly and convincingly about this and related subjects at the end of the last episode of his 2011 DVD lecture series The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works1:
What Will Happen to the Orchestra?
Any institution that relies strictly on the past to preserve its future is dead meat. America’s orchestras do not perform nearly enough contemporary music and are therefore failing to create that very repertoire that will guarantee their relevance into the future. Assuming that I am right about this, and I most certainly am, we must then ask whose fault is this? The answer, sadly, is the obvious one. It’s our fault. It’s the audience’s fault.
Orchestras are market-driven institutions that are struggling to stay alive. The margin between breaking even and bankruptcy-inducing debt can be the ticket sales for just a few concerts. For the most part, modern audiences go to concerts to be entertained by music that is familiar, a fact that militates entirely against the creation of new repertoire. I, for example, would love to compose for orchestra, but I will not waste my precious time writing music that will never be played or that will only be performed once. This is a sentiment shared by virtually every one of my colleagues whose creative energies are being lavished instead on chamber music and vocal music.
By my unofficial count, there are 223 professional orchestras in the United States and Puerto Rico, most of them regional orchestras. In a world in which the basic repertoire has been recorded a thousand times over at a time when more and more people are forgoing the comradery of the concert hall in favor of consuming their music in their cars and in front of their computer screens, the great bulk of those 223 orchestras will simply become irrelevant in a generation unless they do something to make themselves relevant. Taking music to the schools certainly helps as does giving performances in unusual venues. But, really, it is music that feeds the orchestral beast, and without the roughage provided by fresh music, the beast will die of unrelieved constipation.
Cultivating and performing new orchestral music is not an aspect of an orchestra’s mission or even a duty. No. Along with playing the pre-existing repertoire, cultivating and performing new music is the orchestra’s very reason to be. Just as living things mate and reproduce in order to guarantee the survival of their genetic lines, so the orchestra as an institution must create viable repertoire in order to stay relevant and therefore to survive. In this, orchestras must lead and not be led by polls that ask their audiences what music they should perform. There should be a piece of new music five to eight minutes long on every concert program, with a longer featured new work appearing, say, two or three times a season.
When it comes to new music, charity starts at home. Local composers should be cultivated, commissioned, and then paraded on stage before the performance so that (1) the audience can see that they are indeed alive, and (2) so that the the composers might briefly describe what their pieces are about. Conductors must become, as they once were, advocates for fresh repertoire. The orchestral players, realizing that their careers are at stake, must forgo their usual cynicism and lassitude over having to learn a new piece and actually practice their parts at home so that the brief amount of rehearsal time allotted to the new work can be used effectively. The performances of these new works should be posted on an orchestra’s website so that anyone, anywhere can hear what is fresh and new and exciting, in Texarkana, or Sarasota, or Hartford, or Oakland.
Regional orchestras should band together to create consortia that would commission emerging and mid-career composers of promise to compose works, particularly concertos that would feature the section leaders of the orchestras themselves. Yes, charity starts at home. Why bring in an overpriced outsider when your own principal flutist, for example, would be thrilled to be a featured soloist.
The composers themselves also have a huge responsibility as well. I would suggest that they take a page from Aaron Copland’s compositional career. Copland’s chamber music tends to be quite virtuosic and uncompromising in its modernity, while his orchestral music, which he knew he was writing for a wider public, tends to be relatively less virtuosic and more accessible. Now, Copland wasn’t writing down to his orchestral audiences. No. He was writing smart on exactly these lines and in direct opposition to the modernist screed, “Who cares if you listen?” Contemporary composers must care who listens. And if we want the traditional orchestral audience to re-embrace what is new, we as composers have to be willing to meet the audience halfway by composing music that gives something back immediately in terms of rhythm, melody, harmony, and expressive content. In all fairness to most living composers, I would point out that the daunting and ferociously modernistic music of the post-World War II era, music that gave the phrase “modern music” a bad name, has been pretty much a thing of the past since the 1980s. Generally, but accurately speaking, most contemporary composers would no more write such ear-scalding music than drink battery acid.
The local media, radio, and press must commit themselves to new programming as well, with the knowledge that by doing so they, too, will be making themselves culturally relevant. A sense of importance and occasion could be built around the performances of even short pieces of new music that could begin to transform an orchestra’s self and public image.
Speaking of the public, it is all too easy to be cynical about public taste. From David Hannum’s famous line, misattributed to P.T. Barnum, that there’s a sucker born every minute, to H.L. Mencken’s admonition to never overestimate the intelligence of the American people, we are faced daily with the evidence of our cultural cretinism, from network television to Chia Pets, but I would point out that a concert hall is not a baseball stadium and that filling the seats of a concert hall is not a matter of drawing 45,000 people but rather of attracting those people who are predisposed, or who could be made to be predisposed, towards concert music in the first place. I am just foolish enough to believe that if you give the music-liking public a reason to believe there’s something new and exciting happening at the concert hall that they can’t get and won’t find anywhere else, they might very well show up!
We can only hope that at least some of this comes to pass because I fear that the epitaph, particularly for regional orchestras, is already being written. “Here lies an organizational dinosaur that never figured out how to maintain its duty to the past while staying relevant to the present.” Let us hope that such reports of the orchestra’s possible demise are entirely premature.
I would like to offer a few comments on Greenberg’s enlightening essay.
The Tucson Symphony, like many orchestras I’m sure, frequently presents new and often commissioned works, though they are always short, no more than 10 or 15 minutes in length. Many of these works are pleasant enough to listen to, but where are the more substantial works? The new symphonies and the new concertos? Also, there is an overemphasis on works from the Americas. In my opinion, most of these works are heavy on percussion and light on melody, harmony, and thematic development. I find what is going on in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, to be much more interesting and substantial. I would like to see some of these contemporary European works played. And there are many, many works from the past from all over the world that are not in the standard repertoire that also deserve to be regularly heard.
Greenberg brings up a disquieting thought: that composers won’t write what won’t get played. In other words, it may be that the reason we don’t have more symphonies, tone poems, suites, and concertos being written today is that the public isn’t demanding and, yes, paying for them. We could all be doing more to encourage composers to write longer and more substantial orchestral works and to see that they get performed by many orchestras and, yes, commercially recorded and released on CD. I do think this is more of a problem in the United States than it is in Europe, however.
In conclusion—and to expand on my original suggestion for the TSO—are there any orchestras that provide a complete list of all the works they have ever played on their website, and that invite suggestions for works not on this list from their concertgoers, and that program some of them? How exciting that would be!
- Greenberg, Robert. 2011. The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works. The Great Courses. ↩︎
