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And here is the second fact: orchestras appeal to a minority of Americans. There are expanses of American landscape, topographical and cultural, where classical music has little or no acknowledged impact. At a runout concert in Carthage, Texas, an older man approached the conductor of the morning's educational session to say that he had never heard an orchestra before. From his point of view, the orchestra had always seemed a coterie thing, Eastern, elitist.
Yet the truth is he has heard orchestras all his life. They have been playing in the background of his favorite entertainment—popular recordings, Broadway musicals, movies, and television. He heard opera excerpts in Godfather IIIand Pretty Woman and in television ads for Circuit City and Oil of Olay. What is alien to him, in reality, is the concert ritual—the largely anonymous crowd in the darkened concert hall, the performers in formal dress, the presence of the cultural icon in the opus numbers and program notes.
Expense has married orchestras to social elites since the time of Haydn, whose symphonies were played by servants of the Esterhazy household. The most striking example in America, perhaps, is the outright ownership of the Boston Symphony in its early decades by a single wealthy, autocratic individual. The orchestra, someone wrote at the time, "is Mr. Henry L. Higginson's yacht, his racing-stable, his library, and his art-gallery." It was also his ideological weapon. Like his class in general, Higginson hoped to use classical music (and Beethoven as its prophet) as a bulwark against everything we have come to know as popular culture and popular democracy.
Hence, to quote the 1993 ASOL report, Americanizing the American Orchestra—you can feel the ideological anxiety pressing on the very title—"the image of the orchestra as an exclusive, arrogant, possibly racist institution that resists sharing the secrets and norms of participation . …" Hence the recurrent calls for orchestras to come down off their pedestals and mingle. Hence the concert in the elementary school on a late spring morning—the desire to find a new audience, the hope to educate it, or seduce it.
As an icon of "high" culture, the orchestra has prospered or faltered along with the rest of the arts in America. Until World War II, orchestras could depend on their clienteles, especially on Higginson of Boston and the Curtises of Philadelphia, whose devotion gave classical music its elitist air. After the war, there was a rush of hope that the GI Bill and the NEA would give art, for the first time, a truly democratic mass audience. The Ford Foundation initiated, with Danny Newman's Dynamic Subscription Promotion (DSP), a vastly influential theory of how to sell tickets to new customers.
But this rush of optimism stalled in the eighties. The NEA itself, mostly for political reasons, was ambushed for being elitist. The dynamism of DSP seemed to falter: after a whiff of Brahms, it turned out, consumers were more than likely to go back to theme parks and video games. Foundations and corporations remained willing to support the arts, as giving the community an atmosphere of style and creativity. The truth is, however, that by the nineties the corporation itself, not the local art museum or orchestra, had become the cultural icon of urbanity, sophistication, and power.
The fate of orchestras cannot be isolated from the movement of the culture as a whole. For many, the orchestra's survival is a question of how to sell a product that fewer and fewer people want to buy, a product, that is, whose cultural significance and necessity are less and less obvious. The market for paintings has boomed by turning paintings into commodities: a painting is an object, it will hang on your wall and appreciate in value. But a performance of Brahms is an event and an experience—a demanding, perhaps difficult participation in a deeply traditional craft, whose place in the consumer culture is unclear.
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