Joshua Weilerstein - The Past, The Present, and The Future of Classical Music - part 2

Every time a musician has opened their email or picked up the phone over the last  weeks, they’ve braced for the gut punch of yet another concert cancellation.  Some ensembles and organisations were quick out of the gate to cancel everything, while many have valiantly held on until bowing to the inevitable.  Now, with the emerging possibility that large gatherings of any kind could potentially be impossible until a vaccine is widely available, musicians and artists of all stripes have begun to panic, seeing their incomes, their livelihoods, and possibly their futures evaporating before their eyes.  No one knows how or when this crisis will end, but all we can know now is that the performing arts face an existential crisis.  The question remains: How can the classical music business cope with this threat? This series of three articles is meant to explore the past, present, and future of classical music through the prism of conducting and through orchestral life, and why this crisis, while devastating, presents an opportunity for change within a field that is desperate for it.

Part 2: The Current Situation
Reading friend’s social media feeds over the past couple of months has been both inspiring and depressing. On the depressing side, some performers have now had their entire 2020 performance schedules wiped clean with cancellations, immediately thrusting them into potentially dire financial straits. Freelance musicians are especially vulnerable to this kind of situation since government aid is often very difficult to come by for professions like ours and involves miles of red tape and bureaucracy. In the United States, the system of almost exclusively private funding has left many orchestras, chamber music ensembles, and presenters gasping for air, as donors have pulled their funding due to sudden financial insecurity, and the cratering of ticket revenue has created massive budget shortfalls. It is the unfortunate reality that a portion of arts organizations all over the world will not survive the economic recession to come.  On the inspiring side, almost every musician I know has put out some sort of online performance, whether it is an archival recording or an “at-home” video recorded on a phone or tablet.  Musicians have set up Artist Relief Funds, providing much needed support to musicians and freelancers out of work. Performers all over the world have played socially distanced concerts at nursing homes and other care facilities, bringing joy and comfort during this time.  In some ways I do believe that this crisis has reminded musicians of our roles as servants to our communities and to each other, a role that I think will take on an outsize importance once the pandemic passes.  

In terms of performing, the current situation has forced arts organizations and individual musicians to be flexible in unprecedented ways. Recently countries have started easing restrictions on gatherings, but with the caveat that the severe lockdown-like restrictions could begin at any time if Public Health authorities deem it necessary.  One does not know if a concert that was scheduled and programmed 2 years in advance will be able to go ahead with the program originally planned, or at all.  Ensembles are having to come up with programs that use no more than 5, 10, or 50 musicians, all at the same time, without knowing how many people will be allowed to be in the audience, if any. To learn and perform music like this at a high level is extremely taxing on musicians and on the audience, who quite literally are unable to know what to expect from day to day. With that said, this kind of artistic agility is a quality that has been sorely lacking in our business before, and it will certainly come in handy for musicians in the future. A Beethoven symphony might suddenly turn into the 13 instrument version of Appalachian Spring on a moment’s notice, and we need to be ready for that. One of the most popular ideas going around is the idea of performing two concerts in an evening, for a small and safely socially distanced audience. This concert would be relatively short and take place earlier in the evening. After a break of an hour for a deep cleaning and disinfecting of the hall, a second audience would be allowed in to hear the same performance. This presents real issues for performers in terms of exhaustion and also in terms of performing essentially two concerts for the price of one, but this kind of creativity and sacrifice will be necessary to create financial sustainability for concerts during this time period and could provide a model for shorter, more compact concerts in the future.

Outside of the live performance space, innovative solutions have been found already to questions of streaming online performances, with ensembles like the Phoenix Orchestra of Boston putting out high quality, well-produced content on a weekly basis. The sheer number of performances, video clips, audio content, and creativity shown over the past two months is astonishing and deeply heartening. Music will continue to be shared, as it should and needs to be. But now that the initial flood of online content has slightly subsided, we must now ask questions as to how this kind of content can be both musically and financially sustainable for the uncertain months ahead.  How can an orchestra get together and play a full concert with absolutely zero ticket revenue? Many models have been proposed, including a required donation, a virtual ticket, or a suggested donation model.  To me, the suggested donation model has the highest possibility of succeeding. In a way, arts organisations have the chance to perform for more people than they ever have before. Jonathan Biss, the wonderful pianist, recently performed a house concert for the 92nd Street Y that was viewed nearly 300,000 times. At a suggested donation of $5, if even 20% of that public had donated that amount the concert would have made $300,000. Now, not every concert will be viewed by nearly so many people, but the opportunity to reach audiences around the world during this time period allows for the possibility of earning at least a portion of lost ticket revenue back. 

There are many other solutions being batted around by some of the top minds of this profession, but the key is that musicians want to perform, they want to put their music out into the world, and they are refusing to be handcuffed by the current situation. Smart organizations will be able to navigate through this lean year and come out on the other side with perhaps a streaming service and a loyal global audience that they never thought they could have. Of course, this brings up the question of what the classical music world needs to do AFTER the pandemic is over and the world returns to normal. Are there things that we could be doing differently, even now, that will allow us to not only survive, but thrive, in the world after coronavirus? That will be the subject of the final article in this series.