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

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 1: The Recent Past

For many conductors that had established themselves in the field, conducting meant a series of guest engagements that would take them all over the world.  These concerts were facilitated by artist management agencies and were planned often 1-2 years ahead of time. For opera engagements, these could be planned almost 5 years in advance. There was a certain glamour to these engagements, and the excitement at greeting a new orchestra could be compared to going on a blind date with anywhere from 40-100 different people all at once. A conductor(and the orchestra) could potentially know within one minute of the first rehearsal that this was either going to be a difficult week, or an experience they would remember for the rest of their lives.  Established conductors racked up airline miles and hotel points, and spent weeks and months away from their homes and families.  In my case, I have spent approximately 6 months out of every year on the road for the past 10 years. Music director or chief conductor jobs offer their own kinds of challenges, but there is always a feeling of coming home to “your” orchestra, even if you do not live in that city.  In much more profound terms, the deepening of a musical relationship can make a good music director/orchestra something like a family, with all of the ups and downs of those kinds of relationships.  

On the orchestral side, orchestras performed regular subscription concerts for a relatively elderly public. The average age of attendees to orchestral concerts all over the world is well over 60, and every orchestra had devoted hours of time and energy to attracting young people to come to concerts. Similar to the problems of getting young people to vote, these efforts have been only moderately successful. Orchestras of a certain echelon gained prestige from touring, taking the orchestra and an entourage of staff on tours that allowed the orchestra and their Music Director to plant their flag in another city and in another hall. Most orchestral players looked forward to these tours, and administrations, managements, the musicians, and critics assigned great importance to them. Additionally, a recording presence, usually paid for in-house, was essential to project the strength of an orchestral institution. Some orchestras carved out funds to create an online platform, most notably the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall.   This content is often streamed free, though some orchestras operate a subscription model similar to that of Netflix.  Resistance to change, the high cost and often net loss of maintaining such a platform, and complicated Collective Bargaining Agreements over streaming rights and payment in the United States have kept this from being a real possibility for many orchestras in the world. 

There were many positives to this life, and for the most part, orchestras and conductors operated relatively smoothly, though many orchestras operated on a razor-thin line between being in the black or in the red.  But the pandemic and the total shutdown of orchestral life across the world has forced an abrupt stop to almost all concerts and almost all international travel.   The popular phrase “the new normal” will be en vogue for as long as it takes for there to be a vaccine for the Coronavirus, but the question remains about what the post-COVID normal looks like, and whether the system that was in operation was truly in the best interests of all involved. Once the world starts moving as it did pre-COVID, should things also go back to normal in the orchestral world?  There are things we will not be able to do for the near future. For example, a conductor will not be able to be in 4 time zones in 4 weeks and orchestras will not be able to hop between countries on a long tour.  But thinking about the future, could it be more logical to re-appropriate the colossal financial and environmental costs of orchestral tours into building a streaming platform?  And for conductors, is it possible to have a fulfilling and sustainable career while also spending less time on the road?  Considering that our focus at the moment by definition must be local, should orchestras re-consider their investments in recordings, and spend more time building connections with their local communities? And for the moment, how should orchestras and conductors react to ever-changing social distancing regulations that will last an indeterminate amount of time? Should the model of planning years in advance be adjusted? How can a large institution that practically defines itself on preparation adjust rapidly and nimbly to current conditions? 

The next article in this series will focus on the current situation, and how orchestras and conductors can navigate their way through this crisis.  I firmly believe that some institutions and conductors could potentially come out of this situation even stronger than they were than when we entered this long tunnel.  But for now, please keep safe and healthy, and avail yourselves of all of the incredible resources that have emerged online since the pandemic started, from live performances, to lectures, to archived concerts, and more.