Classical Music's Audience Conundrum: Play it safe by taking risks

A New York Times article this week set out in cold, hard facts the realities that we in classical music have been experiencing this year: audiences haven’t returned in the numbers we’d hoped. Andrew Mellor wrote similarly in Classical Music Magazine earlier this month.

There’s a chance that it will simply take more time for things to return to their pre-pandemic norm. The biggest names may well retain their star-studded allure anyway, and Jo Johnson has eluded to exactly that at the LSO.

But hoping (or, worse, assuming) that business-as-usual will find its way back to us feels like a dangerously small ledge to position ourselves on.

Imagine the classical music ‘machine’ is a boomerang (bear with me on this…). For decades, we’ve been throwing the boomerang each season and it’s generally always come back to us. The same throw (aka the product we’ve offered) has reliably resulted in pretty much the same return every time (our standard, traditional audience).

In 2022 it seems that we’re throwing that same boomerang in the same old way but - for reasons none of us yet fully understand - it’s coming back out of catching distance. Audience numbers are significantly down, whether it’s the Proms, smaller festivals, orchestral seasons, operas, in the UK or the rest of the world.

If we stubbornly position ourselves on a small ledge, determined to continue offering the same traditional product to throw out into the world, we risk missing the ability to sprint to the side or lunge forwards to make our return catch without falling off. While our orchestras and venues might just have the financial resilience to drop a catch every now and then, if this becomes a regular habit - such as if our boomerang never comes back in the predictable way it used to - then simply put, it’s game over.

So what can we do?

First, it feels like we need to step off that ledge and give ourselves some more space - or opportunities - to react.

In part this might mean some practical shifts (e.g. reducing ‘conventional’ programming/activity to free up some resource for what’s described in point two), but also a shift in mindset. We have to be ready and willing to leap around to react to our boomerang, and relax into trying some things that initially scare us.

In today’s classical music world, I think this translates into actively embracing experimentation. Being excited about the idea of trying things differently, proactively taking on what we traditionally perceive as risk and being receptive to unknown outcomes. Continuing with the sport analogy, imagine you have to dive to catch the boomerang: if you’re scared of tumbling to the ground and your muscles tense up in anticipation, you’re inevitably going to be both slower to react and more likely to hurt yourself. If you’re relaxed, however, and actively want the challenge, you perform better and get fewer bruises.

This leads to point two: once we’ve given ourselves more agency to experiment and to react, we actually have to try throwing our boomerang in different ways. And rather than just one big throw per year (e.g. a standard concert season), we should have fun throwing it multiple times as we figure out what other approaches might work.

Some of those throws might fail and that’s ok. We must be open to that, keen to adapt and ready to throw again. Our technique will evolve over time. But some of those throws will come back strongly and with rich rewards: new audiences, new artistic depth, new commercial models and emotional responses that are more powerful and meaningful.

I say all of this not as some kind of hypothetical pipe dream but with real confidence because, pre-pandemic, we were exploring exactly this way of working in Southbank Sinfonia’s #ConcertLab series.

Over the course of three years, we experimented, we learnt and we evolved as the series progressed. Great playing and great classical music stood proudly at the core of every concert, but we pushed the audience experience (and that of the musicians, too) in new directions by cross-pollinating thinking from the worlds of theatre and museums. We worked with lighting, staging, projection, immersion, movement, set-dressing, story-telling, and alternative venues, questioning the conventions we’ve all inherited and asking how we could change things up to amplify the power of the music we programmed. And it worked.

By the end of year three, we’d found a genuinely new audience - many of whom didn’t usually engage with orchestras, but who were listening enthralled to a Beethoven symphony, a chamber piece by Elizabeth Maconchy or Peteris Vasks’ Musica Dolorosa and left us glowing reviews. Musicians were raving about the new depth and thrill they’d found in performances that had stretched them in unexpected directions. And we’d found a suite of ways to evolve the product, making it experiential, more relevant and exciting - yet, through necessity, hadn’t cost the earth.

A 2019 review of The Sound Within, pictured here, described it as ”Instead of passively spectating a bunch of very talented people do something I didn’t fully understand, #ConcertLab put me at the mixing desk … and it made the music spectacular.”

I’ll hold my hands up and admit it wasn’t easy. We were all out of our comfort zones and every project threw up challenges. But the proof of concept was there: alternative audiences are interested in us if we’re willing to adapt our product to make it relevant to them and commit the time to develop it. Change doesn’t happen overnight.

All the while Southbank Sinfonia also ran a more conventional series for its ‘traditional’ audiences, though with a handful less performances per year to give us the time and some budget to explore these new, alternative approaches. It doesn’t have to be either/or, even if it does require more creative marketing and brand management (perhaps a topic for a future blog). Did we get any complaints? Not really. Did we get some amazing feedback from new audiences? Absolutely.

Other ensembles have of course done similarly - Scottish Ensemble and Manchester Collective are two that spring to mind, with remarkable artistic results and new business models to match - but they remain the exceptions.

Yes, this was all pre-pandemic and the world is in a different place today. Nothing is guaranteed. That said, my take is that the Covid experience has accelerated an audience trend we were already facing but which - for often understandable reasons - weren’t previously ready or willing as an industry to tackle head-on.

Now we have a choice:

We can risk continuing chasing after business-as-usual, with no guarantee of whether it will return again. Or we can take what other more commercially-driven industries might see as the responsible approach by exploring new options to offer the market, diversifying our risk.

For that’s the remarkable position we’ve now found ourselves in. To retain the status quo is suddenly the risky approach, the one where should current audience trends persist we could easily find ourselves obsolete in the very near future, having reacted too late to adapt (hello Blockbuster, Kodak, Blackberry etc.). A business with all its eggs in one basket is an inherently risky one.

Ironically enough, taking more of what classical music normally describes as ‘risk’ by genuinely and boldly experimenting with our offer to audiences suddenly feels like the safer bet. So what’s stopping us?