Cliff Diving

On Brahms vs. Radiohead vs. Whatever remains of your attention span

Term of the day: Demographic cliff.

Been reading lots about it lately in connection with higher education. The cliff in question there is a perfect-storm phenomenon: Birth rates are declining at the precise moment when high school graduates are questioning the value of four-year college and its debt load.  Some data-crunchers view the numbers and see hard times ahead for schools – particularly small liberal arts colleges and second-tier universities.

Just look around. There are similar demographic cliffs popping up across the horizon.

How about that national pastime, baseball? A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times noted the sport’s declining attendance and TV viewership and concluded it’s only a matter of time before there’s a “nationalize major-league baseball” movement.

Then there’s another august institution, the American symphony orchestra.

For decades, the big-city symphonies have been by run by – and programmed for – a highly educated and overwhelmingly white elite. For the most part, both the presenters and the consumers agree on the mission of the orchestra: To contribute to the cultural life of a region by celebrating the venerable classic repertoire, the warhorses that high-dollar subscription series patrons expect (more accurately, demand) to hear.

For most of the 20th century, this arrangement worked fantastically well. Halls were mostly full. The works of the masters were respected. And then the patrons who’d been a significant source of financial support began to die off. They have not been replaced by younger generations of music lovers. (There are countless explanations for this, among them the disappearance of basic arts appreciation/instruction in elementary and secondary schools.) Corporate and arts-grant support have not covered the shortfalls. Result: Many orchestras are now experiencing declines in their endowments – along with even steeper declines in attendance.

Just one more example: In a recent Facebook thread started by an established record producer, there was actual handwringing over the term “Jazz is Dead.” The producer argued that the canard – which has been around nearly as long as jazz itself and is the title of a series of interesting cross-genre experiments discussed here – is creating the perception that the artform has already experienced its cliff-dive moment. And that, the producer said, is “not helpful.” Most responses noted that the music itself is thriving, with or without a sizable audience – which is true, and could explain why so many of the music’s currently lauded practitioners are doubling down on marathon solos built from technically accomplished and highly abstracted practice room material. Why bother developing anything as fundamental as a melody if only jazz nerds are listening?

What links baseball, orchestral music, jazz and countless other aspects of cultural life currently marching toward various demographic cliffs? Attention.

The only way to get swept into the curious lowkey tension of baseball, a sport where the action happens in fits and starts off the clock, is to take the ride, inning by possibly dreary inning. The fireworks-popping payoff of the final movement of a Beethoven symphony might be impressive as an excerpt; it resonates in different, arguably more profound ways when you’ve followed the themes as they unfold and intersect from the very beginning.

The people around the conference room table at the big orchestras think they have a programming problem: If they just find the right spoonful of sugar, they’ll be able to captivate next-gen art patrons and eventually cultivate deep love for Mahler and the other titans. Maybe. That doesn’t change the initial ask: Give the orchestra hours of your time. Pay lots of money for tickets. Oh, and by the way, while you’re here, disengage from the constant whirl of smartphone communication. That last one may be too much for those wired for constant Internet input.

Orchestras are trying all kinds of creative tactics to reach the segment of the population that’s under 80 years old, in hopes of averting the approaching demographic cliff. The other week, the Philadelphia Orchestra and three vocalists performed composer Steve Hackman’s Brahms Vs. Radiohead, a conceptual “conversation” between Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 and the British art-rock band’s landmark OK Computer.

Let’s leave aside the ridiculous cage-match promise of the program’s title – though you know that if Radiohead had been first to market with such a mashup, the classical establishment would be howling with indignation about the sanctity of the Great Works.

Before a note was played, the orchestra got what it wanted: An audience of reasonable size that looked decades younger than the typical subscription-series crowd. Mission accomplished! Bring on Drake Digs Debussy!

Musically, the results were more mixed. Hackman’s score faithfully builds up the primary Brahms themes, and then explores linkages between the ruminative chords of the first movement and the equally ruminative progressions of Radiohead’s “Airbag” and “Climbing Up the Walls.” The transitions between the two works were graceful and mostly respectful, though there were moments when the defining traits of the Radiohead compositions – those disquieting chords that linger in the air and never fully resolve – wrapped up in hasty fashion so that Brahms could get some airtime.

Thing is, very rarely did the sudden arrival of a Radiohead melody enhance or even speak in a meaningful way to the Brahms narrative. And even the most intricate, gorgeously foreboding scoring in the Brahms seemed socially distanced from the OK Computer songs – odd given the shared temperament. While more artful than a cut-and-paste job, this mashup said all the right things about the possibilities lurking within the recombination and recontextualization of art – and then didn’t offer much actual proof of those possibilities.

We’re destined for more tortured, desperate dances as the demographic cliff approaches, and I’m not terribly optimistic about the potential for meaningful art to rise from them. But there are other sustained responses to the uber problem of attention, some of which show promising results: The New World Symphony, the Miami-based training orchestra, has developed sustained programming initiatives aimed directly at demographic groups not usually targeted by arts organizations. It puts on super short 20-minute performances that are marketed by street teams working the pedestrian areas around the orchestra’s Miami Beach campus. The orchestra’s calendar includes outdoor shows with interesting visual projections, and evenings where orchestral pieces alternate with DJ sets, and so on.

The big idea at NWS is a kind of radical humility for an arts organization: Rather than offer the ritual concert experience according to longstanding symphonic tradition, this group begins by seeking to understand the audience, and then designs events to meet that audience where it is. If a 20- minute experience for $5 is all that’s desired, the New World Symphony offers that. The extensive surveying and market research this organization does – which is detailed in the 2021 academic work Classical Music: Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges edited by Paul Boghossian and Michael Beckerman – suggests strategies that can enlarge participation in the performing arts.

These are smart steps. More action is needed, because the demographic cliff is approaching and within huge chunks of American culture, the capacity for active attention to extended musical works is diminishing. In the cage match between Brahms and Radiohead and the yammering social media feed that will never ever cease, there are no real winners.

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