One positive development is a dawning awareness among American institutions that systemic change may prove an urgent priority. Here are some snapshots, from the East Coast, the West Coast and the Midwest.
Empty Seats, but a New Era Rises in the East
Symphony Hall in Boston is riddled with empty seats. The Boston Symphony once privileged distinguished local composers and later served as a national laboratory for new American works. Now, the orchestra’s programing is anonymous. Judging from its Carnegie Hall visits, it also isn’t playing very well. The musicians, the administration and the board are at odds over the dismissal of the music director, Andris Nelsons, making him a martyr when his departure is most needed.
A Boston Symphony planning document, leaked to the press and patrons with tumultuous consequences, proposes “symphonic cycles,” “festivals” and “programmatic themes that build connections across several weeks of B.S.O. concerts.” Such programing, it says, is “easier to market to targeted audiences.”
The same prospectus advocates “humanities-based collateral presentations, including lectures, panel discussions, demonstrations and workshops,” as well as “affinity programming, intended to appeal to segments of our communities who have not traditionally felt welcomed.” These changes “are neither radical nor even especially novel,” the document adds. In fact, they sound perfectly plausible. And if they prove to be novel, so much the better.
Down the coast, the New York Philharmonic has embarked upon a new era under Gustavo Dudamel, who aspires to become as identified with New York as Nelsons (who also leads the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Germany), is foreign to Boston. Everything about Dudamel’s appointment as music and artistic director, including its emphasis on finding venues outside Lincoln Center, tacitly acknowledges that the Philharmonic has long lacked effective leadership. In fact, not since Leonard Bernstein’s fabled decade as music director has it successfully pursued a consolidated purpose.
It bears stressing that Bernstein did not concurrently preside over another orchestra. During his first season (1958-59), he led 18 weeks of subscription concerts (notably incorporating a “general survey of American music from the earliest generations of American composers to the present”), plus numerous young people’s concerts and 36 concerts on tour abroad. The remainder of the subscription season was shared by only six guest conductors (a stellar list including Herbert von Karajan), each assigned multiple weeks.