Friends,
There's an amusing story in the Sydney Morning Herald about how cover bands are necessary but much reviled in the music scene. Artists performing original works are extended a much higher status than those who play tried and true favorites. The punchline of the article is that symphony orchestras and opera companies are just that--cover bands. And, in Australia at least, they consume a disproportionate amount of state arts funding. According to the author, it's a rare new work that ever gets produced, as classical music audiences seem to prefer the safe and the familiar.
In the U.S., where federal spending of $124 million (down from a high of $175 million in 1992) represents less than 1% of total arts philanthropy, the National Endowment for the Arts distributes most of its money to safe choices, largely due to the backlash against their funding more controversial work in the 1980s.
Traveling this fall, when I have come across public radio stations offering classical music, it's usually been from the canon of our favorite seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century dead white composers, with a rare twentieth century piece (Copland, Bartok, Mahler, Gershwin), and an occasional piece by a living composer (Philip Glass). For many of those stations, it's cheaper and more efficient to carry American Public Media's excellent syndicated service Classical 24, which offers a good mix of classical music that mainly plays it safe.
In the U.S. we are rarely exposed to the leading edge of orchestral music (after all, symphony orchestras around the country are "swimming in debt and hemorrhaging audiences," to paraphrase an article in Crosscut Seattle), but I find that public radio pledge drives are the least convincing when they talk about classical music. Maybe livening up the format and playing more than "cover bands" won't bring in larger fundraising revenues, but it might validate the fact that the small amount of federal funding public radio receives is for "community service." And I believe that communities are better served through greater artistic risk.
Talk to you soon!
Bob
Views, Observations and Musings about the Nonprofit World and my Weltanschaung
About Me
- Bob Stein
- Northern Virginia, United States
- A fundraising consultant for fifteen years, following a successful career as a performing arts executive and fundraiser, Bob Stein heads MajorGiving, a consulting group that provides support to nonprofits in the areas of fund development, strategic planning, executive recruitment. He also serves as a Commissioner on the Virginia State Public Broadcasting Board and as a Trustee of Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
