Some of us noticed our traditional audience was getting older over the years, and got scared of a possible end of our art, because of a lack of audience. We all know there’s a lot of grey hair in our audience, and that’s not a new trend. The lack of audience is, from my point of view, an irrational fear : Yes our audience is in average old, but the older part of our audience renews itself. I know a lot of people who never liked classical music before their fifties and are now going at least once a week to a concert, reading magazines about classical music, or buying recordings.

Content should always be more important than form. This may sound idealistic in our society, but I strongly believe in the supremacy of content and strangely when talking about reaching a new audience, people are obsessed with the form as if it was the only thing we could change.

When attending a classical contemporary music concert (what an oxymoron!), the first thing you notice is the big difference in the audience composition : contemporary music attracts much more younger people. Is there two different audiences for classical music? A classical contemporary one and a classical “traditional” one? In fact there are more than two : with the development of specialized baroque ensembles was born a classical baroque audience too, and I’m sure we could find other examples. What if the classical music audience was not declining but just splitting into different trends? Have a look at concert programs from the first half of the XXth century and you might be surprised how they were different from now : much more contemporary music and baroque music for the traditional orchestras for example.

Nowadays, segmentation is going too far : You can’t play baroque pieces in a baroque festival because you don’t play on a harpsichord, you can’t play in a contemporary music festival because of the 10 minutes of Scriabin in your program, you can’t play in a traditional festival because of your Gubaidulina piece. As a musician, I don’t really understand this : music is a slow evolution and each composer has his roots in older music and there is not such thing as a frontier between baroque, classical, romantic, impressionistic, contemporary…. music. Why would we divide the music world ? Why would we compartmentalize this fabulous evolution? Moreover, this is leading to elitist content, frightening our potential new audience.

Sure, reaching new markets is important, but I don’t think classical music is going mainstream any time soon. Educational programs are absolutely great for this if well done. But before reaching new markets, couldn’t we take care of existing ones? Over the years I learned something important : segmenting a market as tiny as the classical music is a bad idea. We, actors of the classical music business, split our audience in different specialized (and elitist?) audiences without thinking of the future and we now have to reunify the segments. This is not a matter of form, but a matter of content.

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More recently, announcements are succeeding one another: Yamaha has reduced its piano production and suppressed jobs, two big monthly magazines on culture merged to face up to the crisis, General Motors withdrawed as the lead sponsor of the Montreal International Jazz Festival… The examples are numerous, showing that the crisis is affecting the arts.

The fact is that classical music is essentially subsidized by private sponsoring and/or state funds. States are now drawing huge sums to bail out banks and companies in difficulty, leading to savings in less “visible” budgets (culture, for example), and the private sponsoring to tick over, the said companies having less liquid assets for sponsoring.

Now a question which concerns me: who will then subsidize festivals, which are necessary for musicians to make a living? Who will fund municipal or national cultural policies? Will we have to radically change our work habits in order to still be able to make a living from our art? To go in for something new?

Not that easy to see through this mess, and even less easy to know what’s going to be cooked up for us!

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