Engaging the Community

If nothing else, this discussion has highlighted extraordinary efforts being made in cities throughout the country: Denver, Tucson, NYC, Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington — and many, many towns in Canada, thanks to the great work radiating outward from NACO. (How I wish we had a broadband studio at the Kennedy Center!)

I think the challenges remaining in the next few days online are twofold:

· getting the word out to the rest of the country,

and, hardest of all,

· figuring out how to ensure that our community engagement (outreach, education) keeps an orchestra in the spotlight of its community.

The “easy” one first. Polyphonic is a wonderful resource for all of us. This discussion will be archived so that our colleagues can read what’s posted here in the weeks and months to come. They can get in touch with us, or our organizations, and presumably they can flesh out their own ideas, gain inspiration, and get advice if/when they need it. I hope each of us (panelists) will use our last message on August 31 to add any websites that would be of interest to someone reading this discussion 3 months from now. Is there an article you want everyone to read? Is there a foundation you want everyone to know about? Is there a site featuring your orchestra’s most successful project?

Now the hard one: There seems to be a hidden assumption from all of us and I want to question it. We are all assuming that we have to educate our public better (I think we agree on that part), but the unspoken part is that if we do a good job of reaching out to them, they will buy more tickets or make larger donations. With that goal in mind, I’d like to tell you about something that happened in Washington last year.

One of the initiatives we undertook last season (our 75th anniversary) at the NSO was to take an education survey of the orchestra. We defined “educational efforts” as ANY KIND of teaching done by an orchestra member: private students, university students, masterclasses, lecture-recitals at any venue, summer festival teaching, etc. I think of this as “free outreach” — there is no cost to the orchestra when its musicians teach private students or engage in any other musical activity, but the entire community is enhanced by the quality of that teaching or musical activity. At the end of the survey we mapped the states (and countries) where the educational efforts took place. We came up with astonishing numbers: NSO musicians taught over 38,000 students in 44 states and 14 countries. That’s just in one season!

Click here to view a PDF file of the study. [Moderator’s note: The file is ~700K and may be too big for some dial-up modem users to open.]

We highlighted the breadth of our activity in the community, the country, the world. It’s impressive. Yet…did more dollars flow to the institution? Did we sell more tickets? Do people in our city assign a higher value to our institution? I think they would realize the true value of the NSO if the orchestra disbanded tomorrow, because there would suddenly be a dearth of teachers at all levels, from elementary schools to youth orchestras to universities. There would be fewer chamber music concerts, fewer performances in churches, fewer recitals — in short, the music scene in Washington DC would be substantially poorer. The same situation is true of any city with an orchestra.

Many orchestras in the country have been struggling with higher expenses and smaller audiences. We worry about future audiences because we know that schools don’t provide music education on a regular basis. We don’t want our art to die out, so we’ve responded with creative, innovative programs to educate our audiences, inspire students, and increase our relevance to all populations. But do our efforts translate into increased ticket sales? Are there studies that prove it?