The Future of Music in America: The Challenge of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

“But get me a musician.” And then, while the musician was playing, the power of the Lord came upon him (2 Kings 3:15). This verse from the Old Testament describes how the prophet Elisha called on God to perform a miracle. There was a desperate need to fill a dry ravine with water. Music became the instrument of rescue, and the musician the giver of a new lease on life. The idea that music was in some measure a privileged means of communication, a bridge between the human and the divine, and thereby crucial to alleviating human distress through its capacity to bring forth the power of God, has never entirely vanished from our collective consciousness, despite the increased dominance of the secular over the sacred in Western history since the late eighteenth century. A case in point from the far more recent past can be found in H. G. Adler’s magisterial and exhaustive 1955 study, Theresienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of a Coerced Community. Adler, himself a survivor but not a musician, understood that performing music and listening to music in the camp by the incarcerated inmates, which had once “fulfilled a real need,” had become a “curse” when music making ceased to be voluntary and became subject to the sadistic whim and orders of the SS. But for a long stretch of time, concerts by inmates—Adler cites performances of music by Beethoven and Brahms by fellow prisoners—were “triumphs of pure morality over the adversity of an almost unbearable present.” Not because it was a means to an end (e.g., water), but music alone elicited the capacity for hope and goodness—theologically speaking, gifts of the divine located in the biblical account of creation. They were brought forth by the playing and hearing of music. A renewal of faith in this theological image and in the justification of music as indispensable to life and therefore hope and survival in dark and difficult times would be welcome as each of us struggles with isolation, fear, and danger during the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This editorial is being written in July 2020, some five months into the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world beginning in the winter. Of all the places hit hard by the coronavirus, the United States has seen the highest number of cases and deaths, disproportionately among the poor and the non-white population, and has exhibited startling incompetence and confusion, led by an ill-prepared, mendacious, and irresponsible Federal Government. The United States has been hampered by its inadequate and discriminatory healthcare system, the evisceration of long-established resources in scientific and medical expertise, and a public health system dominated by private enterprise. To make matters worse, the pandemic occurred while the nation and its public institutions were paralyzed by a polarized political and cultural environment, in which fragmented extremist fantasies and conspiracy theories that undermine science have flourished within the population, pitting citizens against one another and depressing any shared sense of a common cause. Public life and therefore public culture were abruptly shut down in America, as they were all over the world. The response in the United States, however, was not uniform, thereby prolonging the agony. Music making along with all manner of public events and rituals were casualties. I remember vividly canceling, on March 12, 2020, after the dress rehearsal on the day of the concert, an all-Duke Ellington program at Carnegie Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra and the pianist Marcus Roberts and his ensemble. Every musician on stage realized that something unprecedented in their lives was happening. We understood, as all venues closed and the rest of the 2020 season in New York was canceled, that it was, at best, uncertain not only when the normalcy to which we had been accustomed would return, but also whether something akin to the past would ever resume. And if it would not, what would the future hold. Outside of the United States, for the public sphere that includes sports, religious observance, recreation, and the amateur and professional world of theater, dance, and music, one can reasonably expect that the interruption, no matter how long, will be temporary. The pandemic may leave few long-term residues and scars with respect to the performing arts in Europe and Asia. The governments on the European continent, and in Asia as well, seem prepared to restore institutional subsidies, sustain the livelihoods of artists, and resume programs of education in the performing arts, particularly in the concert, opera, and chamber music tradition of music. In these cultures, the shared acoustic experience in real time and space, for the listener, the performer, and the composer, is highly prized and deemed indispensable. The concert halls and orchestras of Europe and Asia are springing back to life, and gradually, over time, and with a sense of security that the danger has passed, with or without a vaccine, the public will return and feel comfortable sitting closer than six feet from one another in a full house. Choral singing, in places of worship and in concert, will ultimately resume. But that optimistic prediction cannot extend to post-pandemic America. There is no meaningful government support for the arts. With the exception of the mid-1930s, there is no significant tradition of such public sector support. And there is little if any political appetite or prospect for such support. The political mood, so different from the one that supported the New Deal after the Great Depression, shows no inclination to give the arts and artists priority. In the field of concert music and opera, the American scene has been dependent on private philanthropy. This trend was visible already in the late 1950s, when economists (notably W. G. Bowen and W. J. Baumol) predicted that earned income, particularly ticket income, would be a declining factor in meeting future costs, no matter how large the halls might be. There was no way that ticket prices could meet the costs of an inflexible need for personnel and there were no avenues for economic efficiency. The arts, luckily, were then still minor but visible factors in the Cold War, a fact that gave rise to a fleeting flirtation with some brief increase in private and public interest in music and dance. In his 1959 trip to the United States, Nikita Khrushchev expressed his confidence in Communism as superior to capitalism, in part referring to the arts. He noted with evident sarcasm that in the United States, “your theaters subsist solely on the handouts of wealthy people,” whereas under Soviet Communism, high art and culture were supported by the state in order that the great traditions of the performing arts—ballet, opera, and concert music—might become accessible, much like the treasures in an art museum, to every citizen. Even though ticket prices have risen steadily, the economic condition of orchestras and opera companies has worsened during the past sixty years. As has been noted in these pages in past issues, the generation of wealthy American patrons committed to the civic importance of concerts, orchestras, and opera companies is dying out. The attention of the exceptionally wealthy is now focused on other worthy causes, from social justice to the environment, and in the arts, to contemporary visual art and genres within popular commercial culture. The predecessors of today’s popular arts once lacked the sufficient intellectual and social prestige to attract the investment of the superrich; their descendants do not. Therefore, the pandemic of 2020 hit when the traditions of musical culture of concert and operatic life in the United States have already been weakened by the erosion of philanthropy and the sustained absence of support from public funds. But that reveals only one aspect of the predicament. Since 2000, adult attendance at concerts and opera performances in the United States has steadily declined. And the audience that has continued to attend is getting older and dying out. The fact that the age cohort most at risk in the 2020 pandemic represents the core audience for classical music is a perverse form of poetic justice. Skeptical readers should take a look at a YouTube video of a recital at New York’s Alice Tully Hall by David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter from 1970. Shots of the audience reveal not much gray hair. It is astonishing how young the audience was, by comparison to today. Likewise, when the late Beverly Sills finally made her debut in 1975 at the Metropolitan Opera, in Rossini’s Siege of Corinth, all tickets were sold within hours, almost a year before the event. Yet lines of eager fans gathered early in the day of the first performance in the remote hope of getting in. No doubt the fact that Sills was a hometown favorite, and a star not only on the stage but on radio and television, helped. But no classical artist or opera singer now attracts this kind of public attention, devotion, and enthusiasm. Selling out Carnegie Hall or Geffen Hall in New York, even at the last moment, has become a rare event. The half-life of superstardom in classical music gets shorter and shorter. What dwindling audience existed before the pandemic will come back, if at all, only hesitantly. Not only will many still suffer from fear of getting ill with an infectious disease, but some will have gotten used to the ease and comfort of enjoying music using the most modern technology. A forerunner of this dynamic—a romance with a novel technological surrogate to attending a live event—occurred with the development and distribution of the long-playing record and expensive high-fidelity equipment in the 1950s and 1960s. Before the 33 1/3 vinyl disk, the fragile 78’ record had become a popular item. But it functioned as an adjunct to concert life, a supplement to listening to live performances, either in person or on the radio. Recording supported the culture of concert attendance. By the mid-1960s, however, the balance shifted. More money was to be made by artists through recording than live performance. Recordings became more important. And one could readily imagine staying home, in a “surround-sound” context, with or without headphones, and listening to one’s favorite multi-phonic studio recording rather than going out and sitting, uncomfortably, in a concert hall. And the recording had the advantage of being error free, and possibly even “definitive” (that absurd but briefly alluring idea), making attending a live performance if not inferior then redundant, as a venerable colleague, a distinguished scientist, once confessed to me in the context of arguing that the career of a performing musician had been rendered obsolete. Today’s technological substitutes are the finely produced opera high-definition videos and the endless supply of Internet sites from which one can download and stream music. The pandemic has deepened the attachment to video and audio access to music at home. High-fidelity seems less important. We have learned how to take advantage of the ease of computer-based technology, and we can even make listening more personal, tailored to our tastes, and interactive. Consequently, musicians need, for the post-pandemic world, to emulate the way television drew (or stole) from radio. Radio survived, and perhaps concert life will too. Technology might very well play a distinct positive role in renewing the visual experience of live performance and the enjoyment of acoustic sound, and therefore the concert experience. At the same time, however, streaming live events and accessing recordings may become the rule for many music lovers. After the pandemic has passed, why not be content to watch performances at home, much like a soccer match or basketball game. In the world of sports, going out to the arena has been largely the province of healthy, energetic young people under thirty. They readily fill a stadium with tens of thousands of fanatical fans. There is no comparable young ambulatory audience in the United States for classical music or opera. So perhaps in post-pandemic circumstances, an opera will be performed on the Met stage, with the singers facing an empty, 3,800-seat hall, while the performance is watched by a global audience comfortably settled in the privacy of their homes. In that case, one needs only one or two performances, from which an HD video can be made. Individual viewers, most likely, eventually will be able to program their own visual angles so that they see what they wish. This will lessen the incentive to attend a live event. The prospect of further reduced public interest in music in post-pandemic America will, among other things, doom whatever remote prospect for public subsidy for concerts and opera may exist. And although there is a long and honorable tradition of Black American composers and performers, and a significant history of collaboration between jazz and classical music in the United States, most concert organizations, performers, opera companies, and symphony orchestras, prior to 2020, have ignored both and done pitifully little to draw in the non-white population of the nation to the concert and operatic traditions. Now that the country, spurred by the outrage at the killing of George Floyd and faced with a resilient and widespread Black Lives Matter movement, is possibly poised to confront, finally and concretely, centuries of oppression and racism against people of color, perhaps our musical institutions will rise to the challenge. But it might be too little and too late. The neglect of Black America within the world of classical music since the will to and sustain the world of and chamber music and opera in America. there any for positive in the fact that although the traditions of music from the sacred and secular of music in the may not ever and in the United States, and therefore significant public the survival and health of these traditions to and the of and to the of and to the of the the of music in theological of the between the human and the divine is power to give to each and of of and and seem from the and by Yet music is in a by each person and to one’s sense of and This is in part because music is by and of Therefore, music may be more to and as than most and making in its whether in a popular with or in an of music by a may have from but to Even if music is and performed by a of its the of audience and sacred music on more than one and is a sacred of In a one by highly and of and by and are and all a professional musician may be the province of a with but the of the musician in It is to and and is The making of music, particularly its performance in has of in times of and The role of music as a means of hope and in and oppression is not a And for a comparable experience to in contemporary life, we need an in our public culture in the United States that is not or in or and by the by and by of In the musical and many in Western cannot be as and the of political and and therefore without or to all over the world. and hearing music made in real time and space, in by its very between people and the of of and culture and the these factors in a manner to the of science and to popular has and as a common although is far more this religious faith in the need for and importance of our traditions of music, what is to be done to the 2020 pandemic from for future the and of music in American The in no order of are to be and are but and composers this and see it as an and not as a and the between this and a of is more to than and are two to what we but they need to be Music become We should not return to the concert with its of the of and the for that the popular music world. We need or global into opera play in our with a few or come to staying for a such is out the It the and for the musicians in any Since most of the concert scene is dominated by with of is and performances and It was not first before and then, in the orchestras particularly after Orchestra European in the the was and is not Internet and streaming give in the world a sense of what is going on out there and what the What is is and a sense of This a between and music making by from within the same in performance is far more when there is a between the and the the of in today’s is There is an distribution of musicians all over the orchestras can become first Music should live in the of their orchestras and be even when should also be from within the should chamber and young companies need to be more and as not only to but other means of the of the operatic in with in using and and the in but not we should the of professional and amateur particularly in music in the we to live in. the and all concerts, so that music for is more to the of life. The are as art have long We playing the same music from the The to and art in the history of music are us out of the image of music as from a This needs to be done and not as some as many orchestras have to Every concert and opera is located in some to a a and a There is no not to from these institutions to with the of and And contemporary music needs to have a and and performances, not performance needs to become from the concert and opera with the Internet and us give an to acoustic We need to perform in public from to to commercial and in and and on and in the and should be to in their to places they have never been and to from which few are to to attend our more than not from well before this and are therefore inflexible if not obsolete. the and of music to our public At the same time musicians need to more with all, musicians and should the of adult In all this we lessen the on We should people of all at all to take part in making music, from playing to and music. The concert be and We should playing concerts in the and without any between performer, composer, and the and after might on one and then after the should be brought in to the between stage and To do they the capacity to well in public and without to concert and concerts to which are welcome the program to be for should be of the concert and events will be more in after the pandemic. The concert experience should be for in a so that music might a on their sense of history and contemporary life. need to as and to the of music in the in which they no of worship that to have music should be without and the needs to institutions music the the and and listening without down to the be to other genres and of music, without well concerts or the performing of with their New music of all needs to be in this Music with video and with companies, and musicians should their with jazz musicians and Not all of this will But musicians and musical institutions in each and on a to a musical culture for all using with and can and support for music and in our social that we The and of in music will and so too the and of The of and by global and to some world of music making be Now that we can all to any and all manner and of music and performances from all over the world, us on our the public and social of we By to the in musical life we may the to emulate the prophet and for a musician to a comparable to the of for to the dry ravine which we now we the musician and us the power of the divine will as it should our

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.