How old is our audience? (And do we care?)

Sarah and I have both written before about the seemingly intractable debate over the health of classical music in our pop culture-obsessed society. While I doubt the two of us agree on every facet of the issue, and both of us would like to see some changes in the way orchestras, in particular, present themselves, I think it's safe to say that neither of us buys into the idea that classical music is dying. There's just too much data that shows otherwise to be ignored, regardless of the anecdotal evidence to the contrary pumped out continuously by the likes of Norman Lebrecht.

Still, much of the argument has to be anecdotal, simply because we don't have enough historical data to measure modern realities against past eras, and those who believe fervently that classical music is in serious danger are always on the lookout for old numbers that support their thesis. One of the most dogged pursuers of historical orchestra data is journalist/composer/blogger Greg Sandow, who has been sounding the alarm about what he sees as an unmistakable decline in public interest for years now. Now, I consider Greg a friend of mine, and I have a lot of respect for the work that he and his wife (New York Times-turned-Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette) have done in the field of music criticism. I happen to disagree with much of what Greg writes on the subject of the overall health of the field (much of my opposition stems from my belief that he is one of those New Yorkers who see the New York scene as either a microcosm of the national and international scene, or as the only scene that really matters, and that he therefore writes from a perspective informed almost exclusively by what he sees from his front stoop,) but I can't deny that he frequently brings up fascinating side discussions, and supports his theses far better than many others on his side of the debate.

Greg's latest salvo is a continuation of a topic he's taken up in the past - his belief that American orchestra audiences were not always as, ahem, mature (read: old) as they are today. This runs counter to the conventional wisdom within the industry, which says that Americans have always gravitated to classical music as they age, and that the abundant presence of gray hair in many concert halls shouldn't be a concern. In the past, Greg has come up with some extremely limited data suggesting that audiences in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s may have sported a younger median age, but has been stymied by a lack of much available hard data from the era.

Now, with the help of the Minnesota Orchestra's own PR and archive staff, Greg has accessed a decades-old study showing that 55% of our orchestra's audience in 1955 was 35 or younger. The study also has some fascinating breakdowns of where concertgoers of various ages and income levels sat at the shows they attended, and even offers up some advice for the orchestra's PR staff of the era on how to attract even more young ticketbuyers.

This is fascinating reading to anyone who cares about the business, and my belief that our future is not, on the whole, in danger doesn't mean that I dismiss out of hand the idea that our audience may be aging or that we should be concerned about this. But I do see one significant piece of data missing from Greg's analysis (and here again, I think we may be seeing the New York-as-microcosm worldview coming into play.) Nowhere does Greg tell us what the median age of our audience in Minneapolis is now! Now, I'm not sure we even have that information available (I'm guessing we don't,) but Greg doesn't even suggest that he asked for it. If he didn't, I'll bet I know why. Go to a New York Philharmonic concert these days, or a Philadelphia Orchestra concert, or a Boston Symphony concert, or just about anything classical at New York's Carnegie Hall, and you will see a virtual sea of elderly faces in the seats. So it's natural that Greg would assume, from his home in Manhattan, that things are the same everywhere. And from my perch in Minneapolis, I confess that I don't get to many concerts elsewhere in the US, so I'm even prepared to suppose that Greg has seen this phenomenon in other American cities as well.

But here's the thing: what's true in New York just isn't true in Minneapolis. I don't know what the median age of our crowd is in 2007. But I know that I look out every week from the stage at Orchestra Hall and see a wildly diverse crowd, age-wise. We have some elderly fans, yes, but we also have a ton of under-35s, a large college crowd, and even (and this is perhaps the biggest shock) a lot of baby boomers, the very demographic we had supposedly lost for good to the classic rock genre decades ago. With the exception of our morning matinees, which are aimed directly at older listeners who prefer daytime concerts, I'm prepared to stipulate that our average crowd has as many under-40s as it does over-65s.

Assuming I'm right (and you don't have to grant that - even if I'm wrong about the specific numbers, there's still no disputing that our crowd is far younger than the ones I see at orchestra concerts in the Northeast every year,) there are two possible conclusions to be drawn. One is that Minneapolis is a completely unique orchestral oasis with no relation to the larger national scene, and therefore, a study of our audiences from any era is in no way useful in assessing the national health of the industry. I find this scenario unlikely.

The second possibility is that orchestras and their audiences vary widely from city to city (this is a big country, after all, and cultural interests in, say, Miami, couldn't be more different from those in Detroit or L.A.,) and that any snapshot of an audience in one city, during one specific year, is simply not instructive on a national level. Are the Minneapolis numbers instructive as to the demographics of our orchestra? Absolutely. Do they have anything at all to do with orchestral demographics in Washington, San Francisco, or Phoenix? I suspect not.