Wrapping Up The Season

In general, I'm not much for generation gaps. I mean to say, I don't actually believe that they exist, or at least that they're anywhere near as stark and divisive as some in the media like to make them out to be. If you believe what you read in what used to be called "the papers," nearly everyone over 50 loves Hillary Clinton, Paul Harvey, and Susan Stamberg, and either hates or ignores Barack Obama, Ira Glass, and anything remotely connected with the internet. The bulk of Americans my age (early 30s) are supposedly the exact opposite. (Both of these characterizations can, of course, be generally disproven by a quick sampling of people you know personally.)

Whether more than a handful of people in either camp actually fall into these absurd pigeonholes seems to have become almost irrelevant in an age when he who screams loudest on the cable news channels wins every argument. Want to prove that aging newspaper writers are all terrified of the internet? Spend a few minutes watching respected author/sports journalist Buzz Bissinger go absolutely stark raving mad on HBO when confronted with a sports blogger, live and in person. Want to demonstrate that young people today are mindless, sex-crazed, violence-addicted terrors who cannot be allowed to inherit our carefully constructed society? String together a few scaremongering "your children at risk" stories about Grand Theft Auto and Miley Cyrus, and you've got yourself a gripping (if almost completely factually indefensible) model.

In the classical music world, older listeners are supposedly conservative in their tastes, terrified of any sort of change in the concert hall (think lighting effects, video screens, or musicians wearing something other than white tie and tails,) and dead set against any piece of music composed later than 1928. Younger listeners are... well, there are no younger listeners of classical music. Nope, none. (None that matter, anyway.) Just ask any of the thousands of commentators who've been proclaiming the death of orchestras for most of the last century.

Way back in January 2007, Sarah and I did our first show together at Orchestra Hall - a free preview concert for invited attendees of the old Casual Classics series whom our marketing department was hoping to convince to stick around after the impending departure of longtime series host/conductor David Alan Miller. At that show, which focused on Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, we distributed a ridiculously detailed survey asking for audience feedback on everything from the start time of the concert to the food available in the lobby to the performance of the host (me.) The idea, as I understand it, was to identify trends in the evolution of the audience and try to predict, as best we could, who might enjoy the new series, and who we shouldn't bother spending a lot of money trying to attract.

My impression is that our marketing department got a lot of useful information out of that survey. What I got out of it was an overwhelming impression that, while a lot of people my age had enjoyed the concert, everyone over the age of 60 hated me and hated the show. (I should have known better than to look at the survey results at all, but when the information is right there in front of you, it's awfully tempting...) I knew the show had been far from perfect, (Sarah and I had literally just met; I had never before been asked to carry an entire half of a concert from the front of the stage; and to judge from the recording I have of the show, I spent most of the first half speaking at a words-per-minute rate that would have put the Micro Machines guy to shame,) but I was still floored to discover that I was such a generationally polarizing figure. (Sarah, it should be said, was popular with young and old alike.)

As we headed into this season, it was clear that there was an expectation that Sarah and I would be playing largely to an audience closer to our own age than to that of the stereotypical (and largely fictional) septuagenarian classical music fan. Whether such an audience actually existed for us to entertain was anyone's guess, and I found myself wondering, for the first time, whether my long-held conviction that a person's physical age is not indicative of his/her tastes was wrong. So I was relieved, at our first Inside the Classics concert in November, to see a lot of familiar faces, young and old, in the crowd. It appeared that, survey or no, the Casual Classics crowd was at least willing to give us a second chance. Still, I was holding my breath when we asked for feedback from anyone who wanted to give it at the end of each show.

I won't bother going through all of the response, positive and negative, that we've received through mail, phone calls to the box office, e-mail, and blog comments over the course of the season. If you've read through our After Hours posts, you've got a pretty good impression of the overall response we received. There's no question that the direction Sarah and I have chosen to take these concerts has alienated a few scattered people (after that first November show, we received one memorably acerbic communique from a gentleman who was so incensed by the concert that he had torn our program page from his copy of Showcase and scrawled his various objections across it before mailing it to the two of us and to Osmo,) but we've been overwhelmed by the warmth and encouragement shown to us by so many of you.

More importantly, I've been thrilled to look out into the audience each and every night that we've been out there and see a ridiculously wide range of ages. There are kids and parents, teenagers and octogenarians, baby boomers and Gen Yers packed into the hall for these concerts. And while I know that not every one of them always walks out the door 100% happy at the end of our shows, I realized this weekend that I've begun taking a quiet pride in the generational diversity of our crowd. This afternoon, when I was leaving the hall after having played a pops show with the eminent flutist James Galway, an older gentleman called out to me as I was crossing Marquette Avenue. (Not that old, I should stress. His hair was white, but he looked to be in far better physical condition than I am...) "Love Inside the Classics!" he said. "Really looking forward to next year!" As I thanked him for coming, I put another quiet mental checkmark in my scorecard of conventional wisdom vs. reality.

We spent a lot of this first Inside the Classics season poking and prodding at both audience and orchestra, trying to get a handle on what sort of ideas we could reasonably expect to work in performance, and which ones were either too clever for their own good, or not in the least clever in the first place. You all have been very patient with us, and I wanted to be sure to thank you for it. I can't promise that we've worked out all the kinks, or that we'll never leave you wondering what we were thinking at some theoretical future show, but I do know that I'm having a great time getting to know our audience, in all its multi-generational glory.

My favorite Minneapolis theater troupe, Theatre de la Jeune Lune, had a sentence in the program book for their last show, Fishtank, which I think nicely describes our creative process as well: "Free as cows at pasture, we roamed the rehearsal room looking for a fence so that we could wonder what's beyond." After three shows and countless conversations with both ourselves and our audience, I feel like we're starting to see the fence. What's beyond should be fun to discover...