With the Internet Revolution moving at warp speed, the classical music industry has come to realize that adapting to rapid shifts in technology and the new ideas, possibilities and opportunities such shifts have brought about can only be good for business. It may also be good for art. Certainly it could be a revitalizing force for a branch of music some doomsayers once earmarked for extinction.
How best to use this plethora of technology? Aye, that is the rub confronting symphony orchestras, opera companies, marketing and development departments, composers, performers and presenters as they ponder how a centuries-old art form can learn to dance to a new cyber-beat. Many arts people aren’t afraid to admit they are challenged. “The technology is moving so fast that it is not easy to keep up with it,” admits Chicago Symphony Orchestra President Henry Fogel.
Faced with the problem of replacing today’s graying, aging audiences with young, involved listeners, classical marketers are finding the Web an effective means of attracting the latter demographic on its own turf. “The Internet holds the key to developing new audiences for classical music,” says Jean Oelrich, public relations director of the Ravinia Festival. “It provides arts organizations with the opportunity to pique people’s interest, enhance their musical knowledge and develop relationships with customers in a way they never could before.” Indeed, thousands of classical music presenters nationwide already maintain Web sites expressly to encourage Internauts to see what they are doing, attract new audiences and potential donors, and have them learn about their educational efforts. Orchestras have embraced the Net at an astounding rate. To date nearly 400 U.S. orchestras are on-line, roughly twice as many as in 1997. And the number is growing exponentially.
Click on the CSO’s Web site (www.chicagosymphony.org) and you can access a complete schedule of performances at Symphony Center, order tickets on-line, make donations, learn about the orchestra’s history, read biographies of players and music directors, and even find a link to music director Daniel Barenboim’s Web site. According to Jane Quinn, CSO vice president for marketing and communications, the site is being expanded this year “to add more texture to the concertgoing experience and provide new perspectives to customer knowledge of the CSO.” The Ravinia Festival was one of the first major arts institutions to set foot in cyberspace, having launched its Web site, www.ravinia.org, in 1995. Ravinia does the CSO one better by offering on-line program notes and e-mail newsletters; it also features a Cyber Club including discount ticket sales, contests and promotions. Ravinia is unique among the leading U.S. festivals in offering patron information in seven languages (in addition to English) as a hook for international visitors. Oelrich projects that e-commerce orders will account for 25 percent of this summer’s ticket sales, a hefty leap from 1.7 percent in 1996. Last year, 1.4 million people visited the Ravinia Web site.
Thus far, neither the CSO nor Ravinia has made the plunge into live Internet broadcasting, but that day could be sooner than you think. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra gave Net trekkies a peek into the cyber-future Feb. 13 when it presented a live Internet broadcast, in reportedly high-quality audio, of composer-in-residence Lowell Liebermann’s brand-new Symphony No. 2. The stumbling block is that U.S. orchestras presently have no industry-wide agreement how to handle Webcasts of live concerts, although discussions are going on at the national level.
Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra and a self-confessed “Internet-jazz fanatic,” believes orchestras can use the Internet to increase their visibility as well as insure their performances will reach a wider public. “I would love it if they said, ‘We’re going to tape everything for potential Internet use.’ If a new piece or performance turns out to be really spectacular, people [can] have immediate access anywhere in the world,” he said on a recent edition of ABC-TV’s “Nightline” program. Rather than cut into concert hall attendance, Web music could actually boost it, he suggested.
Last June brought the first opera to be broadcast live over the Internet –Verdi’s “Aida,” from the Verona Festival in Italy. The sound was low-fi, the images dark and tiny, the singers’ movements jerky. But IBM, which made the broadcast available to on-line users, estimated that 50,000 to 100,000 people clicked on to the Web site. David Gockley, general director of the Houston Grand Opera, hails cybercasting as the wave of the future. “The Internet will no doubt become the main delivery system for in-home fine arts performances,” he says. “American producers, artists and unions need to wake up and make sure we can capture our share of the action.”
Given the fact that almost every U.S. citizen under 25 is a native of cyberspace, it seems likely that future audiences could receive their first exposure to classical music via the Internet. Indeed, as more and more public schools go on-line, and classroom use of Web resources becomes more commonplace, the Web’s vast potential as an educational and cultural tool can begin to be realized. Think of it: a frame of reference shaped entirely by the information age, where millions of Web sites and thousands of cable channels can be accessed by the click of a mouse.
On the creative end, there is no limit to what classical composers can write today: stylistically the field is wide open, and pieces that combine computer-generated sounds with acoustical instruments abound. Cyber-savvy composers create symphonies and string quartets on their PCs with the help of sophisticated graphic notation software. The only thing computers cannot (and should not) do is supply the musical inspiration.
But even this could change if other orchestras develop interactive music-learning facilities like the Chicago Symphony’s ECHO. Designed to make music accessible to everyone, this unique, high-tech learning lab allows visitors to record their own music on “instrument boxes” that activate touch screens and interactive software. The box is then attached to ECHO’s Orchestra Wall and plays the music they and previous visitors have created. Voila! Everyone’s a composer.
There remains one other E-resource that could prove an incalculable boon to classical music once the kinks are ironed out: Web radio. Once largely the domain of pop and rock, Web radio is attracting an increasing number of classical music fans. While the number of classical music buffs who seek daily fixes of Bach and Bartok on the Net is miniscule compared to the hordes of pop fans who download Springsteen and Madonna by the cyber-bushel, it is growing. And that represents a major opportunity for classical radio, which is dead or dying in many U.S. markets.
Among the nation’s 200 Internet-only radio sites is the Minneapolis-based Netradio.com, which broadcasts 120 channels, eight of them classical. Netradio.com uses “streaming” technology which allows audio signals to be sent in a continuous wave through the sound equipment attached to a user’s PC. The listener can access channels devoted exclusively to piano, symphonies, Gregorian chant, chamber music, a “Maestro” channel, and so forth, or he can program a personal mix of any or all these channels every hour. He can purchase a classical piece he loves just by pushing a button next to the title on the screen.
“This type of broadcasting has a particular audience that has never been adequately served before,” says Bill Parker, classical music manager for Netradio.com. Despite his optimism — Netradio.com attracts 300,000-400,000 on-line listeners each month and is growing — a substantial portion of those who listen from their offices or home computers would appear to seek nothing more than a middlebrow alternative to Muzak: Netradio.com’s top-rated classical site is “Quiet Classics.” And until wireless communications develop further, Web radio listeners essentially will be chained to their PCs or laptops — most of which do not deliver the sound quality of a home stereo system.
But, as the sage once said, man must toddle before he can walk. The classical music industry, and consumers of that music, can and will learn how to use present and future Net resources more efficiently, boldly and creatively. In the best of all possible tech-driven worlds, the universal appeal of classical music — which leaps across cultural, linguistic, geographic and political boundaries — can only be advanced through the pervasiveness of the Internet. One prediction is for certain. As our plugged-in millennium advances, we will not be hearing the same music in the same way again.
