It’s nice see that our premier orchestra – funded as they are by the Feds to the tune of a lazy $10 million or so – have been able to ensure that works composed by Australians edge out those composed by Hungarians (3%), Brazilians and Argentinians (both 2%), but it pales a bit in comparison with the volume of works composed by Russians (16%), French (19%) and Germans (24%).
Here are the results…could try harder!
The Australian Major Performing Arts Group has released its 10th survey of arts group funding and the finding are much as you’d expect:
No surprise, given the staff numbers involved, that the music related major performing groups underperform the overall average:
One thing which did strike me as unusual was the results for major arts groups based in Victoria:
As I discussed here, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra had a significant jump in its grant related income to total income ratio, going from 52% in 2009 to 57% in 2010. Given the size of the MSO grants ($13.7m in 2010) it’s hard to see how the average could be so low. There must be a bunch of Victorian arts organisations operating on the proverbial shoe-string.
Greg Sandow started an interesting conversational thread when he raised – in an interview with The Australian (here), the prospect that orchestras composed of young musicians might make up for a lack of polish with extra pizzazz. He’s expounded on this in various blogs (here, here and here) and elaborated on what he feels is a forgotten discipline, that of assessing the quality of an orchestra.
He highlights four key issues:
I thought it was interesting that Sandow has omitted to raise the issue of audience engagement. This in turn raises another interesting question…what is the point of an orchestra? They have a number of important functions, from preserving our musical and cultural traditions, to educating us, to providing a vehicle for modern composers to show their stuff. But when it’s all said and done, they are also here to entertain us , and there’s an objective that’s extremely easy to measure: ticket sales.
One of the problems of getting overly focussed on ticket sales and broad audience appeal is that its only a matter of time before you reach the point of skating rinks and light-classics-on-ice, the kind made famous by Voldemort. However, surely audience numbers and audience engagement need to be factored into an audience assessment process.
Sandow uses plenty of baseball analogies in his pieces, and here’s another one. Moneyball, a book by financial journalist and former Salomon Brothers trader Michael Lewis, is the story of a low-budget team (Oakland) building a winning record by buying cheap players who actually contribute to winning games (e.g. via a high on-base percentage) rather than expensive players who only appeared to be contributing to winning games (e.g. by home run production or stolen bases or golden glove defensive skills). This was made possible by a very precise mathematical understanding of the things in baseball which are well correlated with winning, compared with things which appear to be important but aren’t in fact all that well correlated with winning. So on this point perhaps Sandow is right – maybe we don’t really understand what makes a successful orchestra, and simply assume that artistic excellence, coupled with a few established international soloist, will do the trick.
As I’ve noted here previously (also here), orchestras around the country don’t do enough to promote the work of a) living composers, and b) Australian composers, and Vine obviously satisfies both tests. That said, the ASO doesn’t fare too badly on either score, with their 2011 program featuring 24% of pieces written by living composers, and 20% by Australian composers (contrast the Sydney SO – 8% and 6% respectively).
Microsymphony went over very well with the audience, as did the Shostakovich, but the star turn of the night was of course the Brahms Violin Concerto with Tasmin Little at the controls of her Stradivarius. This was a tremendous performance, as you’d probably expect, but what I didn’t expect was that she’d take half an hour out prior to the start of the concert to give the pre-match address, along with violinist Lachlan Bramble. I go along to these talks every chance I get, and have heard a range of
In her talk Tasmin mentioned her Naked Violin project, which provides free downloads of a number of violin works (including Bach and Ysaye) along with some commentary. It’s well worth a look. This is her contribution to spreading classical music to the masses, using digital channels and not charging a cent for it. As she said in her talk, she’s keen to prove that classical music doesn’t have to have such a narrow focus on people who are white, middle class and middle aged or older. A bit ironic as her audience was entirely composed of that demographic, but you can understand what she’s driving at.
A bunch of 2010 Annual Reports have turned up on various orchestral websites. Preliminary observations as follows:
As this chart shows, the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s funding model leaves every other orchestra in this part of the world in the shade:
As a small orchestra their costs are obviously much lower than many others (for example, in 2009 ACO’s total expenses were half Melbourne’s and a third of the SSO’s), so their need for grants is somewhat lower, but the real story is their success in generating ticket sales (2009: almost as much as Melbourne, and almost half of Sydney’s sales) and sponsorships. In regard to the latter, 2009 saw the ACO raise an impressive $4.6m, which was more than Sydney managed ($4.4m) and three times Melbourne’s effort ($1.4m – a fairly indifferent effort considering the range of big corporates headquartered there, along with plenty of well-to-do Melbourne families).
How does the ACO pull all this together? A great orchestra, a powerful board and a charismatic artistic director all contribute no doubt. As I’ve noted before, this also needs to be put in the context of a significantly more adventurous repertoire than the other orchestras hereabouts.
I’ve had another crack at the Repertoire Safety Index, this time taking as much of the orchestras’ repertoire as possible into account, not just the flagship series. The results haven’t changed too much – strong showings from the ACO, ASO and NZSO, with Melbourne and (especially) Sydney underperforming the average by a wide berth:
I’ve also taken the opportunity to update the “Live Music factor” (proportion of repertoire composed by people who are still alive) and a “Local Composers” score showing what proportion of repertoire was composed by Australians (or Kiwis in the case of the NZSO):
Given the amount of grant money these orchestras get each year, you might be excused for thinking that these numbers aren’t good enough. Surely the Sydney Orchestra can manage to schedule Australian works at a rate slightly above 1 in 20.
Does the Arts Council bring any pressure to bear in this area, when it comes time to allocating their grant monies? One of their strategic objectives is:
How does the overwhelming quantity of old European masterpieces help to meet this objective?
Alex Ross makes an interesting observation in Listen to This about the decline in the amount of music in orchestral repertoire which was composed by people still alive at the time they were played. Here’s how the numbers stack up for our local orchestras:
A bit dispiriting to see our “flagship” orchestras trailing the pack on this indicator.
