Finding an Audience

Greg Sandow

Some people might get angry at how I’m going to start this. But I don’t think that—on the whole—classical composition has been a very successful art form in the past few decades.

That doesn’t mean we’ve all written bad music. Of course I like the pieces I’ve written, and I’ve loved a vast variety of pieces by others. And of course there are composers who we’d say are wildly successful—Elliott Carter, John Corigliano, Philip Glass. Or make your own list.

But Philip Glass is the best demonstration of why I made my radical statement. He’s the only composer I’ve named with a presence outside classical music, the only one—to put it bluntly—with any real audience.

And no, I’m not making popularity the main measure of artistic success. Yes, Glass has a large audience. But you can thrive with a small one, like Jill Sobule, a sharp and wry singer-songwriter I like, who—in a move that’s become increasingly common in the pop world—raised money for her last album directly from her fans.

So the important thing isn’t the size of your audience. It’s whether your audience sustains you—financially, maybe, but also artistically. Most of us—most classical composers, I mean—hope to get grants, commissions, teaching jobs, awards, and performances by new music ensembles. That’s how we make our careers, and how we make a living.

But Jill Sobule doesn’t have any of that, and neither did Philip Glass, when he first started out. He formed his own ensemble, and found his own audience, largely, at first, among artists in other fields, especially visual artists.

And then in 1976, he had a breakthrough into wider fame, with performances of his first opera, Einstein on the Beach, at the Metropolitan Opera. Note, though, that he rented the opera house. I doubt anyone at the Met had any idea who he was. This was big. It was the only time, in my 40 years in the new music business, that I’ve seen a new classical piece become a major event for people outside classical music. If you were in New York in 1976, and you had any interest in the arts—or at least the downtown, edgy arts—you had to be there. And since the downtown, edgy arts were growing in strength, Einstein became a sensation.

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that Glass is a better composer than anyone else. But he’s the composer people know about—culturally aware people, I mean, people who read novels by John Updike or Ian McEwen, people who knew that Angels in America was a play that spoke to the meaning of our lives today. New classical music, very simply, has hardly any place in contemporary culture. Two summers ago, I saw Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater at the Santa Fe Opera, getting its American première. Santa Fe is an arty town, but Saariaho didn’t draw an arts audience. The people hearing her were a subset of the opera crowd. The performance didn’t rank as a contemporary art event, even in a city full of artists and contemporary art. So what can we do?

Things are changing. Younger classical musicians—including composers—are reconnecting with the outside world. Two years ago, I went to a performance of contemporary orchestral music in New York that drew 1,000 people on two successive nights. This was on a series called Wordless Music, which mixes classical music and indie rock. The draw that night was Popcorn Superhet Receiver, a piece by Jonny Greenwood, the lead guitarist in Radiohead.

But this wasn’t a crossover work, some weak blend of classical music and rock. It was a complex, happily dissonant piece for 34 solo strings, and the crowd roared for it, just as they roared for the music by Gavin Bryars and John Adams it was programmed with. I’ve also seen thousands of people show up in New York for the annual Bang on a Can marathons, presented free in an inviting public space. At 3:00 am, I’ve seen 600 people (by my approximate count) cheer an austere percussion piece by David Lang. And then line up, many of them, to buy CDs.

How can the rest of us find an audience like that?

As I said, times are changing. And one thing in our favor is that indie rock and new classical music are coming together. If you listen to Björk, it’s often hard to say, with some of her songs, why you’re not hearing a new classical piece. And many younger classical composers—certainly many in New York— no longer draw a line between pop and classical music. You hear, in their music, both their classical training, and the whole world of sound and rhythm opened up by pop.

But you can find an audience even if your music doesn’t work that way. You just have to look for one. If you had just 30 fans who loved you—and who’d support your music, the way Jill Sobule’s fans support her work—wouldn’t you be happy? Barriers to this: Most of us don’t believe this could happen. And we’re not oriented to look for it. But the tools for finding an audience are there, starting with everything you might do online, websites, Facebook, My Space, and so much more. First ask who, among people you know, might become committed fans. Tell them how they can support you. And then ask what kind of people, among those you don’t yet know, might love your work, and figure out how to find them.

I won’t say this is easy. And in fact it takes a lot of work. But it’s how the three Bang on a Can composers, Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, got started. They thought, many years ago, that people who went to small theater and dance performances might like their work, and they were right. From that, they built their great success. Why can’t all of us build something, too?