Musical America Blogs

by Keith Clarke

Attendances down 10 per cent, box office revenue down 6 per cent. That’s the stark news from the Society of London Theatre, comparing the first quarter of this year with the same period in 2010. It is hardly surprising. Everyone has been talking about the financial storm coming our way, but so far it has been a bit of a phony war. Now it is getting a bit real. With gasoline prices at an all-time high, the cost of food essentials soaring, there is little doubt that people are feeling the pinch, and thinking twice before booking tickets for a show.

But show business has always thrived on the principle of unreasonable optimism. And when financial doldrums descend, people need entertaining all the more. One thing that changes in a recession is that people tend to make more last-minute bookings rather than planning ahead, which can be nerve racking for arts managers. But the never-say-die approach has seen us through dark days before, so let’s hope it works its magic this time round.

The West End certainly cannot be accused of not trying hard enough. Among its efforts to woo audiences is a live event in Trafalgar Square over two days next month. As the fountains splash and Lord Nelson looks down from his plinth, cast members from more than 20 shows will perform live, free of charge, to an expected crowd of half a million.

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A new report on copyright law has stopped short of recommending that the UK should follow the US model  of “fair use,” allowing limited use of copyright material without the need for permission from the copyright holders. But any step in the right direction is to be welcomed. At present it is illegal to copy a CD to an iPod, even if the owner has bought the CD. That means that many millions of us walking the streets with iPods are technically criminals. But police numbers are being cut at the moment, so it seems unlikely that there will be a sudden rush of bobbies to round us all up.

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It is brave of English National Opera to stage John Adams’s opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, even two decades after it was written. The murder of a disabled Jewish-American tourist by Palestinian terrorists was never going to offer the easiest subject matter, and certainly those 20 years have seen no lessening of Middle East tensions.

The piece was supposed to have first seen the light of day at the 1991 Glyndebourne Festival, the house having co-commissioned the work, along with five other institutions, including Brooklyn Academy of Music, but the leafy country opera house decided to drop it following complaints. It was left to La Monnaie in Brussels to mount the world premiere, with the Brooklyn Academy giving the first US performance.

It was understandable that Glyndebourne did not want its manicured lawns threatened by protest, but a little more controversy might do wonders for the company’s image. These days, the most heat being generated is over the house’s plans to build a wind turbine in the rolling English countryside.

by Cathy Barbash

Once acceptances and responses were issued and received by applicants and conservatories nation-wide, I decided to take an informal look at trend in numbers of Chinese musicians who auditioned at, who were accepted to, and who chose to enroll in American institutions. My hunches proved correct: applications, acceptances and enrollments of Chinese are increasing, but my research hinted at another story. I chose to contact a handful of institutions with which I had enough contacts that I expected responses. What I ultimately found more interesting than the musician statistics was that the willingness or lack thereof to share this information seemed like an indicator of the conservatory’s self-confidence and comfort with this issue.

Curtis Institute was happy to oblige with any information I requested. They had 97 PRC citizenship applicants this year, 7 of whom were accepted. That’s up from last year’s 82. Successful candidates this year included 2 clarinetists, 2 pianists, a violinist, a violist, and a singer. All accepted chose to attend. Curtis even shared the successful applicants’ teachers: mazel tov to Keith Lipson, a Curtis grad himself, who taught both clarinetists!

New England Conservatory of Music’s representative said: “The growth has been really striking and is, consequently, something we’re tracking closely. The number of applications (roughly 15-20), admission offers (roughly 8-12), and enrolled students (roughly 1-5) from China held fairly steady from 2002-2006.

Starting in 2007, application numbers began to increase noticeably and have continued to do so each year. For our most current application cycle (class entering fall 2011), we received 224 applications. This represents about 11 times the number of applications from China than we received in each of the years from 2002-2006.

This increase in the number of applications led to a higher number of admission offers and, ultimately, enrolled students. Last year (with the fall 2010 entering class), China became the country of origin of the second-highest number of entering students at NEC, only behind South Korea. Compared to 1-5 enrolled students in each of the years 2002-2006, we have commitments from 26 Chinese students to enroll in fall 2011.

In terms of the percentages:

– From 2002-2006, applicants from China generally represented just under 1% of our total applicant pool. This year, they represented 7.5% of our total applicant pool.

– Number of Chinese applications is up from 18 applicants in 2002 to 224 applicants in 2011, an increase of 1144%.

– As application numbers from China have increased, our acceptance rate has gone down. This is to be expected—a 58% acceptance rate among 18 applicants is not terribly surprising, but a 58% acceptance rate among 224 applicants would be very surprising! So while the acceptance rate in 2002 was 58%, this year it was 26%.

– The acceptance rate for Chinese applicants over the past five years has mirrored closely our overall acceptance rate for the total NEC applicant pool.

– Enrollment yields (the number of admitted students who choose to come): From 2002-2006, an average of 34% of accepted Chinese students chose to enroll, but the percent from year to year varied greatly because the number of students was so small that the decisions of one or two people would affect the percent dramatically. From 2007-2011, when we’ve had a larger pool of applicants so that the percentages are not dramatically affected by one or two students, our enrollment yield for Chinese applicants has averaged 40%. For the coming year, about 45% of admitted Chinese students have indicated that they will be enrolling at NEC in fall 2011. Note that numbers are for the fall 2011 application cycle but those numbers are not 100% final as they may see changes over the summer.”

Eastman told me that anecdotally they have seen a gradual increase in both applicants and enrolled students from China in recent years. They attribute this increase to ongoing recruitment efforts in the Far East (including regional auditions held in Asia) as well as alums who return to their home country and speak favorably about Eastman to the next generation of students. They apologized that unfortunately they were not authorized to provide specific numbers or percentages to outside parties.

At the other end of the spectrum, two institutions would not share data (I’ll leave my readers to guess who.) One of them replied: “ ________’s application, screening, and audition processes are modeled to encourage applicants from all nationalities. In view of this, we hesitate to break out numbers specifically for the People’s Republic of China; we do not want the publication of any apparent trends in Chinese applications — or those of any country — to be taken out of context or misinterpreted.”

Sounds like I hit a sore spot…

Of all the classical music awards ceremonies, the Royal Philharmonic Awards are easily the most valuable. They are also the glitziest, with a slap-up, black-tie dinner in London’s Dorchester Hotel where the entire British music establishment gathers to quaff champagne and roar approval. So why wasn’t I there on Tuesday night? Having quaffed and roared my way through the event for many a year, this time round I went to a piano recital instead.

What kind of piano recital could take precedence over the most prestigious awards event in the classical music calendar? A pretty unusual one, with 34 pianists going through their paces. One of the 34 was young Benedict Clarke, my 14-year-old son, fresh from gaining a distinction at his Grade 3 exam, and taking his place at the school piano alongside some of the other young musicians currently putting work into scales and arpeggios and two-minute pieces.

It is encouraging that at a time when we are led to believe that teenagers are mainly hooded thugs, snorting drugs and knocking little old ladies over the head, so many are still keen to discover the sheer joy of learning an instrument and making music.

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While the RPS Awards continue to get my medal for the Most Grown-Up Awards, at the other end of the scale the Classical Brits organizers have an important message for us: they are dropping the classical. As from this year, the event is to be known as the Classic Brit Awards. The show takes place tonight at the Royal Albert Hall, and for those who can take the sugar rush, it is broadcast on May 29.

Dropping classical is hardly surprising, since the organizers seemed embarrassed by the adjective right from the start. While the list of winners is usually a reasonable reflection of classical work in the recording world, the show itself has been a ghastly piece of lowest-common-denominator tat, everything heavily amplified, with the usual crowd pleasing combination of flashing lights, dry ice and saccharine presentation.

Over the years it has served its purpose – to get the cash registers ringing in record stores – but classical it is not.

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Back at the piano recital, one thing those youngsters may not realise is that by engaging in that miraculous combination of brain and fingers, they are upping their chances of remaining crisp in later years. A recent report from Chicago’s Northwestern University claims that learning a musical instrument boosts memory and helps keep hearing intact. It’s great news for those of us who have been plugging away at instruments all our lives – if only we can believe it. Do these findings mean that had I not started hitting the family piano aged five, my current senior moments would be even worse?

But I am encouraged by some fellow sufferers who have recognized that we veterans are increasingly getting our heads round texting and tweeting, and have helpfully devised a Senior Texting Code:

ATD – At The Doctor’s
BFF – Best Friend Fell
BTW – Bring The Wheelchair
BYOT – Bring Your Own Teeth
CBM – Covered By Medicare
CUATSC – See You At The Senior Center
FWB – Friend With Beta Blockers
FWIW – Forgot Where I Was
FYI – Found Your Insulin
GGPBL – Gotta Go, Pacemaker Battery Low!
GHA – Got Heartburn Again
HGBM – Had Good Bowel Movement
IMHO – Is My Hearing-Aid On?
LMDO – Laughing My Dentures Out
ROFL…CGU – Rolling On The Floor Laughing… And Can’t Get Up
TTYL – Talk To You Louder
WAITT – Who Am I Talking To?
LMGA – Lost My Glasses Again
GLKI – Gotta Go, Laxative Kicking In

By Cathy Barbash

Despite the continuing international outcry over the fate of the fat man and others, the Chinese government is plowing ahead with its efforts to promote and export what they it defines as Chinese culture. I’ve been invited to speak at the upcoming “International Conference on Promotion of Chinese Cultural Products,” a tag-team effort organized by the Ministry of Culture and its operating subsidiary, the China Arts and Entertainment Group. The week-long caravan will begin May 13 at the 7^th China International Cultural Industries Fair in Shenzhen, then heads north via Luoyang to Beijing. They have asked me to speak about marketing Chinese performing arts through international trade fairs (what we would call booking conferences). It is a speech I’ve given many times before, and I’d initially felt skeptical about its likely impact.

With today’s news of Lincoln Center’s signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Tianjin Innovative Finance Investment Company (TIFI) to provide a broad range of consulting services in connection with building a performing arts complex in Tianjin, I am somewhat more hopeful. The deal came about through classic China-side guanxi choreography (Lincoln Center’s chairman Katherine Farley, is a senior managing director of Tishman Speyer, which has an office in Tianjin), but has real promise. Though an MOU, as Ken Smith accurately describes in his article, may have a number of possible outcomes or non-outcomes, it appears that the Chinese beneficiaries of this engagement are more and more able to act on what they have learned.

Lincoln Center joins a list of other American cultural producer and venue-owner operators who have been active in China. The Kennedy Center has been teaching and hosting Chinese cultural officials since its 2005 Festival of China, and Michael Kaiser has spoken in China on several occasions. However, recent attempts on the part of Chinese cultural officials to create MOUs with the Kennedy Center appear to be sidetracked. (Though there will be a new smaller Festival of China presented there this coming fall.) More specialized American producing and consulting organizations have had greater success. Nederlander Worldwide has been consulting to Chinese developers and city governments for some years about developing Broadway-style theaters and content. AMS Planning and Research did a feasibility study for the Hong Kong-based Shui On Group for a new arts center in their Xintiandi development in Shanghai.

In recent years though, Lincoln Center has been building more China momentum, as they have become active in the training of Chinese culture workers on their home campuses. Last fall, the Ministry of Culture hosted Lincoln Center President Reynold Levy for a week of “getting to know you” activities and a major speech to Chinese cultural officials. (I heard it, it was terrific.) Thus this announcement feels like a logical next step. It is also a lesson in Chinese realpolitik. How many people remember the Lincoln Center Festival’s high profile battle with Chinese authorities over the Peony Pavilion production in 1998? All appears forgiven. What remains to be seen is how the MOU plays out, how the work evolves, and how really able or willing the Tianjin Innovative Finance Investment Company and local officials are to consider and implement Lincoln Center’s advice. I’m hoping for the best.