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NASHVILLE -- Nearly 1,400 members of the American Symphony Orchestra League are here in "music City" for the organization’s annual convention, looking for fresh ways to bolster the future.
They got some advice from Baltimore Symphony Orchestra music director Marin Alsop in a keynote address delivered yesterday in one of Nashville’s prized venues, Ryman Auditorium, the 1893 former worship hall that became the first home of the Grand Old Opry. (Minnie Pearl is still remembered there with a statue in the lobby and vintage photographs in the dressing room backstage.)
Alsop spoke without notes (and with few breaths) for 25 snappy minutes to the Grand Old Symph’y crowd, asking the delegates to "abandon stereotypic thinking," to acknowledge that orchestras "cannot be all things to all people and we should stop trying to be," and to develop a sense of humor. "Let’s have fun; let’s start to enjoy what we do," the conductor said to a round of applause.
Alsop also plugged several initiatives at the BSO, including the Beethoven symphony cycle next season that will be matched with contemporary works, the $25-at-ticket subscription deal that has heated up the box office, and her hope to start a BSO mentoring program that could get instruments into the hands of city kids. (She did admit that she first felt isolated when she began to study violin. "I had to stay in the closet -- as a violinist," she said, generating laughs. "You had no friends at all. That wasn’t fun." But she soon discovered that "music leads to interaction.")
Addressing attitudes in the orchestral business, Alsop said, "The days of ‘if we play it they will come’ are over, gone, forget it." She also asked orchestras to stop hiding new music and promote it instead. The same for less popular established composers like Bartok, who was the subject of a recent festival with her other BSO, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in England. "Talk about box office death," she said to laughter. "The only thing worse would be a Hindemith festival." All that Bartok music did not set attendance records, she said, but "people were so engaged."
Alsop warned about malaise among orchestra musicians, brought on by routine programming, and suggested that it needed to be faced and discussed, so that ways could be found to rekindle the passion for music-making.
One eyebrow-raising suggestion Alsop made was for music directors to spend up to 25 weeks a season with their orchestras, rather than the more typical 16 or 17.
Alsop’s primary message, which she expressed recently in Baltimore, was that this is a time of great potential for classical music, not a time to be despairing. "I’ve been accused of being an optimist," she said. "How is that possible? I’m a woman conductor." More laughter.
In a marketing-driven, business-plan-obsessing age, Alsop scored her strongest point at the end of her speech: "Let the music lead every decision you make, and you can never go wrong."
Preceding Alsop’s remarks in Wednesday’s opening session were remarks from several others, including the startlingly articulate, incisive and inspiring mayor of Nashville, Bill Purcell, and country music stars Amy Grant and Vince Gill. Grant and Gill are big supporters of the Nashville Symphony. Grant’s fund-raising concerts for the then-struggling orchestra in the early 1990s "almost single-handedly wiped out the entire bankruptcy debt of the Nashville Symphony," president and CEO Alan Valentine told the convention.
"I can honestly say that the Nashville Symphony changed my life forever," Grant said. She met Gill when she invited him perform for one of those orchestra benefit concerts, and later married him.
