Just for Grandmothers

Mike Gibson's story about the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra ["Suite Success," Vol. 7, No. 46] talks about only part of the factors which should influence the institution of the symphony orchestra. Watching the bottom line and pleasing a blue-haired audience are only two of an orchestra's task masters. There are actually five forces that a good orchestra manager should satisfy, but given a market-driven culture that most managers come from and the business acumen of most orchestra boards, the bottom line and the immediate ticket buyer always get the attention.

When these two factors dominate, there really isn't much difference between the orchestra and the "recording artist," the oxymoron in the pop music business, who cranks out formularized (sic) commercial products that only rarely approach art.

Obviously an orchestra that is always in the red doesn't survive, but there is a critical difference between operating under sound principles and abandoning the broad purpose of a symphony orchestra just to satisfy the bottom line.

Kirk Trevor should be commissioning new music for the KSO because one of the functions of an orchestra is to serve the institution of music to keep it a living organism rather than an acoustical museum for the dead and the dying. Maybe Trevor hasn't always made the best choices, but there is also the prevailing attitude in the KSO's audience that unfamiliar means unlikable. Anyone who reads the News-Sentinel's reviews can see that the local ears haven't come to terms with the turn of the century—the 20th, not to mention the 21st.

An orchestra is also as much about the musicians as it is about the audience. No musicians, no music! Live performances are never as "perfect" as the snippet-edited conglomerations of much-recorded classical music. On the other hand, recordings seldom have the energy that makes live music addicting. That requires good musicians, and certainly while playing for good musicians is part of the task, so is playing music that stimulates and interests them.

The orchestra also has an obligation to the community. Mostly that means serving as one of the community's symbols. Look how much money the state of Tennessee is putting out to have its name on a football team. If Knoxville wants to be a community that embraces the future as well as protects our heritage, supporting an orchestra that reaches both directions is part of it. If the orchestra never plays music written in the same century as the kids in the schools where the orchestra performs, the kids are entitled to think that the orchestra really is just for their grandmothers.

Harold Duckett
Knoxville