David Zinman joins Baltimore picket line

David Rohde says:

While I appreciate your passion, remarks such as “a scary reflection of what our culture has become” and “throwing away paintings” and so on are not going to solve anyone’s problems. Please understand that I’m not criticizing you personally at all. These finger-wagging sentiments are almost always just below the surface in the types of letters to the editor that have become redundant in the Baltimore situation. See my comment in the thread that runs below the previous post “Detroit Musicians Attack Baltimore Distortions” for the type of letter from a concert attendee (I would love it if BSO musician advocates would stop using the word “patron”) that I think would be far more valuable.

What I can do constructively is to elaborate on this very apt statement of yours: “Obviously the people that can afford to support the arts simply are not being convinced to do so. It certainly in this case is not because the art in question is not of superb quality.” I really can’t speak to the class of potential major donors in Baltimore, but I do know a little something about how people generate very substantial wealth in the Washington metropolitan area, which by the way is more of a high-tech center than many people realize. And remember, the BSO is also a Washington institution – it generally performs once a week at its second home at Strathmore in the Maryland suburbs of D.C.

Clearly there’s the national trend, often remarked upon in general-interest publications, that today’s newly minted gazillionaires have a different orientation to the kinds of projects and institutions they want to fund than past industrialists and real estate moguls. But more specifically, I strongly suspect that newly wealthy people in the Washington area, especially some relatively younger ones, simply do not have the cultural reference point within their circle of long-standing friends of any experience of attending classical music concerts. Thus, the idea of supporting the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra comes across to them as a wholly theoretical proposition that doesn’t touch any particular virtue-signaling bone.

This is exactly why I consistently advocate for the absolute primacy of putting fannies in the seats over the constant redundant language that every actual and potential concert-goer is subjected to about donations (especially the fatal phrase “ticket prices only cover a fraction of our costs,” which NEVER should be uttered during the course of any musical event that’s not explicitly a fund-raiser). You never know what the social and cultural benefits are of simply getting somebody into the concert hall in exchange for any size ticket price, since I think “free” seats somewhat degrade this benefit. I wasn’t a fly on the wall when Mr. Meyerhoff talked to supposedly two dozen potential big donors in an effort to stave off this crisis, and they all turned him down. But I can imagine how some of the conversations might have gone. I bet that some of what I’m talking about came into play.