Category: opera

High And Low Culture: The Price of a Ticket

Published September 19, 2009 by cgerrish

verdi-tamagno

I’m a fan of the opera. And generally when I bring it up in normal conversation, I can see a barrier form. Opera is high art, high culture, expensive— it’s for rich people, old money preferred. There’s a very thick wall between most people and attending an opera. When examined from a monetary perspective, the results are quite interesting. Buying a single ticket (without a season’s subscription) to see an opera at the San Francisco Opera will cost you between $15 and $210. If you’d like to sit in a box seat, it’ll cost $275.

If you wanted to see the band U2 in a stadium this summer, a single ticket will set you back between $30 and $250. A Bruce Springsteen ticket will cost you between $29 and $89. Rock and Roll was originally considered low art, low culture— something on the fringe of popular culture. Through the 60s and 70s, it slowly moved to the mainstream of popular culture. Pop culture is abundantly distributed in multiple distribution formats, it’s on the radio and television. You can buy it on CD and MP3 download, and you can preview it on Lala.com or YouTube.com. The price of a ticket is related to the phenomena of scarcity. There are only so many performances, and a fixed number of seats available for each performance.

Of course, opera was popular entertainment and part of popular culture for many years. However now, more often than not, it’s used as a signal of class differential.

The barrier that some feel when approaching opera isn’t related to the ticket price. For a medium priced seat there’s no difference between grand opera and any other popular entertainment. It has to do with the distribution of the free part of opera. Popular music is sampled widely to create a demand for performances and sales of recordings. There’s a dynamic feedback loop between exposure to an art form and interest in an art form.

Many people find baseball boring because they don’t understand the nuances of the game. It seems like nothing happens for inning after inning. And then, there’s a quick flurry of activity, and then back to nothing. A single ticket to a baseball game falls into the same range as an opera or rock concert ticket. To see the Giants (for a premium game), your ticket will cost you between $25 and $135.

Baseball, rock music and opera all depend on their stars to draw and audience. For the San Francisco Giants, I might prefer going to a game where I know that Tim Lincecum is pitching and that Pablo Sandoval will be in the line up.

If I get to see these players, I know that my chances of seeing something spectacular are much higher. It’s that possibility of excitement combined with the scarcity of the performance and the limited number of seats that defines the value/price of the event.

Opera also depends on its stars to draw an audience, in particular, its divas. On Wednesday night, I attended a performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore (The Troubador) at San Francisco Opera. Looking at the line up card, I could see that there was the possibility of seeing something spectacular. Nicola Luisotti at Conductor, Burak Bilgili as Ferrando, Sondra Radvanosvsky as Leonora, Dmitri Hvorostovsky as the Count di Luna and the great Stephanie Blythe as Azucena. The team delivered, as the last note faded the crowd leapt to its feet shouting bravo and brava.

The grand opera is often thought of as a refined entertainment, an art form that considers the higher values of our culture. But Verdi’s Il Trovatore is nothing more than animal passion unleashed. A Count orders an old Gypsy woman to be burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft. The gypsy’s daughter steals the infant son of the Count and throws it into a fire. A revolutionary war revolves around the passion two men feel about the beautiful Leonora. The Count di Luna obsessed with Leonora will commit any war crime to possess her. The gypsy Azucena will do anything to exact revenge for the death of her mother. These forces are unleashed without limit within the narrative of the opera. It’s the women that drive the story forward: Leonora and the men who lust after her; and the gypsy Azucena and her single-minded obsession with revenge.

Performances not to missed: Sondra Radvanosksy as Leonora. Here she is singing an aria from Il Trovatore:

Mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe also delivers as Azucena. Here she is in concert, singing an aria from Bizet’s Carmen:

This evening baseball and opera will intersect at AT&T park. In cooperation with the San Francisco Giants, San Francisco Opera will present a free HD simulcast of Il Trovatore at the ballpark. High culture and low culture mix and intermingle. Arias and hot dogs with plenty of mustard. Families spreading out a blanket on the infield and enjoying the high passion of Verdi’s opera. The gigantic emotions and passions of Il Trovatore will expand to fill the ballpark.

Here’s a preview of San Francisco Opera’s Il Trovatore:

Earlier this year, the Giants and SF Opera presented Puccini’s Tosca at the Ballpark. About 30,000 people showed up to enjoy the show. I expect to see a similar turn out for Il Trovatore. After Tosca was over, and the crowd began to leave, I noticed a young girl turn to her mother and say, “that was a great opera Mom.”

See you at the show.

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The Crowd Settles and Focuses on the Performance

Published June 10, 2009 by cgerrish

An opera house holds around 4 or 5 thousand people. When the performance is ready to begin there are a number cues to the audience. The lighting changes, the conductor enters, the ushers take their places, the crowd organizes itself, shows appreciation to the performers through applause– there’s a shout of ‘bravo!’ and then it focuses its attention. You’ll hear a shush here and there to establish order, and the performance begins.

At the live simulcast of Tosca at the ballpark there were around 27,000 people from all walks of life in attendance. The cues to settle and get ready for the performance are much more subtle than in the opera house. Ballparks can accommodate highly focused attention, say the ninth ining of a no-hitter. But these venues also work well with multiple threads of activity none of which are focused on the game. As the third act begins, there are some notices in text on the high-definition Jumbotron screen and a small change in lighting.

Watch the video above and take note of how a crowd of 27,000 people can take a cue, settle down and focus their attention on the musical melodrama unfolding before them. This moment is the beginning of the third act. Scarpia is dead and Tosca has gone to save Mario from the firing squad.

As we think about the civility of the real-time social web; about how crowds self-organize for this task or that one. We can look at how civility and cooperation is established in other venues. A crowd of anonymous people understand their role and take their part in the drama. Tosca stabs the evil Scarpia, shouting “this is Tosca’s kiss!” The crowd cheers wildly as justice is portrayed. The emotions of the crowd ride the roller coaster of the bigger-than-life melodrama. No one takes Scarpia’s evil behavior as an excuse misbehave. They understand the roles of the players and the shape of the drama.

We can plainly see that a crowd can organize and police itself in real time as it takes part in the ceremony of live performance. Is it the physicality of the audience that makes the difference? Could it be possible to transfer that social contract to the live web? Or do we believe so little in the substance of our digital bodies that we think of ourselves as ghosts– neither living nor dead, immune to the judgement of our tribe.

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I’ve Always Depended Upon The Kindness of Strangers…

Published March 2, 2009 by cgerrish

Arts organizations and charities swallowed hard when they looked at the fine print of President Obama’s budget. Tax deductions on charitable donations from the wealthy are to be further limited in the new plan. The New York Times reported on the ire of the charity industry.

Under the administration’s proposal, taxpayers earning more than $250,000 will have their ability to deduct contributions to charities reduced to a rate of 28 percent from a rate of 35 percent, according to an analysis by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations.

Professional fundraisers, while concerned, took a different view:

“Research has shown again and again that for major donors, taxes are at the bottom of their list of reasons why they make these gifts,�? said Margaret Holman, a fund-raising adviser in New York. “They make these gifts because they love, are intrigued by, want to invest in their favorite charities.�?

Most, if not all, of our country’s museums, symphonies, regional theaters and opera companies depend on the generosity of large donors. In this severe economic downturn large arts organizations have also seen a sharp reduction in the income generated by their endowments. And as people cut back on their expenditures, the sale of season’s and individual tickets will fall as well. While we focus on the nation’s banks and core industries, there’s a lot of collateral damage being done to our cultural institutions and working artists.

While there’s no such thing as a contribution limit for charities and the arts, one can’t help but compare their predicament with the campaigns of presidential candidates. Historically, winning campaigns have attracted the support and contributions of large donors. This is a continuation of a patronage model that is deeply rooted in the political economics of our history. The largess of the few was the only method of raising the significant sums of money required to run a national political campaign or a major arts organization.

The Obama presidential campaign changed the equation. By reaching out to everyone, employing the Network and lowering the cost of managing a very large number of small donations, Obama was able exceed the results of the traditional fundraising model. A simple way to think of it is to imagine the size and complexity of the social graph of the McCain campaign compared to the Obama campaign. The math is pretty simple, to raise equal amounts of money– how much, on average, needs to come from each node on the network?

To some extent, public broadcasting follows the model of casting a wider net with their pledge drives. The problem is that this method of fundraising is widely perceived as annoying and unpleasant. Donations are often simply made in exchange for bringing the pledge drive to a close. We pay our public broadcasters to stop dragging their fingernails across a blackboard and return to regular programming.

As the business models for public and private broadcasting (including newspapers) begin to converge, we are in dire need of some innovation in how funds are raised. Doc Searls has shown us one possible future with his PayChoice program.

PayChoice is a new business model for media: one by which readers, listeners and viewers can quickly and easily pay for the goods they use — on their own terms, and not just those of suppliers’ arcane systems.

The idea is to build a new marketplace for media — one where supply and demand can relate, converse and transact business on mutually beneficial terms, rather than only on terms provided by thousands of different silo’d systems, each serving to hold the customer captive.

At minimum an opportunity needs to be provided to donate after a great experience with an organization, as opposed to donating to make a bad experience stop. PayChoice is trying to make donations a user-initiated event– where value is paid for when it’s experienced. Needless to say, it’s easier to imagine complex systems than it is to lay down the pipes that would allow those kinds of transactions to flow.

In this era of transformation, arts organizations will need to examine their social graphs and the quality and frequency of the events transacted through them. They’ll need to decide whether they consider social media to be a mere toy, or the foundation of their future.

While we’ve been waiting for the convergence of media devices, we haven’t noticed that the media itself has already converged. We are all broadcasters now, whether in live performance or live over the Network. The potential points of connection have multiplied greatly, but remain largely unused and unappreciated. Just as Barack Obama’s campaign was able to connect and activate a very large network and benefit from those economics– arts organizations, and many businesses, will need to execute the same maneuver. Our relationships just got a little more complicated: they’re connected through the Network in real time, time-shifted, two-way, mobile and always on. The times they are a changing.

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Batter my heart, three-person’d God

Published October 28, 2008 by cgerrish

Batter My Heart

by John Donne / John Adams

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp’d town to’another due,

Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain,

But am betroth’d unto your enemy;

Divorce me,’untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

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