Snapshots from December: Who Is Buying Tickets and Why?
Classical Uprising, Portland, Maine
Before the pandemic, Classical Uprising would nearly sell out its series, says artistic director Emily Isaacson. In the midst of her December performances, she confessed “we're not quite there yet, but we are pretty close.” Three groups make up Classical Uprising: the 50-year-old Oratorio Chorale, the Portland Bach Experience, which Isaacson founded in 2017, and Horizon Voices, a youth choir formed when the other two organizations merged in 2020. One goal of the merger, Isaacson says, was to create an “intergenerational space,” one that appeals to a variety of needs and audiences. “I would say 80 percent of the time, our programs have some sort of immersive, interactive, feel-free-to-dance-and-whistle experience to them,” Isaacson explains. “That's all aimed at getting a younger generation and families in there. And that's exactly what we're seeing.” Whether that’s because of the merger, or the new children’s choir, or diminished concerns over COVID, she can’t be sure. “Whatever it is,” Isaacson says, “we are seeing a very age-diverse audience.”
… Lessons Learned: What Kinds of Programming Are Working?
The recent Audience Outlook Monitor findings suggest the factors that motivate—or inhibit—attendance are shifting. Audiences now appear to be more focused on programming. Whereas COVID was the reason most respondents were staying away a year ago, 60 percent of the November holdouts surveyed said they “have not yet found a program I want to attend.” Wolf/Brown principal Alan Brown interpreted that finding during a December webinar: “This signals to us that people are being more selective perhaps, or their tastes are changing, or both.”
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When planning a Classical Uprising performance, Emily Isaacson doesn’t start with repertoire. She says it surprised her to learn several years ago that “the amount of repertoire that the normal layperson knows is less than 10 pieces. It's, like, Mozart Requiem.” Instead, she imagines a production, an experience she wants to create. For example, she chose Purcell's Fairy Queen “because I wanted to be able to use drag queens, or Arvo Pärt's Te Deum because you can pair it with meditation,” as she did last fall in a program tailored for parents of young children (free babysitting provided). “We really make an effort to make a lot of our programs available to families,” Isaacson says, “and it's working.” Isaacson categorizes these programs as “unexpected” experiences—immersive, interactive, informal, often outdoors, and often involving food and alcohol. Classical Uprising also offers a traditional experience, the kind that “diehards” might expect, but she says there aren’t enough of them in the Portland area to sustain that approach alone—hence the “unexpected” experience and a third one, the “salon” experience, which Isaacson describes as a cocktail hour in an intimate, nontraditional space where the audience can interact with the musicians. “It's part of our mission to bring great art into everyday spaces and into people's everyday lives. In Portland, we need to make it available with as few barriers as possible,” she says.
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Don Lee is a media producer, editor, writer, and amateur choral singer who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. At NPR in Washington DC, he was the executive producer of Performance Today.