SOBRE LA MEDICIÓN DE LAS DESIGUALDADES

Scott (2016) has demonstrated that arts and entertainment audiences are often believed to be discrete groups of people. Participants likewise believed that core and populist attenders drew two different audiences, even when this contradicted their own engagement.

Paul I think the Friday night audiences are different from the midweek audiences.

William Friday Night Classics, with the lighting, you tend to get a different audience.

Julian The faces that we see at the Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday, whatever, tend not to be there on the Friday, by and large. And certainly, none of our friends who are more hard-lined as it were, as I put it, never go on the Friday.

The belief that core audiences attract a different group of people to populist

programmes were partly based on participants’ own social networks. In addition to the above quotations, Georgina was surprised not to see any of her friends who attend core concerts at a populist concert of Gershwin’s and Bernstein’s music. Similarly, Julian felt that the familiar faces he sees at core concerts are absent from populist performances. In addition, populist audiences were believed to be

demographically different from core. In Chapter 2.1, I described how classical audiences are overwhelmingly white, well-educated, middle class and at least middle aged. Participants felt that populist programmes attracted a broader demographic.

John One thing we do notice is that [at populist concert] there is a much wider range of audience in terms of age, a lot of younger people on Friday nights than the staid crew that go to other concerts. Some of them are much more cross-cultural as well. You do see wider audiences from other sections of society as well, which is nice. Emma The audience tends to be a bit different [at populist concerts]. I

don’t feel like I’m bringing the age quotient down quite so much on the Friday night ones. I’ve been to one or two of the classical ones where you’re like ‘I think I’m the youngest here by about 40 years!!’ Populist concerts were felt to attract younger and more ethnically diverse concert- goers. The survey results support the difference in age profile; while both core and populist respondents clustered around middle-age, core respondents were slightly older, with 51% being 65 or over, compared to 32% of populist respondents. John’s use of the word ‘staid’ is interesting; his comments were not neutral observations about the demographic differences but were actively welcoming more diverse audiences. Participants wanted to see a much more diverse audience in age and ethnicity at classical concerts, which I discuss further in Chapter 9.1. Participants

also thought audiences at core and populist concerts differed in their cultural engagement.

Emma I think [populist audiences are] more people who tend to go and see musicals or are probably more the, sort of, Hippodrome audience coming over, rather than… I think the really classical ones are probably the people who do spend a lot of time at Symphony Hall.

Georgina We categorise people into Swan and Saga. Swan is the Swan Hellenic Cruise sort of people, and Saga are the coach trips. We don’t like being part of Swan, but we have to say that, because of the fact that we do go to a lot of things, I’m afraid we come into that category and, I must say, there’s too much Swan and too little Saga at most concerts. But not at the Friday Night Classics. The New York, New York one, that was much more Saga and I like to see that.

Both Emma and Georgina drew on ideas of high-, middle- and lowbrow cultural consumption. Emma believes that while core classical attenders are likely to be regularly attending classical music concerts, populist audiences are more likely to be found at the Birmingham Hippodrome. The Birmingham Hippodrome is the biggest theatre in the city centre. Though it does present more traditionally highbrow cultural events, being the home to the Birmingham Royal Ballet and regularly hosting performances from the Welsh National Opera, its programme centres on touring West End shows and musicals. Emma therefore suggested that populist audiences are more avid consumers of middlebrow cultural events.

Georgina is far more explicit about ideas of highbrow and middlebrow amongst the audiences using the analogy of cruise ships. Georgina claims that core attenders are the kind of people who go on Swan Hellenic Cruise ships, on which the emphasis is on cultural and historical sightseeing, with very little on-board entertainment. This contrasts with populist attenders who are likely to go on Saga coach trips, more focussed on entertainment and socialising rather than cultural engagement. Both Georgina’s and Emma’s comments therefore suggest a difference between core and populist audiences in the nature of their cultural engagement; core audiences consume highbrow culture, whereas populist audience consume middlebrow culture.

The survey data supports Emma and Georgina’s assumptions. In the questionnaires, respondents were given a list of cultural activities and, in line with the ACE’s Taking Part survey (DCMS, 2016b), were asked ‘in the last 12 months, how many times have you been to the following?’ A breakdown of results comparing core and populist respondents is given in Appendix 5. Core attenders were more likely to be regular

and the opera. Populist audiences were more likely to regularly attend the cinema, musical theatre, pop concerts and comedy nights. In addition, as Bryson (1996) has noted the importance of expressed dislikes for defining cultural tastes, it is worth noting the activities that respondents claim to have never taken part in. Populist respondents were far more likely to have never been to the opera, whereas core respondents were more likely to have never been to a pop concert. Notwithstanding these discrepancies, both core and populist attenders were more avid cultural attenders than the English public. For example, 47% of core attenders and 39% of populist attenders had been to a play or drama at least three times in the previous year; in the Taking Part survey, only 22% of the population had been to a play or drama at any time in the previous year. Georgina and Emma’s comments about the difference in cultural engagement link back to the idea of populism as an audience development initiative. Emma compared populist attenders who are at the

Hippodrome with core attenders who are always at Symphony Hall. She therefore implied that populist audiences are not regular classical music attenders.

Nevertheless, despite the belief that there is a core audience and a populist audience, the two groups of attenders overlap considerably, with many people attending both core and populist programmes (Figure 2, data retrieved from the CBSO’s customer database and ticket sales).

Figure 2: Proportion of customers who bought tickets to core and populist concerts in the CBSO 2014/15 season

26% of populist attenders also went to a core concert Core

attenders s

Populist attenders

10% of core attenders also went to a populist concert

This data was taken from the CBSO customer database for the 2014/15 season; within the space of one year, over a quarter of all populist audiences also attended a core classical concert. Even amongst the 42 participants, over half had at some point attended both core and populist concerts (see Appendix 2). Crossing over between core and populist concerts is therefore incredibly common CBSO audiences, yet participants felt they were unusual for attending both.

Cathy I was here at a Beethoven concert and a man suggested to me that Tchaikovsky wasn’t proper music, so I decided to shock him by telling him I was going to the Abba concert and he looked as though I was crazy.

Nicola The week of the Queen concert it was one of two that I attended, with CBSO doing Brahms and Beethoven the following night! This amused fellow audience members greatly. I was sat next to people who only go to the Friday night ones!

As participants cross between core and populist, they believe that they are moving between two different audiences. Such is the strength of the idea that core and populist attract two different sets of people, audiences believe in there being two discrete audiences, even when it contradicts their own engagement. This points to a continued belief in separate art and entertainment audiences for classical music, in line with Scott’s (2016) commentary of other musical genres. Nevertheless, it is worth questioning whether this is a generalisable finding or specific to the

population under study. The fact that the CBSO present both forms of programming may promote more crossover than would be found between orchestras which

specialise in core or populist concerts. A number of UK orchestras and venues present both core and populist programming, therefore this situation is not unusual, but further research is needed to ascertain whether there is the same level of

audience crossover when core and populist programmes are presented by different arts organisations.

This section has once again shown the complexity of understanding core and populist attendance. On the one hand, the anecdotal evidence of the more varied demographic audience for populist attendance points once again to it being a

successful audience development initiative in diversifying the concert audience. The survey data also seems to show populist concerts being consumed as part of a middlebrow cultural diet, compared to highbrow classical music. However, these seemingly clear cut differences in the type of audience that core and populist programmes attract are disrupted by the finding that there is a substantial overlap between the two sets of audience members. This raises important questions around the value of populist concerts. If populist audiences overlap with core audiences,

then populist concerts must have a distinct appeal compared to core programmes for crossover audiences.

Conclusion

This chapter presents a complicated picture of populist concerts as audience

development tools. When populist programmes can attract new CANAs, the concerts venue plays an important role in raising awareness and making audiences feel comfortable enough to try something new. An organisation’s reputation can encourage local non-attenders to try their first concert, stemming from feelings of privilege of living near to a venue and an orchestra that others must travel to hear. Further research is needed to understand which events particularly stimulate crossover from other musical genres, and to what extent audience’s experiences or attitudes determine their willingness to try something new.

Whether populist concerts grow core audiences is debatable. All five populist CANAs in this study were intending to try, or had already tried, a core concert. However, of the small number of participants who came to concert attendance through populist programmes, none have moved entirely to core concerts. In addition, the orchestra’s ticket sales show that very few newcomers re-attend and most that do return to a populist programme. The large overlap of core and populist audiences within the space of a single season also raises doubts over whether there truly is a ‘core’ audience. Participants were unwilling to change their belief that there were two audiences for classical music, as is often assumed in audience research literature, even when they themselves crossed over between the two formats.

Most significantly for the progression of this thesis, the data in this chapter challenges the relationship between knowledge and concert attendance. I have shown that there are knowledgeable attenders who still choose to attend populist concerts, and that there have been CANAs with very limited knowledge of classical music who have yet bypassed populism and found a route in to attendance straight to core concerts. This shows that the decision to attend populist concerts is not borne of naivety. The next four chapters explore various factors in this decision to attend to better understand the motivation and anxieties around core and populist attendance.