Self-Inflicted Wounds

There’s a fascinating blog post by John Pavlovitz from 8/15/2014 that’s worth your time. If you’re wondering who John Pavlovitz is, join the club. I have no idea beyond what’s available at his about page, but his post caught my eye because a great deal of it applies to the orchestra field; so much so that you can practically swap out a few keys words from his topic (church/religion) with those from our field (i.e. orchestra/classical music) without diluting the impact.

Edited Title:

Church Orchestra, Here’s Why People Are Leaving You.

Edited Opening:

Being on the other side of the Exodus sucks, don’t it?

I see the panic on your face, Church Orchestra.

I know the internal terror as you see the statistics and hear the stories and scan the exit polls box office reports.

I see you desperately scrambling to do damage control for the fence-sitters, and manufacture passion from the shrinking faithful core audience, and I want to help you.

You may think you know why people are leaving you, but I’m not sure you do.

You think it’s because “the culture” is so lost, so perverse unsophisticated, so beyond help that they are all walking away.

You believe that they’ve turned a deaf ear to the voice of God symphonic classics; chasing money movies, and sex video games, and material things sporting events.

You think that the gays and the Muslims and the Atheists lack of music education and the pop stars (wait, that one actually works) pop stars have so screwed-up the morality priorities of the world ticket buyers, that everyone is abandoning faith classical music in droves.

But those aren’t the reasons people are leaving you.

They aren’t the problem, Church Orchestra.

You are the problem.

Let me elaborate in 5 ways…

Pavlovitz goes on to list the following five reasons he identifies as the root of the problem and I encourage you to review his rationale then and come up with your own variations.

1. Your productions have worn thin.
2. You speak in a foreign tongue.
3. Your vision can’t see past your building.
4. You choose lousy battles.
5. Your love doesn’t look like love.

But the real kicker is an excerpt from his closing, which practically serves as a sacrament for the emerging class of patron stakeholders. It’s so good, there’s no need to amend a single word.

These words may get you really, really angry, and you may want to jump in a knee-jerk move to defend yourself or attack these positions line-by-line, but we hope that you won’t.

We hope that you’ll just sit in stillness with these words for a while, because whether you believe they’re right or wrong, they’re real to us, and that’s the whole point.

We’re the ones walking away.
We want to matter to you.
We want you to hear us before you debate us.