My brain is still buzzing from two days of presentations, conversation, and debate at the second annual Culturelab convening at the University of Chicago. Day One was an invitational affair with a small group of philanthropic and government funders from the US, UK, and Australia. On Day Two we were joined by Chicago-area arts leaders (and some terrific grad students who will become arts leaders) for an "emerging practice" seminar. The heart of the agenda was a debate about technological layering onto arts experiences: enrichment or distraction?

I had assumed the conceptual action would be on Day One, with its big-picture agenda built around the recent supply and demand fracas in the arts (I spoke on the demand side of the equation). The topics for Day Two — technology in the morning, pricing in the afternoon — promised a more tactical discussion.

But things got interesting well before the lunchtime debate between Alan Brown, the well-known arts researcher (and founder of the Culturelab consortium), and Martha Lavey, the much-admired artistic director of Steppenwolf Theater, about whether audiences should be able to use their mobile devices during performances. Ron Evans (at left) gave a witty and eye-opening talk [pdf] about mobile interactivity and augmented reality, including a card-game app from the Tate Modern in which visitors (you have to be at the museum to play) pick artworks that they think would win in a fight if the works came to life and started brawling with each other.

You could hear the uneasy chuckles in the room: Sounds clever, but is that how we want people engaging with Art?

Evans was followed by another bright young light in the world of social tech: Devon Smith, who talked about foursquare and its current and potential uses in the arts. Among her examples: an art-treasure hunt and exhibition held last year in New York called Mission: Edition, from an art gallery interested in what it calls “psychogeography.” Not surprisingly, the Brooklyn Museum is also on Smith’s foursquare A-list.

What I began to realize, listening to Evans, Smith and others talk about technologies as simple as supertitles and as sophisticated as this amazing dance interactive, is that what’s “augmented” about these arts experiences is the social connection. There’s someone talking to you. Or you’re talking to someone. You’re not alone. ...

Composer Seth Boustead runs one of the most forward-looking grassroots arts organizations in the Midwest, Access Contemporary Music. When I ran into him at a neighborhood lunch spot recently, we got talking about how he and others in the “modern classical” scene view the future of classical music. I invited him to share that perspective in a guest post, which he was kind enough to do.

At a recent panel presentation attended by numerous people in Chicago's music community, I listened intently as the panelists discussed the future of classical music. The conversation inevitably featured a lot of hand wringing and dire predictions. It seems that everyone is worried about how to attract younger audience members, about getting larger audiences in general, and even about the continued relevance of classical music organizations.

As I listened to this, I couldn't help but think how removed I am from these concerns.  As the director of Access Contemporary Music, an organization dedicated to promoting the music of living composers, I realized that, while we in the contemporary music community certainly have our challenges, attracting young people is not one of them.

I never hear any of my colleagues complain about audience size, and I certainly never hear anyone wishing that they could appeal to younger audiences.  If anything, we have the opposite problem!  We could really use more older people with disposable income and a history of philanthropic giving in our audiences.

At one of our recent concerts I spoke with a person who works at a funding organization in town and was dismayed to hear him say that young audience members are the "holy grail" for any arts organization.  I was surprised how off the mark this was for our organization and that someone who should be “in the know” doesn't realize that there are different kinds of classical music organizations, with very different challenges.

We can't get older people to come to our concerts because many of them are old enough to have had bad experiences with contemporary music.  They've seen the self-indulgent performers dressed all in black who don't communicate anything, who come on stage and bloop, bleep and squawk and then pretentiously walk off.  I'm old enough to have caught the tail end of this performance practice and am truly happy that it is rarely seen in contemporary music circles any more.  But the damage has been done, and the “holy grail” for us is now the silver-haired couple willing to listen to a performance of music by a composer impolite enough to be still alive or only recently dead.

It seems silly to me that the classical world has created a culture that glorifies a select group of works, all over a hundred years old, and then worries about the future of their rarified form of ancestor worship.  It's as if a museum stated that there would be no additional acquisitions of art, no new shows or exhibits, but only a series of renowned scholars coming to the museum to interpret and expound upon the old art that the museum itself has proclaimed a masterpiece.

It is to me a bitter irony that most of the time when people talk about the future of classical music they are actually talking about future performances of music from the past, despite the fact that there are tens of thousands of composers in the world writing music and thereby extending the tradition and creating an actual future for it.

As a composer and as the director of a contemporary music organization, it has always been my fond hope that one day there will be no need for organizations that specialize in the performance of contemporary music.  There will just be ensembles large and small performing music from every part of the living, evolving compositional spectrum.  Judging by what I've been hearing lately—and who I’ve been seeing at the performances of organizations like ours—it seems likely that more up-to-date programming might just help classical organizations find their holy grail.

You may remember a quote from Holly in my recent post about “pipeline” vs. “parallel” strategies for young artsgoers. Holly knows this turf far better than I do: she runs Seattle Center Teen Tix, a thriving program that lets teens buy $5 tickets to almost any arts organization in the Seattle area. And she has a secret wish.

Guest blogger Holly Arsenault is the program manager of Seattle Center Teen Tix and has taught theater and writing to students from kindergarten through college. She is also a playwright and dramaturg. I asked her whether engaging young people requires a shift in artistic programming to accommodate their distinct needs, or whether we can attract them to existing programming with targeted marketing messages, social events before or after the program, etc. Here’s her full response:

Ha! Yes. That is the question. I’ve always said (actually, I’ve rarely said, but I’ve always thought) that my secret, subversive goal with Teen Tix was to drag the median age of Seattle arts audiences down enough that it would start to have an impact on programming.

I’ll tell you this: if you were to look at our show-by-show numbers, you’d see that there’s no amount of packaging I can do that’s as impactful on our ticket sales to teens as a show simply being compelling to teenagers. Of course, I see a difference in our numbers when I’ve done a good job of illuminating for our members why a particular show is relevant to them in a way that might not have been apparent, but I can’t make something that’s clearly irrelevant seem like it is.

Nor would I want to. The last thing you want is to convince a young person to go see something by claiming that it’s something that it’s not, then have them bored or alienated by the experience. So, despite our success at growing this audience, I do spend a lot of time wishing that I had better (meaning: more youth-friendly) material to work with.

That said, I do find that teen audiences, particularly at the younger end of the age spectrum, tend to be more conservative in their tastes than you might expect. I think some of them have a preconceived notion of what an arts experience should look like, and they like to have that notion confirmed before they become interested in branching out and trying new things. ...