||| April 7, 2025 by Tony Macaluso

Overcoming Cultural Barriers: Romancing the Newcomers in Millennium Park

Experiencing 30 orchestra concerts and 50 open rehearsals in Millennium Park each summer as Marketing Director for the Grant Park Music Festival provides fascinating opportunities to watch lots of budding romances.

I'm talking about the potential lifelong love-affair between a first-time classical music-goers and a live orchestra.

Conventions might slowly evolve based on new audiences and new dynamics.

The Jay Pritzker Pavilion is a fairly remarkable laboratory for understanding and testing the ways that new audiences can overcome cultural barriers. The simple fact the concerts are free and the venue is uncommonly accessible means that on a typical night, according to surveys, 25% of the audience or 2,000-3,000 might be experiencing their first-ever live orchestra concert. We’ve barely scratched the surface when it comes to truly understanding how new classical music lovers are born in this space, but we’ve had some interesting success in a few areas in recent years and I’d like to share a bit about ideas that might also be useful in other venues.

In thinking about the challenge of overcoming cultural barriers at the concerts, I often remember this archival photo from 1935, the year the Festival was born. First, here’s a small snippet of the crowd gathered at the Festival’s original band shell in the south end of Grant Park during the Great Depression:

To give a sense of the scale, below is a bigger view of the same crowd:

Looking closely at the folks waiting for the concert to start 77 years ago, I see the same dynamic that we still witness at the concerts today: people for whom live classical music is probably a new experience. Their clothes alone are a clue that many of them might not have had the money or perhaps more importantly, the wherewithal to overcome the cultural barriers of going to a formal concert-hall.

Maybe they loved classical music on the radio, but couldn’t afford indoor concert tickets or maybe they’d never listened to a symphony from beginning to end in their entire lives before someone suggested an evening outing along Chicago’s lakefront. The casual, free, accessible, outdoor nature of the concerts in the heart of the city drew them in.

Much has changed since the 1930s and when the Grant Park Music Festival moved to Millennium Park in 2004, the concerts began to draw large audiences with a remarkably high percentage of people who were new to classical music but drawn by the venue, which presented a tremendous opportunity to forge connections and cultivate new classical-music lovers.

Connecting at Open-Rehearsals

One of the first things the Grant Park Music Festival did when it moved to Millennium Park was recruit train a group of volunteer Music Docents to be the face of the Festival at all the free day-time Open Rehearsals. This happened less out of a grand vision for educating audiences than as a stopgap measure to protect our musicians and conductors from being beseiged by questions from the hundreds of people who gathered, many just drawn spontaneously to the music while strolling through the park.

The format is quite simple. A typical Open Rehearsal runs from 11am until 1:30pm all summer-long from Tuesday through Friday and the Docents do the following to help welcome new/curious attendees:

•  Fifteen minutes prior to the rehearsal and then during the break roughly half-way through, a pair of docents give a short talk about Millennium Park, the Festival, the pieces being rehearsed.
• Then they take questions from the audience, making it very clear that general questions about classical music (What does a conductor actually do? Why is the orchestra divided up into sections the way it is?) are absolutely welcome.
• Once the rehearsal begins, they circulate through the audience, giving out season brochures and having quiet one-on-one conversations with any audience members who have questions.
• They also distribute short surveys that allow audience members to both share a few details about how they came to be at the rehearsal and also solicit opinions about what kinds of music interests them. In exchange for completing a survey, rehearsal attendees receive a voucher that allows them to return to an evening performance and be given good seats near the stage for free on a standby basis.

A day-time rehearsal in Millennium Park attended by a group of children from a Chicago Park District program.

Over time the docents developed into amazingly well-rounded ambassadors, as at ease sharing ideas about why Frank Gehry's pavilion looks so startlingly unusual or suggesting the best place to get a Chicago-style hot dog as telling an anecdote about the Shostakovich symphony being rehearsed or explaining the role of our Principal Conductor Carlos Kalmar.  

Perhaps the most important role that the docents have come to play is using themselves as primary examples of people who have gone from being intrigued by classical music to becoming impassioned regulars. They’re encouraged to talk about how and why they themselves became interested in the music.

“Bravo!! Can I clap now?”

One of the most striking examples of this newcomer-overcoming-the-cultural-barrier-dynamic comes with the frequent moment of confusion and uncertainty at the end of a movement of a long work.

For more than a century, the typical custom has been that audiences stay respectfully and raptly silent during a movement break of a symphony or a concerto or other long works. In an indoor concert hall the audience by-and-large knows the convention and the rare newcomer who enthusiastically bursts into applause after the third movement of a Mahler Symphony is likely to be greeted with dozens of sharp, dagger-eyed glares from fellow concert-goers.

Outside in Millennium Park, whether at Open Rehearsals or evening performances, there’s no hope or even desire to stick to this convention. In fact one of the bits of information docents are encouraged to share with new-comer spectators is that staying silent between movements was a comparatively recent, late 19th century idea and that the beauty of a thriving, outdoor venue like Millennium Park is that it’s a place where conventions might slowly evolve based on new audiences and new dynamics.

While it’s a small detail, it can be an important symbol, especially when the docents explain that such conventions evolve. When we think about overcoming cultural barriers so that new audiences can feel a connection to an unfamiliar art form, the idea that ‘the rules’ are a work-in-progress, can be quite a helpful realization.

An especially new, new-comer at a Grant Park concert in the 1930s.

There’s much more to say about this on-going project of connecting with and learning about new audiences in Millennium Park. Among other areas we’re still just beginning to explore are:

• Using text messages and other new media to share details about the music with people sitting on the lawn.
• Conducting live radio interviews with lawn audiences during the intermissions at concerts being broadcast.
• Creating post-concert music events on the lawn, so that more casual lawn audiences have opportunities to see and hear artists up close.
• Designing more insightful and widely distributed surveys to gather an ever-deeper understanding of what brings the many new-audiences to these concerts and sharing these findings with other arts organizations in our community.

All of these ideas are hopefully just the beginning of an ever-growing list of tools for connecting with the new audiences that are already out there. One of the thrilling prospects of this exploration is that the Grant Park Music Festival shares this great laboratory of public interest in the arts with a large list of other Festivals and Chicago-area cultural organizations who perform there periodically, so the possibilities for sharing tools and results is immense.

Tony Macaluso is the Director of Marketing and Patron Services for The Grant Park Music Festival in Millennium Park.

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