Immersion Is Not a Format: What Orchestras Learn When Proximity Becomes Policy

What happened when the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra moved musicians off the stage and into nightclubs, neighborhoods, and immersive venues—and what it revealed about who orchestras actually serve.

The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra performs Become Ocean at Blume Studios. March 1, 2025. Photo credit: Genesis Photography.

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Editor's Introduction

Charlotte, North Carolina, is in the middle of a deliberate transformation. Long known as a banking city, it has been investing seriously in arts and culture infrastructure, which is codified in the city's own Culture Plan, and organizations like the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra (CSO) are testing what that investment can look like in practice. Hutson takes us inside three CSO initiatives that challenge inherited assumptions about where orchestral music belongs and who it's for. What's striking here is how broadly "immersive" operates in her account. Some of these projects involve projection, spatial audio, and purpose-built immersive venues. But the CSO Roadshow—a forty-foot trailer unfolding into a mobile stage in neighborhood parks and plazas—is about as analog as immersion gets, and it may be the most radical of the three. For an industry built on subscription seasons, fixed seating, formal dress codes, and silence protocols, the act of putting musicians at ground level in an electronic dance club or rolling a stage into a community festival represents a genuine departure from over a century of institutional convention. Hutson documents what these experiments revealed about audience behavior, institutional friction, and how we measure organizational success.

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I am standing on the floor of Charlotte's grittiest electronic dance venue. The orchestra is arranged at ground level. Around them, a tight circle has formed.

A board member dressed in Chanel stands next to a man with a ZZ Top beard and mohawk. Tech engineers in hoodies. Bohemian hippie types. Twenty-somethings with tattoo sleeves, multiple piercings, wild hair colors. All of them shoulder to shoulder. All of them silent.

The electronic beats are visual only — light patterns pulsing across the walls — while a minimalist string piece by Philip Glass unfolds. The musicians of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra are performing live. Light moves with the music.

Audience members stand inches from the players, forming a circle around them. They can see bow changes happen in real time. They watch fingers shift positions. When the conductor cuts off the orchestra, a DJ just beyond the circle takes over. The sound thickens. The tempo rises. The room responds.

MERGE: Symphonic x Electronic, The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra. May 2024. Photo credit: Genesis Photography.

After the concert, a man who tells me he has never been to a symphony is still buzzing. He cannot believe he leaned over a Charlotte Symphony cellist's shoulder and read from the same score she was playing. "It felt unreal," he says.

After more than a decade inside classical music institutions, I brace for what usually follows unusual work: complaints, memos, union notes. I was the lead of this project, working closely with musicians whose craft depends on stability and control.

Instead, the musicians leave energized.

MERGE: Symphonic x Electronic, The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra. May 2024. Photo credit: Genesis Photography.

This was not background music. It was not outreach. It was an artistic experiment taken seriously by everyone involved. The only musician complaints I received came from players scheduled to play traditional concerts that same night, who wished they had been there. The venue owners wanted to talk immediately about doing it again. Weeks later, the venue's tech crew showed up together at the orchestra's main hall—half of them with their ZZ Top long frizzy beards—many attending a classical concert for the first time.

But as VP of Marketing and Audience Development, the night exposed challenges that don't show up in post-concert euphoria.

The hall was about half full. In a venue designed for 1,500, we'd drawn maybe 750. The question wasn't whether the artistic product worked—it did. The question was whether this model could function as what the industry calls an "on-ramp": programming designed not to pay for itself immediately, but to cultivate future audiences who might eventually become subscribers, donors, or regular attendees – whether in the concert hall or in the neighborhoods where the orchestra shows up. Most orchestral performances don't cover their costs through ticket revenue alone. Traditional subscription seasons rely on decades of donor cultivation, renewal patterns, and institutional habit. An on-ramp project starts from zero. It has no list, no renewal base, no built-in audience. So 750 people in a 1,500-seat venue wasn't a failure—but it wasn't proof of concept either. It was a first data point.

Still, I wanted it packed. The musical product was extraordinary—months of collaboration between conductor Christopher James Lees, DJ/composer Liam Collins (performing as Push/Pull), arranger Ben Hjertmann, and visual artist Tenorless. This wasn't a mash-up. It was co-authorship. But getting people there was harder than I'd anticipated.

Some of our regular patrons told me they were too scared to come to that part of town late at night. Very few of them showed up. And not knowing the DJ crowd well enough, I'd made a critical miscalculation. I added a late-night takeover after the orchestra cleared out, hoping to lure the crowd that travels from Asheville for Push/Pull. EDM crowds are used to staying until 1 or 2 AM. I thought a second show made sense.

It bombed.

Twenty-five people in the middle of the night dancing in a space designed for 1,500. I was paying significant money for the venue and security. The managers asked if we wanted to shut it down. The artist wouldn't have it. Contractually, he got to stay on stage. So we rode it out.

MERGE: Symphonic x Electronic, The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra. May 2024. Photo credit: Genesis Photography.

Financially, the night lost money. MERGE was never designed to break even on a single performance. The question was whether the investment could be justified as audience development: spending money now to build relationships that generate revenue later. That math is familiar to any orchestra. Traditional subscription seasons lose money on most individual concerts too. The difference is that subscription losses are offset by donor cultivation, renewal patterns, and decades of institutional trust. MERGE had none of that infrastructure behind it. Every dollar spent was a bet on an audience that didn't yet exist in the Symphony's database.

Whether that bet could lead to repeatable programming—a second show, a third, eventually a series with its own renewal base—depended on whether the institution could sustain the experiment long enough to find out.

We had little lead time. There was no established list for this audience because we did not yet know who they were. Revenue was unpredictable. The series was designed for people beyond the orchestra's database, which made it harder to sell than a subscription concert and less reliable than a touring artist with name recognition.

But the people who came—those 750—experienced something that mattered. Those questions about who shows up and why? They mattered. But they were not the most important ones. What we really wanted to know was how to engage the broader community–those who weren’t already regular symphony attendees.

Why I Came Looking for Proximity

When my daughter was in sixth grade, she was struggling emotionally. She'd been placed in a gifted and talented classroom—writing years ahead of her age but sitting next to the nation's top math scorer. Somehow, she made that gap mean something about her worth. People with perfectionist tendencies don't like failing, which means they stop trying things they're not immediately good at.

Gifted kids are at risk. Research shows that 4.5% of high school dropouts are gifted, and about 37.5% of gifted children exhibit depressive symptoms—not because they're struggling academically, but because perfectionism and "poorness of fit" in educational programming create a specific kind of paralysis. By sixth grade, she was so paralyzed I pulled her out of public school for a semester.

Then Mary Beth Norris, principal flutist and founder of the Steamboat Symphony Orchestra, walked into her beginning band class with a golden flute and played Flight of the Bumblebee. So fast. So light. Transformative. My daughter became transfixed.

Music was different. With music, she had to be a beginner. She had no choice. And somehow, that patience—learning to tolerate being bad at something she desperately wanted to be good at—changed her. That's when she learned how to learn.

That moment—watching my daughter fall in love with an instrument because she could see someone play it, up close, in her classroom—is why I became Executive Director of the Steamboat Symphony Orchestra in January 2014.

In Steamboat Springs, I learned what proximity could do. The Strings Music Pavilion seats 569. The musicians are so close you feel vibrations in your chest when they hit a crescendo. Selling out those shows was the easiest marketing I'd ever done. When I later moved to the Portland Symphony Orchestra, I sat in Merrill Auditorium as an audience member and the musicians were distant. Something essential was missing.

But when I started shooting performances from backstage—standing in the side wings, moving through balconies with a zoom lens—the music came back to life. Not because I was hearing it better. Because I could see it being made.

When I came to Charlotte in December 2022 as VP of Marketing and Audience Development, I came looking for a way to give audiences what that zoom lens gave me: proximity to the work.

The Concert Hall Contract

Symphonies are not really built for proximity and there is a historic reason for that. For most of the twentieth century, American orchestras operated within a remarkably stable set of assumptions.

Orchestras performed subscription seasons in purpose-built concert halls with fixed seating and carefully controlled acoustics. Audiences arrived at appointed times, dressed formally, and sat in darkness facing a lit stage. They remained silent during performances, applauded at designated moments, and left when the music ended. The musicians, elevated and distant, were visible primarily as a collective—a unified sound source rather than individual laborers.

This wasn't accidental. It was the economic and social logic of the subscription model. Orchestras relied—and most still rely—on subscription revenue: patrons buying full seasons in advance, committing to a series of concerts before knowing exactly what they'll hear. This model works when audiences share a cultural baseline, when attending the symphony is an inherited behavior passed from parents to children, when "going to the symphony" is something people already know how to do.

To understand why immersive experiments are so financially fraught, it helps to understand how symphonies define success in the first place. For a nonprofit orchestra like the Charlotte Symphony, ticket sales fund roughly 30% of what happens on stage. The remaining 70% comes from donations, endowment draws, and grant funding. This is not a sign of institutional failure — it is the financial architecture of the American symphony model, and it applies to traditional concerts as much as experimental ones.

Immersive programming adds cost on top of that baseline. Where a traditional concert draws from existing repertoire, rehearsed ensembles, and familiar venues, an immersive production requires arrangers and composers working from scratch, new venues with different technical demands, and additional collaborators — VJs, DJs, projection artists, spatial audio engineers — whose work has no existing infrastructure inside the institution.

But there is a third financial logic at work. When a symphony demonstrably serves a broader cross-section of its city — reaching younger audiences, underserved neighborhoods, communities that have never had a relationship with orchestral music — it becomes more compelling to the donors and grant funders who make up that critical 70%. Diversity of audience is not just a social good. For a nonprofit orchestra, it is a funding strategy. The immersive experiments at the Charlotte Symphony were expensive. But they were also, simultaneously, proof of institutional relevance — and proof of relevance is what keeps the lights on.

But programming can't be entirely about relevance — and at most symphonies, it isn't. A deep conservatism runs beneath the experiments, baked into the institution's oldest assumptions. Canonical works by dead European composers anchored seasons because they were recognizable and reliable. Contemporary composers appeared sparingly. Collaborations with artists outside the classical tradition were rare and usually framed as "pops" concerts—separate from the serious work of the orchestra. Innovation happened at the margins.

Institutional structures calcified around this stability. Union contracts built predictable working conditions: specific venues, standard stage setups, defined repertoire, rehearsal schedules calibrated to concert hall performances. Marketing infrastructure oriented toward known demographics—older, wealthier patrons who could afford subscription packages and preferred traditional formats. Programming committees, weighted toward board members and longtime subscribers, favored the familiar.

Historian Emily Thompson has documented how architectural design and acoustic engineering in the early twentieth century fundamentally shaped American listening practices—concert halls weren't neutral containers for sound, but active agents in creating the cultural expectation that serious music required stillness, silence, and focused attention [1]. The format became the message.

Charlotte Symphony, under David Fisk's leadership, pushed hard against these constraints even within its traditional venues. The orchestra programmed little-known works by women composers and Black composers. It brought in racially diverse guest artists. It designed concerts specifically for communities outside the typical subscriber base. From the 2020–21 to the 2022–23 season, ticket purchases by African-American, Hispanic, and Asian audiences grew from 1.7% to 15.8%. Millennial purchasers rose from 22.1% to 26.2%. The League of American Orchestras highlighted these results in its published Guide to Audience Diversification as a national model.

But these efforts still required communities to come to us. To the Belk Theater and Knight Theater uptown, where parking is expensive, where the halls remained mostly white and mostly wealthy, where behavioral expectations—what to wear, when to clap, how to sit—carried cultural weight. No matter how intentionally you program, no matter how welcoming you try to be, the format itself creates barriers.

The subscription model also creates a specific kind of economic logic. A traditional subscriber buys a season in advance, renews year after year, and often becomes a donor. That lifecycle—ticket buyer to subscriber to donor—is how most American orchestras fund themselves, since ticket revenue alone rarely covers the cost of what's on stage. Professional orchestral musicians are among the best-trained performers in the world, earning salaries with health insurance and benefits, but orchestras still depend on philanthropy and endowment draws to close the gap. When your audience development pipeline depends on inherited behavior—parents bringing children, those children growing into subscribers—any disruption to that generational transfer threatens the entire financial model.

This model served the audiences it was designed for. The question Charlotte faced was: how do you serve everyone else?

Why Charlotte

Charlotte, North Carolina is approaching one million residents and remains one of the fastest-growing large cities in the United States. Between 2010 and 2020, Charlotte's population grew by more than 20%—a rate roughly double the national average and significantly higher than peer cities like Nashville, Denver, or Austin during the same period. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Charlotte's population now exceeds 940,000, with a median age in the mid-thirties. Roughly 45% of the population identifies as Black, Latino, or Asian.

What distinguishes Charlotte from other fast-growing Sun Belt cities is not just the rate of growth but its character. This is a city built largely by transplants—people who moved here for banking jobs, tech jobs, healthcare jobs, and brought no inherited relationship to the city's cultural institutions. Unlike a Boston or a Chicago, where symphony attendance can be a multigenerational family habit, Charlotte has a thin layer of legacy arts patronage sitting atop a massive population that has no particular reason to walk through the doors of the Belk Theater.

Many residents did not grow up attending symphony concerts, or any formal arts institutions at all. For organizations like the Charlotte Symphony, relevance cannot be assumed. It has to be built.

This challenge intersects with a broader social reality. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General identified loneliness and social isolation as a growing public-health concern, with particularly high impacts among younger adults navigating digitally mediated, work-from-home lives. Charlotte's transplant-heavy demographics make this especially acute: a city full of people who moved here recently, who may not yet have deep social networks, and who are looking for places to belong. Research consistently shows that shared musical experiences can strengthen social bonds and reduce feelings of isolation across age, race, and socioeconomic difference.

The Charlotte Symphony's relevance to this problem is not that orchestral music cures loneliness. It's that any institution capable of gathering people in a room—repeatedly, around shared experience—has the potential to build the kind of low-stakes social infrastructure that transplant cities lack. The question is whether the institution's format allows that gathering to happen, or whether its protocols keep people at a distance from one another and from the work.

The Institutional Bet

When David Fisk arrived as President and CEO of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, he inherited an organization facing a major financial inflection point. The Thrive Fund Initiative—a multi-year regional funding program—was expiring in 2021, taking $2 million in annual operating revenue with it. Rather than contract, Fisk concluded the organization needed to raise approximately $50 million in endowment to permanently offset the loss and build long-term sustainability.

When I arrived in December 2022, David was still testing whether that target was feasible. Within months, we launched the private phase. The campaign ultimately succeeded, raising $50.1 million. The Symphony now draws approximately 4.5% annually from the endowment to sustain operations.

But a capital campaign of that scale doesn't succeed by pointing to past accomplishments. It succeeds by convincing donors—civic leaders, corporate funders, foundations—that an institution matters to a city's future. The immersive programming and the campaign were inseparable: each initiative was simultaneously an artistic experiment and a proof of concept for donors being asked to invest tens of millions of dollars.

This is where a Knight Foundation grant became critical. The $210,000 grant, with local performing arts organization Blumenthal Arts as a partner, funded the experimentation directly: could we combine the appetite Charlotte had already demonstrated for immersive experiences—Blumenthal's Van Gogh exhibition had drawn over 300,000 visitors and grossed over $20 million—with the staying power of live orchestral performance?

The difference between Van Gogh's initial commercial success and the 2023 bankruptcy filing of its parent company after declining attendance seemed instructive: digital projections lose novelty. Live performers don't. People return for aliveness—the energy exchange between musicians and an audience in the same room.

MERGE: Proximity as Constraint

MERGE was conceived as a hybrid series pairing live orchestral performance with electronic music production—musicians and a DJ and a VJ sharing the same stage, the same compositions, the same audience. But its defining feature was proximity. Musicians played at ground level inside an electronic dance venue, surrounded by a standing audience. Control passed between conductor and DJ. Visual artists shaped the room in real time. Nothing about the setup allowed for passive listening.

From an institutional perspective, this created friction at every level.

Labor was the first constraint. Classical musicians are trained for precision under stable conditions—consistent acoustics, predictable sightlines, controlled lighting. Electronic venues are built for heat, movement, darkness, and volume. Union contracts around setup time, safety protocols, and working conditions weren't written with nightclub floors in mind. Every detail had to be negotiated: load-in schedules, stage configuration, ambient noise during performance, emergency egress.

Collaboration required months of advance work. The first MERGE happened on May 10, 2024. DJ and composer Liam Collins (performing as Push/Pull) wrote new electronic material specifically for the project. Ben Hjertmann arranged it for orchestra—translating electronic compositions into sheet music the ensemble could perform live alongside Collins's beats. Christopher James Lees designed the orchestral program, worked with Liam and Ben on their arrangements, and conducted. Visual artist Tenorless designed projections that responded to the music in real time.

MERGE: Symphonic x Electronic, The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra. May 2024. Photo credit: Mical Hutson. Note the two levels for the staging.  In the front you see a space where the orchestra surrounds the conductor.  Behind the conductor the DJ performs on a small stage.  And then behind the DJ, a VJ controls the live light show on three screens. Audiences moved freely between levels — up close to the musicians or down on the floor with the DJ. 

The conductor and DJ had to rehearse cue transitions until they were airtight. Would the DJ hit tight cues in a live setting where one missed beat could derail the entire ensemble? (They did. But we didn't know they would be aligned until rehearsal.)

Artistically, the results were striking. Musicians reported levels of engagement they rarely felt in conventional settings. Audience members lingered, talked with players, and returned. Financially, the night lost money. MERGE was never designed to break even on a single performance." Weeks later, the Blackbox tech crew showed up together at the orchestra's main hall, many attending a classical concert for the first time.

MERGE demonstrated something specific: when proximity is centered, immersion becomes relational.

We repeated the experiment in October 2024 with MERGE: Halloween Edition. By then, I had relocated to a new city and was advising remotely.

We kept the budget tighter. Jay Huleatt—who'd run tech for our visual artist at the first show—became our VJ. Ben Hjertmann took on a larger role, composing new material, writing all the arrangements, and performing as DJ.

I didn't attend the Halloween show. With key leadership positions turning over, the second iteration required recalibration. The systems that had been built through shared experience had to be reconstructed in real time. When staff turnover disrupts the informal networks that make complex projects work—what sociologist Timothy Dowd calls "the ties among the notes" [3]—institutional knowledge walks out the door at the moment when operational details matter most.

The show happened. But it was harder than it should have been. The Knight Foundation grant that funded MERGE required three experiments within a defined timeframe — Halloween was the second, fulfilling that commitment. Whether MERGE continues as a series, is still being figured out.

CSO Roadshow and Become Ocean: Other Models of Proximity

If MERGE tested whether proximity could work inside someone else's venue, the Charlotte Symphony's other immersive initiatives tested different scales and orientations of the same idea.

CSO Roadshow centered on a forty-foot trailer that unfolded into a mobile stage that would allow the symphony to travel into neighborhoods across Charlotte. Artist Rosalia Torres-Weiner wrapped the stage in bold, celebratory visual art. When it unfolded for the first time on April 28, 2024, at the Latin American Coalition, it wasn't a neutral orchestra platform arriving in someone else's space—it was the community's art welcoming the Symphony as a guest. Local hosts gathered the audience. The Symphony did not market these concerts directly. As a result, the project consistently reached people new to the orchestra, not because they were targeted, but because they were already connected to the place and the artists the orchestra performed with.   Roadshow wasn't designed primarily as a conversion tool — it was designed as a service. I saw modest crossover to the main hall while I was there, and I left before the data could tell a fuller story. But Roadshow kept running after I left, and that staying power is its own data point. Communities invited the CSO back. That's a different kind of loyalty than the subscription model ever imagined, and possibly a more honest one.

Christopher James Lees conducts the CSO Roadshow @ The Latin American Coalition. April 2024. Photo credit: Genesis Photography.

The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra debuts its CSO Roadshow @ The Latin American Coalition for “Musica con Amigos.” April 28,2024. Photo credit: Genesis Photography.

Audience members enjoy the debut of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra’s CSO Roadshow @ The Latin American Coalition. April 28, 2024. Photo credit: Genesis Photography.

“Become Ocean”—John Luther Adams's Pulitzer Prize-winning composition, staged at Blume Studios in February 2025—operated at the opposite end of the spectrum: large-scale, contemplative, spatially immersive. The new 32,000-square-foot venue in Charlotte’s Iron District allowed 360° spatial audio, projection, and a spatially divided orchestra. Where MERGE met audiences in movement and social intensity, “Become Ocean” was built for stillness and total enrapture.

The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra performs Become Ocean at Blume Studios, Charlotte, NC. March 1, 2025. Photo credit: Genesis Photography.

The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra performs Become Ocean at Blume Studios. March 1, 2025. Photo credit: Genesis Photography. The projected ocean surrounded the audience making them feel like they were “in vast waters populated by luminous drifting objects.”  (Symphony.org website.)

The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra performs Become Ocean at Blume Studios. March 1, 2025. Photo credit: Genesis Photography.

These three projects don't point to a single immersive model. But they share a common logic: each one asked the audience to encounter orchestral music somewhere other than a darkened concert hall, in a posture other than silent seated attention. And each one reached audiences the Symphony had not reliably reached before—younger, more racially diverse, with a notably higher representation of young men.

Become Ocean reached audiences the Symphony had not reliably reached before — notably a higher representation of young men, a demographic that rarely appears at traditional orchestral performances. That alone suggests its immersive model has on-ramping potential worth tracking.

Beyond taking audiences into new venues, there are deeper structural questions that will alter the Symphony hall itself to create on ramping for new audiences. The most useful analogy I've found is sports.  Sports fans don't fall in love with a team because of one spectacular game. They return. Week after week, season after season. They learn players' names, recognize their habits. Broadcast technology accelerates this intimacy: close-ups of faces mid-play, slow-motion replays, sideline interviews revealing personality. The spectacle matters, but it's the people who make fans come back.

Orchestras have the same raw material—skilled individuals working within a collective, visible physical labor, dramatic moments, season-long arcs. But traditional concert presentation hides the very thing that builds attachment: the musicians themselves. You sit in the dark. The orchestra is distant, faces obscured. You might remember the Beethoven, but you won't remember the second violinist who nailed that impossible passage.

The technology to change this already exists. Systems like CuePilot—used by the BBC and Eurovision—allow orchestras to pre-program camera shots directly from the musical score. The Met Opera broadcasts live to movie theaters worldwide. Sports bars show games with only seconds of delay.

Imagine a lounge — not attached to the symphony hall, but in the neighborhoods where new audiences already gather, where parking is plentiful, cheaper, or free. Basic audience development logic: meet people where they already spend their evenings, not where you wish they would go.. And within this lounge you have live symphony feeds on multiple screens. Spatial audio tuned for comfort. Couches. Drinks. Food. Conversation throughout the performance. For those who want focused listening, headphones with personal audio feeds.

What distinguishes the parallel listening space from the other experiments in this piece is its financial architecture. MERGE, Roadshow, and Become Ocean all required additional investments  above and beyond regular concert costs — new venues, new collaborators, new production infrastructure — on top of an already expensive institutional operation, for a single performance. The lounge inverts that logic. The concert is already programmed, the musicians already contracted, the season already underway. The lounge broadcasts what exists rather than producing something additional. Infrastructure costs are fixed once and amortized across an entire season. Revenue comes from food and beverage — a proven model that doesn't depend on grants, or donations. This is the question the other experiments couldn't answer: can immersive programming eventually pay for itself? I don't know. But the lounge is a model that excites me the most.

In a city where most residents are transplants looking for places to meet people, a space like this could function as social infrastructure: a place to encounter live orchestral music the way people already encounter music in their daily lives, as an ambient backdrop to social interaction. Income comes from food and beverage. And it comes, potentially, from cultivating future subscribers—audiences who discover orchestral music in a lounge setting in their twenties, then migrate to the concert hall in their forties when they want focused, silent listening.

This isn't a prescription. It's a speculative possibility emerging from what Charlotte's work made visible: orchestras can design for recognition and belonging as deliberately as they design for acoustics.

These three projects don't point to a single immersive model. But they share a common logic: each one asked the audience to encounter orchestral music somewhere other than a darkened concert hall, in a posture other than silent seated attention. And each one reached audiences the Symphony had not reliably reached before—younger, more racially diverse, with a notably higher representation of young men.

Become Ocean was the most resource-intensive of the three — a large-scale, grant-funded production requiring a purpose-built immersive venue, projection infrastructure, and a spatially divided orchestra. Produced in partnership with Blumenthal Arts, who own and operate Blume Studios, the co-production model helped offset costs while building an ongoing relationship with Charlotte's premier immersive venue. It was an experiment with open questions: Who would come? What ticket prices could it sustain? Could it attract sponsors? And by the measure that matters most to a symphony — artistic excellence in service of community — it succeeded. Whether it becomes a repeatable model, and at what cost, remains to be seen.

What We Could and Couldn't Measure: A Coda

MERGE attracted audiences that were measurably different from CSO's traditional base. Post-event surveys showed high satisfaction. The orchestra manager reported zero complaints from musicians. Earned media coverage grew 80% year-over-year, contributing to the visibility the capital campaign needed.

But we didn't measure what might matter most because CSO didn't attempt to track social connection, reduction in loneliness, or sense of belonging after immersive experiences. We measured satisfaction, not transformation. We counted attendance, not return behavior over time. We tracked media impressions, not whether someone's relationship to orchestral music fundamentally shifted.

MERGE lost money—but so do most orchestral concerts when you account for the full cost of what's on stage. The relevant question for on-ramp programming isn't whether a single event breaks even. It's whether the audience it cultivates eventually generates revenue through other channels: future ticket purchases, subscriptions, donations, word-of-mouth that lowers acquisition costs over time. We didn't have the data infrastructure to track that pipeline, and I left before longitudinal patterns could emerge.

Did MERGE audiences return for other CSO events? Did they eventually buy subscriptions? Did Roadshow attendees feel more connected to their neighborhoods? Did the musicians' enthusiasm sustain, or was it novelty? These are measurable questions, but they require years of tracking, not months.

There's a deeper limitation. As art critic Claire Bishop has argued, proximity and participation don't automatically produce the social transformation their advocates claim [4]. Does bringing diverse audiences into the same room create community, or does it simply make institutions feel better about themselves? I don't have a definitive answer. What I observed—the lingering, the return visits, the tech crew showing up at the Belk Theater—suggests something real was happening. But observation is not evidence, and enthusiasm is not data.

I think back to that first night on the floor of the electronic venue—the silence before the downbeat, the way people leaned in, the way no one reached for their phone. Nothing about that room depended on novelty. What mattered was proximity, permission, and the chance to recognize one another in real time.

That posture—more than any particular technology—is what made the Charlotte Symphony's work a model on which to iterate. Whether that posture can survive the institutional pressures that make it so difficult to sustain—staff turnover, budget constraints, the gravitational pull of tradition—is the question Charlotte hasn't yet fully answered.

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End Notes

1. [1] Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).

2. [2] Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Gareth White, Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

3. [3] Timothy J. Dowd and Diogo L. Pinheiro, "The Ties Among the Notes: The Social Capital of Jazz Musicians in Three Metropolitan Areas," Work & Occupations 40, no. 4 (2013): 431–464.

4. [4] Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso Books, 2012).

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Acknowledgments

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and reflect her experience and observations during her tenure at the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra. They do not represent the official positions of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra or any of its current leadership.

The author thanks David Fisk, Christopher James Lees, and the musicians and staff of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra for their commitment to this work.

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Mical Hutson

Mical Hutson is a marketing and communications strategist specializing in audience development and immersive programming for orchestral and nonprofit arts institutions. As Vice President of Marketing and Audience Development at the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, she conceived and led MERGE (a symphonic-electronic series staged in nightclubs) from concept through execution — including venue sourcing, artist hiring, technical production, budgeting, and contracts — and led branding and marketing strategy for CSO Roadshow (a mobile performance platform reaching underserved neighborhoods) and early planning for Become Ocean (a large-scale immersive production at Blume Studios). Previously, she served as Executive Director of the Steamboat Symphony Orchestra and held senior marketing and communications roles at Portland Stage and the Portland Symphony Orchestra. Her work focuses on how proximity, format, and institutional design shape who experiences live orchestral music. She is the founder of Signal & Storyworks, a consulting practice serving nonprofits and arts organizations.

Affiliation: Independent Consultant