Music ensembles have made a concerted attempt to reach out through social media platforms to the communities surrounding their concert venues in order to attract young adults to replace aging audiences. By observing opera and symphony orchestra audience members’ social media engagement through Twitter and Facebook Live, this dissertation endeavors to better understand how technology has changed the culture of classical music concert attendance. The music organizations utilizing social media considered for this study include the Los Angeles Opera, San Francisco Opera, and Boston Lyric Opera for Tweet Seats, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on Facebook Live. Consideration of live-tweets, Facebook Live concerts and comments, and personal interviews with social media users and music ensemble personnel provides insight to the changing experience of concert attendance. Interviews with online users who are actively participating in Tweet Seats on Twitter and chatrooms on Facebook Live during live-streamed concerts reveal that integrating social media during live performances enhances their sense of community, and their musical and social experiences. Participants indicate that prior classical music experience affects their motivation to participate and engage with other users. For many interviewees, affordability and VIP perks were initial incentives for their online involvement, but the overall experience for these users is complex. Interacting online allowed classical music fans to connect and/or reconnect to the ensembles and their music, and to an existing wired community, while negotiating with changes to the long-standing conventions of classical music culture. These alternative concert-going experiences made possible by social media reconstruct liveness within a digital world, cultivate classical music fandom, and enrich the live listening experience through collective engagement.

This was a descriptive study that was completed to gather information about musical backgrounds of orchestral concert attendees, and to determine if those attendees perceived relationships between past participation in school music programs and current patronage of classical music concerts. Participants completed a survey about their musical experiences from childhood through adulthood, as well as memories from school music programs. Results and analysis of the responses identified common themes among participants' childhoods, their schooling and private lessons, experiences that served as gateways to classical music listening, the aesthetic benefits that they found in concert attendance, and negative responses that they had to music participation. Results also found a large number of pieces and composers that participants recalled from past participation in school music programs. Findings from this study analyze why these experiences were important to participants and why they might serve as motivation to attend classical music concerts or continue to support them. Implications of this study include suggestions for professional music organizations, school music educators, professional classical musicians, and church music directors. Suggestions for further research based on this study's findings are also included.