Posted on 03/04/2005 6:19:20 AM PST by jalisco555
Whenever someone predicts the demise of symphony concerts, reassurances come fluttering from every obvious quarter. The Association of British Orchestras (ABO) produces a wireless device that allows concertgoers to follow the music interactively. A record label pays a million pounds to a schoolgirl violinist. A big-name soloist announces that more people than ever are tuning into classics.
As in any death foretold, these final rites will not affect the sad outcome. The Co-Co (for Concert Companion) that the ABO will show this weekend at its annual conference enables listeners to zoom in on the conductor’s sweaty brow or the deep cleavage in the second desk of cellists, while receiving snippets of text information. It has novelty value but that will soon wear off once the menu options are exhausted.
Deutsche Grammophon's huge deal with Nicola Benedetti, winner of BBC’s 2004 Young Musician of the Year, is equally flimsy. DG is in the market for physical assets. Benedetti, 17, an Ayrshire blonde of Italian blood, has been trailed in The Sun as ‘Scotland’s sexiest star’. Declining modelling jobs, Benedetti is keen to proselytise classical music among her own age group. But when her CDs are counted a year from now, DG will find that Nicola has sold overwhelmingly to middle-aged men in country towns and to grannies looking for an educative birthday gift – just as every other teenaged wonder has done over the past two decades.
New audience? What new audience? Classical managers clutch at straws when they look to Classic FM, with six million UK listeners, for hope of renewal. Classic’s audience is chiefly passive: they may tune in, but they seldom buy concert tickets or extend their taste for Mozart to encompass a complete work. During the 12-year lifespan of Classic FM, concert attendances in Britain have steadily declined. Meanwhile, educational investments by many orchestras have failed to yield more than a smattering of children to whom classical music becomes a lifelong passion.
Why the world has gone off classical concerts is a conundrum in which almost every reasonable assertion is disputable. Take the attention-span thesis. Many in the concert world believe that its decline stems from the public’s flickering tolerance for prolonged concentration. If politicians speak in soundbites, how can we expect voters to sit through a Bruckner symphony?
It is a persuasive argument but one that I have come to find both fatuous and patronising. Around me I see people of all ages who sit gripped through four hours of King Lear, Lord of the Rings or a grand-slam tennis final but who, ten minutes into a classical concert, are squirming in their seats and wondering what crime they had committed to be held captive, silent and legroom-restrained, in such Guantanamo conditions.
Their ennui will not be relieved for long by an electronic gizmo which gives them an illusion of mechanical control, nor for that matter by a kid soloist who has yet to grow a musical personality. These are gimmicks bred of desperation, not a coherent approach to cultural crisis.
If the shrunken attention span is not to blame for the classical turn-off, nor is price. Most concert tickets now cost less than cinema stubs. The London Symphony Orchestra last year adopted an impulse price of four or five pounds but failed to attract first-timers. Let's face it: in a busy metropolis with multiple counterattractions, most people won’t be dragged to a symphony concert at any price. As the New York impresario Sol Hurok used to say: ‘When people don’t want to come, nutting will stop them.’
So what, precisely, scares them off? In a word, the atmosphere. The symphony concert has stultified for half a century. It starts in mid-evening and last two hours. The ritual cannot be altered without inconveniencing the musicians and alarming the subscription audience; so nothing changes.
A Chinese businessman, David Tang, believes busy people want shorter concerts. He is launching one-hour concerts at Cadogan Hall, Chelsea, next week, but his revolution has been disabled from the outset by a standard seven p.m. start.
The only concerts that attract twenty-somethings are those which play to their rhythms. In Madrid and Barcelona, concerts begin at ten p.m. and are thronged by youngsters. In Vienna, the standing room at the rear of the opera house and the Musikverein is a singles-scene enclosure, walled off from the stuffy interior and giving the standees a sense of ownership and empowerment.
Elsewhere, the concert hall is a gerontocracy, its decorum enforced more rigidly than in places of worship, its exclusiveness innate. Thirty years ago, in my mid-20s, I used to sit in the backless choir seats behind the orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, studying conductors’ expressions. At the time, I was one of the older kids on the row. Today, at my present age, I'd be practically the youngest.
The greying of the audience is an admitted fact of concert life. Less acknowledged is the aging of everyone else. One expects conductors to be in their seventies, but most soloists have been at it too long and there is barely an orchestral manager of any consequence under 50.
Small wonder that the concert hall atmosphere is about as lively as a cruise liner, its intellectual magnetism as potent as a pension plan. Why would any redblooded postmodern person want to spend an evening in God’s waiting room, even with a Co-co to sex up the da capo?
Other arts, too, have rigid traditions. Theatre, you might argue, has also failed to alter its timing or rituals since Olivier was in full cry. But theatre has continuously overhauled its repertoire, making Shakespeare and Schiller fight for stage time against Pinter and Osborne, Stoppard and Hare, and Jerry Springer: The Opera. Theatre has sharpened its capacity to surprise, while classical concerts rely on stupefying familiarity.
There are ways to change the atmosphere. Design 40-minute concerts for under-40s. Provide a free crèche at weekends. Introduce standing room. Try the late-night route. If there was a genuine will to refresh the concert experience, it could be done.
But, as any good shrink will confirm, the classical business music must first want to change - and I detect no such desire. The old gang won't give up its hegemony and the last one to leave will politely turn out the lights.
I'd also recommend summer opera at Glimmerglass, in Cooperstown, NY. A beautiful setting to enjoy a fine production.
Beethoven's string quartets are my favorite Beethoven. But even his worst works are interesting.
I love baroque and medieval music.
LOL! My sentiments exactly! Guess what we played last season? Bartok Concerto for Orchestra!
snort!
Unfortunately, the Music Director doesn't care about what the musicians think. We're at the bottom rung of the ladder. I agree with your ideas...but the Music Director does what he wants, not what we suggest. I sure wish we could make those changes!
Wagner is actually much better than it sounds.
I knew a joker once, he ran a record store with a decent classical section. He once said, "I liked Wagner just fine until they added the singing."
bttt
Nah, I've tried it. Classical music sucks on an Ipod too. SRV still sounds good on my Ipod though.
I think music directors in general are pressured by critics and some of the well... more snooty benefactors, to program music that appears to be intellectual, strange, avant garde, and difficult to grasp. Some directors get caught up in this group too. I have this suspicion that most of them (except for the directors, of course) actually don't "get" music at all, at least not in an emotional sense. It is like art to them, and the more bizarre things are, the more credit and attention the arts community will give them. They view "pushing the envelope" as a level of success. But this can never replace how people emotionally react to an interpretation of a well known work.
Beethoven and Mozart have been played over and over and over again, but a great performance is NEVER boring. That being said, I have nearly fallen asleep during performances of great works that were performed without any fire or passion. Listen to Carlos Kleiber's recording of the Beethoven 5th and 7th -- two that have been played to death. Kleiber manages to make them sound new and exciting, and all while staying true to Beethoven. It's absolutely sublime.
One of my favorites is the Rachmaninoff Second Symphony. It takes a director and an orchestra with a lot of passion and a lot of guts to pull this one off, and if they do it right, it makes for an almost magical evening. You can't say that about Phillip Glass. Ever.
Count me among the short attention span/frayed wallet crowd. I listen to classics almost every day, but find concerts boring. Not to mention, they never play what I want to hear.
re the most accessible piece is Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. (which IMHO is one of the greatest compositions of the 20th century)...I hear you. This year's subscription to the BSO concerts was all warhorses. A reaction to past ultra-challenging repertoire. Me, I was on the music committee of a church with an acoustically beautiful sanctuary. OK visually, too. We brought in performers of all sorts of music, never pleased everybody, but raised the money for the church's music program.
I would agree that the Bartok is among the great achievements of 20th Century music. However, only a person with a mature understanding and sense of music can truly appreciate it, IMHO. It is a great piece, but not in any way a favorite of mine when compared to other 20th century orchestral works. A few I would rate above it are the Shostakovich 5th Symphony, Copland's Appalachian Spring, the Rachmaninoff 2nd Symphony, and the Mahler 5th Symphony. (I would pick my favorite Mahler, his 2nd, but it was written in 1895.
Dvorak and Wagner are two of my favorites. I went to a Phillip Glass Opera at the Chicago Opera House (a beautiful Art Deco opera house, very unique and a delight to the eye). It was one of his operas where each part of it is repeated over and over and over, ad nauseum (it was based on Mohatma Ghandi's life), until you wanted to scream or leave. My friend and I left. But all these elitist sychophants of whom I suspect at least 2/3rd's of them thought the opera sucked, clapped and clapped, so that no one would think of them as not avant garde enough. Blahhhhh.
I love the trend toward using ancient instruments, and in having more intimate performances. Where I live in the Chicago suburbs, there is an Arboretum (Morton's, the former estate of the great salt magnate, Joy Morton). They have a reasonably priced subscription series each year in a beautiful setting, where you can look out at the loveliness of nature while listening to the music. One time it was plain old idyllic; it was winter and looking out the window behind where the chamber orchestra was playing were a group of deer, frolicking in the snow. You can't beat that as an addition to a performance. Also, lots of libraries are sponsoring musical performances, small ones, such as a flutist and piano or violin, or quartets, etc. And, of course, the colleges, including junior colleges, and small private universities, many of which are scattered throughout suburbs and more rural areas. The junior college in my area (College of DuPage) has built a huge and lovely performing arts center. More performances on film, using Cable or Satellite TV would help, although obviously these are not live performances, but they help to stimulate interest in classical music and/or opera. I loved the musical film version of "Carmen", with Placido Domingo starring. Thought iwas very well done.
I wish there would be more performances with a sort of "musical briefing" before the performance by the conductor. And guides handed out even in small venues (with the miracle of computers, one can cheaply play out informational sheets by the dozens). I think this would draw in more people less familiar or not familiar at all with classical music. Give some history of the composer, perhaps mention any of the great conductors who favored that composer's work and a bit about them, and information on what to listen for in the piece itself, how the composer structured it, how parts of the piece might have held special meaning to the composer, the period the piece is from (romantic, baroque, etc.) and what that meant musically. And, if using ancient instruments, how they are different from today's, both structurally and sound-wise. So, part music history, and part playing the music itself. With more of that I would think one could build a broader audience among newbies, especially younger people. Using smaller venues and charging a reasonable price are key to this working though, and keeping these kind of info concerts at about 1 1/2 hours in length or so, would allow people with today's busy lifestyles to fit them into their schedules. The problem, of course, is that the musicians have schedules they must adhere to also; however, this is their bread and butter, is it not? And if there are no audiences, there are no performers eventually. It's a vested interest thing. New approaches have got to be considered here.
Whatever the ways chosen to spread the classical music word, it needs to be done quickly, or else large orchestras in particular, will go the way of the dodo bird. Getting members from orchestras out into the public schools to give talks, show their instruments, play a little ditty, etc. would work wonders in getting young kids interested. Too many public schools have dropped music from their curriculum, and this has got to be rectified.
I'm not totally discouraged though. My best friend has two girls, one of whom is playing violin, the other oboe. In the Chicagoland area, we have our equivalent of Tanglewood in Ravinia Park, a beautiful setting where one can also picnic (you can buy food or bring your own if you choose). Some of the small towns (Naperville, IL comes to mind) have outdoor bandshells, plus there are many area churches that have concerts also. I've gone to some lovely organ concerts at the Benedictine Abbey, in Lisle, IL. Their music auditorium is wonderful acoustically, and the music members of the Abbey are also faculty that teach at the Benedictine University across the road, as well as perform in concerts. So there are a variety of enclaves out there, where the classical music traditions are actively being upheld.
I don't believe classical music will ever take a total dive, and I will use myself as an example. I was weaned on rock music, and now, in my dotage, I can barely listen to it, and lean ever more toward classical music, as I suspect many of my fellow baby boomer generation are also doing. I think one key is if you have children, have them learn an instrument with classical music as the base of their learning on that instrument. I took piano lessons as a child, and have kept a toe in the classical music world ever since because of my early instruction in it.
You have a point. Used as background music for other events, it has a better chance. For example, 4th of July (Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture), the old British Vauxhall tradition and dancing just to name a few other options.
bttt
I think the orchestra under Solti's direction, and even after winning several Grammy awards, was severely underrated by critics. Solti was just one of those guys who had his own unique sound, and some favored more expression than he was willing to give. He had to compete with Bernstein, ya know.
Chicago is just one of a select few locations where an orchestra can get away with performing a lot of odd and unpopular music. Your story about the Glass opera is evidence enough that people will pay to sit through that kind of thing, but it isn't going to happen outside of maybe a few markets in the country. Frankly, I probably would have grown tired of the performance in less than ten minutes. Minimalistic music just doesn't interest me, and I wonder how people can find it interesting in anything more than a mathematical way.
Chicago has some fine schools of music, and many of the suburban school districts have outstanding music programs, including orchestras. A program with good teachers will have no problems keeping enough kids interested in playing. In addition, the number of professional musicians there assures a good number of fine private instructors, which in turn helps foster an excitement and love of music in young students.
There are countless community orchestras, chamber music performances, church performances, and other events happening all the time in your area all the time. This is a pretty good indication that many and most people need artistic expression in their lives. It is one of the things that sets our species apart from the rest. We can create inspirational works that not only serve as entertainment, but reach right into our souls and move us to an almost spiritual plane.
I don't believe the above can be said of the music of most popular rock and country music. That is a different kind of expression, IMHO, and though appreciated by many, is not quite the same in classical music's power to affect the human spirit.
Vogner was Otay.
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