Alex Ross wrote a great article regarding the challenge modern Classical Music faces in being accepted. It is in the middle of the article that he highlights a great point that cannot be overlooked in my view. I believe the hatred he talks about is more directed to those who present new music. As presenters we too like the composers must be creative because it is hardly fair to complain that audiences wont accept something new, when we present it as if it is a premiere happening in 1865!…..
The article which appeared in the Guardian Newspaper raises the valid point that modern architecture and art is accepted, yet there is a hatred for modern music. This passage I related to very closely from personal experience:
There’s also a sociological explanation: because concert audiences are essentially trapped in their seats for a set period, they tend to reject unfamiliar work more readily than do gallery visitors, who can move about freely, confronting strange images at their own pace. Yet if the style of presentation conditioned the response….
It is hard to compare architecture because generally we are reacting to the outside of the building which is a take it or leave it proposition, now if there was “dissonance” on the inside where all the floors were uneven, there were staircases to nowhere, thresholds designed to trip you up etc…well then it would be a similar comparison! With art however, a gallery can set up a visual progression, can include pieces by artists that influence each other or in other words a planned route with detours to get from A to B. Plus which, there is no prescribed time (other than operating hours) in which people have to be done looking, and they can return again and again if they still “don’t get it’ or want more of it. They are allowed time to form an opinion and a delayed reaction is then possible. In music, we get the aural, and once a passage is gone and a piece is over, that is it and if anything was missed well then….too bad! There is no time to form an opinion, sound evokes a visceral and an emotional reaction that is instant and is hard to get away from, in a gallery, you can get away from something you don’t like or understand, and the reaction is mostly indifference with no offense taken because you can escape by looking at something you do like. In a concert hall as Alex points out you are trapped!
I say we need to modernize our presentation and to accept the reality of our ever increasing visual and emotionally reactive world, by incorporating visual imagery (not only real, but imagined also) into our presentation of new music along with personal thoughts. Just like in a large art museum, when you are handed a map in order to get around or plan your sequence, we also need to provide a virtual map to assist people to get to the point of acceptance. After that it is up to them of course, but we will fail miserably time and time again if we don’t at least get people to the starting point.
Even if there is no concrete visual attachment, I often (because I do have time to learn the work) will formulate one, and I will share this and other personal thoughts with the audience. My goal is to at the very least create a shared experience of discovery bringing them along for the ride, rather than dragging them behind me through the mud. I once did Petrushka and on the same concert was the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 3. In reaction to the Stravinsky I got letters to stop programming this “horrible modern music”. I was floored since it was written at the same time as the Rach! I realized I missed an opportunity and since then I make a point of mapping out a modern work pointing out things to listen to, sometimes even playing excerpts so as to set up landmarks to assist in the journey. Petrushka would have been the perfect work to do this with! I am not saying do a Beyond the Score style presentation, just hitting some key spots, pointing out interesting things from melody to techniques employed, and especially focusing on personal thoughts emotions i.e “this is how I feel, I would love to know how you feel and if it is different” and I encourage an audience to write to me to let me know how they felt.
A couple of weeks back in Springfield we did a work by Daniel Godfrey called Lightscape written in 1997, it is about a sunrise off the coast of Maine and I focused on the idea that this music attempts to put us in the scene rather than asking us to be a passive observer suggesting that Daniel is getting us to focus on the colors, the reflections, the wind, the temperature, the concepts of time and space and pointing out how warm the climactic sunrise actually made me feel and how the dissonance before it was an attempt to create unpleasantness of feeling cold, and not simply an unpleasant sound. I always try to go to the visceral. It took all of 3 minutes to walk through it with some excerpts and so far the only complaint I have received was someone who wished I hadn’t spoiled the surprise for them!
We focus so much on wanting for people to like and appreciate new music when the focus should be first on how to start an acceptance of it by setting up the audience to be objective, so it can be shown as a progression from the music they like and are accustomed to hearing. It is not a new idea, but really needs to be embraced and before anyone chimes in to say well they don’t do it this way in New York! Well you would be wrong about that! (from the article):
Alan Gilbert, who took over as the New York Philharmonic’s music director last season, has had startling successes with such rowdy fare as Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, Varèse’s Amériques, and, at the beginning of this season, Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft. Veteran observers were agog at the sight of Philharmonic subscribers cheering Lindberg’s piece, which contains hardly a trace of tonality and requires the use of discarded car parts as percussion. What made the difference was Gilbert’s gift for talking audiences through unfamiliar territory: in a mini-lecture, he mapped out the structure of the piece, demonstrated a few highlights, made jokes at his own expense, and generally gave people the idea that if they left early they’d be missing out.
Perhaps the most creative way someone introduced Schoenberg that I have heard about was when Andreas Delfs when he was MD of Milwaukee performed Survivor from Warsaw followed that immeditely with the Barber Adagio and then followed that immeditely with the Schoenberg again….BRILLIANT. Their concertmaster and my friend Frank Almond (check out his column) told me about this. It made it an event! Bottom line, even if we don’t “like” it, at the very least we have to keep the creative process of composition alive and music schools would be smart to teach presentation techniques as part of a core curriculum to create opportunities for composers to be accepted. Forget the mainstream, any kind of stream will do, because right now those streams are pretty dry!
Composers have modernized music, we therefore need to modernize our presentation of music and stop with the silent treatment of our audiences hoping for the miracle of acceptance….we have to work for that! Dare I say it but with no warning we are giving a bitter pill to swallow when we should be presenting it as a wonder drug that might have all kinds of effects that you wont know until you try it….and it’s completely legal!
I couldn’t agree more.
The amount and variety of entertainment the 18-35 crowd is accustomed to is so much more than a symphony concert that going to one is for some of my friends “like a 2 hour prison sentence.”
Perhaps approaching classical music with a bit more of a “soundtrack” mentality, and creating a complete evening of entertainment (orchestra, dance, light art, video shorts, etc) could also be a way to engage and maintain the interest of younger audiences more effectively.
If I were the Empress of Music, I would demand that every college student take composition once a week until they has proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that he/she has absolutely no talent for it. The cream would rise to the top! Composers presently mostly compose for other composers, mostly academics, who are on panels to decide who gets a grant or a scholarship. Stavinsky’s big break was getting hired by a choreographer. Schoenberg’s was a Viennese music society that held performances and lionized him. Haydn’s was royalty, who gave him a big orchestra with regular concerts. Bach’s was a day in-day-out church gig, then a royalty-gig, then more church gigs. Prokofiev had to answer to choreographers, performers like Oistrakh and Rostropovich, movie makers, conductors, government entities, and so on. Bernstein had most of the above, plus musical producers. Composers who have to be in a real world of frequent public performances with great collaborators have a better shot at writing listenable music than composers who write for granting panels of other composers! Arrgh! You aren’t even allowed to take composition courses at University of Colorado unless you are a composition major. Okay, Ludwig, forget it, they would say. For this, I am paying lots of tuition! My son won’t even consider signing up. He can write music and improvise, but doesn’t want to do it for a grade.