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Grex > Classical > #17: What would it take to make classical music popular with the masses? | |
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| 16 new of 65 responses total. |
faile
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response 50 of 65:
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Dec 5 01:55 UTC 1997 |
Actually, durrning the better part of most performances durring the Baroque
era and particularly teh classical, the audinece didn't pay attention much
at all-- concerts were a social event. It took something really spectacular
to get the audience to pay attentnion. 90% of the reason one went to a
concert was to see and be seen. (Particularly for the upper strata of
society.) People did get pretty excited when a really great soloist was
performing, it was a composer they knew well, or it was a hum-dinger of an
aria or whatever. (Did I just use the word "hum-dinger" in a sentence? Eep!)
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rcurl
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response 51 of 65:
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Dec 5 19:44 UTC 1997 |
That sounds somewhat like modern audiences. "Famous" artists, even if
well past their musical zenith, sell out. Other performances of lesser
"known" artists are not so well attended.
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faile
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response 52 of 65:
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Dec 5 23:16 UTC 1997 |
Yes, but it isn't acceptable to play cards durring performances anymore. I'd
say that's a step up.
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davel
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response 53 of 65:
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Dec 6 01:54 UTC 1997 |
Re #46 & earlier: <dave contemplates PDQ Bach's "New Horizons in Music
Appreciation">
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md
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response 54 of 65:
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Dec 6 13:59 UTC 1997 |
I love that track. There's actually a lot of information about
the first movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony in there if you
listen.
I forgot to mention that dancing would be encouraged. I suppose
the conductor and soloist could stage-dive if they wanted to,
but their insurance companies might not like that.
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davel
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response 55 of 65:
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Dec 8 02:47 UTC 1997 |
I like it a lot myself, but I'd be even less likely to attend concerts
(or listen to them) in that environment.
Actually, I'm aware of one attempt relevant to the subject of this item
which might be worth mentioning. It's small-scale & conventional, &
I don't really know whether it's doing any real good, but I'll mention
it anyway. The Ann Arbor Cantata Singers have for a couple of years now
been doing annual "Outreach Concerts". What they do is to hold a concert
in conjunction with the choral music departments of local high schools.
The AACS basically manage the concert & absorb the costs, if I understand,
and turn the gate receipts & program advertising revenues over to the
school music programs. Then they put on a concert the first half of
which features the high-school choirs (separately & together), the second
half of which features the AACS with the high-school choirs, including
something moderately ambitious, with soloists from the high schools.
As part of this they also award several scholarships to Interlochen
(summer music camp, not the year-round academy program) to students.
These things could be better publicized, I think, but we heard about the
first one because it was in the Milan paper - we live in Milan, & that
one featured Milan & Saline high schools. The second one, last year,
featured Ann Arbor (Pioneer & Huron) and Ypsilanti, with one soloist
(who was absolutely stunningly good) from Greenhills (a private school
in Ann Arbor). We heard about that because a girl we know was one of
the soloists from Pioneer (& took one of the scholarships, deservedly in
my somewhat biased opinion). But the audience it gets is *not* mostly
a choral-music audience, but families and a *lot* of kids from the
schools who are there because this is a big thing for their friends.
(I should add that the material includes lots of newer stuff, but is
definitely not pop-oriented. For the most part, accompaniment has been
limited to a pianist. For the relatively large combined numbers, they
had a chamber orchestra. Hmm. Wonder what else I should mention.)
Part of the AACS's express reason for doing this is concern for the
future of choral music, given current trends. (That was more clearly
stated (at the concert) in the first one than at the second one.)
Anyway, I do think a really important part of changing the status of
classical music is going to have to be simply creating places where
people listen to it, by choice & not because they have to - though not
necessarily because they're passionately interested or anything. As I
said, I think most of those at these things were family & friends there
to listen because someone they knew was doing it & it was a big thing
for that person - but I know some people who came away with a somewhat
different attitude.
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md
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response 56 of 65:
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Dec 8 12:19 UTC 1997 |
Sometimes a little exposure *is* all it takes. Another approach
that has limited success is the "pop" classical concert and CD, with
stuff like Peter and the Wolf and the Nutcracker Suite, along with
pieces that might already be familiar to the audience, such as
Pachelbel's Canon, the opening of Thus Spake Zarathustra, Barber's
Adagio, etc. There are all kinds of "Classics Go To The Movies"
CDs that sell fairly well. These are all great (I have a few such
CDs in my collection and trot them out every once in a while). But
I keep coming back to the big-ticket pieces like the Brahms Violin
Concerto because those pieces might seem like the most forbidding
ones at first but they're the very heart of the matter.
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faile
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response 57 of 65:
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Dec 9 02:21 UTC 1997 |
Pops concerts ect. can be great-- silly sometimes, but for drawing people in,
especially kids, they can be fantastic. Last year, we did an outreach concert
at a school in Kentucky, and we made the mistake of playing a movement of
Tchaik's second piano concerto, a big violin concerto (not sure which one),
and the Bottisinni bass concerto. (I know we played some other stuff, but
I'm not entirely sure what... it was all fairly heavy) We tried to liven it
up, but... we lost most of our audience about twenty minutes into it. If we'd
done some light pops stuff, we might have been able to keep their attention.
Its funny, but I actually find that young people get more out of concerts than
older people. Here in Nashville, I went to a performance of Phillip Glass'
_Les Enfants Terribles_ (its a dance opera event... it rocks), and the young
ppl in the audience were really into it, opinionated about it afterwards, the
whole nine yards. A lot of the older people in the audience, however, judged
it in the first five minites (it isn't like a traditional opera or dance
performance... it is a tad odd), and were simply disgusted throughout. (The
two men sitting behind me actually started talking aabout football ... ) The
same goes when I go to the symphony here-- a lot of the young people go to
the concerts that other people in town won't, and we always have more
intelligent discussions afterwards. Of course, looking at my friends is a
bad example... I'm a music major, and most of my friends are, as well. I was
lucky... I was exposed young.
(I'm not sure how much of a point I've got there, so I'll shut up now.)
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mary
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response 58 of 65:
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Jan 8 14:09 UTC 1998 |
Today I'm mailing off a copy of this discussion to Samuel Wong, conductor
of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra.
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md
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response 59 of 65:
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Jan 9 11:56 UTC 1998 |
I hope Maestro Wong has fun reading our little discussion. What do
you hope, Mary?
I'd be curious to know how other performers feel about this subject.
The critic David Hurwitz recently advised some young people on AOL
not to stifle their feelings at classical music concerts -- i.e.,
applaud between movements, etc., if you love what you're hearing.
He himself sounds contemptuous of the "decorous" manners expected
of concertgoers, and with the snobs who frown at any display,
however heartfelt, that's more enthusastic than clapping at the
very end of each piece. Hurwitz is a sometime musician as well
as a critic. I'd love to know how performers like Andre Previn,
Zubin Mehta, et al., feel about it. If you had sold-out seasons and
had to add extra concert dates and build bigger halls to accomodate
the audiences, and if your CDs kept going platinum, would it be
worth it?
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rcurl
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response 60 of 65:
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Jan 9 17:04 UTC 1998 |
Of course, *clapping* is a preculiar custom unrelated to the concept of
enthusiasm. It is making a semi-repetitive noise - rather atonal and
inharmonius - after a highly structured sound sequence (music). I always
consider it jarring and wonder what the origin of such a rude interruption
could be.
If any emotional outburst was encouraged during any musical performance,
matters could get rather frenetic, but perhaps disturbing to the performers:
dancing in the aisles; singing along with the tune; OLE!s; etc. There is
no limit to the possible expressions of enthusiasm and appreciation (although
there is a fine line between that and exhibitionism).
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mary
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response 61 of 65:
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Jan 9 23:45 UTC 1998 |
I hope Mr. Wong has enough interest and time to simply look
beyond my short cover letter. ;-) I somehow doubt this
will interest him in any serious way but, that's okay.
I like sending stuff like this off.
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krj
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response 62 of 65:
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Jan 20 23:38 UTC 1998 |
Sorry I've been out of the conference for a while. Some one should have
sent me a note to let me know it had come back to life. :)
I hope you won't mind the general incoherence of my response.
There's a lot of stuff going on. The drastic cutbacks in arts education
are probably the most immediate cause of the listener shortage.
There's also the collapse of the concept of the Middlebrow Intellectual --
the midcentury idea that the broad middle section of society
should find it worthwhile to pursue serious intellectual and artistic
activities, even if they can't do it at the most rarified level.
Instead we've grown a culture which says that if you can't be in
the elite, here, have MARRIED WITH CHILDREN and BEAVIS & BUTTHEAD.
I subscribe to the argument that Classical Music, as we know and
understand it, began when Mendellsohn excavated the music of Bach
and presented it as a rediscovery to the 19th Century audience.
Prior to Mendellsohn, the music of the past was not generally
available; Mozart, for example, had to visit the Bach family
in order to experience the works of JS Bach, because they were
no longer in wide circulation by Mozart's time.
So the 19th Century began to give music, for the first time, a
past, and what followed was the development of a canon.
The canon, and our belief in it, was formed as part of the zenith
of Western European Culture in the 19th century: the Industrial Revolution,
Colonialism, the White Man's Burden, all that.
But the zenith of Western European Culture comes to an end with
the two World Wars, and it's probably no coincidence that Classical
Music grinds to a halt around the same time.
Beginning around World War I, Classical Music starts to lose its relevance
to American Culture. Oh, it hangs on for a while, largely because
American Culture of the early part of the 20th Century is largely an
extension of the 19th cent. Western European Culture. (The Middlebrow
Intellectual might have been one of the last gasp efforts of that
Western European Culture to exert some control.) But sometime
around the end of World War I, Classical Music loses the ability to
create new works which will put fannies in the seats. In opera, the
field I know best, Puccini's TURANDOT (written 1924) is the last work
which can be regularly staged at a profit.
So Classical Music becomes a museum stretching from Bach to Stravinsky,
maybe with Bartok as a little late appendage; and that music recedes
from us in time, and becomes less important to us. (Perhaps the
Early Music craze beginning in the 60s was a desperate gasp for
some fresh new-to-our-ears tonal music?)
Serious music may actually be breathing some life. It has shaken free of
its awful stay in University music departments and its fling with movements
like serialism, and it has started to pay attention to the need to keep
putting those fannies in seats. Glass, Adams, the Kronos Quartet
all show signs of developing a loyal audience which finds them
relevant. But this is serious music breaking free of the tyranny
of the museum, and of the standards dictated by 19th Century Europe.
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md
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response 63 of 65:
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Jan 21 12:22 UTC 1998 |
I thought Glass and Adams represent one way of *returning* to the
standards of 19th century Europe. Serialism certainly killed
whatever taste audiences might've had for new music, but serialism
is as European as a raspberry linzer. The reason composers who
rejected serialism and continued to embrace 19th c. European tonality
had so much trouble making their way after WWII is that, until the
minimalists, there was no coherent theory or movement to justify
tonal music. There was just a bunch of stubborn individual composers.
"Neo-classical" worked for a while, but "neo-Romantic" never had
a chance. "Minimalism" was a term borrowed from a school in
the visual arts, and it gave its practitioners credibility.
Suddenly it was okay to write listener-friendly music. But if you
ask John Adams who really influences him, he'll say Sibelius!
In other words, the fuss over "minimalism" takes place outside the
concert hall, beyond the hearing of most of the audience. It has
nothing to do with the music or the composers. (As with any such
fuss involving critics and academic theorists, it will put the stamp
of genius on mediocrities as well as geniuses, alas. Glass might
be the main beneficiary of this. But time will sort things out, as
it always does.)
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albaugh
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response 64 of 65:
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Jan 21 16:02 UTC 1998 |
Don't ignore 20th century American "classical" music composers such as Aaron
Copland and Leonard Bernstein, whose works encompassed popular themes, the
theatre, etc.
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md
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response 65 of 65:
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Jan 22 11:46 UTC 1998 |
I don't ignore them. I love their music, in fact, and always have
loved it. But they weren't taken very seriously by academia or by
the trendiest critics. "Populism" was another -ism that didn't
wash with them, however much the audiences loved it.
I read a book about American classical music recently that made the
point that Glass, Reich, Adams and Riley never called themselves
minimalists and don't like it when others call them that. Glass and
Adams, in particular, have ended up producing operas in the tradition
of Britten, Menotti and Barber -- i.e., the 19th century European
tradition.
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