Every concert should be as comfortable as this.
Goldberg, a new performance art piece created by Marina Abramovic that involved a full performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, was a marriage made in … well, the drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Abramovic was quoted as saying she would make audiences suffer for their Bach – a scary prospect: one of her pieces had her combing her hair until her head bled – but I’d love to hear any concert in these circumstances, with the pianist in the center and four large rectangular screens at all compass points in the hall emitting a grayish-white light.
Before walking into the drill hall, you were required to leave communication devices, and even your watch, in lockers. (You could’ve cheated with a purse, but why rob yourself of the experience that you’re paying to have?) The younger generation might rebel at such a rule. And in mainland China, where phone addiction is much worse than it is here. there would’ve been either a riot or a lot of empty seats.
My personal biases are pretty much on record. Last summer, I had about 30 seconds of fame when, during the Philadelphia Orchestra’s tour stop in Vienna, I confiscated a noisy cell phone from a patron and I lived to write about it. The Guardian in England dubbed me the scourge of the concert hall.
Scourge. Don’t you just love that word? Anyway …
So giving up my phone at the Sunday performance was no problem. Then we were led to reclining deck chairs. And at the bang of a gong – literally – we all donned noise-canceling headphones for an indeterminate amount of time. It could’ve been 20 minutes or 40 minutes.
This is performance art? It resembled a planetarium show – though, in all fairness, this sort of conceptual art gains its identity as much from what it doesn’t do as what it does do. The idea was to clear out our brains, and in New York, you really need that. I found that observing New Yorkers with the sound turned off shows you how much nervous energy they bring to concerts – maybe one reason why, once oriented to the performance at hand, they’re such engaged audiences.
Inside my head, the void was filled by a lot of silly pop tunes – some people call them ear worms – until I focused on the Armory ceiling and my brain grew blissfully silent. At first I felt safe because the situation promised no interruptions from other listeners. Then I felt lonely because safety means isolation. At one point, I began to miss the outside world, which meant I would appreciate it anew when the event was over.
On a motorized stage, pianist Igor Levit arrived in the middle of the drill hall, and appeared to be deep in prayer. Whatever the setting did for us, it had a wonderful effect on this splendid young Russian/German pianist. He just released the Goldberg Variations on Sony, and though it’s a nice recording, it’s basically a joyful young musician having a great time with Bach’s endlessly inventive masterpiece. But this performance had intense depth and revelations at the end of almost every variation. In fact, there was a painful sense of letting go. Levit was so concentrated, so open-hearted that I wasn’t surprised when, at the end, he was wiping tears from both eyes.
Though one of the up-and-coming pianists of his 20-something generation, Levit is in no position to sell out the dozen or so performances at the Armory. And though Abramovic is one of the most famous people in her field, should she be expected to have that kind of box office clout?
The event was, obviously, an event. Something singular. Something that says See Me Now Or Never. And concerts need that. The old system of subscriptions purchased at the beginning of a season seems to be dying, perhaps due to what some industry insiders refer to as “undifferentiated inventory.” In fact, classical concerts are quite differentiated. I haven’t had anything that felt like a redundant experience in years. The problem is that they look undifferentiated.
The solution is not – say, when the New York Philharmonic’s home in Lincoln Center is renovated – to have deck chairs rather than seats. But I do think that divesting oneself of communication devices has a strong psychological effect on listeners, because it tells them that they’re in the hall to do one thing – to listen and experience something, possibly strange and unanticipated, outside themselves rather than something more predictable that lies at the other end of their phones. Levit is one of a number of artists who are have given me experiences that warrant what I call the executive pass to my life. When they play, I do everything to be there. But how are listeners going to achieve that kind of relationship if they aren’t giving these artists their full attention?
What’s the answer? Confiscating cell phones? No. Listeners have to care enough to give them up voluntarily. But in the time it takes for them to figure that out – to value the experience of the moment over the safety of their phones – might our cultural institutions decline? Or die?