Alex Ross in The New Yorker offers a quick history of the classical concert, and reminds us that what we now believe to be ”traditional” and ”pure” in the concert environment is, in fact, a rather recent construct. Sitting silently in the dark and listening to a full program of complete works wasn’t the way it always was…even for many of the composers we now insist on presenting this way. Rather, the tradition, if there is one, favors continual give-and-take between artists and audiences, and places the performance as a background of social activity in the hall, rather than the focus.
I’ve touched on this point before, but Ross’ review of two books on the subject (Kenneth Hamilton’s After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern
Performance and William Weber’s The Great
Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to
Brahms) brings the history into sharp relief. Says he:
When the concert rite emerged in its perfected form, circa 1950–the ban
on applauding after movements took hold only in the early twentieth
century, almost certainly prompted by the passivity of home
listening–it seemed to elevate and to stifle the music in equal
measure. Composers were empowered by the worshipfulness of the
proceedings, but, generally, only if they were dead. Performers thrived
on the new attentiveness, but struggled against the monkish strictures
of conservatory training and certain inexplicable regulations governing
behavior and dress. (The overarching problem of classical music is the
tuxedo.) Listeners, too, come away feeling both liberated and confined.
James Johnson identifies what he calls “the paradox of bourgeois
individualism” — a culture of conformity encircling an art of untrammeled personal expression.
So, as we collectively struggle to rethink the concert environment among shifting social expectations and preferences, it’s worth asking: which tradition are we seeking to uphold?
I can’t speak for an entire generation, but I do feel that very few people my age (21) find classical music “sacred.” My peers that listen to classical music seem to treat it the same way they treat all music in all genres, they judge it based on its emotional impact. In every concert I’ve ever been to outside of the classical world, whenever I felt a strong emotion, I became, in Lynne’s words, ”an active participant.” It’s about more than being able to clap between movements; it’s about whether or not my generation will embrace a tradition that assumes that the music is so sacred that interrupting it with applause cheapens it. I don’t think it will.
I think about the theatrical parallel a lot: in Elizabethan theatre, the audience interaction was so key to the experience, that jokes were written into the scripts about the immediate environment and the audience – and what we know as an “aside” was a dialogue with folks adjacent to the stage (who could see and be seen easily in the broad daylight when the shows we performed).
That’s fascinating…the next generation of orchestral classical *performers*, those who are now in their late 20’s and early 30’s, are the most technically proficient and yet the most emotionally cold and technically judgemental of the few generations since 1950 I’ve had the privilage to be related to, musically speaking. It seems to many of us older musicians that they have almost no education in how to express the varieties of musical feeling that are hidden behind the notes of composers’ written scores. They seemd to be consumed by technical note perfection, the reproduction of what is visible, and a deep sport-like technical concert-competitiveness. If anything is outside the formal “assumed” concert tradition, they are the first to feel uncomfortable. Perhaps we need to wait for your generation of young classical performers to play professionally for a generation- those who will become union members and who will sit on committees and on Boards – for our orchestras to reflect the strength of your “global” emotional and liberal sensibilities. I only hope that in the meantime those youngsters don’t miss picking up through their early orchestral experiences, the skilled part of how to translate the variety of composers’ feelings into their own orchestral playing techniques. Then what does it matter what a concert looks like if the soul of the music is lost, or if the technical understanding is not there to translate soul into sound?
An interesting set of comments. I would add that my book raises questions whether the audience before around 1800 was all that inattentive, or whether the programs were “miscellaneous” in a negative sense. A set of conventions guided a musician putting together a program as to what genres should succeed each other, and what resulted had a great deal of coherence in peoples’ ears. The relatively small amount of older music in fact endowed programs with a unity–and a focus on the present–that is less common today. We gained and we lost from the Great Transformation. Classical-music concerts came to exert a profound moral authority in modern society, but concert-goers lost the fascination with the new that drove musical of the eighteenth century.
Your point is very interesting, Andrew: you put in a few words one of the key issues in classical music today, how to go beyond the “sacred” tradition that can mummify experience of the music. A number of historians have questioned how much the repertory was “sacrilized” in the middle of the 19th century–I myself think that came around 1900, as a defensive reaction to the influence of popular music.
And Andrew makes a good point, too–the tradition of “serious” interaction with a performing art that we have lost to a large extent. Bill Weber