Some things, apparently, never change.
That image at right is from a 1960s ad campaign that was launched to both raise funds and gather public support for the construction of Lincoln Center.
A friend passed it my way, and I post it here because a lot of ideas floating by me of late re: “How do you solve a problem like the state of the [insert institutional performing art form] industry?” are summarized with just a glance at that slogan. Talk about “something doesn’t smell quite right about this” advertising. It’s like It but with mimes. Fun is kind of the last emotion it raises. But fun is also not generally what I’m looking for when I go to a performance, at least not in the candy colored amusement park sense that seems to be implied here. Maybe I’m just too insider-y and jaded. Did this campaign work back then? Would it work with any demographic out there today?
Bait and switch, water down, make friendly: why go this route? A night at the symphony is not a night at the circus (well, except when it is). I can’t believe it’s that there aren’t enough creative ideas out there when it comes to slick, sophisticated, evolutionary ways of presenting “classical” or “concert” or whatever you want to call the field of music that gets all those government and foundation dollars and so needs to be sure to maintain a certain level of public interest. If nothing else, I read about them on blogs all the time. But getting to the part where we enact change is as frustrating as watching C-SPAN (though here again I fully acknowledge that my own nose might be pushed just a bit too hard against the glass). Truly, it feels like the industry has turned into a kind of political party paralyzed by tradition and bureaucracy. I mean, it’s 2010 and in his lecture to the Royal Philharmonic Society, Alex Ross had to spend many (many!) words on the clapping issue. The clapping issue! We often know perfectly well what’s broken, but will we ever be able to drag significant solutions through in a bold and timely fashion?
Later, Ross did get to speak a bit about the experience of taking friends to classical music concerts and registering that otherwise culturally engaged people leave disappointed and that “the evening in some way falls short.” In my experience, this is exactly the case. We dedicated concert goers arrive at the hall not expecting a “show” or the kind of spectacle most ticketed experiences deliver as a matter of course. Remember how much fun you had at that Bare Naked Ladies show in 1996? This is not that. No, instead we understand going in that at best we’ll get something on par with a good lecture at the public library or a not terribly well-designed black box theater production. We attend as if it’s a religious service because we can take enough joy from hearing this type of music played live to adequately recoup our investment. However, that’s not how increasingly larger groups of people want to spend $40 and a Saturday night. So we can either downsize with a smile, or tweak till we catch up in the numbers game, but even the Smithsonian museum didn’t rely on displaying those dusty dioramas forever.
Sure, there are groups at the fringe doing crazy things right now that blow up (success!) or blow up (clearly no one thought that through!). They take their passion and place their bets. Still, if all those conferences are in any way a reliable reflection of the arts institutions out there, they’ve largely been blinkered and sucked down into a tide pool of exhaustion and fear so forcefully that current economics may be the final straw for some. So unless a hero with super human strength comes by with some pretty strong rope, would the music be better served outside these monolithic institutional structures? I suspect groups that are much more flexible and capable of steady experimentation and rapid change are vital today more than ever, because money is tight, audiences are distracted, and I doubt the answer is one singular sensation in a time gone global.
Now, now, I know what you’re thinking. And I can’t show you the money. The monoliths with the track records have what’s left of it. So what to do?
(Now, completely unrelated funny video as reward for reading that entire post.)
First of all, the last video was Hilarious!
OK. I oscillate between two extremes. Sometimes I just don’t care. I don’t believe in the problem, and I certainly don’t believe in the solution. I love classical music, but I love a lot of music. Does it speak to me? Sure, but I’m a trained musician. Should I expect others to dig it, too? No. And I feel like there’s plenty of orchestras and lobby groups out there fighting so that the (apparent) gradual demise of America’s and Europe’s traditional music of upper and upwardly mobile middle class (b/c that’s exactly what it is) won’t happen too quickly in my lifetime. And yes, I’ve heard the stories of what happens when you give a poor latino child a violin, and I don’t think it reflects on classical music at all. It’s just a delusional fantasy of a classless society.
My second extreme is wanting it absolutely blitzed out, AWS style, 8bb style, crazy dance video display costumed with light show style. I don’t want to see the performers sitting there playing, I don’t want to clap when the conductor comes out. I want to feel the music in my body and see the connection between mind body and soul that rocks my world. Whenever I see people in tuxes or all black sit down to play Ligeti’s Atmosphères I get bored pretty fast. SHOW ME THE MUSIC!
I say these things with all sincerity. I have respect for everybody who produces, plays, and prattles about this music. I wouldn’t have studied it for so long if I didn’t.
Molly adds: My sentiments exactly! I almost didn’t even publish this post because in the end I feared I had been typing for an hour and in the end I SAID NOTHING. Out of shame I added the video to try and make up, just in case.
But yet, on the other hand…so yeah, that’s where we are. Thanks for letting me know I’m not alone in this.
I’m way to close to answer impartially. I’m a “classical music†composer. My wife is also a classical musician, and very well-known in her field. We seldom go to concerts. We find the patriarchal, plutocratic, hierarchical, and nationalistic structures of the symphony orchestra deeply repugnant. Chamber music is not much better. All of the works my wife and I create are attempts to reinvent classical music, to shape it into something we can stomach. And we have taken our work to about 155 cities in Europe and America.
No amount of colored lights, show girls, pyrotechnics, and funky venues is going to change the essential nature of what classical music is. (Nor is breaking up musical forms by clapping between movements.) All of those attempts to pump classical music up will quickly wear thin. In the same way, pieces about cartoon characters, ambient arrangements of Brian Eno, and suburban white guys trying to be hip by strumming a little guitar will quickly lose their appeal too.
The only thing that will make a difference is a long-term effort of increase music education. We only need take our “noses off the glass†for a moment and look across our borders. In cities like Munich and Vienna, opera tickets are so popular they have to be distributed with a lottery system. It takes decades on waiting lists to get tickets for Bayreuth or the Vienna Philharmonic. (The examples could go on endlessly and through a host of countries.)
Arts education is what makes the difference. Almost everyone in countries like Germany, Austria, Holland, Italy, Finland, and Spain plays an instrument. When kids learn to play instruments they usually develop a dedicated, life-long interest in music and support it as patrons. El Sistema is living proof of how arts education works, even in a Third World country.
Music education is a long-term project, which pretty much makes it incomprehensible for fast-food Yankee-land. It would help if journalists and centers for the promotion of classical music got off the hopeless lets-make-classic-hip agenda and started working for the long-term project of better arts education.
Sorry. I know my comments are a bit on the brusk side. I too must be patient.