Now, I know there’s that saying about how the only bad publicity is no publicity. And isn’t making orchestral performance just another part of American life on the list of how we are going to save classical music? But still, if the older woman + Depend undergarments + symphony set-up doesn’t make you cringe, just wait for the “magic wand” line. Between that and an inability to operate the complex mechanics of a music stand, this spot may have just set the perception of women conductors back 30 years in 30 seconds.
Of course it’s great that products like this exist so that people with certain medical conditions can maintain active lives without stress and embarrassment, but really Depend, did you need to pin your marketing angle on an industry already fighting to build up sex appeal and play down the aging audience factor? Oh, yeah, I guess I see how that could happen…Shh, make sure the Cialis people don’t get wind of this.
This highlights another problem. Some have suggested stressing the sexuality of women musicians as a marketing strategy. Sexuality is obviously a wonderful thing, but as a marketing strategy it unfairly disadvantages women musicians, because the “expiration date†for women in our society is much earlier than it is for men. This becomes a serious problem, because classical musicians generally reach their highest abilities when women are past the age our culture considers sexy.
Molly adds: True, but it also seems that often when “sexy” gets applied to new/classical music’s image consciously, the temptation is to go to a very MSM “People’s Sexiest Man Alive” place so fast we can overlook the truly charismatically attractive things that already exist and engage current fans so forcefully. Without going all TMI on our fair readers, I think that’s a more complex and less age-specific reality…and probably fuel for several more posts.
Very interesting. I am a classical musican which which makes it difficult for me to see the mystique in the field and its practitioners. All the same, I wonder which classical musicans are “forcefully charismatic.†Most seem utterly bland these days, even if they affect a punk look, or throw an occasional trantrum, or some such thing. You can’t fake charisma. If you could identify some of those forceful characteristics for us, along with the people who represent them, it might be helpful. (Would that be Too Much Information, or does TMI stand for Too Much Internet?) Bernstein and Callas seem long gone.
The new cultural critics are missing the larger point here. Classical music doesn’t have to be “pop” music. Don’t we have “pop” music for that? The culture around pop music is
hyper-sexualized in the way it is marketed and sold. Classical music, even opera, is not primarily about the explicit sex act. Much of it is about transcendence of the day-to-day human condition. The larger question, one which the cultural critics fail to address (or maybe don’t see)is how to make an oversexualized culture value something that doesn’t elevate “sex” and “sexiness” as it’s number one virtue. Younger critics, any thoughts? Do we really need more sexy anywhere
in our culture? Seems we’re languishing in many
places for a lack of the opposite, those very
things that classical music represents.
Molly adds: Hi Vicki. Thanks for your comment. I appreciate your call for an alternative to commercial pop culture. I could not agree more! However, though it sounds like you might be looking for a complete respite from this in classical music (which I respect), in responding to William I was actually pondering how–since most of the audience isn’t 18 and most of the performers aren’t either–the kind of attractiveness our field is actually already ripe with doesn’t need to play that game anyway and isn’t effective when it does. I am attracted to this music and the people who make it because they are fascinating and do push me hard and far from the day-to-day. There are performers and composers I find attractive because of who they are (already!) and what fuels them as people and musicians. In thinking about it in this context, I also wonder if we’re really a hyper-sexualized culture. It seems more to me that we’re a mono-sexualized culture in the extreme: media shows us a picture and that begins to feel like the only version of what is in reality an exceptionally complex human experience/storyline.
Well said Vicki. Great art stands on its own right whether the creator has a lot of sexiness or even charisma. Günter Wand, Mauricio Pollini, Elliot Carter, George Crumb, Joan Tower, and Pauline Oliveros are just a few examples of classical artists whose lives are not particularly colorful, but whose music is very valuable. This is almost the norm in classical music, which generally celebrates the art and not the idiosyncrasies of the creator. Even someone like Gustavo Dudamel will only be a passing fad if he relies on the current fascination with his personality to generate his success. One of the profound ironies of classical music is that its substance often transcends the personal and even the person.