In today’s New York Times, in the business section, is a brief little story I can’t find online. It talks about a paper in the Journal of Marketing, which reports the results of two studies. In each study, people were given the same food to eat — in one study a cracker, in the other some mango lassi (an Indian yogurt drink) — and then were divided into two groups. The people in one group were told the food was healthy; the people in the other group were told the food was unhealthy. Then they were asked to rate the food’s flavor. You guessed it: people said the food labeled unhealthy tasted quite a lot better.
The moral of this story (for classical music, that is)? We’re always starting educational intitiatives, trying to teach people about classical music. Some of us also cherish a belief that classical music is somehow ethically or culturally pure, and is therefore good for everybody. What these studies suggest is that appealing on these grounds won’t work. People will assume the food tastes bad — or, in our case, that they won’t really enjoy the music — and all our efforts might very well backfire.
Which, by the way, is only common sense.
Why do we keep trying to teach people things about classical music, as if lack of knowledge was the barrier that keeps people away from us? Why don’t we just make performances such compelling events that nobody can resist them?
Greg,
If we have to choose between creating a compelling event and teaching people about classical music, you’re absolutely right. But is it really an either-or proposition? What if we created compelling events that also increased people’s understanding of the music?
I think the problem is that too many people conflate education with familiarization. Classical music can be very intimidating to an outsider, not least because of the lack of information about it available in mainstream culture. However, knowing what famous pieces are called and knowing what different instruments sound like is a very different (and much more basic) educational process than knowing about sonata theory and Gustav Mahler’s life story. Did you read the Wall Street Journal’s story (linked from ArtsJournal today) about the Knight Foundation study? One thing I found very telling about that article was that the one solid predictor they found for concert attendance was a history of playing an instrument or singing in an organized ensemble. It’s ongoing, participatory activities that really get people excited about classical music and encourage them to discover the history for themselves. This applies to composers just as much as instrumentalists, in my opinion. What this means for the future of the industry remains to be seen.
I would be interested to read your response to the WSJ article, by the way, since it stakes out a very different viewpoint from that found in your writings.
Speaking as someone whose interest in classical was pretty much self-directed, enjoyment came before enlightenment, for me – I enjoyed the strange things this music could do and was then seized with the desire to learn how it did them. But I could easily imagine someone less system-oriented than I am simply being thrilled by a piece of classical music, without ever really understanding how that happened. I mean, people read novels and don’t stop to analyze the metaphors and symbols in grotesque detail, even though those things probably have some subconscious impact on how much they enjoy the work.