Or, rather, the myth that people have to be educated to like classical music. This is a common, and deeply held belief. I ran into it a couple of times during the visit my wife and I made to Bowling Green State University.
We took part in panel discussions on the future of classical music, and sometimes people said — speaking with pure, and deeply felt sincerity — that people wouldn’t start liking classical music until they learned about it, maybe even learned to play a classical instrument.
I sympathize with the people who believe this. It’s a lovely myth. It says that classical music is something very special, something not encountered in the common run of life, and that therefore people have to be specially exposed to it. They have to hold a violin or a clarinet in their hands, perhaps, before they can listen to a Mozart symphony. There’s also something protective about these beliefs. Inside them, I think is a longing for classical music to be preserved, not to be damaged, to stay pure. Thus people must be taught to come to it, rather than the classical music world do anything — maybe something harmful to the music — to get anyone to come to it.
But I don’t believe that the core belief here is true. Not that I’m against people learning about classical music. Of course classical music should be part of every school curriculum, along with other kinds of music most people don’t know about. (See below.) But I don’t think this will guarantee the future of classical music, and I don’t think its absence will cause us much trouble.
Here’s some evidence I’d cite. It’s easy — child’s play, just about — to think of music, often new and challenging music, that people came to without any preparation at all. Bebop, for instance. There’s a style of music that in many ways is harder to understand than the mainstream classical repertoire (the harmony is harder to follow, as is the motivic development of musical material in solos). Plus the complexity, especially rhythmic, of all the members of even a small group playing together can be really wild, quite difficult to take in. And yet people gravitated to it in the late 1940s and early 1950s, not in gigantic numbers, maybe, but certainly in numbers large enough to launch the style as a crucial new movement in jazz. These listeners weren’t trained in music. Just look at the beat generation, at the way Jack Kerouac (for instance) writes about jazz. He doesn’t know music in any educated way, but he got into bebop without any trouble.
Another example: current electronica, people like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Clark (to cite three artists on the Warp label I’ve been listening to). This music, too, can be harder to follow than the mainstream classical repertoire. Yes, it has a beat, but the textural variety can be daunting, even confusing, if you seriously try to follow everything that’s going on. This is pop music, maybe, but it’s certainly not popular — and yet still the people I’ve named sell more records, maybe far more records, than classical musicians do. Nobody gets formally educated to understand this music. Some people just like it the moment they hear it. And some people go right to their computers and learn to make it for themselves.
A third example: minimalism. Here I can speak from my own experience; I was on the scene pretty early, going to Steve Reich concerts early in the ’70s. These were dazzling experiences, with people sitting on the floor at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, listening to long pieces like Drumming. Again nobody prepared us for this completely new style. We just loved it, without a word of introduction necessary.
Fourth example: Indian classical music, for which there’s been at least a minor rage for in the west ever since the ’60s. This is complex music, and can go on for quite a long time, but once more the people who liked it simply liked it, without needing any education in any of its complexities, and certainly without needing to hold a sitar in their arms.
The last two examples, by the way, seem to answer one objection that people might make to what I’m saying, that classical music requires sustained listening over longish spans of time. And so it does (though not all of it). But so do the minimal pieces by Steve Reich and Philip Glass that had such an eager audience starting in the ’70s. And so does Indian classical music. Not to mention endless jams by the Grateful Dead (but then, someone’s sure to say, drugs often were involved). Or Miles Davis fusion albums like Bitches Brew or In a Silent Way or Jack Johnson, all of which had long, unbroken spans of music, lasting an entire LP side.
Seems to me that people listen to music because it speaks to them, and that new styles catch on because they catch a wave (so to speak) in the zeitgeist. That matters much more than any special music education. And while typically the styles that spontaneously catch on are new, they don’t have to be. Look at the lounge music craze that hit in the ’90s, sending American kids back to stuff from the ’50s, and Cuban kids back to Beny Moré.
So if classical music can’t latch on to something in contemporary life, it’ll very likely keep on losing listeners, no matter what kind of music education we provide. And besides…we need more than classical music education. I’ve taught Juilliard graduate students who’d never heard Charlie Parker, and couldn’t follow a Parker solo when I played one for them. They also couldn’t make any sense of Robert Johnson’s 1930s Delta blues, which over on the non-classical side of the fence is normally considered some of the most searing music ever known.
But some Juilliard students have trouble even hearing it as music. Music education, in other words, is (or ought to be) a multi-edged sword, and highly educated classical musicians might need it just as much as anybody else.
“classical” music is stale, because it’s afraid to put any rockandroll in. afraid to alienate its financial base.
give it another ten or twenty years, and all will be right with the world…
Good point, well made. But is there not a bias towards music already known, so that at least a previous exposure, if not an education, might amplify the enjoyment of a concert?
reminds me of something I remember Shostakovich saying, something about how a composer should never promote his own works ~ I think the idea being that if the music can’t promote itself, then it’s not worth forcing it on someone ~ for me, that would include 99% of the atonal classical music written since Schoenberg.
We have a financial base? Can somebody give them my phone number?
Greg,
Very interesting points. I wonder though how much young attention spans can tolerate classical music once you add in all the other trappings that go with the live experience. Yes, a Brahms Symphony is just as long as the Grateful Dead doing “Dark Star” or an electronica set, but in those cases people can walk around if they want to, eat and drink, make comments to their friends and dress as casually as they choose. The etiquette for an orchestra concert, of course, is much more alien and so much as an errant cough can invite nasty stares not only from fellow concertgoers but from the musicians on the stage, who often don’t see any need to make the experience more welcoming. It’s unfortunate because there are young, curious people out there who would give the music a chance if the classical world would only start to meet them half-way.
Greg,
You’re right, I think it would be very unusual for almost anyone to attend a classical concert and not find their mind drifting from time to time, whether it’s the purists or the blue-haired society types or the uninitiated newcomers. And that’s interesting that research shows just that.
Still, I always wondered if maybe Pierre Boulez was onto something in the 1970s when he tried out “rug concerts” at the New York Philharmonic? If you can shake up some of the most sacred rituals of concert-going — the obsession with silence, the ban against drinking in the hall, the tuxedos, the parade of entrances, bows and curtain calls — people would feel more a part of something that’s fun, and they’d be less likely to squirm in their seats and cough the minute a piece hits a slow point when nothing really happens.
Of course, changes in protocol can never substitute for smart and engaging programming but those sorts of details seem (to me at least) to be one way to make the experience feel more inviting to the general public.
Who knows, maybe Lorin Maazel will shock us all and as a parting gesture re-introduce the rug concert once again.
Brian
has there ever been a time when classical audiences were primarily younger people? retro is one thing, but most of the music played is OLD.
when new music is programmed, perhaps the orchestra ought to spike their hair, and wear piercings. maybe we need to educate the older listener to accept new music/style, and then the younger audience will start coming to “classical” concerts.
as was mentioned, the whole concert ambience is what attracts some people, and what drives others away.
and Matthew, what little financial base there is…
I have to disagree with paul, who said that music that’s any good makes it own case. A good performance is making a case, so there’s that right from the start.
I think the case is also made by telling people something about the work. That’s why it’s a good idea to talk before performances, if you have something to say.
Greg, you say “So if classical music can’t latch on to something in contemporary life, it’ll very likely keep on losing listeners, no matter what kind of music education we provide.” Insofar as we are talking about new classical music, that’s true. However, it doesn’t address the dwindling audience for older classical music. For that matter, bebop and Steve Reich, to name two musics that emerged from very specific times and places, will also lose listeners over time, and more rapidly the more that music education is devalued in this country. The classical music “industry” is the one complaining the loudest about the decline of music in the schools, but it is certainly not the only music whose survival depends on a musically educated public. Appreciation of all music…Indian ragas, Aphex Twin, Miles, you name it…is enhanced by more knowledge, and is less satisfying with less knowledge. I guess in 2006 America that makes me some kind of “elitist.”
It’s interesting that even with that music you keep pointing out can be appreciated without deep practical knowledge (such as playing an instrument), you also continually cite the complexity of that music as a worthy element. Why? Because I think you know deep inside that music that speaks to heart AND mind, to left AND right brain, is the most rewarding to revisit over a lifetime, time and time again.
Regarding attention spans: I do think there has to be some generalized shortening of attention spans in the population at large given the direction we’re going with technology, speed, etc. But of course, we’re all individuals and as you point out, some electronica, or the Dead, or any number of non-classical musics require long attention spans and do have their young devotees.
And even though many if not most of a classical audience is not following every nuance of structure in a Beethoven sonata, that structure still exists for them to discover, the more time they spend with that language. The relative quiet sitting situation in a classical concert is, in part, consideration for all audience members to give them an equal opportunity to “follow the narrative.” As somebody who’s made a living playing both Beethoven and Reich, though I know people can love the music on first hearing, I always hope that every person in the audience will be initiated into a journey of knowledge and understanding so that every time they hear a given piece, their experience of it will be enhanced, so their love for it will grow, not fade. That’s what is meant by “classic” and it can apply to any kind of music.