Orchestras, engage your audience!

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”6PhJHxYsIWndEpWU4MTzxl1UYh3fEc7t”]

So last week I did a post I called “Excited audience,” about how the crowd at the National Symphony’s recent club performance shouted in excitement at some exciting music.

The music happened to be mixed classical and pop, based on Bach, but with a beat. But the passage that made the audience shout happened to be pure Bach. This led me to ask if we could ever get the normal classical audience reacting like this, in the concert hall.

Well, there are many reasons why that’s not happening tomorrow. The main one would be the airless blankness of the concert hall. External blankness, anyway. What’s going on inside the minds of the audience — and maybe the musicians, too — remains largely unexplored. I’ll never forget someone sitting on the aisle at an Alfred Brendel recital at Carnegie Hall, banging his fist in rhythm with the Schubert Wanderer Fantasy.

So sometimes people do react. But, largely, what concerts do is what Christopher Small — in an unforgettable chapter on concert halls, from his book Musicking — said they do: Create isolation for everyone. Isolation of the audience from the musicians, and the musicians from the audience. And isolation of members of the audience from each other. All of which makes outspoken excitement during any music not very likely. All of us, at a concert, make sure our feelings stay private, until the end of a piece, when we’re free to let them out. But up to then, we’re supposed to keep ourselves closed to everyone else.

Which of course means that at normal concerts, the orchestra — or, really, any classical musician, playing solo or in any ensemble — does nothing to engage the audience.

And so, back in the club…

Even there, things were a bit disengaged. The NSO musicians looked a little awkward on stage, locked in their chairs, half hidden behind their music stands. They were cut off from their audience. The conductor, Steven Reineke, Principal Pops Conductor of the NSO, did look lively, and turned around to speak in a lively way to the audience. But the musicians seemed a bit like ciphers, offering nothing like the lively presence most members of most pop groups give us.

What could fix this? The show was a success, even as it was. But how much more strongly might it have charged up everyone, if the musicians engaged with everyone more?

An important note: I’m not blaming them for not doing that. They did what they normally do, for which nobody can blame them. I’m talking about a big change in orchestra culture, which will take a while to evolve.

So, some things that orchestras might do

Orchestras could play from memory

That would make a difference! No more music stands. No more physical barrier between musicians and audience. Musicians free to look at the audience, to make eye contact (if the lighting allows them to see anyone’s eyes). To smile. To show how much they love the music, and love playing it. (And if they don’t love it, or love playing…that’s another long discussion of orchestra culture.)

And of course I know that playing from memory might not be possible. Orchestras play a lot of music each week. Asking them to memorize all of it might not be fair. And might take us out of the zone of reality. But still…how freeing it would be! (See the University of Maryland’s student orchestra, playing Afternoon of a Faun and *Applachian Spring* from memory, while dancing those pieces.)

Orchestras could play standing

The Australian Chamber Orchestra does that, explaining on its website About page how it transformed itself into “the energetic standing ensemble (except for the cellists) for which it is now internationally recognised.” I’ve never seen the group live, but people who have tell me that they’re bracingly exciting.

Orchestras could look at their audience

Even from behind its music stands. At Echo Stage, the club where the NSO performed, the strings sitting nearest the audience were facing sideways, toward the conductor, just as they are at formal concerts. Why not angle them? Seat them at a diagonal (if there’s room enough) so they face partly toward the conductor and partly toward the audience. And thus can engage.

Once they’re looking, they can smile. React to the music. From the long-ago days when I was a teen, I remember an open rehearsal at Tanglewood, Charles Munch conducting the Boston Symphony in one of the Brandenburgs. (Yes, those were long-ago days.) He was having so much fun that at one point he turned to the audience and grinned. While still conducting. Corny? Maybe. But how fine that he included us. “Don’t you think this sounds fabulous?”

And at a concert in New York, by Gidon Kremer’s Kremerata Baltica, I remember two musicians, stand partners, turning to each other and grinning at some point they loved in the music. Certainly made me like them.

I’ve heard of the Berlin Philharmonic improvising in (if my infomation is correct) a Haydn symphony. One of the winds played a phrase, and improvised some ornaments. Another woodwind had an answering phrase, and improvised some answering ornaments. All, maybe, with smiles.

And speaking of the Berlin Philharmnonic…

Those musicians move when they play. I’ve never seen anything else like it in classical music. They put their bodies into their playing. Just picture all the strings doing that! Not in any choreographed, or otherwise planned way, but sponteneously, so that everyone moves differently. I’ll never forget the basses almost dancing with their instruments, even in profound and slow music like the last movement of the Mahler Ninth.

I think that deepens their sound. And, as you sit in the audience, makes you feel that they’re engaged. That they care. That they’re committed. That they’re individuals, doing something great, fused together, but not in any way that takes away from who they are.

One last question

Why, in traditional classical music thinking, are all these things — engaging the audience, smiling while you play, moving while you play — considered low-rent? As if they’re attacks on the dignity of the music.

I’m not going to say that playing in these ways is appropriate for all music. It would seem odd in a Pierre Boulez piece. And maybe also in a truly profound work, like the Beethoven Missa Solemnis or (the example I usually give) the Mahler Ninth. Except that (in the performance I saw) the Berlin Philharmonic moved almost ecstatically while playing the Ninth, and only made the music more powerful.

This kind of playing was hardly unknown in classical music’s past. I ask students in my Juilliard course on the future of classical music to read some accounts of how classical music was played in other centuries. Including (to cite just one example) musicians and audience bonding with eye contact during a passage from the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth, because the music was so new and exciting for everyone.

And we don’t know what classical music could be like, with interaction like that, until we see it happen. The changes this implies — changes from our normal understanding of what classical music requires — are huge. But the gain in engagement, for both audience and musicians, could be priceless.