When we wonder why more people don’t listen to classical music, or attend classical concerts, we generally start by talking about two things: the music being played, and the atmosphere the music is played in. On the first, there are barriers to enjoyment because people don’t know what to expect going in. With the second, there’s the code that dictates behavior and what to do and what not to do. Both need to be dealt with, and dealt with together. If you only deal with music, and try to educate people on why this piece does this and who else did stuff like this, it’s a closed circuit that goes no farther than that night’s concert. Lecture people on remaining quiet or not taking pictures alone, and not because it will actually help everyone to enjoy the show, and you’re needlessly irritating people.
It’s fashionable to say that classical music needs to lighten up and treat its audience a little gentler, not to issue diktats telling listeners to stay quiet. I have to say it makes no sense to me. When was the last movie you went to without a recorded voice asking everyone to turn off their cell phones and also not to talk? In the halcyon days before Chicago had a smoking ban inside all buildings and even within 15 feet of entrances, the bouncer at the Green Mill (Big Al, who has a handlebar moustache) would tell people A) you can’t talk during the music B) you had to turn cell phone off and C) you can’t smoke, because it was a singer’s show and would mess him up. That’s intimidation, and theoretically should’ve led to a mass revolt on the part of the audience stripped of the basic human rights we are all accorded at birth.
And yet, we still go to movies, still get annoyed when someone’s cell phone goes off, and the audience at the Green Mill didn’t smoke, didn’t have their phones on, and didn’t talk, and no one died in a riot created by not being allowed to do these things, because it didn’t happen. I imagine that the singer’s fans would’ve rioted had someone’s phone gone off, and beaten the offender to death with it. Or simply let Big Al mete out his own personal brand of justice.
Contrast this with the average classical concert (defined as Chicago Symphony concerts, the ones I attend most frequently). A recorded voice of a well-known soloist comes on and asks people to turn off their cell phones, pagers and anything that rings, usually with a dose of humor thrown in, I assume so that people aren’t put off. Anyone taking pictures risks the wrath of an usher asking them to stop, and that’s it. This isn’t soft power, this is a series of humble requests.
Who can be put off by this? Some people are, and now that this Twitter thing seems to be going and its users (who by definition must admit to being Twits; yay, progress), request being allowed to do this during concerts, the argument for greater relaxation in the code is being advanced. I say, talk to Big Al.
This intersects (runs head-on into, is more like it, but let’s use intersects) with the music of the concert is a tangential topic to this article about Elliott Carter’s music by Charles Rosen, in the New York Review ($$). The vast majority of society doesn’t listen to classical music. They listen to even less contemporary music, so they tend to be confused by it, as they and everyone else are by something they have little experience with. Rosen writes:
“Only when one understands how the music works (that is, feels at ease with the music) can one perceive the emotion.”
I love this definition of “understands,” which doesn’t depend on having read Allen Forte or Richard Taruskin, but rests simply on the listener’s own comfort. Listener’s cannot get more comfortable with music except by listening to it. It may be listening in the concert hall, in the club, performing it, with an iPod on the train, or in the car, but it’s that exposure that’s required. And if that exposure is cheapened by mediating it with the ring of cell phones, the loud talking of other ticket-buyers, or Twittering, that understanding isn’t going to take place, potential listeners and fans will be turned off, and the audience will dwindle. It’ll probably shrink faster, too, since the people who already like it will start staying home and the new fans you’re trying to attract also won’t come, since they can listen to cell-phone conversations without buying a ticket.