This is a thinking-aloud about how classical music is pitched and experienced, inspired by what I've noticed in my job as Classical CD Guy at a large urban store, by Kyle Gann's new book Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice, by the book-in-progress The Future of Classical Music? that Greg Sandow has been writing online, and by Gann's and Sandow's blogs. It's more hurried and rambling than usual, too, but I wanted to get it out there quickly now that some of the thoughts have come together.

I've also been procrastinating for months on another long post, so perhaps posting this unrelated item might break the logjam...

I don't find myself interested in going to many classical concerts nowadays, and I keep thinking that I should. Even as a relatively well-educated and engaged audient, the experience of sitting in a dark room listening to an orchestra doesn't interest me much. I know that there's no way to hear classical music as clearly and powerfully as when you're in a room with people playing it, but it's not enough to get me to go.

In talking with my customers, often having to describe pieces of music to them quickly, I find myself caught in the gulf between how the music is sold and how it is designed, and seeing how difficult it is to talk about it in non-technical terms.

Sales Pitch vs Experience

Classical music is pitched to the public, and experienced by them on the most popular CDs and TV performances, in an almost fraudulent way, selling them on an experience that is the opposite of what they actually get in the orchestra hall.

Steady-state vs Change

Classical music is pitched to the public as a set of steady-state experiences, and the public expects it to be that. But this is the exact opposite of what most classical music is designed to do and does best: classical music excels at depicting experiences and emotions that change over the course of the piece. Thus, most sales of classical CDs (other than the blips of other highly hyped star discs) consist of very short pieces and excerpts of larger pieces, which don't have time to change much. (Is there a good way to describe what a classical piece is "about", much as one describes the plot or theme of a movie?)

Hooks vs Development

Classical music is pitched via its melodic hooks, but those hooks only appear in an immediately recognizable state in a very tiny portion of the piece. (Sitting now in a coffeeshop where they are playing the local classical radio station with its usual collection of the 100 or so most relaxing pieces, I find myself hearing a well-known piece, which in better conditions can carry me along, as "theme, blah, blah, blah, theme again, blah, blah, the other theme, blah, blah, blah, the second theme again, the opening again, blah, end.")

Background vs Foreground

Classical music is pitched as background music, with much of the best-selling music being pitched as "relaxing", but most of it is designed to demand and require foreground attention and conscious work. (Though one might draw a line through Cage to the existence of intentional music as a training ground for people to give that quality of attention to everything they experience.)

The Experience of the Concert

Going to a classical concert is more like going to the theatre (presenting a play in a language that most of the audience doesn't speak) than it is like any other musical experience that the audience is likely to experience. We sit together silently, facing forward in the dark, looking at live people doing something in the light, without communicating (and without popcorn!). The experience is even more distanced than the theatre, though: in most theatre, we are seeing a more-or-less ritualized depiction of events happening to people who are more-or-less like us; in the audience of musical performance, the changes and incidents happen to quite abstract collections of sounds. And we're expected not to respond to them in any way that anyone else might notice until after the event -- or possibly a rather long chain of vaguely connected events -- has finished. What drama might be involved is predetermined and fixed, except in the case of virtuosi battling difficult material (a quest that is invisible if done well, and more athletic than artistic if seen).

Which leads me to wonder: why do we look at the musicians in a classical concert at all? What does seeing people saw away at strings and blow into various tubes bring to our experience of the music? Do we care whether the third trumpeter is sweating? Are we looking at them because, when any visual component has dropped away, that's all that's left? Is seeing the musicians more of a problem than an asset?

In a lot of classical performance, there really is nothing to see up there. The musicians act as if the audience is not there, except for the brief, ritualized interactions at the beginnings and ends of pieces. Watching them is no more interesting than, say, watching an expert short-order cook or bricklayer do their jobs. If one has personal experience cooking or laying brick, one might spot admirable nuances in the work, and one might find physical details of the actions interesting (much as in Phill Niblock's films of people working at various jobs), but otherwise, it's just a bunch of people doing a task in realtime, ignoring us.

Still, the musicians are lit and attention is drawn to their visible actions as if there were more impact to them than we actually see. What would happen if the performers were in the orchestra pit, where they play in pieces that are designed with visual components? Would we attend more to the sound if we couldn't see them at all, or does seeing the minute movements of the musicians at a distance help us focus on the right parts of the sound? And how would it affect things if they adopted the technologies used in concerts in other media and in TV broadcasts that draw the attention to particular performers at various times?

I'm reminded of seeing Pink Floyd in the 80's: enough was going on visually all over the place that, while the players were visible on the stage, we rarely looked at them. And I've found that the avant/improv events that I've most enjoyed have tended to involve dance or a visual component outside of watching the players. (Others, such as the TransBay Skronkathons, have benefitted from being true community events, where musicians played for each other, and even had a barbecue.)

And while classical concerts also resemble going to the movies, theatrical presentations of movies are also a fading experience, increasingly turning into expensive teasers for DVDs.

Are movies changing to make people still want to go to the theatre rather than watching DVDs? Is this simply a matter of making thing go kaboom more loudly, or is something else being done?

I find that I tend to go to either small quiet movies (especially those that my friends are talking about) or movies (mostly science fiction) where being swallowed by a huge screen and surround sound is important.

Explaining as we go along

It does help, in the course of performance, to work with the audience to understand what is about to happen. (Since it's close to Passover, I'm reminded of the Seder, in which the entire structure is built around explaining the source and meanings of the rituals within it.) The best-known example of this is Leonard Bernstein's CBS "Young People's Concerts." (Are reruns of these still broadcast? They should be.)

In doing my solo performances, I've found it quite helpful to talk about each piece as I'm about to do it. It helps that, coming in a sense from the post-minimalist tradition, it's been relatively easy to describe the single process at work within each piece. But a word of information goes a long way. (As some audients told me at a show in Nashville some years ago, "this is the first of these things we're been to where we had any idea what is going on.")

How can we help people, in real time, to follow the story of what's going on? The best example I can think of it the abstract early section of Fantasia. (Have any studies been done of the effects upon people of seeing Fantasia, or, later, Fantasia 2000, at an early age?)

Would something like surtitles help (though would that split the attention badly, in a left-brain/right-brain sense, between reading words and listening to music)?

I keep coming back to PDQ Bach's comedy sportscast, in which a performance of Beethoven's 5th is presented like a football game. I wouldn't want to have this happen in the course of a regular experience, but it did lay out what was happening in the piece more clearly than I had experienced it before.

Perhaps, rather than having audiences listen to premieres cold, groups could release recordings of the pieces beforehand, perhaps as podcasts, to whet interest. (I've found that the weekly Naxos podcast does this well.)

The Sacred Space of Musical Attention

What does the audience get from the experience of classical musicking? A sacred time and space designed for that quality of attention.

In 1989, I experienced a performance, in Austin's biggest live-performance theatre, by Buddhist monks which included (what we were told was) a standard study session of their texts. The audience was captivated. I wondered if the audience would be nearly as involved if it were something with which they were more familiar, or if it were the very exoticism (or, in the worst case, some sort of Buddhist chic) that drew them in. (And my theatre piece Shekhinah: the Presence came directly from that experience, beginning as a translation of Jewish ritual, though it eventually turned into quite a different experience.)

Perhaps we would benefit from presenting Western classical music as a ritual experience, one with traditions and expectations. Perhaps presenting the experience as if it is to be experienced as part of everyday life is a mistake -- we might benefit by saying that, yes, this is an "alien" experience from another world that can be deeply meaningful to those involved in it. But it's more akin to going to high mass or to Orthodox shabbat services than it is like going to a rock concert.

I'm again reminded of the paradigm of the Four Sons from the Seder. It presents the people at the Seder as being in four groups (the Seder is as full of fours as some Christianity is of threes): one is already in tune with and interested in what is going on; one is there grudgingly and hostile to the event; one knows that something's happening, but won't know what it is; and one isn't even aware that something unusual is going on. How do we address these four groups in the potential classical audience?

The Personal Invitation

Penguin Books put out a series of the books of the Bible with celebrity authors writing brief prefaces (such as Bono introducing the Psalms). WXPN now has a podcast with musicians introducing music (mostly in popular genres) that influences them. There's also the "Oprah effect", where we see that any book that Oprah features immediately has a huge bump in sales, even if it's been a previously moribund book like the Faulkner. And I'm continually turned on to new musical experiences by mailing list members, blogs, coworkers, and customers who are enthusiastic about music that they've heard and made.

The key thing of these is that the audience trusts the person who is introducing them to the new experience. That experience might come from the intimate experience of a history of conversations with a friend, the less close experience of someone's suggestions on a Net discussion group or as a reviewer, or from the experience of a celebrity through the media (fabricated as that may be). It's not the vast, anonymous voice of Official Culture saying that one "should" experience something, but rather an identifiable person saying that the person to whom he or she is speaking, who has already built up a level of trust in the speaker, might personally find pleasure in the experience.

Perhaps we should appeal to people by saying "We're going to be having this ritual event tomorrow evening. Here's what's going to be happening. It means a lot to us, and we'd like you, as a friend, to experience it. We'll help you follow what's going on, but you're going to have to experience it openly and with few expectations." The "as a friend" aspect is important, and it can not be done by a phone tree or anything like that -- nothing sets off people's wariness detectors faster than being addressed as a friend by someone that they barely know.

But this can really only work on a level of intimate experience, such as chamber music. It would have real problems with experiences that require dozens or hundreds of people, such as orchestral performance or opera. Might it be appropriate to switch the focus of classical evangelism away from the enormous and toward the intimate? Rather than maintaining cathedrals of culture, might the work be best done at the level of the salon? And if we would have to turn away from the massive events for a while, would it be possible to do so without losing them forever?

(And it might not be a bad thing to have more musical experiences without audiences. After all, a string quartet's experience in playing a work is far different than a non-playing audience's experience in hearing it. Does one require the other? I've found this especially true when it comes to the improv music that I've experienced -- on the whole, it's a lot more fun to make than it is to hear, and the immense effort in trying to raise an audience and rent a hall is often more distracting and less worthwhile than we might like. And again, while inviting others to the Seder is an important part of it, I've found that some of the most rewarding Seders to be the ones where everyone was involved in their creation.)

In Lieu of a Conclusion

So that's a lot of questions, with a very few hunches as to answers. I don't think that anyone can answer all of them. But if classical music is going to continue as anything other than background music and a historical museum event, questions like these might be critical.