Changing the Scene
One of the constant refrains surrounding classical music is that audiences are declining and aging. Many orchestras have adopted policies intended to reverse this trend. Some go for superstar blockbusters. Some try to build bridges with popular music acts, like when the San Francisco Symphony played a concert with Metallica. Others, like the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, give special discounts to the under 30 crowd, together with friendly advice about when to applaud and how to cough.
I can understand these policies, and they seem well-meaning. But they also seem like defensive, stopgap measures that see but don’t address the deeper problem in which major symphony orchestras find themselves. This is the fact that classical music as performed and appreciated in concert halls has become severed from living, energized music scenes – something evident in TSO’s need to give written instructions about how young people should control their bodily functions during performances.
It wasn’t always this way. The modern symphony hall emerged in the 19th century, designed to look like temples and to enable a kind of religious awe before great and pure works of art. This was the scene in which modern audience norms evolved, such as silence, bodily stillness, and fixed, focused attention.
These musical temples, however, existed alongside and in connection with a lively informal but not too dissimilar musical world that took place in salons, parties, and as a normal part of domestic life. Somewhere on the way to becoming “classical,” this link was severed. The date is hard to pinpoint; some suggest that the Woodstock Nation started to view popular music as not just a stage on the way to more respectable forms but a viable alternative. Whatever the historical details, in any case, the primary institutional ties of the orchestra began to be with conservatories and universities, neither of which, on their own and acknowledging all their virtues, are likely candidate site for generating a living scene.
The big challenge for classical music is to find some way to reengage with the musical scenes that go on beyond the concert hall walls. The above policies are certainly after this goal. As are others, like Toronto’s Somewhere There, which is pushing, often without much support or adequate performance space, for creating and adding new and improvisational music to existing repertoires.
But our work (and others‘) on the sociology of scenes suggests another approach. A living scene often has some art form at its center; but a scene is more than the arts. There is the whole ambiance and atmospherics around the art and artists, the styles of interaction, the sense of authenticity, the common commitment to a set of values, the buzzing vibe, the feeling of being a part of something on the rise or important, the kind of attention encouraged by the lighting or the crowd outside, the seeing, being seen, and being seen seeing. Without all that, you might have some music, but you wouldn’t have much of a scene.
This suggests that if you change the scene within which a music unfolds, you might change the way the music is experienced, opening up possibilities for making and appreciating that music in new and engaging ways. What might this mean for classical music? Perhaps instead of trying to coax young people into the symphony hall, playing metal or hip hop there, or generally trying to artificially make it cool to go to a classical concert, we might see what happens if classical music goes out into the world of nightlife and clubs and participates in a different scene. Changing the scene might change the relationship to the music.
In fact, something like this is what’s happening at Pete’s Candy Store, a bar and music venue in Brooklyn. Typically featuring an eclectic range of music from indie to folk, Pete’s just added a new series, called “classical candy.” Here’s an excerpt from their description:
Classical Candy is an after work Thursday gathering featuring performances by some of New York’s finest young classically trained musicians eager to present pieces that represent the truly eclectic, varied, and exciting sound world that encompasses ‘classical’ chamber music.
Each evening will be an hour-long exploration of acoustic composed works by various composers from days pre-Bach to works by living composers for a variety of instruments. Experience chamber music as it was originally intended to be enjoyed: in a wonderful intimate space. Every other Thursday from 7:30-8:30 p.m.
Works by Mozart, Villa-Lobos, Mihailova, Bach, and others! Villa-Lobos “Assobio a Jato” “The Jet Whistle” for flute and cello Villa-Lobos “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 6″ for flute and bassoon Mozart Sonata in Bb Major K. 292, for cello and bassoon And others!
What I find exciting about this is that the performers, like typical musicians at a jazz or pop club, will jostle for attention with drinks, conversations, glances around the room, cigarette breaks, and the rest. If they want the audience’s attention, they’ll have to grab it. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But just being placed in this setting will likely reframe and make more fluid the demands on musicians and the expectations of audiences concerning what kind of energy classical music can make.
And if it works, it isn’t that hard to imagine somebody who tasted some classical candy at Pete’s thinking it might be a good idea to go to a symphony hall, sit still, and listen hard to the music. The vitality from the informal scene, that is, might infuse the formal one, and inspire younger people to feel the power of those bodily practices of self-control and sustained attention that have enabled so many to be so moved. Each scene can go on being itself, highlighting those musical experiences at which it excels, strengthened by the interchange. At least, this seems to me more promising than putting Jessica Simpson on stage with Yo Yo Ma.
