First of all, apologies for the sparse posting lately. Sarah and I both have a ton of work on our plates at the moment, and for me, that won’t be changing for at least another three weeks. So if there’s less new content around these parts than you’re used to, hang in there – we’ll be back at full strength by the end of the month, I promise…
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This past weekend, I was asked by our development staff to attend a pre-concert dinner the orchestra was throwing for some of our most generous and longstanding donors. I was happy to do it – stereotypes about rich arts philanthropists to the contrary, these are wonderful folks, not just generous but friendly to a fault, big-hearted, and utterly passionate about music. (Also – free dinner at Porter & Frye? I don’t know many musicians who would turn that down.)
The routine at these dinners tends to be pretty constant – a half-hour for cocktails (not for me, obviously, since I’m about to play a concert) and mingling, then a leisurely sit-down meal with one orchestra musician assigned to each table. As the dinner begins, a board member welcomes the crowd, then introduces someone from the orchestra who speaks briefly about the music on the program we’re all getting ready to attend. I filled the speaker’s role last fall, and this time around, it was our talented young assistant conductor, Courtney Lewis, who was tasked with demystifying a marimba concerto and Mahler’s most confounding symphony.
Courtney did a great job, assuring the diners that the marimba concerto was quite accessible and giving them a few things to listen for before launching into a very well-constructed narrative about Mahler’s 7th. His talk was a blend of established historical fact (things Mahler actually said about the piece) and Courtney’s own thoughts on, for instance, why the fifth and final movement of the piece sounds so completely different from anything else in the symphony. Mahler can be an intimidating presence for even the most experienced listeners, and Courtney’s disarming style probably went a long way towards alleviating the pre-concert stress of anyone in the room who had glanced at the program and been alarmed at seeing “90 min.” listed next to a single piece of music.
Still, not everyone was appreciative of the context Courtney was providing. A very nice woman sitting next to me at our table kept sighing softly whenever he attempted to assign a specific image or event to some part of the music, and eventually said to me under her breath, “Oh, well, he’s just making all this up!” I assured her that he wasn’t, and she revised her opinion: “Maybe not, but you just don’t need all this… stuff in order to listen to the piece!”
And there it was – the great unspoken clash of concert music in the 21st century. Populism vs. elitism. Words vs. music. Context vs. purity. Call it what you will – this is the seemingly unbridgable gap between those who believe that music gets better the more you know about it, and those who believe that music should be a purely aural experience, undisturbed by explanations or images. Those in the first group are the type who roll their eyes at the various conceits of the concert hall, who constantly question why we persist in following silly traditions simply because that’s how “they” did it 100 years ago, and who tend to gravitate to offbeat concert series like Inside the Classics or casual performances at non-traditional venues. The latter group revere the tradition and pomp of the grand concert experience, and sneer at the idea that some attention-challenged people seem to need to be led by the arm through a tour of the music before just hushing up and listening to it.
In music, as in politics, most people fall somewhere in between those two extreme positions. I’ve met people who are big fans of what Sarah and I do in our ItC shows, but are also quick to say that they certainly wouldn’t want every concert to be like ours. I’ve also heard from folks who regularly attend the academic-style pre-concert lectures offered at nearly all our subscription concerts, but who can’t stand the deliberately offbeat narratives Sarah and I construct for ItC. So most of us are centrists at heart, neither dogmatic enough to be offended whenever someone dares speak from the stage, nor free-spirited enough to believe that every piece of music should have a story told in words and pictures as well as notes and rhythms.
But just as most of us who call ourselves political independents actually wind up voting for one party over the other more often than not, it’s likely that your musical sympathies lie closer to one side or the other in the Context vs. Purity debate. And just as in politics, it’s not really about right and wrong (or right and left) as much as it’s about a clash of two competing (and compelling) philosophies. The divide is partly generational, partly educational, and yes, partly political.
I’m not naive enough to imagine a world in which these two philosophies and their adherents somehow wind up aligned in perfect agreement over the Right Way to listen to music, and I’m also not enough of a culture warrior to think it’s vitally important for one side or the other to win the argument. (There’s nothing I find more wearying than the commentators on both sides of this debate who are forever insisting, on the flimsiest of evidence, that All Of Concert Music will cease to exist within a generation unless their side wins the war immediately.) But I am endlessly fascinated by the different ideas people have about the importance (or lack thereof) of placing music in a larger context. I’d love to see a study on how such viewpoints dovetail with views on, say, education, or tax policy, or climate change. Not because I think I know what the correlations would be, but because I strongly suspect that I don’t.
Anyway, your thoughts on this simmering feud are most welcome – how much context can you take before you reach overload stage? What composers or pieces do you find you need the most “preparation” for? And if you’ve been listening to music your whole life, how do you think your perception of things differs from someone who’s interested in discovering “your” music as an adult? Discuss all this and more in the comments…
Interesting questions. These are partly matters of musical maturity, intellectual curiosity, and capacity to listen.
Some faithful members of your audience can be pretty limited on these counts. I was in a focus group last year and gritted my teeth when another respondent said–rather proudly–that he would walk out before hearing an “modern” piece in the second half of the program. He and others in the group made it clear that they go to relax to the music rather than to be really engaged.
When I was around 12 years old I first heard the Rite of Spring and La Valse while working through my father’s Readers Digest Classical LP set. I had no idea what the composers were doing, but thought they were absolutely cool. My understanding and enjoyment deepened later when I noticed a family resemblance with the earlier Petrouchka and then with the radical Les Noces, which is really cool. Likewise with the Ravel, La Valse became not just pleasing but profound when I understood the context of World War I and all that went with it.
For some works you need some help. I would count the Mahler 7th as one of those, because it is really strange. It (along with the 9th) are my favorite Mahler, but it’s taken years to get my mind around it–especially the first and fifth movements. (See Kenneth Wood’s blog, A View from the Podium, for a fascinating discussion of the problems of conducting the Mahler 7th, http://kennethwoods.net/blog1/?cat=2.)
(An Aside: I thought the Mahler 7th performances last week were very good overall and sensational in a couple of movements. But I came away thinking that you need to play Mahler more often than once a year in order to get the kind of command that you now show for Beethoven and Sibelius.)
Even sophisticates can use help on really familiar works. The Star Tribune critic threw a fit a couple of years ago when the orchestra included not one but two Rachmaninoff pieces in a concert. His review repeated all sorts of criticisms about Rachmaninoff that were made 75 years ago when it was predicted that he would be another forgotten composer. . I thought his review was remarkably unsophisticated: He should have consulted Michael Steinberg’s essay on Rachmaninoff which explained what is right about this music.
Explaining what is happening in the music without getting lost in technical matters, or being too simple about it, or being silly regarding alleged story lines is very hard to do. On such occasions I feel like telling the speaker to shut up so we can hear the music.
My college degree is in music, so I’m used to digging out info myself about something I’m going to hear in concert. However, I’ve appreciated the pre-concert talks a LOT at times, especially when the speaker addresses a composer’s life and state of mind at the time he or she composed the work we’re about to hear. Or what a composer was trying to achieve by writing the piece. Then, for me, the listening is enhanced, enriched and deepened. Artists in all mediums do not create in a vacuum, and I think it’s always helpful to learn under what conditions the art was created.