Results tagged “audiences” from Life's a Pitch

This is Life's a Pitch: The Outward Bound Edition, as I'm in the lovely Berkshires. Other than the Biblical rain on Saturday night and the spider bite I seem to have acquired above my left eyebrow that has subsequently swollen and given me a not entirely unattractive kind of lazy-eyed Romulan-chic look, Tanglewood is fantastic.

Hearing - emphasis on the 'hearing' - three concerts at Tanglewood this weekend has made me think more about different outlets of experience, previously discussed here. I had written about live-blogging/live-Tweeting during concerts, unsure of which side to come down on, and my clients Hilary (Hahn) and David (Lang) weighed in with their artist perspectives. My conclusion after this weekend is this: it is not a presenter's job to mandate what an audience member's experience will be, but rather to offer as many different experience options as possible while both protecting the quality of each option they offer and maintaining artistic integrity.

On Friday night, my friends and I went to see Emanuel Ax rock out Beethoven 4. We sat on the lawn with snacks, wine and apparently not enough bug spray, and watched the concert on the big screens around the outside of the Shed. Three of us sat on lawn chairs and two of us lay down on the blanket. One of us got her face bitten off, four of us did not. Before the concert and during intermission, the screens flashed through upcoming performances and various Tanglewood initiatives, which was decidedly not-annoying and actually quite useful. I've often wondered why there aren't movie-type previews at performing arts centers, and at the very least highlighting upcoming listings on big screens seems like a good start. Again, you have a(n almost literally) captive audience; market to them.

Saturday, we had planned to watch Die Meistersinger from the lawn, but were scared off by the monsoon. I'm told the kind people at Tanglewood were able to squeeze most would-be lawn watchers into the Shed, but we didn't have the energy. So instead, we listened to the live broadcast on WAMC. The sound quality was great, and we actually started popped in the movie Grizzly Man halfway through. Totally weird, yes, but exactly what we wanted to do.

Sunday was What the Joshua Bell's concert at 2:30pm. We packed a picnic lunch and, while we were offered some box seats ("  "), opted for the lawn. It was a beautiful day, I had just purchased a floppy sun hat, and we were proud of our picnic fixins'. There are no screen projections during afternoon concerts, so we ate and lay in the sun, just listening. Well, listening, snacking, looking up Whatever Works movie times on phones, rolling our eyes about how boring the end of Dvorak 8 is. Actually, I think only I was eye-rolling, but you see my point. We weren't bothering anyone by looking up movie times, because we were in a space where that was acceptable. Would I have been playing with my phone had I taken the inside-seats? Of course not; the people inside expect a certain experience, an experience that does not involve my pink Blackberry. The people listening to a live radio broadcast expect one experience, and the people driving by Tanglewood with their windows down expect another, so on, so forth.  

My friend Meg joined me at the exceedingly lovely Mostly Maux Arts Festival's presentation of Ravel, Faure and the-man-of-the-two-hours on Saturday night. Previously, Meg was my date to Satyagraha at The Met, lured there by the promise of puppets. Whenever I go to a classical presentation with a first-timer, I become eminently more aware of the comedy of errors that is the audience. What a crew. Here are some of the highlights:

Saturday night, 7:45 pm. We found our seats in the orchestra and sat down without incident, which is more than I can say for the gaggle of men in front of us. AA or A? Are we in AA or A? What's the difference? MM?  Does your ticket say MM?  Then, as it turned out, an elderly couple in their row was in the completely wrong seats, and a middle-aged set of ladies had tickets in the correct seats but for Friday night, not Saturday night. Cut to two rows in front of us, where not one but three ushers kept trying to seat people (presumably without tickets?) next to this poor woman, who repeatedly said, "This is my husband's seat!" I couldn't hear properly, but I think one usher actually declared, "If he doesn't come soon, he's going to lose his seat!" Oh really? Is that how it works at Avery Fisher? I didn't think it was.

Concert starts, and I lean over to Meg and say, "There's no clapping 'allowed' between movements, but there might as well be because everyone coughs disgustingly." Sure enough, coughing, sniffling, shuffling, page-ripping - a veritable Stockhausen tribute - between every damn movement. Is everyone just saving up the germs for the silence? Are you just coughing because the guy next to you coughed? Are we extras in 28 Days Later?

Transition to the piano concerto. Five to seven minutes of stage reorganization, and then, at the precise moment the pianist sits at the instrument, a hatted woman in stage-seating starts making her way down the staircase! Right-left, right-left, right-left...we're all waiting...right-left. The usher helps her off the stage. And then, one minute later, just as the piece starts, down comes another one! Clunk, clunk, clunk, goes the Laura Ashley-clad broad. Usher helps her off the stage, too.

Intermission. As if the whole first-half ordeal with the seating mishaps and The Ladies Who Lunch making their exits during the piece weren't enough to put you off classical music forever, the outfits on display at intermission would do the trick. Everyone is so dressed-up! When did that happen. Is it because going to a classical concert is a "night-out" and people want to dress-up for it? Is it because tickets are so expensive that folks assume they have to bust out their finest? When people ask me, I always encourage them to wear what they would wear to work, whatever that may be (granted, Amanda Beard has never asked me).  I wonder if this can be fashion-policed by venue ads and posters: include photographs of audiences of all ages wearing nice, normal clothes. How many people are avoiding classical music because they assume there's a dress code?

The second half of the concert involved more unabashed and exceedingly distracting rudeness. A woman behind us started opening up a candy. Slowly. Crinkle. Crinkle. Crinkle. Normally, I would chalk that up to someone just being oblivious, but she was laughing while she was doing it! Laughing! If she had been a 22-year-old in jeans, she would have gotten yelled at, but because she's old and sitting in the orchestra, it's OK? The concert ended, and half the people leaped to their feet, not to applaud, but to leave as fast as they could. This was a good concert. Stay another three minutes and applaud.

I had gone to the Batman IMAX earlier that day. The audience was better behaved. I went to a Radiohead concert the night before. That audience was better behaved. The assumption that new, young audiences "wouldn't know how to act" at Lincoln Center is absolutely correct; they wouldn't know how to behave that inappropriately.