Acess points?

Lately I had the privilege of being in some workshops led

by an admirable and charismatic consultant, somebody widely employed by arts

organizations, including orchestras, to help them reach out to a wider audience.

I know him, and I’m fond of him, but I’d never seen his work before, and I ended

up with some questions about it. These don’t reflect on him; they’re more about

the assumptions behind his work, assumptions that are shared widely in the

classical music business.

This consultant works with the idea of “access

points”—things about a work of art that let us build bridges to it from the

things people already know about. This, parenthetically, is one of the most

admirable things about the way this man works: He starts from the art itself,

and says very strongly that any outreach approach that doesn’t do that isn’t

going to work.

And he’s terrific at finding the access points. Pick a

bodily function, he’ll say, to variously intrigued or embarrassed giggles in the

group he’s working with. Then write down what this function feels like. Then use

these feelings, and the function itself, as a metaphor for something in American

life. Now imagine that this something has become gigantic, transforming,

apocalyptic. Now imagine someone caught up in all this, and invent a monologue

for that person to speak. Having done all this, the consultant (who used to be a

professional actor, and evidently a strong one) speaks a monologue from a Sam

Shepherd play, in which somebody, with marvelous zany verve, decries America for

being too clean. What we need is tourista, he says; we need to get sick

from our own water. Then we’d know what life is all about.

And then the more limited “we,” the we in the workshop, see

how we were lead point by point through much of what lies behind the Sam

Shepherd monologue. Certainly we appreciate Shepherd a lot more. If we might

have had trouble with the faint scatology of the monologue, now at least we

understand where it came from. The consultant also asks us to examine how we

made our own metaphors, what imaginative process we used. That way we learn ways

to draw on our imaginations even if at first we’re stuck.

Of course, you might ask why anybody needs access points to

a Sam Shepherd monologue. Shepherd is a successful playwright. He has his

audience; anyone who doesn’t care for him or doesn’t understand him doesn’t have

to be in that audience. And the humor in the monologue doesn’t need any

explanation. It’s not much different from a lot we find in (just for instance)

South Park.

But classical music, people think, does need explanation.

Certainly it needs a new audience. So that’s where this consultant’s work might

really be helpful, and that’s why he was doing his workshop at a music gathering

I was at.

He had many ideas. He described, for instance, how he and

others led a group of kids toward Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. He had them

make thunderstorm noises with their mouths and their bodies. Then they set up

textures based on these noises. Then they performed the textures, which changed

a lot. Then they listened to the thunderstorm in the Pastoral. And lo! They

could follow it! And appreciate Beethoven’s skill in making it work.

Now, granted, this was for kids. But a lot of the classical

music examples worked in similar ways. The music is assumed to be valuable. It’s

also assumed to be opaque, more or less, to those who haven’t come to it yet.

And finally it’s assumed that if you find the right access point, the work will

open its glories, and the people who went through this process will be glad that

they did.

My problem with that goes something like this. The

approach, I think, will work with kids. And it might work for adults in their

50s or 60s who want to like classical music, but find it baffling. It certainly

might work for people in the classical music audience who can’t understand new

music.

But will it work for smart people in their 20s, 30s, and

40s? Do I ever doubt that. Do they want to hear about the thunderstorm in the

Pastoral Symphony? Probably not, because it’s so plainly obvious. Anyone can

understand that music can depict a thunderstorm. Things like that happen every

day of the week in film scores. And in fact the whole idea seems naïve, or at

least it’s going to seem like that to people who listen to (let’s say)

Radiohead, and therefore (a) are already used to music with complex textures

(subtler textures, in fact, than they’ll find in Beethoven), and (b) are used to

music that traces fine shades of often ironic emotion, something that (once

again) is a lot subtler than a thunderstorm. How is this consultant going to

attract them?

Well, again—the Pastoral Symphony exploration was aimed at

kids. I assume the consultant would plan something else for smart people in

their 20s, 30s, and 40s. But nothing he said, no proposal that he made,

addressed the worldview of this crucial but difficult audience. (Crucial,

because they’re the people classical music is most notably not reaching, people

who, in past generations, would have grown up to become the classical music

audience; difficult, because they’re the people the classical music world least

understands.) 

Besides, why should art need access points at all? This is

the most important question, I think, and one that’s bound to be controversial.

Many of us take for granted that classical music is complex and abstract, and

that people need to be taught to understand it. These access points would

therefore be an early stage in that education.

But maybe the problem is simply that this music is old, and

for other reasons has gotten distant from contemporary life. It never needed

access points when it was new. Worshippers in Bach’s church didn’t have to be

taught to understand his cantatas. Verdi’s audience had no trouble understanding

his operas. Wagner swept through Europe like a storm. Artists in Paris at the

turn of the 20th century were immediately drawn to Debussy. The beats and other

hipsters in the late 1940s and early 1950s heard bebop, and loved it. Thousands

of people in and around the New York art world in the 1970s (including me) were

thrilled to hear minimal music.

Some art, of course, is more popular than other art, but

that doesn’t mean that the unpopular art needs access points. It’s not popular

because it’s not for everyone. But the people it is for find it on their

own. Nobody offered access points to bring anyone to difficult pop music, like

Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, or Sonic Youth. Those groups simply found their

fans.

So what’s the problem with classical music today? Why does

it need special treatment? I’ll go out on a limb here, and suggest that an art

that needs access points is dying or dead. Why can’t it communicate more

directly, not to everybody (no art does that), but to whoever might hear it, and

like it? Don’t we have to work on the presentation of classical music, so that

it seems interesting even before it’s played, and so performances happen in an

atmosphere of enthusiasm and excitement?

And don’t we have to play the music more excitingly? At the

workshop, I asked if the most important access point shouldn’t be the music

itself. If it’s not functioning that way, couldn’t the problem be that we’re not

playing it in the right way? I’ve mentioned here before that Brahms, among

others in the 19th century, thought that music ought to be performed

differently—with more pronounced tempo changes, for one thing—when musicians and

audiences didn’t know it yet. That’s the situation all classical music is in,

these days, when it looks for a new audience.

So here’s a question, for everyone involved with playing

classical music who wants a new audience. (And isn’t that just about everyone?)

How could we play the music, so its impact would be immediate and unforgettable?