Rock & roll joy

Not long ago I wrote two posts here about why classical music organizations should embrace pop music. I gave many reasons — that we need to embrace the world outside us, that we’ll never attract a new audience unless they know we live in the same world they do, and of course that many people in the classical world like pop music, and many classical musicians play it. Later I added one more thought, that a concert of pop and classical music together might be fun, and stimulating.

But talk about missing the obvious! This weekend, I joined many people from the orchestra world in a tour of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It’s a wonderfully happy place, and full of information, too; I highly recommend it..

And how did the orchestra people feel after the tour? I won’t claim to speak for them, and certainly didn’t survey their opinions. But in the days that followed, as I spent time with them in various activities, the tour came up a lot. And not just in conversation with me; people kept bringing it up in general discussions. And what everyone who talked about it said (I didn’t hear a single dissenting voice) was that they wished orchestral concerts felt more like rock & roll. Specifically, they talked about how happy the rock & roll audience seems, in videos on display at the Rock Hall (as they call it in Cleveland). And how freely the audience reacts to the music, moving and smiling, not sitting blankly in their seats.

This led to discussions about why the orchestral audience sits so blankly. Often orchestral music is very rhythmic. Why doesn’t the audience move (even a little) to the rhythm? Do orchestras preclude that, by sitting blankly onstage themselves?

I found this wonderfully hopeful. It also gave one more reason, quite a decisive one, I think, for putting classical and pop music together on a program, or at least opening classical music organizations to pop music in all the ways I’ve discussed: This will be good for the classical musicians, and for classical concerts.

Footnote: I hope it’s clear that nobody in these discussions expected classical concerts to become entirely like rock & roll, with audiences on their feet dancing, and clapping along to the music. (Though in the past, especially before the 19th century, the music we now call classical was performed much more informally than we’re now used to, with a lot of participation from the audience, as well as a lot of relaxed audience members talking to each other instead of listening.) Obviously classical music is different, and some classical works — Bruckner symphonies, for instance — should be listened to more quietly.

But that doesn’t mean that both audience and orchestra can’t show more feeling than they now do…