Classical and pop reviews (6)

Coming home from an O.A.R show the other day, my friend - a longtime classic rock fan - made the point that concerts are primarily social experiences. We were talking about another friend's decision to see a concert by herself and he adamantly protested this.

Their disagreement may parallel the fault lines in the mentalities of classical and pop fans. Classical fans would see the concert, accompanied or not, with the purist's view that the music is enough for the experience. Pop fans would not want to be alone in the audience because their priority is "the concert experience," of which the music is only one ingredient.

But I wonder if there's a deeper link between these two attitudes. If pop concerts are loud and rowdy, but classical concerts are silent and subdued, is one necessarily social and the other anti-social? After all, pop fans enjoy listening by themselves on an ipod, and classical people enjoy more social occassions like the outdoor festival or salon concert. The problem is that this binary - anti-social classical v. social pop - fits nicely into the comparisons you've been making between classical and pop reviews. Pop reviews emphasize the experience and classical reviews stick to the music proper. This simple distinction is inaccurate and powerfully damaging to the perception of classical music by new listeners. Indeed, my friend is profoundly right to argue that concerts are an essentially social experience. For all of the Adorno-esque disdain for the audience floating around modernism, concerts are, by definition, a connection between the performer and listener. It's still a social connection, however much more abstract than the frequent dialogues between performer and audience at pop events. The success of a concert turns on the strength of this connection. The technical quality of the performance is one, but not the only ingredient to strengthening the performer/audience relationship, not even the most important. Where classical reviews become preoccupied with minute technical details, they miss other aspects of the connection between performer and audience. Some groups, for instance, pride themselves on informalizing the atmosphere of the classical concert. They might converse with the audience about the music or tell stories about their performances. For most concertgoers these gestures would be more important to their experience than a performer's interpretive mastery or nearness to perfection. I think most audiences would gladly trade some informality in the performance for a little heart and soul from their performers. Personally, it's more exciting to see a musician struggling with music, being challenged by it, than to breeze through it.

Good points. In past centuries, especially before 1800, the music we now call classical was performed at rowdy concerts. The audience participated, noisily.

And then something else evolved. Christopher Small, in his book Musicking, has a wonderful evocation of a classical concert, in which he lays bare his impression of the unspoken social interaction when everybody sits in silence, and both the construction of the concert hall and the conventions of concerts keep the musicians and audience from making contact.

Greg, Several years ago the NYT published a short profile on Colin Davis in which he said that for years he avoided Wagner because he was rather repuled by it, but he was conducting Tristan at Covent Garden and in the last act suddenly felt that he would have to flee the orchestra pit, as the music was "fairly groaning" with emotion. He goes on to say he couldn't leave, as "that isn't bloody practical."

Wonderful, David! Thanks. Here's a link to that NY Times profile: http://tinyurl.com/6ffvel But unfortunately it's not available free. We have to pay them to read it.

There's kind of an unspoken ur-theme behind many of your posts, at least for me, which is "If classical presenters gave us much more contemporary music, and contemporary classical music was fruitfully engaged with the world, classical music would have more cultural currency and immediacy, thus leading to fewer existential questions regarding the genre." I guess I'm not going to pretend this is a comment as such, but if I follow the implications of many of your posts, this is where I find them winding up.

FWIW, I agree.

Hi, Andrew. Yes, that's exactly what I think. Thanks for ferreting it out! It'll be one of the main points in my book.

Here's another way to put it. If classical music functioned the way it did in past centuries -- up to the first years of the 20th century -- it might be as widely loved and accepted as it was back then.

One caveat. I'm not sure things will change simply because presenters give us more new music. A whole new classical music social structure has to emerge, in which presenters, performers, composers, and audience all are linked, and all are thinking in new ways. As regular readers know, I think that's begun to happen in New York.