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.
This is more complicated than saying, if you want to play with your phone or eat during a concert, stream it at home. Sometimes, oftentimes, people want to be physically close to the live action but not actually in its presence. No, I couldn’t see Ax play in person from where I was sitting on the lawn, but I could experience the concert with friends and fellow concert-goers. There’s something in a night-out, in a shared human experience, that makes a difference. Ax still had my attention, I just wasn’t sitting up completely straight. And if I wanted to use the light of my phone to read the program, or leave early, or cough, I wasn’t bothering anyone. Maybe my ideal “concert-going experience” is to read live Twitter feeds from my computer while watching primetime television. If that’s what I want, no presenter or fellow concert “goer” should judge me. The challenge, though, comes in letting someone Tweet to create that experience for me without affecting someone else’s ideal experience in a concert hall.
Of course it could be argued that you go to the movie theater for one experience, you go to the concert hall for another, you stay at home for another; the impetus is not on a presenter to cater to you, finicky audience member. My point is that the more options a presenter creates, the more they can control and possibly monetize each option. See Rob Thomas selling copies of his live performances to fans as they leave his concerts, as Thomas Cott pointed out in his newsletter today.
FWIW I rather like Dvorak 8. I was recently reminded of how clever and wonderful of a composer Antonin is when I heard the CSO play the 8th.