Amanda is, as she says, the Blog Mistress, so I’m starting by responding to her latest post. (I’m also going to try to fold as many points as possible into this post as it may be my last – I don’t have any more transatlantic flights this week which will provide me with hours to write/a valid excuse not to practice.)
In answering Amanda’s question about where the responsibility for making concert presentations special lies, I’m going to return to one of my original points (fine, OK, Alex Ross’ point, which I seem to have unofficially co-opted): the presentation doesn’t have to be “special,” or different — it has to be musical, and in making that the case, there is responsibility on all sides, but the buck stops with the artist. This means thinking about many things. One (and this is Alex’s specific example – I hope we don’t get into a copyright situation) is lighting, which can create or destroy an atmosphere, and should not, to use an obvious example, be bright and clinical when the subject of the music is death (and perhaps transfiguration). Another is applause: it seems clear to me that there are certain pieces which are entered into more effectively from silence than from a room full of clapping, and other pieces which lead into silence, and should be concluded that way. One can make these requests of an audience, and at the very least, it will force them to listen differently, and just as importantly, think differently about what it means to listen — really listen.
The most important aspect of this, I think, is programming. A good program – a musical program – should be constructed in such a way that one’s hearing of each piece is — altered? enhanced? challenged, I think — by what came before it and what comes after. This doesn’t mean that every program has to be all over the map: to address Alex Benjamin’s comment, the last 3 Beethoven Sonatas make for an extraordinary listening experience, in part because of a certain uniformity of extraordinary language. But each of the last 3 Beethoven Sonatas threw down a kind of gauntlet for all piano music that came after it, and it is in fact extremely easy to find 19th/20th/21st century music of an inarguably high quality which makes for an arresting pairing with any one of the three. (And a serious fringe benefit is that the diversity serves the artist as well: playing new music will deepen your understanding of late Beethoven, and vice versa. Or: what’s good for the listener is good for the player.)
But before leaving this topic, I have to say, beating a dying horse, that I found it slightly dispiriting that Amanda’s LMO list included lighting, program books, artist appearance, and usher attire, but made no reference to the way the music sounded. Because my feeling is that while all of these issues are important, they are side issues. Or: If the playing was memorable, the concert was not LMO; If the playing was not memorable, none of the rest of this is going to be make the slightest bit of difference.
Switching gears, I’d like to turn my attention to Matthew’s excellent post. I share many of the same concerns, particularly about the many ways listeners’ expectations are manufactured. I think often about how to give an audience useful context for what they are going to hear, without telling them what they should think/feel about it. It’s a tightrope act, honestly.
So here are my questions: given your desire for each audience member to have an authentic, individual experience, for whom are you writing when you review concerts, and what do you hope your readers’ relationship to your writing is? I hope it doesn’t seem impertinent to ask. It’s just that I’ve always been fascinated by criticism — musical and otherwise — but I’ve never seen a discussion of its aims, and I think this could be a great forum for it.
Once that’s out of the way, we can talk about Simon Boccanegra, my hope that you’ll create a cartoon for this week’s discussion, and the vexing question of whether your dog is named Moe or Soho.
James responds to this post, and then Jonathan responds to him, in the comments.
“If the playing was memorable, the concert was not LMO; If the playing was not memorable, none of the rest of this is going to be make the slightest bit of difference.”
This is true in a world where the final currency of music-making is the single emotional/experiential connection between the performer and each audience member whose butt is already in a seat in the hall, and heaven knows that although I would not have a job, that would in every other sense be a wonderful world. As it is, it is certainly worth trying to preserve the value of that currency as much as humanly possible; however, someone pays you to make that experience, because some other people pay them to bring you to make that experience, and I cannot agree that we are succeeding if we just hope based on its promise that enough butts, and the right butts, will be in those seats when the time comes. For the very reason that we have all said here that the music itself is special and the experience of hearing it is special without any further elements involved, there is a responsibility, whether you see it as a business responsibility or simply a responsibility to the art and experience that you love, to find ways to allow people in. Again, I do not think that this responsibility belongs solely to artists; they must create that emotional/experiential connection in whatever way is most effective and honest for them; but there are so many people who have not experienced it, who don’t think it’s worth experiencing because they have an idea about it in principle, or who for whatever reason are not going to be a butt in a seat for memorable playing because they see all concerts we work to create as a type (and therefore by definition LMO). It is without a doubt worth thinking about those people, and for those people, “the rest of this” is the only thing that will make a difference.
James, I think this is all valid, and I’m in agreement with almost everything you say, but I don’t think you’ve represented my point entirely fairly by isolating the quote which appears at the top of your comment. At the point in the post at which that remark appeared, I’d already spent two (overlong?) paragraphs giving examples of how artists can and should think about making the concert experience better beyond how they play. I maintain that a memorably played concert is not LMO, but I did not mean to imply that that means memorable playing excuses the artist from the responsibility of thinking about these other considerations. I was merely making the point that if huge numbers of concerts are indistinguishable from one another, surely part of the problem is that the playing is indistinguishable. (And Amanda’s comment which inspired the quote seemed more directed at critics/press coverage than at audiences and the question of audience building.)
I also want to point out that your last sentence conflates the questions of getting a new audience to concert halls and getting those same people to have a positive experience once they are there – both very important, but not, in my view, the same. My LMO comment (which, again, did not seek to absolve the artist of extra-musical responsibility), only addressed question #2, and I’ve often met people who have just been dragged kicking and screaming to their first ever concert, and who came away excited, and with a lot to say about the music, not “the rest of this” (and apologies if that term came off as dismissive). To me, this is evidence that in thinking about creating a new audience that is taken with the concert-going experience, we need to think about the music as a primary consideration along with, not segregated from, all of these other questions. I made the remark because I was struck by the former’s absence in Amanda’s remark, NOT because I think that the latter are irrelevant.