Here is a post we recently made on the ASOL’s website about the future of orchestral music….
Enjoy!
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Hello all. My apologies in advance for a long and heated post. I was very gratified to stumble across this vibrant thread of conversation on the orchestra and its future. As a composer and conductor of orchestral music, I have a deep love for the power of the orchestra, and I am convinced of its power to move audiences when it is unleashed from some of the crust that it has accumulated.
As I look across the landscape of music in our country, I wonder if somewhere along the line those in ‘classical’ music haven’t become so self-absorbed with the supposed importance of their work that they have forgotten that our craft is still at its core Entertainment. Music is something that is undeniably important to the human soul. One need look no further than the fact that most people in the world choose to have almost continuous musical stimulus for large chunks of their day whenever it is available to them (the iPod effect). Everyone wants the profound intimacy of a personal soundtrack that is really a mirror of who they are and their experiences in life. It never ceases to amaze me that music becomes a security blanket in the lives of those who cannot stand silence. Whatever music they choose, it is deeply intimate and in fact becomes a very Web2.0-means of self-expression (anyone here ever make a mix of favorites for a friend?) The music may lead them into profound personal reflection, but they do not seek out music that will make them better or smarter. In their private experience, they will choose music that resonates with their inner being and their daily existence.
I will here echo the sentiments of many of the posters in this thread. As much as I am deeply moved by the work of Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Stravinsky, et al., I believe the institutions of orchestral music in this country are absolutely beating a dead horse by re-serving the identically uninspired gravy of ‘standard repertoire’. Most of this music dates from times so far removed from our day-to-day life that it is almost impossible for a modern listener to hear this music with the same resonance as those whose world it reflected. These classics are wonderful to hear performed live, but this is music of satin pants and horse-drawn carriages. For at least a generation, people have stopped accepting the bullying that told them they needed to attend the symphony to be cultured. In a world where lives are absolutely packed with distraction, and music has become wallpaper, can we really be surprised that young audiences aren’t falling over themselves to leave their homes to go sit like cadavers in a mausoleum of untouchable ‘greatness’ both on the podium and in the repertoire? There are so many snobberies that fill a trip to the orchestra, and the halls are so acoustically unrewarding and surgical that it should be obvious that a trip to the orchestra will lose out to an evening prime-time. We need to avoid the easy, self-justifying, trap of blaming the ‘dumb American culture’ and sobbing when people aren’t throwing themselves into the equivalent of steamed broccoli. People are expressing a preference for musical experiences that have the energy of relevance. As I believe Mr. Widager points out above, people will routinely pay huge sums to hear the latest bands blasting throngs of their fellow man at near deafening volumes. The experience of these events is every bit as much about social interaction and identification as it is about the music. Let’s be real, any of us can get a more intimate and powerfully detailed listening experience by putting on a CD in our home stereo than we will ever get from a concert hall. The whole magic of live is the irresistible magnetism that living people in the same room as the listener can generate. This cannot be digitized, mass-copied, or downloaded. This is humanity in all its gritty, teeming, and glorious imperfection.
This leads me to a conclusion about the institution of the orchestra. All the vaporous and quasi-mystical reverence with which the culture of ‘concert music’ has been saturated, has led to our current state of affairs where the music of one of the most powerful and expressive musical ensembles of human creation is almost completely irrelevant to the culture in which it exists. Many will be familiar with the description of an orchestral concert as ‘an expensive nap.’ All of the exhortations to our fellow citizens about how important this work is have fallen on deaf ears as audiences grey and fade. New audiences grow up in a world of hyper-real audio reproduction. This is our reality. People will respond to the amped up orchestras of our blockbuster films but wouldn’t necessarily choose to listen to the music otherwise. The orchestra has no ‘cred’ as an ensemble that can generate excitement and social energy.
What solutions then present themselves? It seems to me that one of the absolutely essential elements of bringing the orchestra back into the world of our fellow americans, is to work in every way to first entertain them. Orchestral music has no intrinsic right to exist as an institution if it continues to fail in creating a community of energy and discovery as a product of its work. There is little novelty in yet another performance of Beethoven symphonies unless you are already so enamoured with the performers that they could play simple nursery tunes and you would be rapt. Orchestras need to break the deathgrip of several problems to start:
1) The general refusal to perform new works
2) When new works are chosen, the mindless inferiority complexes that lead to the programming of new music that is so academic and self-absorbed that it completely fails to entertain anyone but the composer. Instead they have to be ‘important’. Although this snobbery can help the orchestral ‘in-crowd’ pat each other on the backs about how ‘significant’ the sound of feral cats scratching each other in an alley fight might be, it absolutely fails to ignite any interest in almost everyone else.
3) The culture of the concert hall that treats the music as so divine in nature, that we have built a religious awe around it. We do not need to be told how amazing and profound things are in our life if they are in fact both amazing and profound. Instead, let the music old and new, be presented as from people, to people. Pre-concert lectures are a start. However, usually one the music begins, it’s back to being a roomful of mannequins. We need to create a climate of energy and community that draws people out from their McMansions and into something amazing.
There is so much new orchestral music being constantly written, why don’t we drop Beethoven and the rest for a few years and recklessly throw ourselves into performing new music. Let us pick things that are visceral and beautiful and toe-tapping, and let the work of repeated performances cull the cream from the milk instead of stuffy committees of musical priests mediating that world for us. Let’s build a sense of excitement around orchestras: that they are constantly and aggressively finding the new Mozarts and Beethovens, and invite our audiences into the adventure. Let’s work in performing spaces that don’t have seats that are 25% too small for the average American derrière. Let’s pull every shred of technical wizardry to make the live experience simply overwhelming. We can build new communities of people who are looking for an amazing adventure that will reflect their world and times and the sounds of jet planes and iPhones ringing and all the other countless jangles of modern life, and put the carriage horses in the stall for a season. Then, when they return, the music will be undeniably powerful to audience that continues to hunger for new adventures in the power of the orchestra!
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