Now I've seen it all

[Ferretfancy]

I remember hearing an interview on Radio Three a few years back with an academic from one of the London colleges who'd managed to persuade (well, bribe) some of her students to go along to an orchestral concert with her. She said that many of the students were taken aback by the way the orchestra failed to acknowledge the existence of the audience in any way - it struck them as incredibly rude.

So maybe there is a case for some slight changes to the way classical music is presented? Just something simple like the conductor saying "Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Tonight's first piece is the overture to the Magic Flute by Mozart"? You obviously couldn't do a full "and J. Arthur Rank on gong" introduction of every member of the orchestra, but why not introduce the soloist?

However, that doesn't address the problem of how you get people through the door in the first place.

Getting people through the door doesn't seem to be a problem at the Proms, and apart from the very front of the Arena it's a pretty young audience, at least in the Promenade and the cheaper seats. I see a few Prommer friends at other venues during the winter months, but a large proportion of the Arena crowd seem to stay away until the next season comes round. This must surely be due to cost, but nevertheless an audience is there, willing to attend if they can find the price of a ticket.

It might help a bit if part of the subsidy for opera was given to the orchestras in London. This might have the effect of pushing the ROH and ENO into less extravagance, but allow orchestral managements to offer better ticket prices.

None of this will help orchestras in Britain generally, but it might be a step in the right direction.

Excessive soloist fees are another problem.

[salymap]

When I used to attend the proms years ago, the conductors were sometimes criticized for having too much to say to the audience. Even Beecham [not at the proms] would interact with the audience sometimes.

I don'tthink loveof classical music has much to do with education. I had very little formal education because of the war and bad health but I took to music from an early age. You either like it or you don't.

[Hornspieler]

The real problem to me is one of access. I went to the QEH a couple of nights ago to hear a young performer, Freddy Kempf play an interesting programme in a full hall. It wasn't one of his best evenings, but never mind. The point was that as a 77 year old I was surrounded by people who were roughly my contemporaries, with hardly a young person in sight.
It isn't a matter of dress or other formalities, it's due to high cost coupled with with the fact that far fewer younger people are introduced to classical music in school and elsewhere. Actually, orchestras such as the LSO and LPO do a great deal to make their music more accessible, but they operate in a hugely commercialised cultural environment completely dominated by pop music.
The Guardian publish a monthly colour magazine called Guardian Music Monthly, but it does not feature classical music at all. presumably to them it doesn't count as music,
and this is all too typical of the press in general.

In my message#10 on the RPS concert, I wrote:

The late Helen Henschel, who introduced me to this symphony on Childrens Hour back in the 1940s would have been overjoyed with the way that first subject (the big tune) was performed.

.

That is a very large part of the problem. How can children get to hear and enjoy "classical" music when all they are subjected to is Radio One or Capital Radio blaring out from the transistor in the kitchen - or in the Supermarket where Mummy does her shopping - or in the car, when Daddy is listening to Local Radio for the traffic news?

Compare "Blue Peter" now with how it was when it first started on Childrens TV (there is no longer a radio version) Gone is Housewive's choice, where the young family heard Litolff's Scherzo, Jewells of the Madonna, Isobel Baillie singing about Rutland Boughton's Fairies from his Immortal hour?

The only classical music (some would not even call it that) that young people have heard on air for the last forty years is Rossini's "Lone Ranger"**


** We used to play the William Tell Overture at Schools concerts in Bournemouth!

The corporation decreed that all pupiils from the schools should attend (It was one of the conditions of their Annual Subsidy to the Bournemouth orchestra that we should give concerts for children) So buses came to the Winter Gardens from all over the town. Filling the 2500 seats in the hall took over an hour, so the children, some of whom had heard their parents complaining "...why should we pay an extra thruppence on the rates to subsidise a bloody symphony band?", were already a restless and hostile mob before we even started.

Schoolmasters were patrolling along the back rows, smacking heads and if anyone would have liked the music, they could hardly have heard it properly anyway.

William Tell was always the last item. Loud whistles and coin dropping accompanied the cello introduction and the cor anglais solo - the storm overcame the racket from the stalls and then came those trumpets!
There were excited shout of "The Lone Ranger!" Everyone listened with rapt attention and the mob filed back into their buses having had a jolly good time all round.

THAT was what we were up against in 1959. The situation, now that TV and particularly Commercial TV rules the household is even worse (and BBC Two could make at least some attempt during school hours to redress the balance.

Hornspieler

[french frank]

The Indy carried the story yesterday. But the editorial (slightly stuffy I would say) did take the opposite view.

It should be said that Max Hole is in the industry, and marketing is in his interests- bigger audiences, more business. That's quite true, of course, but it's not the prime rationale - to make money for Universal.

[ahinton]

If you're in a Hole, stop digging, anyone?...

[MrGongGong]

That is a very large part of the problem. How can children get to hear and enjoy "classical" music when all they are subjected to is Radio One or Capital Radio blaring out from the transistor in the kitchen - or in the Supermarket where Mummy does her shopping - or in the car, when Daddy is listening to Local Radio for the traffic news?

Or in the cinema where they can hear the LPO
or playing wretched computer games with a soundtrack by the LSO

etc etc

[John Wright]

I remember hearing an interview on Radio Three a few years back with an academic from one of the London colleges who'd managed to persuade (well, bribe) some of her students to go along to an orchestral concert with her. She said that many of the students were taken aback by the way the orchestra failed to acknowledge the existence of the audience in any way - it struck them as incredibly rude.

Some local orchestral concerts do 'Hello and Welcome' and introductions, all smiles, introduce soloists. These are quite intimate affairs, though, audience less than fifty, in fact often same audience from month to month, many know the conductor and musicians. And one occasion in a rather damp building I remember the wind soloist firstly explaining to the audience that the instrument may give him problems in this room, and it did, with some delays between movements.

[french frank]

I wonder if there's anything in the idea that younger people don't merely want to be included and to respond: they want to participate, dance in the aisles. Mr Hole seems to assume that if he were to 'shout and yell - or whatever he said, that would add to other people's enjoyment, add to the atmosphere, even if it momentarily drowned out the sound.

[teamsaint]

I wonder if there's anything in the idea that younger people don't merely want to be included and to respond: they want to participate, dance in the aisles. Mr Hole seems to assume that if he were to 'shout and yell - or whatever he said, that would add to other people's enjoyment, add to the atmosphere, even if it momentarily drowned out the sound.

I suspect that younger people will be attracted to an "event", whatever form that might take. If, for instance, Lang lang was to play at Salisbury city hall, and over 35's were excluded, I suspect you would get a good turn out, with some half decent marketing.Celebrity, novelty, spectacle all attract people, and that doesn't have to be at the expense of quality.
I do feel that the Proms "brand" could be so much better used , out in the provinces, to promote the kind of music played on R3.

[ahinton]

One of the fundamental problems here is the encouragement of listeners to feel that they should somehow "participate" while doing so and that this risks undermining the very virtue of participation in the right places - in other words, it's usually better to try to develop one's appreciation of music by not only listening with concentration (both at live performances and to recordings and broadcasts) but by endeavouring to learn to sing and play, however ultimately unsuccessful the results might be; the composer Sorabji used to say that he had a voice like a crow with laryngitis but nevertheless felt that it was of vital importance for a composer to learn "what it is" to sing - something that can only be achieved by attempting to learn to do so.

The "participation" thing is sadly reflected in the chattiest of the R3 presentations where listeners are encouraged to "participate" via email, Twitter, phone and the rest to something where the fundamental principle of the creation and re-creation of music (supposedly the principal subject even of these programmes) is nevertheless enshrined in the fact of a composer composing something that performers perform before the listener at the end of the process gets to be able to listen.

One reason why this entire "élitist" business sickens me as much as it does is that the patronising and divisive attitude necessary for its continued existence is arguably more foreign to the principles that govern the creation and performance of music than to anything else; this spreads out into attitudes about younger listeners, too. We know well what pressures (peer and otherwise) that younger people are under today but I remain to be convinced that these of themselves give rise to a situation in which it is more difficult per se for young listeners to concentrate on and be affected by whatever it is that they're listening to (subject, of course, to how much there is in its contents that is capable of affecting them or inviting their concentration). I know this from my own experience which has long since taught me that it's not even necessary to have some kind of background in music for it to work.

Coming from an entirely non-musical background, at the age of 11 I had hardly heard any music and knew nothing about it when I chanced upon a broadcast (almost certainly by John Ogdon) of Chopin's Fourth Ballade and was utterly riveted by it - shocked, indeed, as it affected me so profoundly despite everything about it being entirely outside my previous experience - I'd never heard of Chopin, let alone Ogdon and, to the best of my recollection, had never seen or head a piano. Within a few weeks of this, Roussel's Third Symphony and Ravel's Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé and Piano Trio had pretty much the same electrifying and wholly engaging effect. That said, all that these pieces made me want to do was sit quietly and absorb them - not to dance in the aisles, still less shot, yell or anything else that would have distracted me from the listening experience.

Years later, I met someone who had pretty much memorised (in his head) Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony in its entirety since first listening to it as a child and being affected by it much as I was with my first listening experiences - and this person is not even a professional musician!

I suppose that at least part of the reason for my attitude about this kind of thing is broadly similar to that which prompts me to look askance at some of the doubtless well-meaning "outreach" projects that seem to take little or no account of the possibility that some music can just get to people without an irrefutable need for their "helping" hand.

I suspect that the Holes of this world would never countenance the possibility that anyone could have such experiences of views as it would otherwise upset their noisily advertised dumb-down-at-all-costs agendas.

[MrGongGong]

Listening is NOT a passive act

http://www.minuteoflistening.org/

[ahinton]

Listening is NOT a passive act
http://www.minuteoflistening.org/

I did not suggest that it is; the early listening experiences that I outlined above didn't feel remotely "passive" to me because the music demanded my total involvement in it, which is surely a very different phenomenon to just sitting there and having it merely "done" to you or letting it simply wash all over you.

[salymap]

I've never realised how lucky I was as a child in London, Born in 1930, the radio stations, I think called National and Regional, seemed to broadcast quite lot of light classical pieces.My mother had a lovely voice and sang in church as a young woman, but had no training. I remember 'Lilac Time' by Schubert [taken from Rosamunde] and Brahms hungarian Dances being played and there didn't ever seem to be that dividing line between types of music that there is now. My parents also had a few classical records so it was easy for me to start learning when the Third Programme started. But they would never have thought of attending a concert, although they loved musical theatre. I suppose I was lucky, looking back.

[MrGongGong]

I think it's important to realise that those of us who are more than a little obsessed with music in it's myriad of forms and had the kinds of experience that many write about are in a tiny minority of the population.
"Classical Music" often does itself no favours at all by creating impressions that somehow it's a secret club or that one needs to "understand" it.

[teamsaint]

[QUOTE=MrGongGong;254084]I think it's important to realise that those of us who are more than a little obsessed with music in it's myriad of forms and had the kinds of experience that many write about are in a tiny minority of the population.
"Classical Music" often does itself no favours at all by creating impressions that somehow it's a secret club or that one needs to "understand" it.[/QUOTE]

if it does that, and I am not saying that it doesn't, who exactly is doing it?

Doesn't seem to me in general that the professionals, or lovers of the music want to keep it secret, (though I suspect some do).

The people on this board , whose knowledge and skill is often at a pretty rarified level, seem keen to share....