Wednesday, May 04, 2005
orchestra stuff
The problems of orchestras and their survival is just one aspect of what seems to me to be a much larger, over-arching problem. After all an orchestra is an orchestra; since there have been orchestras they haven't changed all that much in terms of structure; mainly they've just got bigger. If you want what they can do, they can do it. It's not especially realistic to expect an orchestra to be something else. I suppose concerts can be made to be more user-friendly in one way or another, but ultimately a concert involves people sitting (or standing) and being quiet and listening and paying attention, and I'm not sure how much that can ever to be made less "stuffy." There are very few other things in life where that kind of serious silence is so crucial to what the experience is about, and it certainly isn't the case in lots of other music. I can't tell that people worry that much any more that they have to dress up for a concert any more than for anything else. Although I agree that it is a very desirable thing for orchestral programs to have more recent music, I'm not sure that that's a major aspect of the problem. (There are a number of composers who seem to get a quite a lot of performances all over the place, and a lot of their music doesn't interest me, so whether or not there's more or less of it around doesn't really worry me that much). If it were just a problem of concerts being stuffy there would be other ways that people would be getting the music--recorded music, for instance, might be booming instead of contracting.
I think the real problem is that most of the people in this country haven't had any particular contact with any kind of classical music at all, so what an orchestra does is just foreign to anything they know, and therefore irrelevant to their lives. And that includes anything, however simple or populist or easy to listen to. This is really a problem of music education. It's not as though the masses are just bored with hearing the Beethoven symphonies. If they had any idea of what a Beethoven (or Tschaikovsky or Brahms or any composer you want to name) symphony was or sounded like and if they could make any sense of it, there would probably be some kind of crowd still coming out to hear that, and once they got there and heard other kinds of music, they'd probably like some of that as well. I'm not sure how good general music education ever was in this country--my own experience of it was that it was pretty bad--but any thing is better than nothing, which is mostly what it is now. I'm not sure how much exposure to "serious" music (or for that matter any serious exposure to music of any kind) there really needs to be for some number of people to find it appealing and interesting, but it takes some. We're now seeing the results of the gutting of music education that started with the Reagan years, and if things stay status quo the situation will probably only get worse.
posted by Rodney Lister
7:25 AM
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