strinasacchi,

This subject has come up occasionally on this forum. There's a number of musicians here, and a larger number of people like myself who are just occassional concert-goers. I like to attend concerts in Warwickshire and Coventry and at £8 - £12 a ticket they are cheaper than any local pop/rock concerts (in fact you need to go to Brum, Wolverhampton or NEC for the more celebrated groups).

Most of the audiences I see for a concert of Bach or Mozart are students and over 55s, and number less than 100, and it just seems that the bulk of UK's population are incapable of sitting quietly through a concert of classical music. The classicals-in-the-park concerts DO seem popular, we have them in Warwickshire, but I expect that's because the audience does NOT have to sit in silence and that's why I would never attend one of them. I think a lot of the problem is education, or lack of it, and I fear there's no going back and our concert audiences will reduce even more.

John W

strinasacchi,

That was going to be my question, who attends classical concerts in Europe? I expect in Austria, Italy, Germany, Czech Republic the early education of children pays good attention to their own composers, particularly from the 19th century, so they know how to listen to music, maybe others here know?


John W

What's the composition of audiences at Early Music festivals ( York, Brighton, Lufthansa etc ) ? I would have hoped that these sort of events would bring in more of a cross section. I do agree with roslynmuse about indoctrination by omission. It's been mentioned before that the Observer Music Monthly for instance has virtually no "classical" music content. And programmes like Newsnight Review on tv and Saturday Review on Radio 4 hardly ever cover serious music and if they do it will be a "controversial" opera with all comment limited to the production not the music. These omissions could be rectified by sympathetic editorial teams.

Why not an early music ensemble or a string quartet in the acoustic tents at Womad or the Cambridge Folk festival ? For instance ? Attendees at such events ought to be open minded enough to appreciate something which to them would be new.

The thought that pops into my mind is that there is one fatal flaw to the HIP concept:

The most important aspect of a 17th or 18th performance was the fact that most of the music performed would have been new - in the main eagerly anticipated first performances. It strikes me that in order to genuinely recreate the effect of a historical’ performance would have to mainly perform new music of a kind you could genuinely image your audiences looking forward too.

Classical music wasn’t always classical – and perhaps its asking too much of audiences to maintain an indefinite enthusiasm for 17th C and 18thC. Was there much enthusiasm for 15th C and 16th C music in the 17th and 18th Centuries?

Another obstruction is an assumption that to enjoy a Classical Music concert, you have to "know" something. Yannick Nézet-Séguin puts it most eloquently:

I want to stop people saying 'I don't know anything about classical music, but I think I enjoyed it.' Why do they need to specify whether or not they know anything about it? Do you ever hear someone coming out of the cinema saying 'I know nothing about film directing, but I think it was a good movie'? No. We are not just putting on classical music for people who know, we're playing it for people who feel something.

I think this is a very fair point, Ian.  However, very often the music in question will be "new" to the audience who hears it, or at least it will be "new" in the context of a live performance.  At the very least, I suppose we like to think it will be "newsworthy" in the way that an old smoke-fogged painting acquires a new and fresh look when it's been professionally restored?  Even so, your point retains an amount of validity, and I don't see any easy way around this.  


This is the other side of the same question, I guess!  Although it was "black vinyl" and not cds, I'm part of a generation who have grown up expecting to be able to find almost anything on disc.  From St Colombe to Sallinen,  a determined visit to a well-furnished library, or a flit around Amazon will net you almost anything you wish.  Even without leaving this room I can hear almost any symphony from Haydn to Simpson in a choice of recordings...  some without even leaving my chair.  

The idea that classical music was the rarest of privileges, the sumptuous banquet of fleeting ephemeral pleasure available only to a C15th nobleman and his enraptured guests cannot ever be recaptured.  We've fed people lobster and caviar until they're sick of them, but are we happier as a result?   I think the answer to your question is that listening to "art music" (let's exclude the "tongs and the bones" that were the fare of the market-place and carnival) would have been the unattainable dream of many in the C15th and C16th...  but the dreary laws of market forces (can I mention these, Mods, or are they on the filter-list with the red herrings?) mean that overabundant plenty has reduced their value to almost $0.  

In my own little padded cell of the music business,  I guess we hope that a fabulous cast, and an innovative production, might encourage a public through the opera-house doors to see something "a bit special"?  Even this has its downsides...  singers are so used to "gonzo" productions these days that I had performers coming to me mid-rehearsal asking if I was really sure that following the composer's own stage directions was a good idea?   Wouldn't it be more interesting (ie more hope of selling tickets) if we changed the ending so the trigger was pulled by the daughter, the sister, the butler, a poltergeist?   That's the topsy-turvy "ethos" in which we now work...   unless you can restage it in the Third Reich/A Submarine/Chechnya/Iraq then it becomes a "hard sell" at the Box Office


With you there entirely, Strinasacchi!  Where I work, it's not unusual at all for people to bring their kids to performances.  At the Bolshoi Theatre you often see entire classes of kids who have been brought to the performance - often to quite "intense" pieces that go on for a long time ("Swan Lake" might have lots of "chunes" in it, but you don't half have to wait for them!  Without cuts it runs at least 3.5 hours, which is a loooong time for the junior attention-span.  But they sit as good as gold, my heart goes out to them!  And these are not "ballet-school" stage-struck girlies, but regular city schoolkids).  I suppose I attribute this to an enduring tradition of "culture in place of religion" soviet-era hangover that isn't perhaps, entirely reprehensible?

If national pride keeps 15-year-olds quiet during Shakespeare then why not Elgar, VW, Delius, Holst, Walton, Britten, Tippett, Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies...?

I think it is all to easy to forget just how BIZARRE music sounds to those who don't have a listening habit. (Far more bizarre than Shakespeare's eternal themes...)

I remember hearing Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments for the first time, live, when I was at school. I was already a fairly regular concert goer, but had probably heard nothing more "modern" than Ravel in the concert hall. (I had heard quite a lot of Stravinsky on record, but somehow SofWI had not been on the list). I remember so clearly the disbelief with which I heard those sonorities. I couldn't help but smile (as years earlier I had on hearing the snare drum crescendo in Bydlo - Pictures from an Exhibition - and the bass drum roll in Scheherazade.) But to someone with NO listening experience whatsoever, ANY live sonorities might provoke a potentially far more extreme response.

The other thing is that people are genuinely scared of displaying anything that might be construed as ignorance - "what do I listen for? how do I listen? what if I don't like it? how do I know if it is any good?" - and it is easier to avoid an embarrassing situation by not being there in the first place.

Dare I also say that the 'educated' may unwittingly end up putting off people by displays of erudition - whether it is intended or not, feelings of inferiority can easily be provoked, making for a deeply uncomfortable experience, and one that a newcomer might not wish to repeat.