Each week, approximately 10,000 people come to Davies Symphony Hall to hear the San Francisco Symphony. Of that number, nearly 1,500 people, or 15%, are coming for the very first time. What causes those 1,500 people to make the decision to come hear a live orchestra concert? Is it our marketing? Public relations? Word of mouth? An invitation from a friend?

The answer is likely some combination of all of the above. While it is important to understand what motivates people to make their purchasing decisions, I’d like to focus on what happens to those people after they’ve made their decision to attend – when they actually sit down and experience the music. One of the things I find fascinating about orchestras is how the concert-going experience can be both extremely public and intensely private at the same time. Think about it: You arrive at a concert hall along with hundreds, sometimes thousands of fellow audience members; you take your seat in an enormous room along with everyone else, amid lots of hustle and bustle; a group of extremely talented men and women make their way onto the stage, preparing to perform with astounding coordination and passion. It certainly seems like a communal experience.

Yet when the lights go down and the music begins, something magical happens: each member of the audience is suddenly alone, experiencing the music. You have absolutely no idea what the person sitting right beside you is thinking during the performance, or how the music is affecting them. Perhaps they are thinking about the oboist’s tone; or maybe they are admiring the composer’s voice-leading techniques or orchestration skills; maybe the music is taking them back to a memory from their childhood; perhaps they are still focused on that difficult meeting they had that afternoon at work.

I am continually intrigued and surprised by how music affects me. There are times when I arrive in my seat after a long and tiring day, half wishing I were somewhere else. And then BAM, something in the performance shocks me, moves me, transports me…and suddenly I’m hoping the concert never ends. How is music able to do that? Sometimes I have a completely different reaction to a piece I’ve heard many times before. Was it the performance? My mood? Sometimes my reaction to a particular piece changes over time. For example, I used to be completely overwhelmed by the Verdi Requiem; for some reason, in recent years whenever I’ve heard the piece it just hasn’t moved me at all (apologies to all those Verdi Requiem fanatics out there). As far as I know, Verdi hasn’t made any changes to his Requiem since I’ve started listening to it…so what is it about me that has changed?

Lately I’ve realized that almost every performance I attend prompts some specific memory of my mother, who passed away six years ago. Recently I heard Richard Goode performing a Mozart Piano Concerto, and as he walked out on stage I remembered how much my mother loved his recordings of the Mozart concertos with Orpheus; a few weeks before that, at a performance of the Sibelius 7th Symphony, my thoughts wandered back to the time I played that work in a youth orchestra, and I could clearly recall my mom’s beaming face in the audience; at a recent concert featuring Beethoven’s Eroica, I remembered the first time I ever heard the piece, sitting next to my mom at home watching Leonard Bernstein’s televised performance with the Vienna Philharmonic. I’ve actually come to look forward to and be comforted by the fact that live concerts have been providing me with these regular “encounters” with my mother’s memory.

Just as my mother’s memory has become a reliable and expected part of MY concert-going experience, every audience member comes into the hall with their own memories, their own pasts, and their own life’s journeys. Perhaps because I am always so aware of music’s amazing ability to affect me, I am also fascinated with how it affects others. Whenever I invite someone to hear an orchestra for the first time, I look forward to speaking with them immediately after the performance. First, my guests typically pepper me with questions:

“What does the conductor really do, anyway?”

“How can that piano soloist memorize so many notes?”

“Those musicians are amazing, how many weeks of rehearsals do they have for each concert?”

When I have a chance to ask them about their experience, the question I pose is always the same: “What was going through your mind during the concert?” And most of the time, my guests have to pause for a moment. They were so busy thinking about the external elements of the experience that they didn’t pay attention to their emotional response. But soon the answers come: Some found that they were focused completely on the details of the music and the musicians on the stage, others experienced emotions triggered by what they heard, and still others weren’t quite sure what they were feeling.

Maybe it is counterintuitive that as part of an effort aimed at encouraging people to bring a friend to an orchestra concert, I’m choosing to emphasize the solitary nature of the live concert experience. But it is an aspect of the experience that I don’t think is sufficiently celebrated. In fact, it seems that more and more frequently we encounter the argument that the format of orchestra concerts will have to change because people’s attention spans are getting shorter. We’ve all heard the refrain: “Nobody is willing to sit still for two hours anymore.” My response is that orchestras should not only celebrate but flaunt the fact we offer an increasingly rare opportunity for people to come into our concert halls, leave their daily existences behind and sit for a while, alone with the miraculous music our orchestras can produce…and with their own thoughts, dreams, and memories. Where else can you do that?

Exactly. ~ Drew McManus

Toronto, April 14, 2003. The entrance to the large factory space at Cherry Beach Sound in Toronto’s docklands has been renovated with various vintage items of Arctic travel and resembles a museum of exploration as much as an alternative opera venue. The audience (slightly frigid as a result of an unseasonably cold April) passes through the long atrium and arrives at the starkly lit entrance to the performance space as if entering into another carefully constructed reality. The occasion is the premiere of Linda C. Smith’s Facing South, an opera (based on a libretto by Don Hannah) that looks at Robert Peary’s quest for the North Pole, and has been commissioned, workshopped, and produced by Tapestry New Opera Works, an opera company whose mission is to create new works for the operatic stage.

~

After having just arrived in Toronto in the summer of 2002 with absolutely no work lined up, the first engagement that I was hired for was as a pianist for the 2002 Composer-Librettist Laboratory at Tapestry New Opera Works. For this workshop (held every August in the cavernous Rosedale United Church), 4 composers and 4 librettists pair up with each of the others of the opposite discipline to create 16 operatic scenes in just over one week. On the first day of the workshop, writers, composers, pianists, and singers met for an initial meet and greet, followed by a mini-performance where each singer performed a few arias that showcased their voice. The discussion that followed dealt with the particulars of register, range, tessitura, timbre, passaggio, falsetto, as well as which vowels each singer preferred to sing for their highest notes. After this, singers and pianists were dismissed and the first round of composer-librettist writing began.

The Composer-Librettist Laboratory was unlike any other previous engagement I had played at because on every subsequent day that the singers and pianists were called, we arrived with nothing. When we showed up for each rehearsal and performance session, we sight-read what the writers and composers had just written (most often overnight), rehearsed each scene for only an hour, and then performed each scene for the group. Following seat-of-our-pants performances, dramaturge Michael Albano and musical dramaturge Wayne Strongman (also the Artistic Director of the company) would talk about their initial perceptions of text and music, the drawing of characters, the suitability of musical style, and dramatic trajectory. This was one of the most rewarding moments of the discussion, and we could perceive in the resulting dialogue which writer/composer pairings just might be willing to take the next step and work toward the eventual commissioning of a larger operatic work, either through Tapestry or another company.

~

Montreal, September 21, 2005. In a renovated industrial space, artistic director Wayne Strongman, composer Darren Fung, librettist Colleen Murphy, mezzo soprano Jessica Lloyd, tenor Keith Klassen, and I arrive for the annual convention of Aeroplan, a publicly traded company that specializes in airline reward plans. Aeroplan supports the arts, and desires to learn from the companies that they donate to. As part of the afternoon’s proceedings, Fung and Murphy have just created an operatic scene (overnight, no less) based on submissions the day before from convention-goers on themes from the life of their company. The resulting five-minute operatic short tells the story of how a office worker (played by Keith Klassen) in his first day on the job ends up comforting a senior manager (played by Jessica Lloyd) who has just heard the terrible news that one of her most beloved colleagues in the company has suddenly passed away.

~

The workshop process of an operatic work-in-progress isn’t like any other activity you’ll find in the opera world. Unlike more established operas in the repertoire whose every single note will be set in stone for one’s entire professional life, the ground is never solid beneath one’s feet when a new operatic work is in the workshop process. The aria that seemed to slow down a scene in today’s rehearsal might be chopped down to a few lines of text, and that transition that never seemed to give enough emotional time between scenes might be expanded into a much larger interlude by tomorrow’s rehearsal.

Having an openness of mind is what composers and writers need so that they can develop their toolkit of techniques while in the operatic sandbox. Singers that excel in this field are able to utilize their voice, acting skill, and physicality to literally create characters out of nothing, allowing composers and writers to fine-tune what they have written and chip away at the marble in order to create a more detailed operatic sculpture.

~

Sault Ste. Marie, October 17, 2004. On this evening, Tapestry is producing the first opera ever presented in the industrial northern Ontario city of Sault Ste. Marie as part of the Algoma Fall Festival.

The sold-out performance takes place in a hardwood lumber factory.

The owners of the mill have graciously donated one of their factory buildings to the Algoma Festival for the remounting of Opera To Go 2004, a series of six one-act operas that had premiered in Toronto six months previously. The audience enters the large factory space redolent with the scent of high-quality hardwoods, and finds their seats in two open areas of the factory floor, one for the first half and another for the second. Octobers in northern Ontario can be rather cold and the factory has none of the amenities of more traditional, heated opera houses. But what nobody counted on was that the acoustics of the space, consisting of equal parts concrete and hardwood inventory, would be this resonant.

~

The survival of a Canadian niche opera company such as Tapestry depends on its ability to apply for and receive funding from the three levels of government (municipal, provincial, and federal), as well as being able to raise funding from numerous private sources. Part of Tapestry’s success story has been its ability to effectively manage its finances (it is now debt-free and runs in the black), as well as constantly expand its pool of engaged audience members, creative artists, and donors.

The most recent step in Tapestry’s path has consisted of the formation of the Tapestry New Works Studio Company, an ensemble funded by the Metcalf Foundation consisting of directors, singers, repetiteurs, led by Resident Director Tom Diamond. The members of the studio company (I am honored to be one of its two coach/repetiteurs) form the core of Tapestry’s artistic undertakings and make a multi-year commitment to the company’s activities, no matter where other performing and teaching engagements may lead them.

~

Toronto, September 28, 2007. The audience in the Ernest Balmer Studio in Toronto’s Distillery District arrives with plenty of time to spare—they want good seats. The short run of Opera Briefs 7 has sold out faster than anyone anticipated. Since many of the performers, writers, and composers in the production are active Facebook members, the online event listing circulated for the event has gone viral, with nearly all tickets being sold prior to opening night. In fact, ticket sales were cut off nearly a week before opening so that there would be a dozen or so seats available for any walkups lucky enough to arrive early enough on performance days.

The audience for Opera Briefs 7 is also younger than usual, with an average age that looks to be closer to 30 than 50. After performances of 12 mini-operas culled from the 2007 Composer/Librettist Laboratory, most of the audience stays, and for a good while too. After Tapestry performances in the Ernest Balmer Studio, it has become a tradition to hold receptions for audiences, performers, and creative staff to mingle, since many of the best discussions about the fledgeling operatic works take place before the paint is dry. What audiences leave with is priceless: an inside look at the beginnings of what may just become the future of opera and the chance to exchange ideas with those that participate in the creative process.

I have a terrible confession to make. When I was 13 or so, I loved to watch chess tournaments on PBS. Shelby Lyman, I believe, was the host of these programs, and they were surprisingly campy. On the particular fateful day that I’m thinking of, for instance, Tim Rice (frequent librettist for Andrew Lloyd-Webber) appeared as guest authority, on the basis of his musical “Chess.” I not only watched, but taped, this program; puberty was wreaking havoc on my judgement. Right afterwards, a Verdi opera, Falstaff, came on; I let the VCR record this too. Of course I didn’t know from Falstaff, but whoa dude! I was entranced, delighted, smitten; I sat, glued, inches from the grainy screen, and watched while my mother yelled at me to vacuum my room or something; and when the final fugue happened and all the characters in the last joyous bars vanished from the stage leaving merely the empty forest landscape, leaving the impression that it had all been a beautiful dream … well, I was beside myself, a happy happy tween. 84-year-old Verdi had come, perhaps in the nick of time, to rescue 13-year-old me from associates of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Here’s the moral of this story. I had all this Verdi on low-quality VHS and I bubbled to my parents about it. They’re music lovers, and I was sure they would love it as much as I did. But, having sat them down … well, it didn’t seem to make an impression. My father perhaps dozed off? I don’t exactly recall. My mother seemed a bit bored. Alas, it was the wrong moment, it was poorly chosen! This is a vivid memory of mine: Sharing what you Love is sometimes a hazardous proposition. Also: 13-year-old enthusiasms, for good reason, are not always taken seriously.

This issue comes up, naturally, in relation to the Take your Friend to the Orchestra Initiative. Love for Music is such a vulnerable, personal thing; it is fragile, changeable; it is hard to share. Any one concert is not going to do justice to it; it may in fact seem diametrically opposed to it; you must be prepared for disappointment.

I suppose one of the first things I would do for a new concertgoer is confess to them that I am also often bored at concerts. A piece in a concert can seem like an animal cooped in a cage: desperate to get out. Often these days, I look around those grand, gilded rooms with the rows of chairs all tidy and neat, and childhood urges come back to me: a preschool dining table, and the beautiful desire to upend everybody’s plate and have the king of all food fights. I think splattering a major orchestra with banana creme pie would be an excellent start, for something. But what? Could this irreverence, paradoxically, prevent people from thumbing their Blackberries during the slow movement of Beethoven’s 4th Concerto? Because despite the flying pie I want music still to reign; I want there to be decorum and disorder, ecstatic chaos and reverent awe, all at once.

This last sentence brings me back to Falstaff. Because in its final act we have a performance that exists for its unraveling: it is a combination of tender beauty, irony, humor, violence, terror, deception, you name it: a performance that proceeds according to a pre-existing plan, but depends absolutely upon accident. The Merry Wives of Windsor have convinced fat Falstaff that he is to meet the beautiful Meg at the magic oak; he is to have a romantic, moonlit midnight rendezvous out there with her. This oak is also the subject of a local legend; it is said to be haunted by the fairies, and that to look upon them is death. Midnight is the hour of the fairies, by “coincidence.” For it is all a scam; the entire town is in upon it (except for Falstaff): they all dress up as spirits and are going to scare the hell out of the fat fool, once and for all.

Falstaff is the performer, then? Everyone is there to watch him, to see how it will turn out for him, how he will be humiliated. But he is also the audience, for the scam that the townspeople are putting on. The scam, finally, is harmless; its end result is knowledge. They do not plan to imprison him, to do anything permanent, or misery-inducing; they just want him to be exposed to himself. This truth-telling must occur, paradoxically, in a scene of pure fantasy … fantasy is required in order to know the truth.

Everything is double-edged. The townspeople, one realizes, are not just there to trick Falstaff. They enjoy the playacting as well; it is a celebration for them. (Performance as celebration and deception, simultaneously.) So the joy has a (wicked, clever) purpose, but it is also pure frivolity, a lot of effort for what could be achieved in a much simpler way, a weird mixture of waste and intention: a perfect metaphor for art.

Encased in this giant joke is a jewel of beauty: the aria of the queen of the fairies. This is how the performance really gets going, this is how they convince Falstaff of their show, of the supernatural: he hears the fairies singing; they terrorize him with a lullaby. As Nanetta sings, everyone becomes an audience to her: Falstaff and the whole town, together, punished and punishers. (Falstaff cowered on the ground, clinging to the oak …) The grouping of the spectator and the audience has changed, and Beauty is the magnetic field arranging them. Audience and performer, Verdi tells us, are not merely functions of who buys a ticket! (We have all bought tickets for our own unmasking.) This central, convincing part of the wily ruse is also the purest, most innocent kind of beauty, something absolutely free of guile, a heart of gold. In other words, the proof of the lie is truth. The liars (and everyone in this drama is a liar of some sort), convinced of the truth of this beauty, watch it raptly, sing along.

Verdi’s setting is astounding; it sits at a certain classical remove, almost beyond style. At the refrain of the aria, he brings in the chorus: and he adds just a few extra bars at the end, one of the most beautiful, simplest codas every written, a kind of echoing, or a blanket wrapped around the soprano’s voice, a shimmering aura around it. This aura, this choral coalescence, is the perfect musical metaphor for the idea that we have all gathered around this musical moment, around this hush like a hearth, around the pure beauty of song.

From that moment on the Performance begins its process of unraveling. The various performers gradually unmask themselves: each act runs its course, to be revealed as fantasy … Falstaff is punished by the crowd, but then recognizes the drunken scent of his former servant, and turns the table on him; all his dupers then get all their joy out of revealing themselves; they drink up their schadenfreude. But that is not all! Ford, the jealous husband, becomes the audience for his own humiliation: he is a performer, whether he knows it or not. Various other tricksters and poseurs are exposed, until finally there is no more audience, no more watched and watcher. At this moment, Verdi writes a fugue: a musical symbol of “Equality of Voices,” a communal song, if you will, without hierarchy. Yes, we are all clowns. Everyone is performing, and so everyone is audience as well: audience to their own folly, which they observe and celebrate.

The final act of Falstaff, then, provides several beautiful interlaced paradigms for listening, and for performing. One could propose two poles of listening: one is Nanetta’s aria, where you are drawn, entranced, silenced, immobilized by beauty; the other is the final fugue where all the voices are in a constant process of listening and responding, where song is not immobilizing but gives way to active participation. In concerts these days, we are supposed to sit still, and take it all in, we are supposed to be mesmerized. Our chairs want us to be confined, but we are not. Our minds are racing, our lives are going on (they do not stop, they are merely overlaid with the concert) … and we are fighting ourselves to feel immobilized by beauty rather than simply stuck in our seats. Why do we fight so hard? We want to join in the lusty, communal shout, in the fugue of the happening; that is part of music too.

An ideal concert might be like the last act of Falstaff: a giant joke, tinged with magic, sometimes very affecting, in which truths are revealed and love is requited, temporarily. Or, you might propose that the classical concert is an assembly of clowns: the performers in their outfits, with their neuroses and demands; the board members in their finest, with their expectations and desires; all the various audience members, bringing their agendas and days to bear: all of us clowns trying to sit still for 2 hours of music. Out of this massive delusion, in which everyone, to some extent, is a performer—make no mistake—there must be some unmasking, some truth-telling.

Which led me to these thoughts:

Suppose I am playing piece X. In my first week with a piece, the “wonder week,” I am its audience. The pages, the composer’s notes, sit in front of me, iconic performers. I look on them, I applaud. The notes are always more interesting, more intriguing, than I first imagined. They ramble around my brain, freely, as if it were a stage set.

Like the Merry Wives of Windsor, the notes deceive and entangle me. I find myself doing love-struck things, dancing around the practice room in frustration and pleasure, yelling “that is so great” after I hideously mangle some fantastic passage. It has very little to do with me, at that period. My best-laid plans seem unfortunate, then best-laid again. Certain quirky asymmetrical phrases of Mozart, for instance: you decide that the phrase is going here (with a capital H) but when you get there you suddenly realize that it has already been going somewhere else. And these little beautiful puzzles, hiding everywhere in the music, don’t exist merely (or mainly) to be solved.

You would never want to hear any of that dubious, searching, stumbling piano playing … but I wish I could distill some essence of my thoughts of that time and sprinkle it over every performance that I give. Because, as the weeks creep on, learning a piece, I become more the performer and less the audience. Like Falstaff, I begin to delude myself, to take on airs, to believe that I in fact “know something” about the piece, that the piece goes “this way” and not “that way;” I become that deadly word, an “interpreter;” in my search for truth, inevitably the delusions multiply. And I must unmask myself, reveal myself, accept myself as mere audience again, if my performance is to be worth anything.

Falstaff suggests that performance is a chance to unmask ourselves. Immersed in the stress of our lives, like a bottle, we are not always willing to let the air in. But this amazing music has a way of sneaking around your defenses, of tricking you … As if … indulge me for a moment … you were in your house, on a summer evening, on the top floor, concentrating, and it (the music) sneaks in the backdoor and begins to creep around the ground floor; safe in your room, you hear its creaking on your floorboards, along with the sound of crickets. And you wonder, is this sound a burglar or is it my long-lost lover? There is only one way to find out.

- Jeremy Denk

Ron brings his creativity in the classroom to TAFTO 2008 by sharing the concert experience through the eyes and ears of his students. Having them serve as embedded observers, Ron details their numerous objectives in attending a Springfield Symphony concert with the purpose of absorbing the concert experience from the patron’s perspective. The results are both informative and entertaining and serve as a welcome addition to TAFTO program. ~ Drew McManus

When Drew asked me to write for TAFTO I immediately agreed as it has been a favorite series of mine to read especially since it is such a proactive approach.  However since I am mostly in performances and not watching them, I was initially stumped on the angle to take.  I have invited many friends to attend in the past, some have become subscribers and one recently became a board member and now heads up Crescendo, a patrons social group at the Springfield Symphony that she herself formed.  Since I write extensively on the subject of Orchestras and their relationships with their audiences and communities over on Sticks and Drones, I decided to bring to TAFTO an assignment that I gave to my Audience Connections class at Drury University.  The assignment was to do a review of two different performances by the Springfield Symphony, one a Classics, the other a Pops.  The class had 4 students last semester so 2 went to the Classics and 2 to the Pops and I sat them in different parts of the hall.  These however were reviews with a twist (literally), for they were not there to review the orchestra’s performance, because I told them to turn their backs on us and instead review the audience!

I asked them to get there early to stand by the ticket windows, then walk around, talk to people, observe their reactions during the performance, and finally listen to what people were saying at intermission and after the concert.  I jokingly suggested that they could even stand in the restroom line to overhear conversations. One of them commented on what they overheard inside the restroom! Nothing untoward I promise!

It was both fascinating and eye opening to read their reviews and also very helpful to us as an organization.  I think this is something all performing organizations should consider undertaking to help them appreciate and understand the audiences experience, reactions, personalities and desires. That way when programing or deciding any new policy, the audience’s voice can be present in the discussion but more importantly, be the catalyst for why a change needs to take place.  It sure beats focus groups as those give you feedback after the fact, not while it’s actually happening, and they’re expensive!  This is similar to the practice known as Mystery Shopping that many companies use to determine their level of service and employee performance.

Here are summaries of their reviews. The complete documents are available to download at the bottom:

Classics: Glazunov – Autumn, Rachmaninoff – Piano Concerto No. 2, R. Korsakoff – Scheherezade

Dan Kieffer wrote very honestly about his first impressions. As and arts administration major his focus is music and this was not his first concert to attend. These were his observations pre-concert:

At first, the people there seemed primarily gray.  By this, I mean that they were old.  When I entered the main auditorium to hear the pre concert talk, I noticed that almost everyone in there was older.  Then I went back into the lobby to find out why people were at the concert.

When I was talking to people, there were many reasons people were there.  I noticed many families and many elderly couples.  I found few people who said that they were there for the love of music.  Many people said they were there because they had a friend or family member in the pre-show home school orchestra.  Many other people, especially younger people, said they were there because they had gotten free tickets and/or they needed some sort of requirement to be filled by their attendance of the concert.
One thing I found very interesting about the pre-concert crowd was that all of the more elderly people seemed to be socializing and having more fun than the younger crowd.  Perhaps this is because they elderly are more comfortable and used to that particular scene and the younger people find it intimidating.

Whilst there was not a lot of talk about music in the lobby he wrote this about a particular moment in the performance:

I also noticed during the Rachmaninoff, during one of the slow piano solo cadenzas, that the full hall was silent.  It seemed like there was a collective holding of breath during this very delicate moment of the music.  When the rest of the orchestra joined back in, there was coughing and audible breathing.  I thought this was a great moment.

So in the lobby he notices very diverse groups of people, but in the moment of the performance he describes above, they are unified as a one!

Amy McGeehee is interested in a career in culinary arts, this was the first orchestra concert she had ever attended and she observed this about people’s attire and general demeanor:

While some people were dressed in suits and dresses, others wore jeans.  I think many view dressing up as part of the experience of going to the symphony.  Many of the casually dressed were groups of students standing around with an aura of obligation or apathy.  Other “fancier” adults, however, seemed to find the event as an opportunity for socialization, eager to visit people of a similar social standing.  When standing near the ticket booth, I noticed a man with crutches in line to purchase a ticket, and was impressed with his insistence to attend.

This next observation is proof that word of mouth is key to help someone to decide to attend a Symphony concert!:

After moving upstairs, I saw a fellow Drury student.  She was at the concert because her sister and mother have season tickets, but her mother couldn’t attend.  When asked if she was looking forward to the concert, she hesitated, stating that such events weren’t really “her thing”. However, her sister had promised her these concerts were fun and engaging rather than “stuffy.”

Just by this comment I see the challenge in making ourselves accessible by changing peoples perception of “stuffiness” and was pleased to read that we might have made some inroads!

Right before the performance Amy in one paragraph encapsulates the importance of comfort and the fact that listening is not a passive experience for some!:

I heard a man comment on the nice amount of leg room provided.  When the orchestra began tuning their instruments, I heard a woman behind me say, “I love the sound of a tuning orchestra!”  During the first half of the program the audience members I observed were very attentive.  During the first piece, the older man next to me seemed very involved in the song, tapping his foot at the fast parts. During the slower parts, he moved his head from side to side across the stage as if taking it all in.

Pops Concert: The Three Phantoms – an evening of some of the great solos, duets and trios from classic Broadway Musicals ending with a trio version of Music of the Night all sung by three bona fide Broadway stars

Katie Schirmer who’s focus is on Theater came out of left field with this comment about the weight of the program book which is valid nonetheless. Nothing should be overlooked and we are proud and our advertisers are pleased that we print using magazine quality paper.  We might have to rethink this policy!:

Talk before the show circulated between everyday life and the show they were about to see. One comment that kept popping up was that the programs were heavy – something I had said and then was surprised at how many people also made note of it. It was interesting because people were talking about their days and then would finally come to the page listing the selections for the evening and immediately comment on their excitement. It seemed everyone was either excited about the totality of the line-up or about one particular song.

I can’t tell you how many Pops I have done in which an artist will simply have on their program page: selections announced from the stage.  The above comment goes to show the value of printing the selections.  Just in case you are wondering after reading this next observation of Katie’s, I assure you the Three Phantoms did not sing Food Glorious Food!:

Intermission came and the audience got up to stretch and some walked around. Because the rows are so wide with no middle aisle, many people just stayed in their seats so as not to trample over all the other patrons. Most of the talk at intermission was about day-to-day life; I heard a riveting conversation on tilapia and how to best prepare it.

Again this next quote shows our audience as a unified body:

During Mark’s “Impossible Dream”, I could feel the tension in the air as the audience was waiting to applaud. It was as if they just couldn’t hold it back any longer, they were so appreciative. “Bring Him Home”, sung by Craig, was positively heartbreaking. The woman next to me was crying and she wasn’t alone.

Ellie Swogger is a dancer/choreographer who is going to intern this summer with the administration of a major company. At first she seemed somewhat perturbed by the audience:

The first thing was their disengagement with performance before, after, and during intermission.  I attended the performance with my roommate and as college students, we don’t often have the time or funds to attend arts events like this one.  Perhaps this is why our resulting enthusiasm about the show was so intense compared to others.

Her excitement as a young person at the concert is in contrast to Dan and Amy’s comments above about the general demeanor of the younger patrons, although I wonder if its because it was a Pops? Ellie’s initial observations continued at intermission:

During intermission a few older couples chatted about their summer trip to Europe while two younger women discussed their plans following the show.  Overall, there seemed to be a general disinterest in the beauty of the art being performed, which was the purpose of their gathering at the place.  In the bathroom, a few women were quietly discussing their preference for one of the vocalists above the other two, but mainly there seemed to be an unspoken rule of silence in the ladies’ restroom.

Yet, I saved Ellie’s quotes for last because she came to a wonderful realization:

My overall conclusion is that people attend and participate in the arts for many different reasons and connecting with an audience can mean something different for every member of that audience.  In any given audience at any given performance can be found a wide variance of audience types and, whether reasons for being part of an audience are purely social, artistic inspiration, entertainment, or personal enjoyment, the profound effect of the outlet provided by art is a necessary one that an only be achieved through true audience connection.

A unified observation from each student was that even though there was a collective focus and involvement in the performance, people were talking before, at intermission and after the concert about everyday life.  This is something that pleased me to no end. I maintain that to become special to someone we need to become relevant to them first, and true comfort at a performance is when people feel like they can be themselves.  My goal is for us as an Orchestra to become a part of “everyday life” so that when concert goers are in line at the grocery store checkout or at the bank etc…, they just might talk about the Symphony!  It is my belief that we are not in the music business, but in the people business!

Half of my job as a teacher is simply to put young ears and eyes in contact with classical music and art. In my experience, if you can do that with a modicum of knowledge and enthusiasm about the subject and then just get out of the way, the aesthetic experience does the work of conversion in most cases. Although the background can be handled in a classroom or in a conversation with a friend, the real magic has to happen live, with the visual sparkle of paint on canvas or the crackle of musicians in unified attack in the concert hall.

Taking a Friend to the Orchestra is not much different, and anyone who loves classical music and wants to continue attending concerts by a local symphony orchestra needs to evangelize. As a reviewer, I attend concerts with lots of friends and family, but I do set aside some time to take people along who have never been to a concert. In fact, I have done this before in a more public way, inviting a non-music blogger for a “ride-along” review, and in both cases the only hard part was making it work with another person’s busy schedule. Allow yourself some time, choose a concert that is not too esoteric but — and this is important — of very high quality, and then just let the experience unfold.

It is surprising that people can live in a city like Washington, D.C., and never have visited the Kennedy Center or another concert venue. People are far more likely to have missed out on classical music than on museums or other cultural fare. One of my own editors, a cultured and intelligent person, went to the Kennedy Center for the first time when I took her to hear Yo-Yo Ma. That brings me to my first point of advice: if possible, choose a concert with a performer a novice may actually know. No one is likely to turn down the chance to hear Yo-Yo Ma or Joshua Bell, and chances are that one will be predisposed to enjoy the experience if it seems at least a little familiar.

The second point of advice is, as mentioned above, to choose something of very high quality. Nothing against minor symphonic ensembles or community orchestras, but if you have only one chance to convince a person that Italian food is worthwhile, you would not take him to a lesser restaurant. Stack the deck in your favor, and present your friend with a real delicacy. Last April, in honor of TAFTO 2007, I co-authored a review of the truly extraordinary Australian Chamber Orchestra with a sports writer. His comments about the experience provide the template of what to watch for.

First, take into consideration your friend’s busy schedule when you choose the time of your concert: we went on a Friday night, and he was exhausted. Similarly, I recently attended an opera with a friend whose work day had not really ended when he rushed to the theater to meet me on a Wednesday night. He spent the first intermission on a conference call. Little wonder that audiences are predominantly gray-haired: retirees have less hectic schedules.

Second, your friend does not need much specialized discussion of what she is about to hear. In fact, somewhere in the back of his mind may be a certain discomfort or fear of unfamiliar territory. At a recent National Symphony Orchestra concert, to which I took a relative neophyte, the main feature of the program was Mahler’s sixth symphony. Without giving a long lecture, I simply explained that the big table at one side of the orchestra was where a percussionist was going to wallop the surface with an enormous sledgehammer. She looked really surprised but did not ask any more questions: when we got to the hammer-blows, she looked like she was about to jump out of her skin with excitement.

If you point out one thing about the piece, your friend may want to know more and could ask you questions. Just watch for that glazed look in her eyes: that is when to stop talking. She should not be overwhelmed before the music starts. Afterward, find a place to take your friend for a celebratory drink of his choice. That is where you can share your impressions and find out what each other liked and did not like, and make plans for the next concert. Don’t expect a miracle, because you are unlikely to create a new subscriber in one night’s worth of music. You will have opened up a possibility in your friend’s mind, however, and hopefully at least dispelled some worries and misconceptions about what symphony orchestras do and how easy it is to enjoy them.

“This site is aimed at people who want to get into classical music. It’s hopefully just right for someone who can recognize a couple of pieces (the da-da-da-dum of Beethoven’s fifth for example), and who might stick on a CD for a pleasant background to work to, but would basically consider themselves a beginner when it comes to classical music.”

Ben embodies everything that is TAFTO and if classical music has a bright future in store, it will be due in large part because of folks just like him. ~ Drew McManus

Three years ago I was a classical newbie. The day I started to switch was just a hair after my 24th birthday, and three years further on it is a process very much in development. Before that transition point I had barely more than a baseline exposure to the genre, being able to recognize Beethoven’s fifth (well, as long as it was the first movement) and listening to each of the three classical CDs in my collection for perhaps a few hours each year, if they were lucky. Classical music was something to daintily dip my toes into, not to dive under.

The big hook happened when the second Saint-Saëns piano concerto was playing as an unobtrusive canvas to schoolwork. I can still clearly recall the music pouncing from the background into the foreground, and myself being quite surprised by this sudden exposure. There was a long, continuous melody! It wasn’t at all just a lot of random orchestral noodling! Those gripping little melodic baby-teeth were the start of my conversion process. By the end of the week I had ordered all five of the piano concertos, and it all rolled on from there rather quickly.

So why did it take me so long to switch? Well, there were two particularly unexpected things that became apparent during this process, two things which had I known previously would have made me way more likely to experiment earlier. The first was the variety of subgenres, that it wasn’t all Bach and Beethoven and Mozart. I discovered that twentieth century classical music exists and is particularly aligned with my preferences. The second surprise — and the most important — was that it takes a lot of listening before a classical piece makes any sense. It sounds so obvious in hindsight, but back then I simply did not realize that if I kept listening to a classical piece I could “get” it in a similar way to my other music. There are melodies you can follow through and watch as they writhe and twist and tangle. It just takes a little longer to see them.

I think that this is really important to convey to the first time concertgoer, to let them know that classical music can be pretty overwhelming the first few times you hear a piece, but on the third or fourth or tenth listen all kinds of awesome things are going to start unexpectedly popping out. Of course at a concert you only get to listen to the pieces once, straight through, no rewinding. This means that if you’ve never heard the piece before you’re going to have a really hard time making tons of sense out of it. The key is that if you are expecting this to be the case, then it isn’t going to bother you as much. If new listeners are aware that it’s really hard to get a piece the first time through they are less likely to think: “Well, this is sort of pretty, but it doesn’t quite make sense the way other music does. I guess classical isn’t right for me.”

Of course, if they have a love-at-first-listen experience then that’s spectacularly awesome, and I am jealous. Otherwise though, I think the goal of a starting concert for a newbie should be to present as wide a selection of music as possible, while providing lots of little hooks to draw them in and convince them to keep on listening to classical after the concert is over. Given these goals there are a few things that would have been fantastic for my own early experiences:

1. Not too much of any individual piece. Coming from a non-classical background means that sitting stationary for upwards of half an hour listening to a single composition is sort of pushing one’s concentration limits. While it might work out if it’s a wonderful performance, and the piece played happens to juxtapose nicely with the listeners personal preferences, a huge Mahler symphony (for example) probably isn’t the right way to go. It’s pretty off-putting to be sitting fiddling your fingers and wondering why everyone else is enjoying themselves when you were ready for something new after the first twenty minutes of the first movement. Of course, this is mostly common sense, but sometimes this is hard to remember when you’ve fallen in love with a piece and think everyone else should do the same.
2. Go to something they probably haven’t heard. Initially I didn’t even really realize that there were any other genres than late Classical and early Romantic, which is kind of the popular view of what classical music is. By providing a wider buffet selection the probability gets increased that one of the items will be especially appealing to the new listener, something that will make them think “Wow! This is classical?” If I were selecting genres at a concert for my previous self to attend, I would try and cram in something late romantic, something atonal, something early and something late twentieth century (maybe Brahms, Berg, Shostakovich, Adams). I think most people already have a pretty good idea of what the Baroque, Classical and early Romantic periods sound like already, so it’s good to mix it up a bit. Don’t be afraid to have “difficult” pieces in there (like something atonal), as long as they are different.
3. Make it memorable in subtle ways. Little hooks go a long, long way. One of my early concert experiences was a performance of Shostakovich’s eighth string quartet arranged as a chamber symphony. The memory of finding out about the DSCH motif still juts out dramatically as an instantly intriguing aspect. It made me feel like I actually understood what was going on, just a little bit. Having some little tidbit of information, some cool musically observable feature is a great aid for someone who kind of feels out of their depth to get a grip on things. It doesn’t have to be something quite as obvious as DSCH; the rather tragic story behind the Berg violin concerto is another more program-notey example of something which really gave me a connection to the music. Anything that gives an inroad into the unfamiliarity of the genre is wonderful.

Overall I think the goal to shoot for should be a post-concert Googling. That is to say, if the potential new listener is intrigued enough to search for more information on the composers or the specific pieces, then the concert was a success. Truly getting to grips with a classical piece takes a lot more time than a single concert provides, but there is ample opportunity for that later on. The most important thing is igniting that initial curiosity, and that is something you can directly aid with your choice of program, and by sharing your explanations, enthusiasm and passion for the music

What do you love about going to the symphony?

This is the question I asked  the readers on my website, Violinist.com, which has a lively discussion board populated with professional musicians, enthusiastic amateurs, teenage students, their parents, teachers and fans of the violin.

I received 100 answers over three days, and nearly all of them spoke of  the magic of live music, of the peace and beauty of the concert hall, the fun of dressing up and being “glamorous” for an evening, the appeal of fine music and great artists. But hanging over the entire conversation was one comment (from an arts administrator!), posted only 14 minutes after I published the question.

She wrote: “I am not drawn to the symphony. Sorry to say it but true. I’d rather play pool than go to a classical music concert. I’d rather go to a multi-media experience, like a symphony performing a soundtrack live and show the movie simultaneously. I like lecture concerts as well. Anything… ANYTHING but just sit there, not be addressed as an audience member at all, and listen to music I’ve heard or played a hundred times.”

The problem is that many symphony administrators, board members, even musicians, feel like this. They do not understand the innate draw of a symphony concert; maybe they don’t believe it even exists. And when you do not understand its innate draw, you will never take a friend to orchestra – you will never find its audience.

I think I know how to attract people to the symphony: start with the people who are passionate about the symphony experience. Start with the people who love it, and you might be surprised at what they want.

When I first started my violin website, I wondered if I should tread lightly on subjects that some readers might not understand. I mean, how many people are going to be able to participate in the conversation if I ask whether or not they play the last note of Bach’s E major Preludio as a harmonic? Who wants to get into the arcane details of  how to shift one’s hand up the neck of a violin?

Well, I do, actually. I’m a violinist. I love talking shop. I’m passionate about the violin. But won’t it just turn off everyone else? Won’t my audience shrink into nothingness if I get that deep?

I found the opposite to be true. The deeper I dove into the very specific subculture that is the violinist’s life, the more truly passionate violin lovers emerged. And the more they began to populate the site, the more passion they generated among other readers.

Would you like to read 400 passionate responses to the question, “Should I use a shoulder rest on my violin?” Many violinists would. And because I am a violinist, I know that. If I didn’t have a deep understanding of the motivations, lifestyle, everyday issues that a violinist faces, I would not have a feel for this.

Strangers have called me and tried to pry the domain name Violinist.com from me. “We could monetize your site!” (“Monetize” is a verb?) Yes, I can see it now: a site devoted to advertisements for factory violins from China and guitar sheet music. It would attract the people who type the domain into the computer. Once.

That’s not the way to build an enduring audience for a website. Or for a symphony orchestra.

I don’t necessarily ask my friends to the symphony; I ask “fans.” They aren’t necessarily fans of me; they are fans of classical music. How do I find them? They are the people in my life who perk up when they learn I’m a musician. They want to talk about recordings, or what I think about the review in the paper. As the only violinist they know, I represent classical music for them. These “fans” come out of the woodwork, if you open your eyes to look for them. I’m not the only one who has witnessed this phenomenon:

“Classical music is not only for the upper class, the highly educated or the musically literate; it is for everyone,” wrote Jennifer Laursen, of Durham, North Carolina. “At our local post office there are two postmen who are avid classical music fans with collections who would rival any of us on V[iolinist].com. One of the bank tellers at my local bank shows up at chamber concerts regularly, and one of the UPS drivers who delivers to our home is a classical music fan. These are just the few I know of. All of them told me that while they were growing up they enjoyed seeing the NC Symphony when they came to their town. So, more important than accessibility of the programming, is the access the public has to seeing it live.”

These are people who truly love the symphony experience and who love classical music.

“I love to hear a great concerto played with an orchestra. As a non-musician myself I am amazed by strength and bravery of soloists and the solo versus orchestra interplay absolutely draws me in,” Laursen wrote. “I heard the Cleveland Orchestra play Beethoven last summer and I thought I had glimpsed a better world!”

This is a common theme for those who have caught the symphony bug: they love the sheer excellence of it.

“When I go, I marvel at the color and textures, the pure power and, by contrast, the effect of silence,” said Mike Harris of Austin, Texas.

“What I love most about attending symphonies and live music, is how enraptured you can become in the experience,” wrote Jake Bush of Sugar City, Idaho. “Music on your computer, CD player, car radio, etc, is usually background noise while another task is your primary focus. When going to a performance, the music IS the entire focus, giving you the ability to completely immerse yourself…There’s so much more magic in live theatre and symphonies. So in short, the reason I go is just that: the magic.”

There is much power in that magic. Unfortunately, that power sometimes intimidates those who do not understand it. But we should play to our strength – that power, that magic – and quit treating it as  weakness.

Taking a friend to the orchestra is a bit of a tricky matter when you play in the orchestra. Most of my friends either play in the Calgary Philharmonic themselves, or have been coming to concerts their whole lives. And when I do get to know someone from a different sphere, and find they’re enthusiastic about hearing an orchestra for the first time, I’m not always in the best position to guide them through it. I’ll be up on stage, hoping they managed to get there, didn’t feel too lost or bored, and maybe we’ll get an opportunity for a post-concert chat. I don’t get to help them out or answer their questions, at least until after the concert has ended.

The worst scenario for me would be to invite someone and find they’d been completely alienated by the experience, hated the orchestra and me for inviting them to it. (This hasn’t happened, I just have a very active negative imagination – leading me to envision “Take a friend to the orchestra, leave an enemy!”) Because I fear this happening, I’m often reticent to invite people I don’t know pretty well. This story is about an occasion when I did invite two new friends, and it worked out surprisingly well.

It was a Baroque-series concert in late January, somewhat alarmingly titled “The British Are Coming”, and I had two comps for it. This concert was on a Thursday, in the middle of a frigid week with temperatures in the -20s, and giving away these comps was proving surprisingly difficult. My orchestra won’t always offer comps to musicians, and when we do the system of distribution seems to be:

1. the orchestra manager stands up on podium, either before rehearsal or during a break
2. he holds up a stack of comp tickets
3. musicians descend like a pack of vultures

So managing to swoop in and snatch two tickets was a big victory for me, and I wanted to make them count. I would feel awful to leave them unused – what a waste, what a letdown! Then again, giving them away to someone who found it a tedious chore to have to use them might be even worse…

The morning of the concert day I went to my yoga class, and was leaving the center when I remembered the tickets. I dug them out of my bag and asked my yoga teacher Harmony, “Do you know anyone who might want some tickets to hear the CPO tonight?”

Despite my unenthusiastic pitch, she was instantly excited and said, “Oh, we would!” She and her husband Jeff both teach Ashtanga yoga in the Mysore tradition 6 days a week, which means they start practicing and teaching around 4 am almost every day. As a result, I doubt they make it to a lot of concerts (also, yoga teachers don’t earn much money). But they’re very musically attuned people – and involved in an eastern tradition with a lot of similarities to western classical music.

So handing off those tickets to Harmony felt good, but still a little queasy. I didn’t know how they would react to this concert of mostly Baroque, English music, but with Haydn’s ‘Oxford’ Symphony as the concluding piece. Maybe it was a good thing that I didn’t accompany them to the concert. I would have just babbled about music history and stylistic periods; whereas the experience of seeing and hearing an orchestra for the first time, all the distinct sounds and gestures of the musicians and instruments, might only be diminished by too much explanation – like a magician explaining how a trick was done. In a recent article on magic, Adam Gopnik writes:

What they call “the real work” isn’t the method, which anyone can learn from a book (and, anyway, all decent magicians know roughly how most tricks are done), but the whole of the handling and timing and theatrics of the effect, which are passed along from magician to magician and generation to generation. The real work is the complete activity, the accumulated practice, the total summing up of tradition and ideas. The real work is what makes a magic effect magical.

– “The real work: modern magic and the meaning of life”, The New Yorker, March 17, p. 57

I think our art has a similar, unexplainable dimension which new audience members are best left to discover and savor for themselves. Whenever I do answer an audience member’s technical question, about German bows or C-extension machinery or the physics of pizzicato, I often have a sense of vague disappointment. I can explain the principles involved, but I’ll never unveil the mystery, power and beauty that all that craftsmanship makes possible.

One of the magical things about bringing new listeners to the orchestra is that they can restore our own sense of the wonder and magic in what we do. I received this e-mail from Jeff:

Matt,

I can’t thank you enough for the tickets last night. What a powerful performance. Harmony and I really enjoyed ourselves! The music actually brought tears to my eyes more than once. The discipline and the dedication of the musicians is so evident. True yogis! True communion. It is incredible what depth and complexity these great composers must have had… What a fantastic, moving life you have chosen.

You are a great, great man! Thank you so much for your kindness!

Jeff

Reading that was a huge morale-booster for me; and after watching that performance, Jeff told me, he and Harmony have both been especially careful not to dislocate my wrists or pull a shoulder out of its socket while adjusting my yoga poses! So I suppose in all respects it was a successful instance “Take a Friend to the Orchestra” — no friendships were harmed in the making of these new audience members!

One of my most interesting and inspiring experiences as a conductor happened in China, but it had nothing to do with taking a friend to a concert. It had more to do with taking people in general to a place in life and the arts they didn’t know before. I want to link my Chinese experience to the topic of taking a friend to the orchestra. Taking a friend to the orchestra is really about sharing a meaningful experience, and sometimes that means trusting somebody to lead you into a field with which you are unfamiliar.

In 2000, the Zurich Opera invited me to conduct three performances of Mozart’s Magic Flute in Shanghai. In those days, the Zurich Opera had one of the most famous productions of Mozart’s opera ever mounted for the stage in their repertoire, that of Jean Pierre Ponelle, and I had conducted many performances of it in the early 1990s. The interesting part of this undertaking in Shanghai was that the production and the singers were to be from the Zurich Opera House but the orchestra was to be Chinese. So I traveled to China and imagine my surprise when I encountered an orchestra of musicians, none of whom spoke English. Moreover, they had never seen a note of the entire Magic Flute in their lives and didn’t even know what the story was about. For the next couple of days I sang the music instead of communicating through a translator so they could become familiar with Mozart’s piece.

It’s not so important to tell you if our nine days of tough rehearsals were successful (they were!) or if the European singers were happy with us once they arrived in Shanghai (yes, they were!). The important thing for me, which I remember to this day, is that it was possible to carry a group of people (or friends, for that matter) on a long journey through a field unknown to them. And because of my own enthusiasm, passion, my love for what music really means, this group of people ultimately listened, participated, and understood.

The miracle of an orchestra concert is that the experience goes way beyond what can be described in words. We humans use language to communicate with each other and when we learn a language, sometimes a couple of them, this knowledge enhances our ability to communicate with our many friends across the planet. But when talking about the language of music, the experience after a concert with a great orchestra can be this: you have concentrated, you have listened, and the language of music has spoken to you but there is no need to talk about it. In this case, you’ve understood each other using nothing more than the language of melody and harmony.

Bringing a friend to the orchestra has nothing to do with showing off the art as such. For me, classical music is far more than just something to be admired for the mastery of the art form. It is a way of conveying a multitude of emotions. In this sense, classical music can literally be “everything.”

Bringing a friend to the orchestra is about sharing something you care about with somebody you care for. It’s as simple as that. Sometimes I compare it to other things I enjoy doing in life: hiking, drinking a good glass of wine, or going to the movies. All of these things can be enjoyed way more if you are able to share them with a friend. Even the wonderful art form of literature…how beautiful it is to read a good book, how great it is when you can actually talk about your thoughts with a friend.

I have had the pleasure and honor of conducting for over 20 years. The best moments in a concert hall (and it doesn’t really matter what type of music is being played) are when there is this wonderful feeling of “we” in the room. The fact that there are people on stage, actively involved in presenting a piece, and on the other side of the room there are people listening, becomes secondary. The magic happens when we all are unified in our thoughts and experience.

And knowledge, intellectualism, and brainy attributes are not what I want to bring to my friends at an orchestra concert. I want my friends to listen with an open heart. All of the great composers whose work accompanies us through life did not write music because they wanted either you, or your friend, to admire their skill, the handling of the harmony, etc. A concert is not about admiration of craftsmanship. It has more to do with becoming unified with other human beings and experiencing a language that doesn’t need translation. It brings people together.