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Is it necessary to give Classical Music a facelift? (part 2)April 14th, 2009
In the first part of Is it necessary to give Classical Music a facelift?, we talked about dress at concerts. Today, I would like to share with you my thoughts on concert programming. A good programming is indeed essential. However, isn’t it tiring to hear the same works every year, everywhere in the world? “It’s the law of the market!”, organizers and agents say, “you must play what the audience wants to listen to”. But if no one introduces anything new to the audience, they won’t ever want anything else. And, as the audience cannot know all the repertoire, one always finds the same works in most programs.
I would like to begin with a quote from Maurizio Pollini: “People who go to concerts are occupied during the day with completely different things than music. It is therefore not for them to decide what one plays or not”.
Is it necessary to play what the audience wants to hear? No, it is not. Building a program is an art and a science. A program, by letting the “law of the market” operate, looks more like a medley of classical music endless hits than a program which has been coherently drawn up.
To attract a new audience, nowadays, there are crossover concerts, combining different styles within the same concert. Let’s take, for example, a great singer and make her/him sing Haendel, Fauré with some arrangements of Norah Jones or The Beatles in between. This is quite simply stupid: you might as well be asking your plumber to fix the roof. As classical musicians, we are not trained for this and are only able to give ridiculous or pompous versions of these music genres.
Instead of making us perform what we are not able to do, or decerebrate our programs, it would be interesting to notice that the programming of contemporary works is always a success with audiences which are not much or not at all used to classical concerts.
Could “broadening the audience” and “updating the programming” rhyme? Should we not, at last, for the greatest pleasure of all, commonly and durably combine Chopin with Boulez, Beethoven with Murail? The music of our times has often proved that it could attract young audiences!
There is a French idiom saying “One is only old in one’s mind”. Programming does not need a facelift, but it is necessary to stop making it voluntarily old. Classical music is alive and its forces are intact, but as a result of living too much in the past, it now seems old and moribund. It’s up to us, interpreters, to follow our artistic path and to refuse to be confined, without trying to make programming a tool to reach an ephemeral glory.
04/14/09 - 21:13
Something is annoying about Maurizio Pollini’s comment. It might not be for the people who go to concerts to decide what he plays, but it is for them to decide whether to go to his concert or not.
But Pierre-Arnaud, you bring up interesting points. I look forward to Part 3!
04/15/09 - 22:00
I agree with you, but I think this comment has to be understood in Pollini’s own context: Whatever he plays, the concert is sold out. In this case, it’s easy to say “If you don’t like what I play, just stay home!”.
Anyway, I chose this quote just to illustrate that artists are getting tired of being taught what they should play
04/12/10 - 15:34
I very much look forward to part 3. I am a marketer for a small orchestra (living in the shadows of the CSO) and I’ll readily admit that I am looking for a silver bullet to make my job easier.
I can sell out a house when Beethoven is on the program, but if I’m handed anything labeled as “new” music I often hear the drone of crickets in the audience.
For me, I need the help of the orchestra to sell this music to the audience. I need those players telling their friends and family, Facebook followers, blog readers how exciting the music is and why they love to play it. It is that excitement from within an orchestra that can assist in promoting this music. The musicians are much more emotionally connected to what is happening on stage and in their hearts when they play and it is that passion that can help to bring in the audience…not a postcard, not a radio ad or a print ad — it’s the orchestra and their love for the music.
04/12/10 - 22:44
Here, here! I work with both “traditional” orchestras and new music ensembles of various sorts and I see time and time again that the problem is really about labeling. When something is labeled as “new” or “avante guarde” in a subscription symphony concert, it gets treated like a visitor from another planet. Sometimes this means an exciting and successful premier, but it rarely means a 2nd or 3rd performance. The idea that orchestra repertoire should be focused on music of the past is a very recent and anomalous phenomenon. Good music is exciting, no matter when it was composed.
So, the trick is to program concerts in a thoughtful and creative way and not segment the repertoire historically, since that only trains the audience to do the same. The mp3 generation has brought with it a world where all music is always available and the boundaries of historical period and genre simply matter less to listeners. This is a golden opportunity to create programming that is adventurous and not in the rut of Beethoven or bust (though Beethoven need not be excluded, of course).