iPod Sensibilities and “Improvements” to the Concert Experience
Over at Sounds & Fury, ACD is critical over a somewhat anonymous posting discussing alternatives to the standard concert-going experience. While I am actually somewhat proud of my iPod sensibility (although I’d prefer a more generic mp3-based title, as I cannot stand the cult of Apple) I find myself basically agreeing with ACD.
The author of the original article (which is itself a response to this piece comparing popular and classical pieces) suggests things such as multiple annoyance tiers (of course, this isn;t what the author calls them) for concerts. That is, different rooms in which people can “attend” a concert performance - such as one in which the audience is free to drift in and out and talk amongst themselves, albeit only up to a certain decibel level (god knows how that would be policed).
I’m all up for natural selection of ideas, so someone should give that one a go… but I’m pretty suspicious of it’s potential for success. I suspect it would end up as a bunch of people standing around, not really discussing the piece, and than leaving after a few minutes because the whole experience is kind of uncomfortable.
The next idea discussed is even more bizarre: that there should be an alternative means of attending the concert which consists of sitting alone in a booth with a pair of headphones on and some sort of video screen. There would be controls to pause, rewind, etc. Now… how is this different from just watching a DVD of the performance? In your own home? A much better implementation of this idea would surely be just to provide high-quality video and audio versions over the internet, for a small price. I’d love it if the major orchestras regularly did this.
I think the concert hall listening experience is distinct. You are experiencing the music without any pauses, and perhaps more importantly, without the ability to pause it. You necessarily relinquish your control. No replaying is allowed, you simply have to experience the music as it comes to you. Contrast this to recorded music, in which you can skip sections, or replay movements or fractions of movements as the music moves you to do so. These two approaches are complementary, and trying to shoehorn one into the other seems to be tricky, and probably less than ideal.
What I would much prefer to see is not only the orchestras putting their performances up online, but also making it so that these recorded performances can be discussed and analyzed by the devotees. For example, how about a system in which people can comment along the timeline of the video, meaning that each section can be separately discussed.
January 7th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
“You are experiencing the music without any pauses, and perhaps more importantly, without the ability to pause it. You necessarily relinquish your control.”
Best of all, you are experiencing the music the way the composer intended it to be experienced. But of course that means little or nothing to a lot of folks nowadays, who insist that all of their experiences be completely alterable at their own whim.
While I am all for all of the fantastic ways classical music can be presented to newbies by modern digital technology, I fear that many of these newbies may get so caught up in all of the slicing and dicing and mixing that they never get around to experiencing the actual thing, which (I am reactionary enough–in the area of music–to insist) can only happen in live performance.
January 11th, 2008 at 4:20 am
I pretty much learned classical music from records, as there weren’t many opportunities in my town to get it live. What a difference, the first time I sat in at a performance that truly had the audience in its grip. Not that it was necessarily any better in musical terms than the best recordings of that music; in fact it was not. But the experience put listening to canned music in the shade.
Later I learned that the audience can influence performances in a positive way (not just disrupting them with coughing and dropped umbrellas). In a post-concert panel with the members of the Emerson String Quartet, violist Lawrence Dutton said that in the seconds before they began playing the Shostakovich 15th quartet, the audience’s concentration and engagement was so strong the players could feel it–he said it was even scary–and throughout the performance, the quartet and audience were responding to each other in ways that affected the actual playing. *That’s* something you can’t get from an iPod.
Of course this doesn’t happen every time. Indeed it doesn’t happen very often, as far as I can tell. But each time I go to a concert or the theatre, I’m ready for it, and even if the performance isn’t exactly transcendent, I’ve no doubt that I and the others sitting out front often put our stamp on it.