The Elephant in the Room

My last entry focused on concert hall acoustics and their possible impact on attendance at symphony orchestra concerts. Today I want to address the ‘elephant in the room.’

A good friend who regularly listens to classical music and a trained amateur musician said: “I stopped going to the New York Philharmonic years ago.”  “Why?” I asked.  “Because I couldn’t stand the repertoire!” he replied. His ‘unsubscription’ occurred during the Pierre Boulez era as the Philharmonic’s music director.  While serving as assistant conductor of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra I watched, incredulously, as more than a few people walked out of the hall to the opening strains of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps.  It was 1979 - 66 years after the premiere of Le Sacre - and some people still found this score impossible to sit through.

As a former member of the Louisville Orchestra, an ensemble with a history of championing contemporary music and, sadly, currently under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, I became quite comfortable playing new compositions.  I do vividly recall the tepid applause that often followed the premieres of many of these pieces. However, I personally found the process of playing and recording new music exciting and stimulating.  I feel fortunate to have conducted recordings of the music of 21^st and 20^th century composers Frank Ezra Levy and his father Ernst with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, another ensemble with an abiding commitment to new music.

I would never advocate that orchestras abandon new music. Nor do I think they should stop programming dissonant, old repertoire such as Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin.   I believe new art in all media must be encouraged and supported.  But think about this.  Popular composers and performers – ever since that moment when classical composers took the leap away from tonality – have never released continuously dissonant pop songs.  What sort of careers would Frank Sinatra or Beyoncé have had if they had recorded such material?

There are those who believe human beings are genetically programmed for tonality and, on some primal level, incapable of processing continuous dissonance.  If you wish to pursue this discussion, some of the latest thoughts from the scientific community on the subject may be found in Elena Mannes’s fascinating new book, The Power of Music (Walker & Company). 

One last anecdote.  I was in Carnegie Hall one evening eagerly awaiting a performance by the Vienna Philharmonic.  Seated next to me was a young couple in their late 20’s who announced to me that this was their very first symphony orchestra concert.  The program began with a work by Anton Webern.  After the muted applause, the young man next to me turned and whispered: “Is it always like this?  I think we’ll leave.”   I whispered back: “Since it’s your first concert, why not stay for Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 on the second half?  I think you’ll like it.”  They did and, despite the dissonant passages to be found in Mahler’s 1^st, were swept away by the incredible power of this music.

The ‘elephant in the room’ is not dissonance in music.  Dissonance has musically been with us for thousands of years!  In my opinion the ‘elephant in the room’ is the apparent inability of many people to tolerate continuous dissonance.  Even many seasoned concertgoers just can’t deal with it. Some individuals avoid symphony orchestra concerts when they have the slightest suspicion such a work may be played.  How many people like my friend have just stopped going?  If in more than a century audiences haven’t acclimated to continuously dissonant music, when do we expect the breakthrough moment will arrive?

Today, when many American professional symphony orchestras are fighting for their very survival and hoping to maintain - let alone increase - audiences, they must come to terms with ‘the elephant in the room.’  Performances of new tonal works will probably be welcome, and many orchestras have been programming such compositions.

Perhaps The Discovery Orchestra’s mission of ‘teaching the listening skills that help people emotionally connect with classical music’ will assist some individuals in understanding and identifying with a few of the highly dissonant masterpieces of the 20^th century.  We will persist. Visit us! http://bit.ly/bZ1Vsc   

Any other suggestions?

Can You Hear Me Now?

I grew up listening to the fabled sound of The Philadelphia Orchestra.  As musicians, we work diligently to achieve a certain sound on our instruments or with our voices.  Here’s the rub.  If one is performing on an acoustic instrument, the room in which we’re performing is part of our sound.

In the early 80’s I took a teenage piano student to a pair of orchestral concerts.  The first featured the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall performing the Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition.  After the bombastic final movement, Jeremy turned and said: “How come my stereo can play louder than the New York Philharmonic?”

The second featured the American Symphony Orchestra playing Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in a pre-renovated Carnegie Hall.   Our seats were in the ‘nosebleed’ balcony at Carnegie where Jeremy was ‘blown away’ by the sound of this incredible work…as one would have hoped he would have been by Pictures.

While there are many opinions regarding ideal acoustics in a concert space, the following are properties I look for as a performer and as an audience member: 

Enough decay time to permit the blending of sounds and ease of playing.  The acoustics of a cathedral may be so ambient that clarity is completely lost.  But if a space is utterly dead, all sounds are unblended and one has to struggle to shape every musical phrase.  It’s far better to play and listen in a space in which sound decays over time rather than stops dead in its tracks!

Some natural boosting of low frequencies.  If a concert hall does not slightly favor the bass end of the spectrum, performances sound ‘ungrounded’ with the high frequencies dominating.  Some people, without knowing why, would say that a hall that favors bass frequencies sounds “rich” to them - as opposed to the sound of a hall that does not, which they might describe as “thin” or “too bright.”

Loudness.  If 110 musicians are playing the final moments of Respighi’s Pines of Rome as loudly as they humanly can, audience members throughout the concert hall should physically feel vibrations in their bodies!   With the help of electronic amplification, people can and do experience this phenomenon at rock concerts or from the car next to them while stopped at traffic lights, or even from their own home ‘stereo’ to quote Jeremy.

Can we really expect people who have grown up with electronically enhanced music to come on more than one disappointing occasion to listen to a large symphony orchestra that – because of the room they are playing in – cannot physically excite them with the very SOUND of their playing?   

Financially, this is one the most difficult matters to address regarding shrinking audiences at symphony orchestra concerts.  Do we build another hall after spending one hundred million or more dollars to build the one we’re in?  Move to another location?  Go back to the old concert hall - if it hasn’t already been torn down?

Short of gutting and rebuilding our new concert halls, what can we do if we do not have the luxury of performing regularly in an optimal acoustical setting like that of the Vienna Musikverein or the Amsterdam Concertgebouw?  I think we must come to grips with at least one option, albeit abhorrent to purists. Sophisticated computerized electronic enhancement  is now available to ‘fix’ our performing art centers and give them the desired acoustical properties. It may be the only cost-effective way to address this issue.