Jerry Bowles of Sequenza21 has a great writeup of the Thursday night Alarm Will Sound gig. His focus is on how their presentation of the music makes what they play more comprehensible for a younger audience, one that is often turned off by the ritualistic Temple of Art pretentions of classical concertgoing:
We have had lengthy discussions in the Composers Forum about the importance of venue in attracting audiences for postclassic music, especially the relative merits of clubs versus concert halls, but neither is exactly perfect. Most young people find the notion of going to sit quietly for two hours in a darkened room with a bunch of strangers staring at people in black outfits blowing into horns and hacking away at fiddles to be not only some kind of archaic ritual, but downright punitive. This is SERIOUS MUSIC, children. Pay attention.
[...]
What Alan Pierson and his talented Alarm Will Sound crew proved on Friday was that it is possible to reach a concert hall audience on both a visceral as well as intellectual level and to tap into some of the strengths of both worlds. In the process, they offered some valuable insights into how to stage a compelling new music concert.
[Jerry also very kindly links to my own review of the AWS gig.]
This also reminds me of some of Greg Sandow's excellent posts on the Youth Problem in classical music:
Younger people are critical, and prone to irony. They see through hype and bullshit. Which, I'm afraid, in classical music means that they'll have no patience with pious talk about great masterpieces. They want to know what's really going on.
They may not respond to romantic music. Though of course some of them will. But the sweep and passion of 19th century classical music, which some people might assume to be a selling point, will make many younger people think they're hearing a cheesy movie score. The movie score, of course, is very likely a knockoff of romantic classical works, but this new, younger audience doesn't know that, and "cheesy movie score" may well be their first association when they hear Tchaikovsky.
They don't plan their lives around what I might call "appointment events," adapting that term from a marvelous expression I ran across in discussions of new trends in television: "appointment TV." Appointment TV is the old watch-it-when-they-broadcast it paradigm, according to which you're stuck watching shows when the networks put them on. Thanks to TIVO, and now video downloads from iTunes and other sites, you can watch many shows whenever you like. The parallel development for the performing arts is that people don't leave work at 5 PM, go home, have dinner, and then head out the door for an 8 PM concert. They leave work at 3 PM or 8:30, make time for the gym or rides on their mountain bikes, and may well head out of the house at 9. Then they might well look for something going on in a neighborhood full of clubs and other street-level places that you can walk in and out of ad lib. The classical concert hall, most obviously, doesn't work like that at all, which from a younger person's point of view might well make it too rigid to be an attractive night-life option.
Greg also posts some on-point criticism from a young music student in Missouri:
May I just add to the list that a lot of younger people find the whole classical music scene hugely pretentious, in ways that those of us inside the circle may not even think about? I took my sister, who is really just a huge music fan and goes to a TON of non-classical concerts, to a SLSO [St. Louis Symphony] concert not too long ago. At the end of the concert, the conductor and soloists came took their bows, left, and came back to take another bow. She leaned over to me and said, "Cool -- are they going to play some more?" I told her no, orchestras being practically forbidden to do encores by union rules. And she said, "Oh, so they're just coming back out because they're full of themselves." And, honestly, I was a little shocked by the comment, because, of course, in Classical Music World, we see the bow in a completely different light -- a gesture of appreciation to the audience, respect for the music we've played, etc. I hadn't even considered how pretentious it might look!
[xposted at Secret Society]
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