Audience-envy, or, How One Becomes What One Is Not

Different genres of music have different cultural codes.

In rock music the band often interacts with the audience by throwing questions, sometimes drum sticks, at them. Questions like “Do you feel good?” and “Is everybody happy tonight…??”. The audience is expected to answer these questions with a unison monosyllable: “YEAH!”. A child could do it.

Jazz musicians don´t put questions to the crowd. They just swing. But after each solo you are expected to give a small donation, in the form of applause. And this irrespective of whether you thought the solo was great or ridiculous. Jazz audiences might see themselves as rebels, but they sure are polite.

In classical music the listeners are expected to turn off their mobile phones, not talk during the performance and not applaud between movements.

This last set of codes is the most logical and rational.

If your mobile phone rings, it might ring in a different key than the symphony being played. (This is not a problem with atonal music.) If you talk you will disturb the musicians, who are sensitive mechanisms themselves, used to play against a backdrop of silence, just as a film is projected onto a white, neutral screen. (Nobody would accept a screen that had a painting on it.) You also break the concentration of both musician and listener if you applaud between movements. Puff… the magic departs, and the etheric atmosphere that the orchestra has worked so hard to build up is prosaically shattered and has to be built again. A mild form of Sisyphus punishment.

The codes of jazz and rock, however, are arbitrary and whimsical. Not applauding a jazz solo is in no way a disturbance, it might just be a sign that you are listening closely; you even want to hear what happens right after the solo, which the applauding, thus somewhat distracted audience probably doesn´t hear. (While making our own sounds we temporarily become deaf to the sounds of others.)

The somewhat infantile game of “Do you feel good?? – YEAH!!” is also not necessary. The audience can show appreciation very well without answering rhetorical questions with pre-fabricated answers. So even that unnecessary code can well go.

In actuality, however, all this is turned upside down. The arbitrary codes are left in peace — nobody questions them — while the logical and rational codes of classical music and musicians are increasingly questioned — by classical musicians themselves!

For example HERE. [A classical conductor suggests we should be able to bring our drinks into the concert hall. I heard him conduct the other week, but, alas, forgot to bring my Jack Daniel´s along.]

Do classical musicians have a death wish for their own genre and its unique qualities? Bring your drink to the concert hall and pretend it´s a jazz club. By all means take out your iPhone and record the entire evening. Did I forget to say: bring your kids as well? I am sure they would enjoy crying and screaming to Stravinsky´s Agon. Welcome, the family that listens (or not) together.

Fine. Let´s do it. Let´s scrap the old codes. But then let´s also abolish the obligatory applause after a jazz solo and the childish question answer-game between rock musicians and their audience.

I mean, codes are codes. If they are bad in one corner they are bad in every corner. Right?

Or perhaps all codes are not created equal…?

That was of course rhetorical. We know they aren´t.  Fact is, classical music and the values it stands for are under attack. The barbarians are not only at the gates, they have entered the castle.

I am all for welcoming new people to classical music – it would of course become extinct without new listeners — but not at the high price of making it something it is not: an informal affair, like a lunch hour jazz concert. That is not saying one genre is better than the others. It is saying they are different.

The jazz musician says: I am what I am. The rock musician says: Rock on, do your thing! The classical musician says: I try very hard to be something I am not…

Why is that?

– Because I have looked over the fence and seen the gigantic audiences that pop and rock music attracts. (Did I say “looked”? I mean I have thrown longing glances.) Yes!!! I want a gigantic audience, too! I want QUANTITY! I admit it: I suffer from audience-envy….

We don´t know who all these people are, but they sure haven´t come to hear Schoenberg´s Second Chamber Symphony.