Engaging the Community

If you watched the World Cup matches on TV a few weeks ago, you felt like you were on the field with the players (even though you were at home and they were in Germany). You could see them sweating and concentrating; you could even hear them shouting back and forth. You watched the games from several different angles and when there was an important play, you’d see at least one re-play of it within a few seconds. During breaks in the action, knowledgeable announcers described fine points of the game using diagrams and statistics. At any time, the announcers could show us interviews with the players, their coaches, and other players of the same caliber. No possible opportunity was lost to bring the viewer to the heart of the games.

Contrast that with what “average” concert-goers experience when they come to a concert hall: performers sitting onstage in formal dress, hardly moving, hardly acknowledging the audience’s presence, playing music that the audience didn’t choose. As soon as the concert ends, audience and performers both go their own ways. It’s possible to attend a concert and never speak to another person during the entire evening, and come out of the hall no wiser than when you entered. (“Was that a “good” performance? Don’t they ever smile? Why did the harp player leave the stage after the first piece?”)

There are many differences between a televised sporting event and a concert experience but I believe one of the most important differences is education. The World Cup is broadcast with the assumption that many viewers want to know more about soccer, so every effort is made to educate them in real time, as it happens. I don’t know if it’s possible to replicate that experience in the concert hall, but what fun it would be for audiences if we could!

I think there are many, many opportunities for education in the orchestral world. Sometimes “education” comes from a conductor like Leonard Slatkin, who speaks easily to an audience before they hear a newly-commissioned work, reassuring them about it, as well as giving them a few “landmarks” to listen for. Other times it’s a pre-concert lecture about the music of a particular composer. It could also be a group of musicians playing in a school and talking about their instruments. Or it might be a private music teacher telling their students about the composers of the pieces they are practicing.

We can no longer assume that “everyone” plays an instrument (if that was ever the case); in fact we must assume that most people have no experience with our instruments. We can no longer assume that “everyone” will pay top dollar for classical music; in fact we know that people hear lots of free music every day from a wide variety of sources (iPods, CDs, radios), in non-concert settings (jogging, bathing, driving). We can no longer assume that “everyone” wants to hear Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven; we can rightly assume that people know little about even these famous composers.

But with creative thinking and energy we can overcome these obstacles, and I know that all of the panelists in this discussion find the challenges stimulating, not daunting. Each of us has been working in our own community, and I’m excited by the prospect of hearing about all of these projects!