Monthly Archives: December 2014

So a lot of people have been going rather crazy about the violinist who interrupted her recital to ask the parents of a nine-year-old with a persistent cough to bring her back when she was older. The performer has since ‘clarified her views’ by stating children should be allowed in ‘appropriate’ concerts.

Now it’s possible to throw all kinds of mud at that and quite a bit will stick, but to do a critique of the violinist’s point of view that’s worth having would involve understanding the intersection of the Western classical music tradition as it exists in the early 21st century and her east Asian background – a job which I think is as much beyond me as it is beyond the people I’ve come across writing very obvious comments on online news articles. What I want to do instead is offer a very alternative perspective on classical performance and the role of musicians and audiences in it.

Sometime round about 1800, or a little earlier in some cases, the arts became elevated in Europe (largely, at that point, later spreading to most Europeanised societies) to the status more or less of a religion. Religion itself was in decline in ‘cultured’ circles, not least because of the fashionability of ‘Enlightenment’ materialist rationalism; early Romantic writers, composers and painters often encouraged, sometimes directly stated, a view that their imagined worlds were better than the real one and therefore their creative powers greater than those of the traditional Christian God. (I don’t have time to try and knock this down now; let’s keep this to a history piece.)

In the wake of this, not only were individual creative people regarded with the awe and semi-worship the middle ages and the counter-Reformation had bestowed upon mystics and saints, but artistic performances gradually gained an accumulation of ritual and regulatory norms in keeping with the quasi-religious view of art. Audiences, by the mid- to late-nineteenth century, sat in respectful silence from one end of a symphony to the other, without even applauding – whereas when Beethoven’s symphonies were premiered, other pieces were interspersed with the movements, and Jane Austen’s accounts of concerts in Regency Bath suggest that the first few bars of everything were lost in people wrapping up their conversations and refinding their seats, and that the gaps between pieces were perhaps as long as the pieces themselves. Formality of dress went with formality of behaviour, and has remained for performers while audiences gradually dress down. Have you ever seen someone in the flesh in white tie other than a classical performer? And certainly for myself I wear black tie to play a good dozen times for every one that I go to anything formal enough to wear it otherwise, even now that about half my performances are non-classical and therefore without that dress code. And then there are the practices of applauding when the conductor and even the leader walk on stage – with the absurd consequence sometimes that the orchestra tunes up without its leader, who has to tune offstage as far as he/she can hear the A, then hope that on checking quietly after arriving, she/he does not find any problems!

This veneration tends to be self-perpetuating, and of course tends to apply itself to music that enters the performance sphere subsequently, whether that be Modernist music which does generally anticipate similar treatment (being the norm around its composition), or the re-entry of Classical and Baroque (and Renaissance indeed) repertoire into the concert hall – which was not written with such a setting in mind, but is placed into the same category.

The result is a tendency to see all ‘classical music’ performance as high art, and therefore not necessarily an egotism on the part of performers about themselves as artists, but rather a veneration of the composer as such. The result is a vehement and self-righteous objection to any distraction, or frequently to deviation from the rules. (Would Bach’s B minor Mass sound any worse sung in sports jackets without ties than it does in white tie and tails? I suggest not, yet the idea seems ingrainedly offensive.)

So what is my counter-proposal? Well, the problem with the art perspective is that it places the audience at the service of the composer or even the performer. Hence the latter’s right to interrupt the music for excessive background noise and exclude people perceived as having inadequate self-control to obey the forms – like nine-year-olds.

This was not the perspective familiar to composers and performers up until the early nineteenth century. Generally, composers worked to hire – they might be household staff producing background music, chapel services, etc. on demand, usually in combination with a musical director role involving heading up an orchestra and choir for secular and sacred purposes; they might be working to commission from opera houses or virtuoso soloists. Either way, they delivered more or less what they were asked for, because that was how the arrangement functioned practically and economically. Of course, many composers produced other music that was not commissioned (it is not evident why Mozart’s last three symphonies, or Bach’s solo string sonatas and suites, were written, though perhaps there were good pragmatic reasons at the time); but this was a secondary consideration to making a living. Similarly players spent a lot of their time doing fairly much background work while the rich nattered, or playing concerts at which the expectations of audience behaviour weren’t that much greater than in Shakespeare’s theatre, or playing for church services where whatever reverence was present was certainly not directed at the music. And they were paid, either by the occasion or on a salary, to play or sing and expected to deliver what the patrons (whoever exactly that might be) wanted, not what the musicians deemed artistically worthwhile.

Some of this hasn’t changed that much, especially from the performer’s point of view, if you’re not a soloist or conductor. But the idea that classical music is at the service of its patrons would seem almost blasphemous to many aficionados whether listeners or players. Because if that is the case, then all the musicians can complain about is being under- or not paid, or being asked to deliver the undeliverable (being given too little rehearsal time, perhaps, for a given programme). As long as the audience remain happy with the product being delivered by the musicians, it does not matter to the musicians in the slightest if members of that audience cough, fart, flirt, gossip, eat, drink, haggle or indeed get up and leave. The audience can complain of each other if their enjoyment is prevented – but that is nothing to do with the musicians. The musicians can legitimately, I think, complain if the audience prevent them doing their job of performing, in the same way that a gas engineer may need me to move half of my kitchen furniture so he can get to the cooker stopcock; but only if they are being stopped from playing properly. So instead of objecting to noise and incorrect behaviour demonstrating a high level of veneration for the compositional art, it would constitute an admission of not being able to fully concentrate through the noise level present. Which is fair enough if you can’t hear for it, but can you imagine if footballers stormed off the pitch because the crowd were making too much noise?

If you are trying to make music work for you as an income source (rather than, perhaps, riding the wave of having already become successful), then a lot more stands to be gained by seeing the person giving you the money as the client, and you as a contractor supplier. Of course you don’t do whatever they ask, nor would you in any other job, but fundamentally they’re the customer and you owe them (because they pay you, duh) not the other way round. Obviously, if they don’t pay then it’s their lookout.