Inexperienced Audiences: A Love Hate Relationship

I recently watched the webcast of Gustavo Dudamel conducting Beethoven's 9th at the Hollywood Bowl. It was an wonderful performance by the conductor, musicians, and singers. Unfortunately, the performance by the audience was less than wonderful, although no less audible.

OK, it's a summer crowd. For many this was their first classical concert. One can overlook the clapping between movements, the whooping, and even the shouting out to Gustavo. But the applause in the middle of the fourth movement – ouch!

What's one to do? Kill the enthusiasm? Pass out cards with the etiquette of concert attendance printed on them? Perhaps ushers with cattle prods to keep the masses in line?

No, classical music lovers are already viewed as snobs in popular culture. We don't need to turn people off to the beauty of great music, we need to turn them on. The only real option is to accept and educate.

For a number of years at Taft High School our concert audiences were, shall I say, "inappropriately vocal" during performances. Eventually, I decided to make a little speech at the beginning of each concert reminding the audience of how hard the musicians work on their music and how important it is to hear every note. Anything distracting from the performance is inconsiderate of their effort. After a few concerts, this began to work, and now our audiences are relatively well behaved.

Of course, a professional concert is not the same as a high school concert. A similar speech just wouldn't cut it at Disney Hall or even the Hollywood Bowl.

We can only hope that many of those overly boisterous Hollywood Bowl audiences members fell in love with classical music that night. Let's hope that some of them will begin to go to other concerts and eventually learn why clapping in the middle of a movement might not be such a good thing. I even hope that a few of the audience members at my high school concerts begin to appreciate the importance of hearing every nuance in every note.

Gustavo Dudamel vs. the Second Coming

Judging from all the recent press, Gustavo Dudamel's coming to Los Angeles as the Music Director for the Los Angeles Philharmonic is a news event equivalent to the second coming – and with greater expectations. If he doesn't conduct the world's greatest concerts, end war in the Middle East, cure AIDS, and out draw the Lakers, his first season will be considered an abject failure.

Overstatement is certainly nothing new in advertising for the arts, and since hyperbole is the expected language in ads and press releases, anything less falls flat. I know this first hand from my work in advertising for the Media City Ballet Company. "Come see a very good mid-level ballet company perform an entertaining and fairly artistic rendition of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker," becomes, "Don't miss this truly great performance of Tchaikovsky's timeless masterpiece The Nutcracker by the outstanding Media City Ballet Company."

I suppose, "Come hear the LA Phil under the direction of Gustavo Dudamel. Mr Dudamel is a very talented young conductor who should grow and mature nicely while working with the Phil," will never make it into the orchestra's advertising. Admittedly, that version may be a little too understated, but there is something to be said for lowered expectations.

Take Robert Schumann's article in Neue Zietschrift für Musik about Johannes Brahms. In hyperbole worthy of a trailer to a Hollywood blockbuster, Schumann writes:

[In a galaxy far, far away]. . . someone must and would suddenly appear destined to give ideal presentment to the highest expression of the time, who would bring us his mastership, not in process of development, but would spring forth like Minerva, fully armed from the head of Jove. And he is come, a young blood by whose cradle graces and heroes kept watch. He is called Johannes Brahms . . . He [bares] all the outward signs that proclaim to us. "This is one of the elect."

Minerva herself couldn't have lived up to such high expectations and the glowing praise really messed with Brahms' head. It is said to be one of the main reasons why he took so long to complete, and then to publish, his first symphony.

But Brahms survived and most likely Dudamel will as well. In the end, it is about the music and nothing else. If the music is true, it doesn't matter how far the truth is stretched in the press.