Classical music culture needs less applauses. Its really annoying, both for the performers and the music lovers.
I love applause. And I also love applauding. I believe that applause is in a way the human response to the acknowledgement of the existance of music. It's like saying "I just heard this music, and I have felt such a connection with it that it demanded audible attention of its own - that is, the clapping of my hands."
Keith Otis Edwards over at Classical Archives has written an intriguing article on this very subject. I will reproduce it here:
MIMES WITH BATONS
As I discussed in previous rants, popular music has degenerated to the Lowest Common Denominator, consisting of nothing but pinched and nasal whining with dumb kids strumming random chords on loud guitars. Pop music does, however, put on a good show. There is elaborate lighting and nymphets dancing in their underwear and fireworks ignited on stage occasionally set fire to the building. It's all very exciting.
But what of classical music concerts? I would fain admit that I no longer attend many classical concerts, and the reason can be summed up in two words: bore ring.
When you registered with the Classical Archives, you probably didn't bother to read the full text of the terms you agreed to, and you are thus unaware of the fact that we are monitoring your activities whenever you access this site. For instance, we have seen on our screens that most older people who have read the previous paragraph become enraged, even apoplectic. Their reaction typically runs, This crude fellow has the temerity to state at the Classical Archives that classical music is boring?
I believe that the music itself is great, but the manner in which it is presented is dull, and I am not alone in this opinion. In his 1960 book, Crowds and Power Elias Canetti gives this description of classical music concerts.
All outward reactions are prohibited. People sit there motionless, as though they managed to hear nothing. It is obvious that a long and artificial training in stagnation has been necessary here.
This, from a cultured European who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work, and he is quite correct—classical music has grown stagnant. A classical concert is an experience similar to attending worship in a Presbyterian church—perhaps spiritually enlightening, but hardly a thrill.
The reaction of readers to this is What do you expect? We are mature people—and serious! Do you expect us to engage in stage diving?
Very well, but it wasn't always this way.
In his book The Maestro Myth, English smart-guy Norman Lebrecht provides this account of a performance conducted by the great Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922):
Tchaikovsky's fourth symphony under his direction had a London audience jumping up on to the Queen's Hall seats, "stamping and shouting themselves hoarse; many chairs were broken."
And also:
The London Symphony Orchestra found themselves playing Tchaikovsky's Fifth "like fiends: when we reached the end of the first movement, we did rise from our seats and actually shouted."
Well, that's interesting. When was the last time you saw a classical musician jump and shout?
And this is from Raymond Lewenthal's notes to his recording, The Operatic Liszt:
When Thalberg descended on Paris in 1835 he brought with him a trick. When he first played his fantasia on Rossini's Moses people could not believe their ears. They stood up in their seats to see what was going on and to try and find out how it was done.
People standing on their seats again. What has happened to classical music from the time of Arthur Nikisch until today when the audience is required to act as if they were all paralyzed? What caused this change? Was there a period in which nuns with whips patrolled the aisles, ready to lash someone who wasn't being serious enough?
Or is it that classical concerts are simply so dull that they naturally attract only the local farbisener? It would be great to get such people to break out of their shells and rouse them until they're standing on their seats, but classical concerts instead seem to have the opposite effect and only reinforce their prim behavior.
Classical performers must realize the dullness of their enterprise, and conductors have gradually changed their demeanor to introduce some showmanship. In 1937, Leopold Stokowski left the Philadelphia Orchestra to Eugene Ormandy and emigrated to Hollywood so that he could appear in such profound movies as 100 Men and a Girl and Walt Disney's Fantasia. There he fell in love with Gretta Garbo and stayed to conduct at the Hollywood Bowl. In these outdoor concerts, he had spotlights trained on his hands—he conducted without a baton—so that the shadows of his hands would be cast on the structure of the Hollywood Bowl itself.
That was a sort of light show, and never having witnessed the spectacle, I can't comment on its effectiveness (though Hindemith called Stokowski a "charlatan"), but Stokowski's stylized mannerisms on the podium seem to have had a deleterious effect on modern conductors.
Just what does a conductor do that sets him apart from his rivals? What makes him great, and what distinguishes the maestros whose names we recognize almost as readily as those of the great composers? Obviously, it is the quality of the performance he is able to wring from his players and his ability to cause people leaving the hall to speak not of Beethoven, but his Beethoven—as if mere Beethoven on his own was not worth listening to and needed some enhancement.
And just how does a great conductor achieve such an effect? How does he turn a mediocre thing like a Beethoven symphony into a work of art? In today's musical world, with union contracts mandating overtime pay, a conductor really has little time to rehearse the orchestra, and most of this limited time is spent getting acquainted with whatever new or unfamiliar material is on the bill. The standard repertoire is usually relegated to a quick run-through, or only difficult passages may be rehearsed.
How then, does the maestro work his magic? The modern technique if for the conductor to elicit the desired performance by a series of body contortions and exaggerated gestures. He makes the music fit and healthy by performing calisthenics on the podium.
The gaudy gestures seem to be the result of Stokowski's influence, as most of the legendary conductors of the past used a minimalist approach to conducting. The aforementioned Arthur Nikisch stood perfectly still with only his baton in motion, and his pupil, Adrian Boult, pretty much followed his example. (Boult said that as a youth he "nearly went mad" each night he watched Nikisch conduct. Afterward he realized that Nikisch's hand had never once risen above face level throughout the entire explosive experience.) Toscanini and Furtwängler kept their feet in place, the difference between them being that Toscanini's baton was precise like a metronome, while Furtwängler's beat was impossible to follow. Fritz Reiner stood like a cat ready to pounce, but never moved much. The twitching of his baton was so slight that musicians tell the story of a wisenheimer bassist in the Chicago Symphony who once pulled out a spyglass in rehearsal and trained it on Reiner's baton in hope of seeing the beat. (Of course, the man was fired on the spot.)
In addition to the contortions and arm-waving, the conductor always makes a dramatic show of cueing the entrances, particularly those of the brass players. These guys are all making a minimum of $80 grand a year, and they don't know enough to count their measures rest so as to come in at the right spot?
Even worse is the fact that I was always unable to watch the broadcasts on the US Public Broadcasting System of performances by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Kurt Masur. His technique, in addition to swaying about the podium in an intoxicated manner with the usual grand gestures and theatrical cues, is to make faces at the orchestra. While I have no doubt that Dr. Masur is a great musician, and I certainly respect his courage in the face of the repressive communist regime in his native East Germany, it must be admitted that he is nowhere near what may be termed as handsome. So why is it that the directors of cultural programming assume that, except for seeing the solos in the wind sections—and, of course the tympani; it's very important to show the sticks beating on the tympani—viewers would want to spend two hours staring at this dog-face grimacing and raising his eyebrows at the orchestra?
But do these techniques actually work? That's an easy call, as I think it's obvious that they work every bit as well as the similar "body english" that a bowler applies in enticing the ball to strike the ten pin once it leaves his hand, and I base this assessment on empirical observations made while attending symphony concerts. The martinets I played under in my youth always demanded that every member of the ensemble watch his majesty the conductor at all times, so I'm always curious to see if professional musicians likewise keep their eyes on the maestro. Perhaps it is due to the homeliness of men like Kurt Masur, but I can report that symphony musicians seldom turn their gaze directly at the man on the podium. They may only be playing a repeated series of whole notes, but somehow it seems necessary for them to stare directly at the sheets of music on their stands.
If, then, the gesticulations of the conductor have at best an indirect effect on the ensemble, just whose benefit is the conductor carrying on for? Obviously it is all a charade designed to hoodwink the poseurs of the classical audience into believing what they desperately want to believe—that they are witnessing some transcendental event in which the lofty goals of "aht" are being realized through the medium of musical genius. It must be musical genius; why the hell else would that old man be waving his arms about madly while performing an awkward ballet on a platform? He's acting in an absurd and deranged manner, yet he's well-respected and highly-paid, therefore the only explanation is artistic genius at work.
Today's youth are highly cynical, and they're buying none of it. They find the conventions of the classical world as embarrassing as if they'd stepped into a Pentecostalist revival, only it's worse than embarrassing and worse than the revival, because it's boring. The proof of this is that audiences no longer react with the excitement reported in the examples cited above, and each year the situation only worsens.
A hundred years ago, when classical music dominated all forms of culture, when it was alive and vibrant and worthwhile, audiences regularly cheered at the end of a movement if they were so moved. As with jazz, audiences often applauded during the music—if the passage or solo merited cheering. In today's strict rules of decorum, however, no one is allowed to express delight or react in any way to what was just heard. In recent times, the situation has only deteriorated in that orchestras now take longer and longer to start the next movement of a piece—ostensibly to prepare for the change in mood. (That's precisely what happened to professional baseball—the games became drawn-out and tedious because there is now so much time when absolutely nothing is happening other than frequent spitting.) Still worse is the fact that orchestras now find it necessary to tune-up between movements. Professional musicians making top dollar, and they can't keep their instruments in tune for forty minutes?
All of this is quite obvious to any objective observer, so it shouldn't be necessary to continue with additional examples of what's wrong with classical performances, but what can be done to improve the situation? How can the music of Beethoven be made as exhilarating and emotional two hundred years after its creation as it was one hundred years after its creation?
Certainly changes are in order. Concerts need to be tightened up with less time between movements and pieces, and the conductor's ridiculous parading off and then back on stage between pieces must be eliminated. (Who started that, anyway?) But what I'd relish seeing is an imitation of Hans von Bülow and his Meiningen Band all of whom had their music memorized—there were no music stands and no paper was on stage. All the members of this orchestra performed standing—even the cellos. In such a scheme, it would be interesting to also see the performers move around on stage during the performance. A soloist might step forward, and an instrumentalist whose part called for thirty-two measures rest could retire to the rear.
That's just a thought, and it may or may not be a good suggestion, but it's a moot point anyway, as the classical audience of today is entirely hostile toward improvements. They don't want any change whatsoever, and they'd certainly react in the indignant manner of some Catholics when the Mass was modernized after the second Vatican Council. Only a person who has become so deluded as to think of himself as a supreme intellectual who lives for "aht" enjoys the modern artifice and posturing of classical music rituals, but that's precisely the type of person classical music now attracts. If the concert ritual is oppressively boring, it's to their taste; making it rousing or even entertaining would ruin the rigid decorum of the ceremony for them. The tales recounted above of concerts during the great days of classical music are regarded by such a person as being comparable to the extermination of the Arawak Indians by Columbus—a rather unpleasant historical curiosity. If they could go back in time to change it, they would, but alas . . .
These people are but a small portion of the population, which is fortunate, or we'd yet have blue laws on Sunday, but they are the core of the dwindling classical audience. This situation would seem to doom the future of classical music in public, as such people don't seem to reproduce with much fecundity (for reasons I'll leave to your speculation). In our state of perpetual financial crisis, it is only a matter of time before the general taxpayers object to further subsidizing of this minority form of entertainment.
But I don't care. I have my scores, and I have my keyboard, and I have my CDs and LPs, and I have a refrigerator full of beer, and anyway, what those puritans prefer has nothing to do with the Brahms I know.
Topic: Avoiding applause