Treat Your Audience Well

There's been a bit of an industry kerfuffle going on in Orchestra World lately over a new marketing campaign launched by the Philadelphia Orchestra. I'm not going to get into it, partly because I have a number of good friends in that orchestra and it's the band I grew up listening to, so I'm hardly objective; and partly because I think it's silly to get so worked up over a slogan.

But one of my favorite ArtsJournal bloggers, Molly Sheridan, wrote a post earlier this week that went beyond the trashing of a slogan to address the larger issue that some American orchestras still aren't very good at making the audience feel welcome. That Molly makes the point by relating a personal experience in which she was made to feel welcome makes the post all the more effective:

"I think being open to and engaged in hearing much of the orchestral repertoire in 2010 hinges on fostering that connection between the mass of performers on stage and the audience members out in the dark of the hall. Without it, the most transcendental musical experience has an uphill fight on its hands."

It really can't be said much more succinctly than that. Times change, and though the music we're playing might be timeless (I said might,) the social trappings and crowd etiquette that go along with any public event evolve from generation to generation, and orchestras tend to be horrifically bad at noticing this. My pet theory is that this is because orchestras (especially major ones with venerable histories) prize Tradition so highly, and are therefore slow to accept any change, for fear that even a small adjustment in the proceedings will snowball into a wholesale devaluing of that Tradition.

That's why I'm not surprised that the orchestra that gave Molly such an unexpectedly pleasant night out was the Baltimore Symphony. The BSO is a major-league band, to be sure, but in the hierarchy of big-time American ensembles, Baltimore, like Minnesota, fits comfortably into what I think of as the "upstart" category.

Upstarts generally perform at a level comparable to more famous orchestras like New York and Philadelphia, but toil in unglamorous mid-sized cities that the New Yorkers who write the rule book of cultural fame tend to overlook. This can be annoying if you're an upstart band trying to find a permanent place on the mythical list of Great American Orchestras, but it's never going to change, so it's best just to accept it.

Besides, the upside to being an upstart is that you're probably less shackled to the whole Tradition thing than the hidebound ensembles at the top of the meaningless GAO list, so innovation is easier to achieve. And because residents of midsized American cities tend to be less likely than your average jaded New Yorker to interpret friendliness as a sign of weakness or stupidity, you can buy an awful lot of goodwill from the public just by smiling a lot and telling concertgoers how much you appreciate them coming out to the show.

Of course, I rarely experience an orchestra concert as a customer, so my view of things may be somewhat skewed. So I'm throwing this one open to all of you who buy tickets and slog through the winter snows to hear us play: give me your best/worst customer service experiences with an orchestra. Who does the little things right, and what is "right" to you? And most importantly, what's the one thing an orchestra can do, other than playing great music well, to make you want to come back?

Fan Relations

When you make your living as an entertainer of any sort, it's inevitable that you'll need to develop some degree of skill in dealing with the people who pay you to entertain them. Because whether you're a professional athlete, ballet dancer, or rock star, there are going to be fans who want more from you than just a performance. They might want an autograph, or a high-five, or maybe even a personal chat. And you have to decide what your personal boundaries are in these circumstances.

For those of us in the classical music world, of course, this is a pretty easy task. Not all that many people know who the heck we are, or care, so the demands on our time are pretty much confined to the few dozen regulars who flood the stage door after concerts. They're nice folks, for the most part, and it doesn't really take much effort to stop and have a word with them. And as for autographs, well, I'd say I've probably been asked for a total of ten in the decade that I've been in Minnesota, so there'd be virtually no excuse for my ever refusing to sign one.

For really high-profile performers, though, personal boundaries will very likely define your public image more than anything else. You might be a profoundly mediocre major league ballplayer, but if you make a point of sticking around after games long enough to sign autographs for every kid who wants one, you'll very likely develop a reputation as a great and generous guy. But push past one kid's outstretched hand, or snap at one pushy collector while a camera's rolling, and you run the risk of forever being known as a guy who thinks he's too good for the whole world.

Is it fair? Of course not. But it comes with the territory. Besides, you never know what consequences could come back to bite you later for an act of thoughtlessness today. Consider one Brendan Shanahan, retired NHL hockey legend and all-around good guy: earlier this week, Shanahan was on a radio show, and related a fantastic story about how he reacted to being rebuffed by one of his heroes...

“When I was 14 years old I was skating in the summertime at a rink in Toronto. Rick Vaive happened to be skating at an adjoining rink and we were actually in dressing rooms that were right next to each other. I went in when he was sort of settled and asked him for an autograph. I didn’t get the best response...

“Fast forward four years later and Rick Vaive is waiting for a meaningless faceoff in Buffalo. He’s now playing for the Sabres. He’s lined up next to some 18-year-old kid from New Jersey. When the puck dropped, I attacked Rick Vaive.

“It was a quiet, uneventful game. He couldn’t believe the rage I had, not only in attacking him, but it took two (linesmen) to restrain me afterwards and throw me in the penalty box.”

Now that's harboring a grudge. And it's also the best reason I've heard yet to never turn down a fan request...

The Occasionally Audible Audience

With the start of a new season, all of us in the orchestra are reacquainting ourselves with everything from the repertoire we're playing to the sometimes curious conceits of the concert hall. (It's amazing to me how unfamiliar some of the simplest acts, like remembering to stand up when the conductor walks out at the beginning of the show, can be after only a few weeks away.) And of course, we're also reacquainting ourselves with our audience.

Sometimes, that's a wonderful experience. Last Saturday, as we were plowing through Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije, I caught sight of a couple in the front row who I hadn't seen at any previous concert. I'd guess they were in their late 30s, and as soon as I noticed them, I knew I'd be watching them for the rest of the evening. He was slightly balding, tall and attractively slim, with an intense quality to his face, and he had the kind of eyes that seem to suggest that he's absorbing literally everything going on around him. She had dark shoulder-length hair, wide eyes, and a devastatingly pleasant smile. I know about the smile because the more we played, the more she smiled.

The two of them spent the whole of the concert reacting quietly to every single thing that happened on stage. Every time Osmo showed off a flashy move, or crouched down to indicate a pianissimo, her face would light up, and his eyes would flash. When the second violins and violas began scrubbing furiously during a passage in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, the two of them stared wide-eyed for a moment, then turned to each other to make sure the other had seen it. Together, they had that innocent quality of children seeing something incredible for the first time, but judging by how knowingly they looked around as the music played, I'm certain they've spent some time in concert halls before.

By their mere presence, these two made the concert twice as enjoyable for me. I desperately wanted to corner them before they left and tell them what a pleasure it is to play for people who are so obviously enjoying what we're doing, but in the end, I decided not to, for fear that it would make them self-conscious, and thus less likely to buy front-row seats next time.

Then, of course, there's the other side of reacquainting with your audience. We've yet to have a cell phone interrupt the music (that I could hear, at least,) possibly because our usual pre-concert admonition to turn them off is being augmented at the moment by a special announcement from Osmo regarding the fact that Hyperion is recording our first two weeks of concerts for a CD project with pianist Stephen Hough. But I'm guessing it won't be more than another week or so before we get the first cell-based intrusion of the season.

It's never easy to know what to do as a performer when this happens. Most of us settle for pretending we can't hear it, or tossing a brief glare or head-shake in the direction of the offender. But every once in a while, someone snaps, and confronts the rudeness directly. Actor Hugh Jackman is the latest to make headlines for this, having broken character in his New York production of A Steady Rain to chastise an audience member whose phone. would. not. stop. ringing...



The best onstage reaction I ever saw to a cell phone intrusion was from comedian Paula Poundstone, who was midway through a set at the old Guthrie Theater (this was sometime around 2001) when a phone started to ring very loudly. Without missing a beat, Paula turned towards the sound, and insisted that the phone be handed to her immediately. As soon as she had it in hand, she answered the call, and proceeded to improvise five of the funniest minutes of stand-up comedy I have ever seen in my life, centering around the caller's reason for calling at that exact moment.

As it happened, the person being called had inadvertently locked his housemate out when he left for the show, and the housemate was trying to get the keys to get back inside. Paula actually convinced him to catch a bus to the Guthrie to reclaim the keys, and half an hour later, the caller came trotting down the aisle for his keys, which Paula handed to him personally, before creating another few minutes of impromptu laughs from the situation. It was utterly brilliant.

So, anyone else got a favorite story of a performer retaliating against the audience? I collect these, so seriously, chime in down in the comments. If there are any truly great ones, I'll pass them along to Osmo for possible future use...

hmmmmm....

...well, look, I'm all for using technology to enhance performance experiences. But I'm all for finding the most efficient and organic way of utilizing those technologies; I don't think it makes sense to incorporate multi-media/electronic/communication gadgetry just for the sake of using the technology in itself.

Case in point, an upcoming Beethoven Sixth Symphony with the National Symphony Orchestra led by NSO associate conductor Emil de Cou in which program notes will be sent via Twitter at appropriate times during the performance.

I don't have a problem with real-time program notes, which some have found to enhance the concert experience (I would think particularly so for those less familiar with the repertoire/type of music at hand). I just don't think Twitter is really the right vehicle.

I love tweeting as much as the the next Gen X/Y-er, but the charm of Twitter is that posts are pithy reflections of experiences in real time, as they occur. The 140-character limitations creates the necessity of boiling down a thought or observation to its essential meaning, and posting is a matter delivering these as they occur to you, a running commentary on life as it occurs (some tweets I just read as I write this blog: "Running to USPS & bank so I can get my errands and exercise done at the same time."; "In Vegas for a meeting, believe it or not. Just saw the spot where Elvis waited in his cape before he went on."; "Just did a shot of aquavit and sight-read the "Moonlight Sonata." It's wild sharps in that sonata.").

Pre-written program notes, tweeted as carefully cultivated musical points, first and foremost, defeat the purpose of Twitter. This is an example of the use of technology as a delivery system (for mass texting) which is peripheral to the whole purpose of the technology itself (from the Twitter website: "Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?").

If you want to provide real-time program notes, why not have a super-title screen?

Ok, Ok, I know some of you will say, "Well, at least with the Twittering, those of us who don't want to be distracted by the program notes don't have to see it on some screen above the orchestra." To which I answer, what's more distracting, a screen high enough above the orchestra so that you could ignore it if you so choose, or seeing the pale glow of countless phones and PDAs as people read their screens every few minutes? Are we encouraging people to read texts during a concert? What precedent does that set?

Orchestras have slowly climbed aboard the technology bandwagon, which I applaud. What I'm less enthused about is the use of the latest "sexy" thing ("Hey, everyone's on Twitter! We need to incorporate this into what we do because it's proof that we're hip and current!") just for the sake of the thing itself, when there is a more efficient and perhaps more natural way to accomplish the same ultimate goal.

I've had a long-standing relationship with the NSO (I first worked with them back in 2002), and I appreciate this attempt to think outside the box; however, for my taste, this particular foray into use of technology seems off-mark. I'll be curious to see commentary from those who attend the concert.

PS: had set this to post on a 12-hour delay without carefully proofing, sorry for the typos in the original!

Beyond The Product

Doug McLennan over at ArtsJournal has a blog post up today taking arts organizations to task for not keeping up with other entertainment venues when it comes to customer comfort.

"Despite the fact that the average concert hall was many times more expensive to construct than the new-generation movie complexes, the customer amenities inside the halls constructed over the past 20 years - how can I put this kindly - kind of suck... There's an argument to be made for preserving formal rituals in going out to see a performance. But things change. I like some of the rituals, but I have to admit I often resent the degree to which it is imposed by rigid seats and cramped legroom. And why can't I bring my drink back in to the show?"

This is the kind of issue that those of us who make our living on stage forget to think about most of the time - after all, we don't sit in those cramped seats very often, and to be perfectly frank, if you think the audience spaces are uncomfortable, you should see the backstage areas we work in. (Just for example, if we have more than three soloists on a single concert, we don't have enough dressing rooms for them.) But we should, and this ties into a much larger issue. Doug's been talking a lot on his blog lately about the need for arts groups to realize that we're no longer just competing with other arts groups - we're competing with baseball teams, rock bands, TV programs, and the almighty Internet, and we might want to start acting like we're aware of this.

As it happens, of course, the Minnesota Orchestra recently announced that we're intending to spend $40 million to upgrade Orchestra Hall, and nearly all of that money will be spent on audience spaces like our severely undersized lobby. Now, unfortunately, $40m isn't enough to suddenly transform a 35-year-old concert hall into this, but it's certainly enough to make a tangible difference in the concertgoing experience.

So what are your priorities? What, specifically, do you think we should be spending our renovation budget on? And what popular upgrades do you think would be a huge waste of resources that we shouldn't even think about bothering with?

Driven to Distraction

An article in Sunday's Chicago Tribune talked about the impact of skyrocketing parking rates and 24-hour meters on the Windy City's cultural institutions. Basically, the article's thrust is that "getting folks to come out to your entertainment venue involves convincing them that they're going to enjoy themselves, but no one enjoys stressing out about parking, and that stress has become increasingly difficult to escape."

This is a problem everywhere in America, especially in cities like Minneapolis/St. Paul, where almost everyone seems to drive everywhere. Urban sprawl has also given rise to a class of arts aficionados who are used to parking for free in vast suburban lots, and consider city density to be a major inconvenience that makes them far less likely to spend an evening downtown. Those living in the urban core (and my bike-commuting, transit-riding self is definitely guilty of this) often dismiss these suburbanites and their gripes with a roll of the eyes and a rant about how spoiled Americans are, but the truth of the matter is that arts groups cannot afford to be even the least bit dismissive of anyone at a time when we should be endlessly grateful to every person who even considers coming through our doors.

Unfortunately, those same arts groups usually aren't in a position to do much about the problem. Some orchestras (ours included) offer discounted parking to subscribers, or run special shuttle buses from various suburban malls to concerts, and that's nice, but the vast majority of audience members are still going to drive themselves to the show, and when they're angry at having to pay $9, $12, or even $20 to park within an easy walk of the show they're attending, it's not the parking ramp attendant who gets vented at - it's us.

We do a fair amount of audience research for Inside the Classics, and whenever we ask about negative parts of the concert experience, we get loads of people who thought everything that went on inside the hall was great, but ohhhhhh, the parking situation! And the construction! And the traffic downtown! We used to get even more complaints than we do now, back when the ramp immediately across from Orchestra Hall was prominently labeled "Orchestra Hall Parking Ramp," leading many to assume that we owned it, or at least had some control over it. We didn't, and we don't, and the people who do were kind enough to change the name to the "11th & Marquette Ramp" at our request a while back.

Some orchestras (like the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra) address the issue by meeting the suburban audience where it lives, playing regular run-out concerts at small venues in first- and second-ring suburbs. It seems to work well for the SPCO, but some think it just encourages people's wrongheaded notions about cities, and a pragmatist would point out that moving a 33-piece chamber orchestra around the metro is a heck of a lot less expensive than moving a 95-piece symphony orchestra. As if to prove the point, the Minnesota Orchestra had to cancel a popular suburban concert series in Mahtomedi last year for lack of funding.

So what about it? How much do issues like the high cost of parking downtown affect your ticketbuying decisions? And what do you think those of us putting on performances in the downtown core ought to be doing about it?

Encouraging Dissent

Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette has an interesting post up on her blog this week about an odd sort of groupthink that frequently seems to permeate the classical music world:

"Why do we all have to like the same composers? I’m sure that we could find movies or books that we disagree about without it seeming quite so heretical. (Actually, my husband doesn’t care for Bruckner, and I love Bruckner, and we manage to continue a happy marriage regardless.) Anyway, I think we need to embrace these disagreements, because they help get classical music off its film-star pedestal and into an arena where we can interact with it, have opinions about it, dare not to like it."

I like the comparison to other art forms, because whereas critics who write about movies, books, and theater spar continuously over the quality (or lack of quality) of what they're reviewing, many classical music critics seem to feel constrained only to review the performance of a piece of music, and rarely discuss the merits of the work itself. And given how passionately many classical fans feel about their favorite composers, I'd probably do the same in their shoes. It's really not worth the trouble you're going to stir up by saying in print that, just for instance, Bruckner's symphonies are overrated, long-winded, and boring.

Midgette has another theory about why critics should be more open about their likes and dislikes, though:

We talk a lot about how to reach new younger audiences: well, they’re not fooled by didactic lectures and hollow praise. I have a host of anecdotes about times I felt I reached someone who was new to classical music by giving them permission not to like it.

Now, this rings very true to me, and I've got an anecdote of my own. A few years back, we were playing the world premiere of a newly commissioned work, and from the opening moments of the first rehearsal, we knew that we were in for a very tough slog through some incredibly dense, modernist stuff that our audiences were just going to hate. It's never fun trying to get through music like that, because we can see the audience visibly hating it, willing it to be over, and nobody wins in that situation. You can always hope that the audience will be so incensed that they'll do something dramatic like refuse to applaud, or even boo the composer, but most American audiences are far too polite to ever consider such acting out.

Now sometimes, when we're playing a new piece, we'll invite the composer to say a few words about it before we play it, which can sometimes have the effect of making the audience more open to what they're about to hear. But in this case, the composer of what I'll call the Noise Concerto wasn't actually going to be at the concerts, so Osmo decided to speak to the audience instead. I couldn't imagine what he was planning to say about a piece that basically everyone agreed was unlistenable. Here's what he said (to the best of my memory - this was several years ago, and I don't have it on tape):

"When I first received the score for this piece by [Composer X], I thought to myself, 'Oh, no.'"

At this, there was a slight gasp and some nervous laughter from the audience. Osmo went on, "It seemed so dark, and so difficult, and with so much happening all over the orchestra, and I didn't know whether anyone would be able to listen to it. But now, as we've been rehearsing and playing it all week, and we have begun to understand some of the composer's ideas, now I think... well, now I think still "Oh, no" in many places."

The audience erupted in laughter. Osmo wasn't done: "But," he said quickly," what does Vänskä know? I am hearing the piece for the first time just as you are, just as we all are, and when we play it, you will have your own conclusions, and those are what matter."

It was a masterful way to introduce the piece. There was no question, once we'd finished the premiere, that the vast majority of those in attendance fell into the "Oh, no" camp, but the amazing thing was that it was clear from the looks on people's faces as we played that, by giving them permission to hate the piece, we had made them more open to giving it a chance. At some of the work's loudest, most headache-inducing moments, I even saw a few people smirking or chuckling, as if to say, "Wow. This must be one of the 'Oh, no' places."

The lesson, I think, is that people who know they're allowed to have their own opinions on what we're doing on stage are far more likely to engage, and to view concerts as something they participate in, rather than as something static that is set in front of them. Midgette sums it up nicely:

"We don’t need boosterism: we need to regain a sense that this field matters, and that there are reasons for everyone to care about it, beyond a dutiful sense of “it is great and we should.” That's the basis of a love of music, an amateurism, that sustains, rather than distant appreciation of isolated, glamorous performances."

First Sign of Winter

Every Monday, our top management types (CEO, CFO, VPs of every description, etc) get together for what they call a Management Team meeting. I've never been to one of these confabs, but I gather that they're sort of a weekly State of the Union conference, a chance for everyone to be sure that everyone else is on the same page they're on, and that no one is caught by surprise by any new initiative, program, or directive that might come down the pipe. Everything from day-to-day finances to ticket sales to marketing is on the table, and at the end of it all, someone sends around the minutes of the meeting to all the musicians in the orchestra, and I believe to all of the staff as well. To be honest, I usually just skim these communiques, looking for key phrases like "Inside the Classics," "Grammy nomination," or "massive deficit." (That last one hasn't come up lately, fortunately.)

But for the last couple of weeks, the meeting summaries have taken note of a sharp uptick in audience complaints regarding... coughing. Yes, people do actually bother to call or write to us about their fellow patrons coughing in the middle of a performance, and every one of those complaints gets carefully logged and sent up the chain. (Even folks who complain verbally to an usher or a ticket sales rep about something or other have their comments officially noted and passed on.) This tends to happen most years around this time, because... well, you know why. We're all coming down with the winter's first salvo of The Crud, that's why. If half the audience is afflicted with Martian Death Flu, or whatever we're calling it this year, there are gonna be more than a few involuntary expulsions during the slow movement, and there's not much anyone can do about it.

But that doesn't stop our more sensitive concertgoers from getting up in arms about it, and I can understand that, I guess, although I have a hard time taking offense myself, unless the offender is well and truly hacking up a lung and refusing to leave the hall to deal with it. And at the moment, I'm truly sympathetic to the coughers, because I'm battling a serious chest cold myself, and truth be told, I was narrowly saved from hacking my way through this morning's first half by the fact that fellow violist Ken Freed happened to have a spare Halls to hand me. (Note to anyone planning to attend a concert with a cold: Halls are the way to go. I'm not saying they're the best cough drops in the world, just that they're the ones that come in soft, pliable, silent wrappers. All those little hard candies in crinkly cellophane? Those are from the devil.)

I've always divided concert hall coughers into two groups - sick coughers and bored coughers - and their presence signals two very different realities for those of us onstage. (You can tell the difference because, if your hall is full of sick coughers, you can just hear the phlegm behind it. Bored coughers sound like they're trying to alert you to the fact that the person you're saying mean things about is walking up behind you.) The sick coughers signal that winter has arrived, or is still here, or is dragging on into April. The bored coughers signal that something has gone wrong with the performance: either the conductor's interpretation is failing to engage, or the orchestra doesn't seem believable enough in its commitment to the music. Either way, the audience has lost (or failed to ever achieve) the rapt attention we're hoping to inspire. And that's a lot more our fault than theirs.

So what do we do about the coughing, and the concomitant complaints? Well, it seems like our management team is considering an array of options, from making a pre-concert announcement, to posting signs informing patrons that our ushers have cough drops available on request, to looking for a sponsor to reinstate the huge boxes of drops we used to keep at every door. (They vanished in a previous round of budget cuts several years back, which should tell you something about just how deep the budget knife can fall when tough times strike a nonprofit company.) But in the end, there's always going to be coughing, and I presume there will always be people who complain about it. Chalk it up as just one more risk of going out in public, I suppose...

Murphy's Law

Weirdest thing happened this morning at our Coffee Concert featuring MN Orch conductor laureate Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. Intermission had ended, the orchestra tuned, and Stan, who is about to turn 85 but has more energy than I do, came striding out and took his bow. We got ready to start Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, which begins with a long, low hum in the contrabassoon and organ, before the trumpets come in with the famous theme from 2001. Only, as the applause died and Stan raised his arms, the room rumbled a bit, and kept rumbling, at roughly the same pitch as the opening hum of the piece.

Stan, startled, looked around to see if the organ was already playing for some reason. It wasn't. He looked next at Jorja, who tried to quietly explain that the construction outside on Marquette Avenue was causing the noise. (What are they doing to that poor street, by the way? It looks like a war zone from 12th all the way up to the light rail station!) Orchestra Hall is pretty well soundproofed, but when you've got jackhammers and other heavy equipment working underground right next to it, there's really no avoiding some intrusion. Stan didn't understand what Jorja was telling him, and by this time, people in the audience were looking around worriedly, and wondering if we were ever going to start the piece.

It was around this time that a woman about 20 rows deep on the main floor started talking. I don't mean whispering. I mean talking in a full, clear voice, although I don't know whether she was speaking to anyone in particular. I couldn't make out much of what she was saying, but as half the hall began shushing her, I distinctly heard her say, "What? They haven't even started yet!" Which was true, but as the entire orchestra plus Stan was now staring at her with confused looks on our faces, she might have been able to ascertain that she was part of the cause of that.

Meanwhile, the rumbling stopped. For about three seconds. Then it started again, and Stan again looked to Jorja for help. At this point, we'd all been waiting for nearly two minutes. Jorja shrugged, and said, "We're gonna have to play through it." So Stan raised his arms again, and cued the contrabassoon and the organ, who came in perfectly in time with a giant hacking cough from the front row. Some days, you just can't win for losing.

Overheard...

...at tonight's concert, which ends with Messiaen's L'Ascension, a rapturous 29 minutes which, while eminently accessible on some level, is not without its challenges:

(a well-dressed couple pushes up from their seats in Tier 1)

Man: "That was such...dream music, of a dream world, I really liked it."

Woman: "Well, I hated it."

The conversation continued as they exited and walked down the corridor - I tried to follow the thread until they were out of earshot (I didn't feel like stalking them down the stairs!). It struck me that this is one of the best reactions any concert could elicit. As much as I'm a big supporter of concert-as-enjoyable-entertainment, I find satisfaction in the counterbalance of concert-as-challenge. The Messiaen affected this couple enough (albeit in dialectically opposed ways) for them to continue the experience of the concert beyond the confines of the actual performance. Which, to me, is the level of both emotional and intellectual engagement we strive for when we present art.

A small victory - a little bit of light in what has been a pretty rough week!

Premature Jocularity

So. Anyone at the concert last night? No? Okay, here's what happened:

The big piece on the program was Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade, featuring our concertmaster, Jorja Fleezanis, on the big violin solos. It's a pretty massive piece, but, like a lot of tone poems, it ends with a whisper, the solo violin holding a solitary high harmonic as the winds and horns fade away underneath. It's a breathless moment when you do it right, and there's always a wonderful few seconds just after the sound drifts away, when audience and orchestra are waiting together for the air to clear, and then the applause can begin.

Only last night, that moment didn't get a chance to happen, because there was this guy. He was sitting somewhere around the 18th row on the main floor, dead center, right in the middle of Orchestra Hall's acoustic sweet spot. And clearly, he enjoyed the performance, and couldn't wait to let us know, because Jorja's bow had only just left the string when dude leaped to his feet, pumped his fist, and shouted, "YEAH!" before beginning to applaud wildly.

He was, I should stress, alone in this. There's always a lot of back and forth among musicians and audience members about whether we should really expect audiences to conform to our idea of when applause is appropriate, and I've said many times that it doesn't bother me a bit if someone is moved to applaud between movements, or laugh when something funny happens in the music. But this was not one of those times. This guy clearly wanted the spotlight to be directly on him, and was going to do whatever it took to accomplish that, even if it meant ruining that breathless moment for everyone else in the hall.

Osmo was not amused. He always hates early applause, and has frequently shown his displeasure to the audience when it happens. But this time, he was really angry, especially when the guy kept whooping and smacking his hands together as loudly as he could, even as people around him shouted at him to sit down, and Osmo whirled around to glare from the podium. When it was clear that dude wasn't going to quit, the rest of the audience began to applaud, knowing that they weren't going to get their moment back, and the concert was over regardless. Osmo glared harder, and extended a sarcastic thumbs-up at the offender, who pumped his fist a few more times in return. After what seemed like an uncomfortable eternity, Osmo finally motioned for us to stand, then swept off the podium angrily. It was nearly a half-minute before he would come back out to take his bows, and for a moment, I thought it was possible that he wouldn't reemerge at all.

Now, there is a school of thought that says that a conductor has no business chastising an audience member, even a clueless and rude one, under any circumstances. If the guy liked the performance that much, says this line of reasoning, why would you ever discourage him from showing it, especially with classical music so hard up for fans these days? Personally, I think this is hogwash. We've become so accustomed to the conventional wisdom (which is wrong, by the way) which says that classical music is in crisis that we've somehow decided that we should be the one entertainment form that has no rules of behavior, lest we put off a potential convert. But this argument presumes that concert hall newbies aren't just inexperienced, but actually stupid, childlike morons who have no idea how to behave in a public place. And I don't buy it.

Back when I was about 19, working as a counselor at the music camp I've been going to for more than 20 years now, one of the faculty decided to make use of the giant speakers we'd rented for a dance the night before to give the kids a Mahler 8 experience to remember. He invited them all to bring pillows and blankets down to the concert barn, and just lie there listening to the massive Symphony of a Thousand blasted over an audio system big enough to actually mimic the concert hall experience. The piece is 90 minutes, and a few kids wandered away as it wore on. One, though, returned about two minutes before the end, and stood silently in the doorway, waiting. And then, the moment that the last chord died away, and everyone began that wonderful moment of silent waiting for the emotion to drain away as well, the kid in the doorway spoke up. "That was a really long song," he said loudly. "I can't believe you guys sat here and listened to that whole thing!"

The room rose up as one and began shouting at him, and a few kids even attacked him with their pillows. His best friend sidled up to him from behind, and murmured, "Not cool, dude. Seriously not cool." And here's the point: the anger wasn't because this was a stupid kid, or a kid unable to take the measure of a situation like this, but precisely because he could have, and chose not to. He wanted the attention to be on him, not the music, so he found a way to make that happen, just like the jackass who was with us last night did. Not cool, dude.

Slouching Towards Snobbery

All-purpose columnist Joel Stein has a funny piece in the LA Times today in which he endeavors, as part of a larger plan to become "an intolerable old man," to learn the tricks of the trade behind being a classical music snob. In pursuit of this dubious goal, he enlists the aid of a bass player from the LA Philharmonic, who must have been slightly confused by Stein's request, since he seems to have spent a fair amount of time trying to show him how to enjoy classical music, when really, Stein just wanted to know how to become one of the jerks who shushes people and glares at anyone who claps between movements.

The Stein column put me in mind of an essay I wrote a few years back for Drew McManus's Take A Friend To The Orchestra Month at his blog, Adaptistration. Drew's annual TAFTO feature enlists musicians, writers, and listeners to describe how best to approach an orchestra concert for the first time. Some of the entries are quite serious, some are heavily intellectual, and some are aggressively populist. After careful consideration of all of these approaches, I went with "sarcastic and silly" for my contribution. (Shocking, I know...)

How To Be An Elitist Snob In 20 Easy Steps is a pretty lengthy piece, so I won't reprint it here. But you can read it over at Drew's place, if you enjoy jokes about cough drop crinklers being beaten to death with bassoons and the like...

The Mahler Problem

We're playing Mahler's ginormous 9th Symphony this week with one of my favorite guest conductors, Mark Wigglesworth. Which is interesting, because it's entirely possible that you could be a regular visitor to the Minnesota Orchestra web site, could even be planning to attend this concert, and be unaware that there's any Mahler on the program.

The headline on the website for this concert is "Schubert's Unfinished Symphony," which is, to be fair, also on the program. The same description appears on the concert tickets themselves. The thing is, the Schubert, lovely though it is, is a 20-minute appetizer, while the Mahler is a 90-minute magnum opus, so it might seem a bit odd for our marketing department to be highlighting what is unquestionably the less significant work. But there's a reason that they do it, and it's one that musicians often avoid talking about: the concertgoing public just doesn't seem to like Mahler.

I should qualify that right off the bat by saying that, clearly, many people do like Mahler, and several thousand people will be joining us for the concerts this week to prove it. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if our overall ticket sales this week are among our lowest totals of the season. Past experiences with Mahler, in fact, almost guarantee it. And this isn't just a Minnesota problem - audiences across America are decidedly less enthusiastic about Mahler than we musicians are.

So what's the problem here? Mahler's symphonies have been a part of the standard orchestral repertoire for the better part of a century now, so it can hardly be a lack of familiarity that keeps audiences at bay. If anything, I get the sense that our audiences know exactly what a Mahler symphony is, and that it's that knowledge that keeps them away. A couple of years back, our piccolo player and I were talking about Mahler's 5th symphony at a Hallowe'en party (yes, we're huge dorks,) and her husband disgustedly broke into the conversation to explain, in great detail, that only musicians like Mahler, and that people who have to listen to it (rather than playing it) generally hate the experience.

And the thing is, he may not be wrong about that. There's no question that Mahler is generally a lot of fun to play, especially if you're lucky enough to play it with a really good orchestra, under a really great conductor. The music is hugely challenging for every instrument in the orchestra, contains plenty of melodic content for everyone, fits together like the world's most complex jigsaw puzzle, and is just incredibly visceral and raw in it's style. If playing Mozart is like baseball, all clean lines and perfect structure, playing Mahler is like rugby. It's brutal and draining and everyone seems to be piling onto everyone else at exactly the same time, but damn, it's exciting.

Of course, Mahler is brutal and draining for audiences as well. And on top of that, Mahler symphonies are loooooooooong. The one we're playing this week is 90 minutes, which isn't at all unusual for him. I think his shortest symphony is an hour, which is as long as Beethoven's longest. And when you consider that, in most Mahler symphonies, the drama, the pathos, the agony, and the navel-gazing start right off the top and almost never ratchet down, it's asking a lot of an audience. Most people aren't in the mood for that sort of thing very often, and a fair number of people never are. It's like asking people how they feel about Ulysses. Most will allow that it's a great work of literature, but they're not going to make an attempt to read it very often, because who has that kind of energy?

I strongly suspect that a lot of concertgoers get turned off to Mahler after wandering into a performance of one of his bigger works (the 5th, the 6th, the 9th, etc.) unaware of what they were in for. Mahler isn't a composer you want catching you off guard. If you're just looking for a nice, relaxing evening out, and you suddenly find yourself being assaulted by all the personal demons of a 150-year-old manic depressive Austrian in musical form, you're not in for a good night. It'd be like intending to spend a quiet night at the movies and wandering into Letters From Iwo Jima. Even though you recognize that it's an impressive work of art, it's not even remotely what you were looking for.

The reality is, too, that a number of Mahler's symphonies are arguably longer and more over-the-top than they needed to be. It's almost impossible to have a reasonable conversation about this, however, because the people who love Mahler really love Mahler. And in the same way that people who love, say, Lord of the Rings, are not willing to hear a single word said against it, Mahlerians are prone to fly into fits of righteousness if anyone so much as suggests that, really, the first movement of the 9th does drag on a bit. So there again, we run the risk of alienating audiences who, encountering a passionate fan of Mahler, are made to feel as if they are just too dumb or impatient to understand the attraction.

All that having been said, a lot of Mahler's music is great stuff, and we're really not going to stop playing it anytime soon, much as our marketing department might like us to. So I'm curious to hear from our readers on the subject. Do you like Mahler? Hate him? Feel confused by him? Does seeing his name on a concert program make you less likely to buy a ticket? And if so, how did that aversion get started? Enquiring musicians (and marketers) worldwide want to know...

Wrapping Up The Season

In general, I'm not much for generation gaps. I mean to say, I don't actually believe that they exist, or at least that they're anywhere near as stark and divisive as some in the media like to make them out to be. If you believe what you read in what used to be called "the papers," nearly everyone over 50 loves Hillary Clinton, Paul Harvey, and Susan Stamberg, and either hates or ignores Barack Obama, Ira Glass, and anything remotely connected with the internet. The bulk of Americans my age (early 30s) are supposedly the exact opposite. (Both of these characterizations can, of course, be generally disproven by a quick sampling of people you know personally.)

Whether more than a handful of people in either camp actually fall into these absurd pigeonholes seems to have become almost irrelevant in an age when he who screams loudest on the cable news channels wins every argument. Want to prove that aging newspaper writers are all terrified of the internet? Spend a few minutes watching respected author/sports journalist Buzz Bissinger go absolutely stark raving mad on HBO when confronted with a sports blogger, live and in person. Want to demonstrate that young people today are mindless, sex-crazed, violence-addicted terrors who cannot be allowed to inherit our carefully constructed society? String together a few scaremongering "your children at risk" stories about Grand Theft Auto and Miley Cyrus, and you've got yourself a gripping (if almost completely factually indefensible) model.

In the classical music world, older listeners are supposedly conservative in their tastes, terrified of any sort of change in the concert hall (think lighting effects, video screens, or musicians wearing something other than white tie and tails,) and dead set against any piece of music composed later than 1928. Younger listeners are... well, there are no younger listeners of classical music. Nope, none. (None that matter, anyway.) Just ask any of the thousands of commentators who've been proclaiming the death of orchestras for most of the last century.

Way back in January 2007, Sarah and I did our first show together at Orchestra Hall - a free preview concert for invited attendees of the old Casual Classics series whom our marketing department was hoping to convince to stick around after the impending departure of longtime series host/conductor David Alan Miller. At that show, which focused on Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, we distributed a ridiculously detailed survey asking for audience feedback on everything from the start time of the concert to the food available in the lobby to the performance of the host (me.) The idea, as I understand it, was to identify trends in the evolution of the audience and try to predict, as best we could, who might enjoy the new series, and who we shouldn't bother spending a lot of money trying to attract.

My impression is that our marketing department got a lot of useful information out of that survey. What I got out of it was an overwhelming impression that, while a lot of people my age had enjoyed the concert, everyone over the age of 60 hated me and hated the show. (I should have known better than to look at the survey results at all, but when the information is right there in front of you, it's awfully tempting...) I knew the show had been far from perfect, (Sarah and I had literally just met; I had never before been asked to carry an entire half of a concert from the front of the stage; and to judge from the recording I have of the show, I spent most of the first half speaking at a words-per-minute rate that would have put the Micro Machines guy to shame,) but I was still floored to discover that I was such a generationally polarizing figure. (Sarah, it should be said, was popular with young and old alike.)

As we headed into this season, it was clear that there was an expectation that Sarah and I would be playing largely to an audience closer to our own age than to that of the stereotypical (and largely fictional) septuagenarian classical music fan. Whether such an audience actually existed for us to entertain was anyone's guess, and I found myself wondering, for the first time, whether my long-held conviction that a person's physical age is not indicative of his/her tastes was wrong. So I was relieved, at our first Inside the Classics concert in November, to see a lot of familiar faces, young and old, in the crowd. It appeared that, survey or no, the Casual Classics crowd was at least willing to give us a second chance. Still, I was holding my breath when we asked for feedback from anyone who wanted to give it at the end of each show.

I won't bother going through all of the response, positive and negative, that we've received through mail, phone calls to the box office, e-mail, and blog comments over the course of the season. If you've read through our After Hours posts, you've got a pretty good impression of the overall response we received. There's no question that the direction Sarah and I have chosen to take these concerts has alienated a few scattered people (after that first November show, we received one memorably acerbic communique from a gentleman who was so incensed by the concert that he had torn our program page from his copy of Showcase and scrawled his various objections across it before mailing it to the two of us and to Osmo,) but we've been overwhelmed by the warmth and encouragement shown to us by so many of you.

More importantly, I've been thrilled to look out into the audience each and every night that we've been out there and see a ridiculously wide range of ages. There are kids and parents, teenagers and octogenarians, baby boomers and Gen Yers packed into the hall for these concerts. And while I know that not every one of them always walks out the door 100% happy at the end of our shows, I realized this weekend that I've begun taking a quiet pride in the generational diversity of our crowd. This afternoon, when I was leaving the hall after having played a pops show with the eminent flutist James Galway, an older gentleman called out to me as I was crossing Marquette Avenue. (Not that old, I should stress. His hair was white, but he looked to be in far better physical condition than I am...) "Love Inside the Classics!" he said. "Really looking forward to next year!" As I thanked him for coming, I put another quiet mental checkmark in my scorecard of conventional wisdom vs. reality.

We spent a lot of this first Inside the Classics season poking and prodding at both audience and orchestra, trying to get a handle on what sort of ideas we could reasonably expect to work in performance, and which ones were either too clever for their own good, or not in the least clever in the first place. You all have been very patient with us, and I wanted to be sure to thank you for it. I can't promise that we've worked out all the kinks, or that we'll never leave you wondering what we were thinking at some theoretical future show, but I do know that I'm having a great time getting to know our audience, in all its multi-generational glory.

My favorite Minneapolis theater troupe, Theatre de la Jeune Lune, had a sentence in the program book for their last show, Fishtank, which I think nicely describes our creative process as well: "Free as cows at pasture, we roamed the rehearsal room looking for a fence so that we could wonder what's beyond." After three shows and countless conversations with both ourselves and our audience, I feel like we're starting to see the fence. What's beyond should be fun to discover...

Sit down and shut up.

Seattle Weekly has an article in its latest issue which dares to suggest that there actually might not be anything wrong with the way classical music is presented in concert halls. Author Gavin Borchert acknowledges that there seems to be near-constant griping these days that the staid formality of our genre is a relic of a past era, and fails to take into account current social customs and concertgoing trends. But, he objects...

A couple of things puzzle me. First, the classical concert experience is, in all essentials, identical to that of dance, theater, literary events, or for that matter—barring the munching of popcorn and cheering the fireball deaths of villains—movies. Go to the performance space, buy a ticket, sit down in rows, watch and listen, try not to disturb your fellow audience members. Yet it's only in conjunction with concerts that you hear complaints about what a crushing burden this all is. Second, why is sitting quietly considered such an unendurable ordeal?

I think Borchart is on to something here, and I say that as someone who regularly decries what I see as a silly and mindless orchestral devotion to certain 19th-century traditions. (Exhibit A) It's long bothered me that many of the withering criticisms aimed at classical music (in particular, the idea that playing music from the past somehow makes us irrelevant to the present) are not considered valid when applied to, say, theater. (Imagine how silly it would sound if critics in the UK were to start lambasting the Royal Shakespeare Company for not doing enough plays by Tony Kushner!) And while I am all for shaking orchestras out of our sometimes sleepy patterns when it serves a larger purpose, I'm baffled by those who argue that the concert experience would be improved by people milling about and talking while we play.

Setting aside for a moment the inescapable fact that we perform, without amplification, in concert halls that are designed to bounce the maximum amount of sound around a huge room, I just don't get what walking and talking would add to the audience's experience. I sincerely doubt that anyone is really itching to socialize during a performance, in any case (that's why we have dinner and drinks with our friends before and/or after a show, isn't it?) and honestly, the only reason people talk instead of whispering at First Ave or the Fine Line is because the music is so damn loud! Besides, if you think back to the last time you saw a band you really like at some local bar, I'll bet you can remember being annoyed by that couple in front of you who spent the whole time shouting into each other's ears and ignoring the music. Because you're there for the music, and if you aren't, you should be somewhere else.

After citing a few recent examples of "alternative" classical performances he's attended, Borchert concludes:

Maybe people behave the way they do at concerts not because it's an artificial standard imposed by ironclad tradition but because the music sounds better that way. Maybe listeners feel classical music most deeply when they pay quiet attention to it. Maybe sometimes not clapping is OK, and we don't need to rush in and obliterate every silence.

I know it's heresy these days to suggest that America's symphony orchestras are doing anything at all correctly, but I couldn't agree more.

How old is our audience? (And do we care?)

Sarah and I have both written before about the seemingly intractable debate over the health of classical music in our pop culture-obsessed society. While I doubt the two of us agree on every facet of the issue, and both of us would like to see some changes in the way orchestras, in particular, present themselves, I think it's safe to say that neither of us buys into the idea that classical music is dying. There's just too much data that shows otherwise to be ignored, regardless of the anecdotal evidence to the contrary pumped out continuously by the likes of Norman Lebrecht.

Still, much of the argument has to be anecdotal, simply because we don't have enough historical data to measure modern realities against past eras, and those who believe fervently that classical music is in serious danger are always on the lookout for old numbers that support their thesis. One of the most dogged pursuers of historical orchestra data is journalist/composer/blogger Greg Sandow, who has been sounding the alarm about what he sees as an unmistakable decline in public interest for years now. Now, I consider Greg a friend of mine, and I have a lot of respect for the work that he and his wife (New York Times-turned-Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette) have done in the field of music criticism. I happen to disagree with much of what Greg writes on the subject of the overall health of the field (much of my opposition stems from my belief that he is one of those New Yorkers who see the New York scene as either a microcosm of the national and international scene, or as the only scene that really matters, and that he therefore writes from a perspective informed almost exclusively by what he sees from his front stoop,) but I can't deny that he frequently brings up fascinating side discussions, and supports his theses far better than many others on his side of the debate.

Greg's latest salvo is a continuation of a topic he's taken up in the past - his belief that American orchestra audiences were not always as, ahem, mature (read: old) as they are today. This runs counter to the conventional wisdom within the industry, which says that Americans have always gravitated to classical music as they age, and that the abundant presence of gray hair in many concert halls shouldn't be a concern. In the past, Greg has come up with some extremely limited data suggesting that audiences in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s may have sported a younger median age, but has been stymied by a lack of much available hard data from the era.

Now, with the help of the Minnesota Orchestra's own PR and archive staff, Greg has accessed a decades-old study showing that 55% of our orchestra's audience in 1955 was 35 or younger. The study also has some fascinating breakdowns of where concertgoers of various ages and income levels sat at the shows they attended, and even offers up some advice for the orchestra's PR staff of the era on how to attract even more young ticketbuyers.

This is fascinating reading to anyone who cares about the business, and my belief that our future is not, on the whole, in danger doesn't mean that I dismiss out of hand the idea that our audience may be aging or that we should be concerned about this. But I do see one significant piece of data missing from Greg's analysis (and here again, I think we may be seeing the New York-as-microcosm worldview coming into play.) Nowhere does Greg tell us what the median age of our audience in Minneapolis is now! Now, I'm not sure we even have that information available (I'm guessing we don't,) but Greg doesn't even suggest that he asked for it. If he didn't, I'll bet I know why. Go to a New York Philharmonic concert these days, or a Philadelphia Orchestra concert, or a Boston Symphony concert, or just about anything classical at New York's Carnegie Hall, and you will see a virtual sea of elderly faces in the seats. So it's natural that Greg would assume, from his home in Manhattan, that things are the same everywhere. And from my perch in Minneapolis, I confess that I don't get to many concerts elsewhere in the US, so I'm even prepared to suppose that Greg has seen this phenomenon in other American cities as well.

But here's the thing: what's true in New York just isn't true in Minneapolis. I don't know what the median age of our crowd is in 2007. But I know that I look out every week from the stage at Orchestra Hall and see a wildly diverse crowd, age-wise. We have some elderly fans, yes, but we also have a ton of under-35s, a large college crowd, and even (and this is perhaps the biggest shock) a lot of baby boomers, the very demographic we had supposedly lost for good to the classic rock genre decades ago. With the exception of our morning matinees, which are aimed directly at older listeners who prefer daytime concerts, I'm prepared to stipulate that our average crowd has as many under-40s as it does over-65s.

Assuming I'm right (and you don't have to grant that - even if I'm wrong about the specific numbers, there's still no disputing that our crowd is far younger than the ones I see at orchestra concerts in the Northeast every year,) there are two possible conclusions to be drawn. One is that Minneapolis is a completely unique orchestral oasis with no relation to the larger national scene, and therefore, a study of our audiences from any era is in no way useful in assessing the national health of the industry. I find this scenario unlikely.

The second possibility is that orchestras and their audiences vary widely from city to city (this is a big country, after all, and cultural interests in, say, Miami, couldn't be more different from those in Detroit or L.A.,) and that any snapshot of an audience in one city, during one specific year, is simply not instructive on a national level. Are the Minneapolis numbers instructive as to the demographics of our orchestra? Absolutely. Do they have anything at all to do with orchestral demographics in Washington, San Francisco, or Phoenix? I suspect not.

Move to the music

One of my earliest musical memories involves sitting in a Honolulu Symphony concert (I grew up in Hawaii) watching, slightly mortified, my father on the edge of his seat, swaying to and occasionally air-conducting a Brahms symphony (is it the burden of children to be embarrassed of their parents??). Dad was an enthusiastic amateur musician and going to the Symphony was a regular Sunday afternoon activity. At nearly every concert he could barely keep still, so great was his need to move to the music and to participate in those performances.

A fairly recent New York Times article confirms what I have always suspected – that music directly affects those parts of the brain responsible for physical motion. Music should make us want to move. And yet, movement and participation is antithetical to the modern “concert experience”, where audiences are expected to sit still and silent until the very end.

This is something that I struggle with. On one hand, what takes place on stage during a symphonic concert requires a tremendous amount of skill and concentration, and it would be terribly distracting, if not impossible (how do you clap along to Webern?) for the audience to actively participate in any way. On the other hand, these constraints feel unnatural and forced – I mean, who really can sit still when listening to, say, the last movement of Beethoven 7? If people wanted to spontaneously leap out of their seats and dance for joy, I’m rather inclined to let them do so.

Of course, the standard concert hall is not entirely conducive to impromptu dancing (and you would probably get escorted out by an usher immediately!). Sometimes a change of venue can put a very different spin on how music is experienced; in my two seasons with the Richmond Symphony, the concert series I headed took place at a rock venue, the Canal Club. It’s all part of a larger trend (check out this article from Symphony magazine) to redefine the performance experience of classical music.

I bring this up because of what I observed during these performances at the Canal Club, where seating was limited and a majority of the audience stood for the 55-minute performance (and to be clear, although we were not performing complete symphonies, we were certainly playing movements of symphonies and larger works by Mozart, Ravel, Prokofiev, Janacek – “real” music, not “classical light” – although I don’t find anything wrong with that either…more on that in another entry). While not everyone did so (we are so conditioned to be quiet and still while listening to Mozart!), people were able to move to the music. Sometimes it was swaying or nodding. For the least self-conscious (and kids excel here), there was actual dancing, jumping.

I’m not saying that we should make audiences stand through a Mahler symphony (although sitting may not be much more comfortable – many halls have seats that feel worse than flying domestic economy class). So, the conundrum remains – if not as part of a conventional concert, how can we best experience symphonic music?

Ask An Expert: Can you hear me now?

Time for another of our reader-submitted Ask an Expert questions. (Click the link in the menu above to submit one of your own!) This week's question comes from Daisuke Takeuchi, who is not, as far as I know, any relation to the star pitcher for the Boston Red Sox:

Q: I am a new fan of classical music thanks to Osmo Vanska and The Minnesota Orchestra experience. My question is about the sound range of classical music. When I listen to CDs, some parts are too quiet to hear. So, I turn the volume up, but then the loud parts get too loud. I feel like in order to listen to classical music you need a perfectly quiet environment, otherwise you cannot hear the quiet parts. I live in a neighborhood where cars go by, babies are crying, dogs are barking, and I get frustrated when I cannot hear the music. Of course, putting on a headphone would solve the problem, but this bothers me. So, please enlighten me as to why some parts are played so quietly that I cannot hear a thing.

For an answer, I went right to the top, to the master of extreme pianissimo himself, Minnesota Orchestra music director Osmo Vänskä. Osmo has a reputation for demanding extreme dynamics at both ends of the decibel spectrum from his orchestras, and our recent Beethoven recordings do have a startlingly wide dynamic range, due in part to the incredibly senstive digital equipment that the recording team at BIS uses. So Osmo, why so soft, and what's the best way to listen?

Osmo's Answer: First of all, don't try to listen [to classical music] in the car. There's just too much extra noise around. I would say that, even in the concert hall, during the softest passages, you still can hardly hear what we are playing, and you have to allow that that may be what we want you to hear. In [popular] music, everything is recorded so that the sound meter is always in more or less the same position. The sound level never goes too far into the red, and never goes very far the other way either. It is not that way in our music. So I would suggest to Daisuke that he set his volume as loud as his neighbors and his stereo will allow for the loud parts, and then keep it there - don't touch it when we go to the softest passages. It is meant to be so that it is very difficult to hear. That's the whole secret of the music we play - if you [turn up the softest parts,] you are missing the opportunity to go where the music wants to take you.

This way there be dragons...

Bernard Holland had a column in Sunday's New York Times that really grabbed my attention. It was about the role of composers in the concert experience, and it expressed, in words far more organized and eloquent than I could come up with, much of what I believe to be true about late 20th-century music and those who wrote it.

The column starts out by repeating a question every critic has either been asked or asked himself: namely, how one should prepare for a world premiere, when there's no score to study and no recording to consult for perspective. With so much new music layered in complexity, how can even an educated listener hope to be ready to offer an assessment of a completely new work after one hearing?

Holland doesn't like the implications of the question: "Haven’t we got things backward? Shouldn’t composers be preparing for me rather than me for them?" That may seem flip, but it expresses the beginnings of the frustration that those of us in this business hear year after year from members of our audience. I can't count the number of times that some intelligent friend of mine has looked pleadingly at me after a concert featuring a work by a contemporary composer and whimpered, "Did you like that piece?" It's as if they can't allow themselves to believe their own distaste without having it confirmed by a professional.

This just shouldn't be the way things work. Composers (especially those in the business of writing dense, academic scores that sound more like aural representations of calculus equations than music) have spent a lot of time over the past several decades blasting away at symphony orchestras for not playing more new music, while conveniently ignoring the undeniable fact that the programming of new music didn't decline precipitously until virtually the entire music world fell under the spell of a generation of composers seemingly dedicated to the deliberate alienation of the listener. (see also rows, tone) Not only did these composers and their advocates in the press delight in the discomfort and hostility of the average concertgoer, they viciously attacked or studiously ignored any composer impudent enough to continue making use of such supposedly passé concepts as tonality or emotion.

This era is mercifully over, and has been for at least 15 years (although certain modernist bigwigs with friends in high places are still inexplicably held up as shining examples of what composers should be in certain academic and musical circles.) Most of today's best composers are writing music that, while certainly challenging in comparison to much of what you can hear on the radio, is accessible enough to the average listener that it won't trigger an immediate fight-or-flight reflex. More importantly, young composers seem to be granted greater freedom than in decades past to experiment with different styles and find their own voice rather than being pressured to adhere to a rigid ideology that equates impenetrable complexity with intelligent artistry.

To me, the great tragedy of the era in which new music was used as an intellectual cudgel with which audiences could be beaten is that even in 2007, when my orchestra is preparing to premiere a new work that I know for a fact they'll be able to absorb and enjoy on first hearing, I look out into the crowd before the first downbeat, and see hundreds of tense and worried faces attached to intelligent, open-minded people who are steeling themselves for the worst. Listeners have become so used to being confused and taken advantage of by the composers of the past that they can't help but assume that they're going to hate what's coming from a composer of today. And that's a damn shame.

The good news is that it doesn't seem to take much to break down those fears. Bear with me for a story: A few years back, the Minnesota Orchestra was premiering a brand new work by a composer of some international renown, as we do on a somewhat regular basis. We'd been rehearsing it all week with varying degrees of success, and as the concert loomed, we found out that the composer would not be able to attend, due to ill health. This was a shame, because we had been hoping that he would speak to the audience about the work, which was very complex and dark, before we played it, thus perhaps preparing them for what to expect.

Instead, Osmo took the microphone to speak about the piece, and everyone in the room was amazed by what he said. Right off the bat, he confessed that when he first saw the score, he had thought, "Oh, no." The piece was so esoteric and academic that he feared that neither the orchestra nor the listeners would be able to get their minds around it enough to make the experience of listening worth anything. Osmo further confessed that, even after days of rehearsal, he still wasn't sure whether he liked the piece. But, he added with a laugh, "what does Vänskä know? You will have your own opinions, and if we are playing the piece well, you will be able to hear with your own ears." It was an unexpectedly profound moment, even as the audience laughed at the joke. A conductor had just given a roomful of listeners full permission to hate a piece of music that they had paid to hear. All he asked was that they listen with an open mind.

After that concert, I cornered every audience member I could find, and asked what they'd thought of the piece. (I hated it, myself, but didn't let on.) Lots of them thought it was lousy - a few liked it. But the difference between these listeners and the ones I usually hear from after a tough premiere was that all of them were smiling, even the ones who had no use for the piece. Osmo had given them credit for being intelligent adults, capable of drawing their own conclusions about music, and that made them far more willing to engage with the piece than they would have been otherwise. I've often thought that if Osmo's speech could be replayed before every new or unfamiliar work we play, our listeners would wind up liking a far higher percentage of what we play for them.

Holland sums it all up better than I can: "Composers ought to write anything they want. And how nice it is that lovers of Duparc or Ned Rorum can gather in small recital halls and listen to the songs they wrote. Let explorers of microtonal imagery or computer-generated randomness revel in their exclusivity. The Internet seems made for niches of specialized interests; and if Milton Babbitt disciples want to crawl into one and exchange examples of combinatoriality, let us leave them to it. [But] for thinking big, you need to need the people... Giving composers the luxury of being important and disliked debilitates music."