Music & Education Talks: Audience Animals

Hello again, it's me, Stephanie, together with Virtual Sheet Music. Before I begin today's video, I wanted to start off by saying that I'm going to change the way I do things in this and in future videos. I've had various people get in touch with me in my six-month stint with VSM, but not nearly as many as I'd have liked. And let's face it, though all of us come from different walks of life, professional musicians, teachers, students, closet instrumentalists, choir singers, concert goers, you name it, the one thing we do have in common is music. So if we don't share our thoughts, then it's a missed opportunity. You need neither profundity, nor wit, nor a deep knowledge of Schoenberg serialist techniques to drop me a line. Reflect on what I've said. Ask me a question or simply contest what I've said outright.

So to prompt you, at the end of each video, I'll be requesting that you suggest something that you'd like me to talk about in my next video. It could be something academic. It could be a reflection on music and society today. It could be something generically musical that's been bugging you. I'll look at all the suggestions that come in and choose the one that excites me the most. As for today, well, in part, it's a response to my previous video "SOS Orchestra." If you haven't seen it, please do. And there are also some interesting comments from VSM members, too.

Now, there I talked about the absurdity of orchestral concerts, adopting strict formality with 21st century audiences. So today, I'd like to talk about the audiences themselves. Now, before I begin, audience types as we know are geographically bound both by national characteristics and obviously by the type of performance halls available. Being in Milan, you will appreciate that my experiences will be extremely different from yours and you may totally disagree with me. A perfect reason for getting in touch, wouldn't you say?

So I'm gonna start with La Scala, how can you not? Before Christmas, I took my daughter to see "The Turn of the Screw" by Benjamin Britten, a great opera, incidentally for kids because it's got ghosts and two out of the five characters are children. You know, you just can't fail with that opera. Anyhow, as you can imagine, La Scala is La Scala, and looking down from the cheapest seats in the house, I could see throngs of people puffed up at the thought of being in one of the world's most important theaters. After the interval, though, about half the audience had gone. You know, maybe some of the technical flaws at that performance turned people off. If you paid 200 plus for seats and then see the computer graphics go ape on more than one occasion, I suppose it's understandable. But undoubtedly, the un-Italianness of the music was partly to blame. You know, why go to a La Scala when there are no tenor hits, "Nessun Dorma," or chorus greats, "Va, Pensiero" or "The Anvil Chorus." No Verdi, Puccini, Bellini, Rossini, or of course that absolute theatrical must, the lead woman who dies at the end: "Butterfly," "Traviata," "La Bohème."

You know, it was clear sitting there that night that many in the audience were tourists, La Scala being an intrinsic part of the tourist route. And of course, a lot of tickets come in with a hotel package. I can imagine the average punter having sat through the angst of Britten and in the absence of Verdi's oompa, jolly hits or the schmaltzy Puccini numbers would simply have abandoned ship at half time. La Scala does, however, have another type of audience, a tiny bunch of diehard Milanese fans that eagerly await that one fluffed note of the leading tenor or soprano, so they can enter into action, booing and hissing their participation in the history of the institution, thereby assured. Now, I don't know if this happens elsewhere, but I just find it really, really rude on the part of the audience, and it's certainly unfair to the musicians and totally counterproductive to the music and indeed the storyline.

Of course, there are those who genuinely want to hear some music at La Scala, but maybe Dario Fo who won the Nobel Prize for literature, had a point when he said, "La Scala is not for the Milanese. It is for corporate businesses and outsiders." I can't comment either way, but for those of you who get to The Met regularly or Covent Garden or any number of other famous theaters, opera houses, and concert halls throughout the globe, do you think Dario Fo's comments Re:La Scala can be applied equally to your geographical context? It's certainly interesting to compare and contrast.

I'd now like to look at another type of audience, this time in the form of parents who take their kids to children's concerts. You know the type, industrious, anxious that their child gets some kind of culture. That's me, that's me, here I am, you know. Now, I waited till my daughter was seven before taking her along to a concert, not at La Scala incidentally. And it was a concert based on the theme of animals, so you had your bird song in Vivaldi, fish in Debussy, and of course Saint-Saens "Carnival of the Animals". Okay, predictable music, but at least a theme that kids could really get their teeth into.

Anyhow, I'd like to say that the concert was great, but it was kinda hard to hear when one, children and parents were talking throughout the concert, two, babies were crying throughout the concert, three, toddlers were running around all over the auditorium with their parents following behind throughout the concert. This is no exaggeration. Honestly, I found it hard to fathom why an orchestra would pimp itself to an audience so blatantly ignorant of the basics in sitting down and listening, unless of course the orchestra gets funding for educational programming, and it probably does. There was nothing, nothing educational about this particular experience. And as I sat there blushing in the darkness, embarrassed that I was lumped into this rudeness all around me, I vowed that I would never again take my daughter to a concert where the only thing to be gleaned was how not to behave and where bad manners was apparently okay.

Now maybe the concert hall needed some tips on organization, maybe getting some ideas from successful children's programs in action elsewhere in the world. Certainly, there was no age limit for my...where I was sitting. None of the ushers ever intervened with the particularly rowdy children. And frankly, I was too cowardly to complain. Again, I'd be really interested in seeing how my experience compares with yours.

Finally, let's turn to the over the age 70 audiences. Untainted by the instantaneousness of 21st living, they understand the idea of musical development. And unlike my own younger generations, they have the patience to sit through music without the need for regular WhatsApp, email, Facebook, Twitter, or indeed selfie fixes. It's this type of audience where as you sit down, you struggle to find anyone your own age. And anyone younger is much younger because they've been dragged along by their conscientious grandparents. Now I found it's this type of audience that the listening experience seems to be heightened, it's almost got this meditative quality. But of course, I've missed on a whole heap of audience types that you are going to write back to me and explain. Wherever you are, in the U.S., China, or in the Amazonian jungles, I dare you to describe who we are as music consumers. And of course, please do get in touch too, to let me know what you'd like me to talk about in my next video. Bye.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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