While I was in Joshua Tree I had the chance to hear Kanae Matsumoto, a pianist who teaches at UCLA, in an intimate concert at the Hi-Desert Cultural Center in JT. The room was full and the audience attentive; the playing was good, particularly the Schumann on the first half. And then, at intermission, I heard this exchange take place:
Person 1: "Fantastic!"
Person 2: "Yeah, she's amazing."
Person 1: "It's just intermission, right?"
So I think we can agree there's a problem here.
The issue is not the audience members, who were lovely and appreciative, the type of people who go to classical music concerts on Friday nights. Neither is it the venue, which is bringing classical music to their community in a comfortable setting and successfully drawing people to their events. The issue is a concert ritual that was developed for more knowledgeable audiences. Schumann and Debussy are not endemic here. At a Springsteen concert, by contrast, no one needs to explain the proceedings: millenial Americans know that rock concerts proceed in series of songs, that you can cheer whenever you want, particularly after the songs or when something exciting happens, that when the band leaves the stage at the end you should make noise because they might come back and play more. &c. But most Americans haven't grown up truly immersed in classical music and its rituals; this is not a judgment or lament, just a fact. And no matter how literate and savvy your audience is, if the concert program is in sets and no one explains the breaks or why the pieces are grouped the way they are, if no one clues people in as to which movements segue into the next and which don't, if you don't announce program changes, no one is going to know where the hell you are on the program. I don't mean to harangue Matsumoto, as she was simply following the party line w/r/t concert format, but in this case the party line woefully obviated a better experience for the audience.
See, here you have a nice, appreciative audience who is certainly capable of a higher level of listening, a deeper understanding of this music, but it's a bit tough you give them no ammunition. How much can they be expected to process when they don't even know what piece they're listening to? Or hey, the movement titles are in German: how about we provide translations, so people know the fast one from the slow one? And how about a bit of context, just a tiny amount about the composer's life, the nature of the represented genres or programmatic content, to give the people something to listen for? Today's orchestras famously attempt to do this with program notes which are nearly uniformly stuffy and ineffectual (next time I read that x composer "cast this movement in Sonata form," I will run screaming from the hall). It would seem simple for a pianist, who after all has been doused with these composers from a young age, to stand up there and say "a Sonata is a multi-movement work with interwoven, recurring themes. Listen for this and this in the first movement and this thing in the slow part." Not a full summary in the orchestral program-note style, but something, some sort of verbal information for the people to hang onto.
Otherwise, no matter how illuminating the performance, you'll get the same flat comments that I heard after Matsumoto's concert. "Amazing." "I can't believe she played all of that from memory." The venue was lovely, the playing artful, the audience enthusiastic--so was the concert a success? It felt to me like a missed opportunity. These people were exposed to some great classical music, but our old concert rituals prevented them from really picking up anything about it beyond the vaguest generalities. I'm sure many of them turned on the radio or ipod on the way home and piped in some music whose customs and rituals are not so willfully mysterious.
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