Peanuts, Popcorn, and….the Symphony??

Those of you who follow me regularly (you are out there, right?) will know that I recently moved back to my hometown in the suburbs of Chicago. Among other perks, my reinstated status as a midwesterner has allowed for me to once again become involved in the activities of my immediate family, which have changed somewhat since I left home six years ago. This change is most apparent in the proclivities of my youngest brother, who is ten years my junior; when I departed for undergrad, he was only going into first grade, but now he’s in middle school and a dedicated athlete. Basketball is his main sport (I came home one spring break to discover a brand-new hoop towering over the driveway), but that doesn’t start until winter, so now he’s in the thick of cross country season. As a result, I’ve spent much of my free time cheering him on at meets, which has been a decidedly new experience for me. Having long accepted my status as the token non-athlete in the family (I get out of breath just going up the stairs sometimes), I never did sports in my youth, and neither did my other brother (although he is in much better shape than I am), so something as typical as a cross country meet is unfamiliar territory. Here I’m used to sitting quietly at youth orchestra concerts (our family’s primary extracurricular activity), slightly proud of the fact that I know when to clap and that I’m wearing a nice shirt, but out on the sunstruck field in back of my brother’s junior high school, I’m a fish out of water. Instead of a conductor, there’s a coach; instead of suits, the kids are in singlets; it is most definitely not silent; and nobody quite knows how things will turn out (well, okay, so sometimes this is the case at youth orchestra concerts too).
Call me a sheltered classical musician (which I am), but I found the differences to be striking, and ultimately, thought-provoking. A sport is appealing to us because it draws upon our deeply engrained competitive instincts. Actually, if you think about it, it’s an evolutionary throwback to the days when winning or losing was not a friendly competition, but a matter of life and death. Sure, the guy behind you might be a nice boy from the junior high across town, but as far as your instincts are concerned, he’s a saber-toothed tiger out for blood (well, okay, so sometimes you see those at junior high too. But I digress).  On the other hand, watching and listening to a concert appeals to our emotional instincts. While this experience can be very powerful, at times it is difficult to truly understand what is transpiring onstage if one lacks a knowledge of the style and idea of the piece being performed. There are no teams to follow or coveted championships hanging in the balance; there’s just a bunch of musicians in their formalwear who, barring an unprecedented emergency, have a very good chance of making it to the end of the fourth movement. We know that things will end well, thus removing the element of suspense–and to some degree, an element of engagement.
Contemplating this, I was reminded of a great recording I once heard of two actors “announcing” Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. They would say things like, “Oh, is that theme going to come back?” “Are we ever going to reach the tonic??” or, “Now the strings are taking the lead!”. At the time, I merely chuckled at its comedic nature, but now, I think those guys were on to something. Sports players never have to worry about audience engagement, but it’s all we musicians can talk about. There have been many ideas proposed to this end, ranging from things as simple as pre-concert lectures to the Colorado Symphony’s controversial “Classically Cannabis” series. Some of the more radical suggestions have concerned “alternative,” informal concerts, in which the audience was allowed to speak, applaud, cheer, or do whatever they’d like while the music was being performed–not unlike the way classical music used to be presented in the days of Mozart and Beethoven. In fact, there is that famous anecdote about an audience member calling out the horn player in the premiere of Beethoven’s “Eroica” for ostensibly coming in early (the entrance, of course, was actually correct). Now, that sounds like an exciting concert! Of course, I think it’s very important that we remain true to our traditional formalities, and yes, having people actually announce an orchestra concert would probably be going a bit too far, but I do think there’s a lot to be said for experimenting with these different means of audience engagement. Who knows, maybe we could even make a little extra cash selling peanuts and popcorn. And any renditions of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” would most assuredly be in tune.