Music & Education Talks: SOS Orchestra

Hi, all. I'm Stephanie. Today's discussion is based around my thoughts and ideas developed through my contact with people generally. Students, teachers, musicians, individuals at schools and conservatoriums, but also just general folk. As well as the reading that I've done, so this could be from books or newspapers or indeed social media. The video is therefore simply the start of a discussion that you guys will then continue to guide and dictate. So no shyness please. Let's begin. I don't go to orchestral concerts very often. Like all parents, there's only so much you can do independent of family responsibilities. However, my daughter is now well past 8 years old, can stay up till 10 p.m. at a push and vaguely knows how to behave in public. So the last six months has been a much happier time for me concert-wise but also something of a shock. Maybe it was always this way and I just never noticed but audiences do seem to be something of a blue rinse parade. The average age is 70, 75, with a large majority women, presumably because the other half have popped their clogs. Now why? Where are the other generations of the '60s, '70s and beyond? What is the reason for this desertion of the orchestral experience, an experience that encompasses around 400 years of differing repertoires, styles, aesthetic, and orchestral make-up? And where our human ability for working together...generally pretty poor, granted...seems to excel here as the 50 or so individuals in front of us are united in their goals, passion and, above all, instrumental mastery, clearly we've a polarity in the concert hall: Youngish orchestral players consumed by an older audience. The players themselves seem to have no one of their generation supporting them. Well, the whys could be anything. One thing that does spring to mind is that consumption via TV, and more recently by way of computers and phones, means that maybe younger generations feel less need of physical contact with live performances. Everything's at their fingertips, after all. And yet with this situation, one could actually argue the opposite. Lack of contact prompts people to go out and experience firsthand. Now this is very much a sociological question and certainly not my area at all, so if any of you out there are able to shed some light on this, you'd certainly liven up the conversation.

Another reason might well be the formal stiffness that seems to prevail in these concert halls. Now if you think about it, this is quite a contradiction to our increasingly informal societies. I mean, why the tuxes? Why the reverent silence? Why the clapping at set places? And for that matter, why not whistling or crying out, you know, "Yeah, Beethoven." Historically, people used to clap whenever they heard something that they liked, you know, in the middle of a piece or a song, rather like the situation you get at jazz concerts. They were able to express themselves as audiences and also created real time nonverbal dialogue with the musicians. Today, and for a long time now, the overall setup by comparison seems to be a bit prescriptive and sterile. Direct communication between audience and musicians seems to be limited to formulaic interludes. And of course, for those people with less knowledge about classical art music, this becomes a turnoff. Of course, maybe people simply consider listening to past musical styles an anachronistic activity. But even here, this does not explain why contemporary composers, with the possible exception of John Williams, are likewise shunned. Now as regards the younger audience, I personally think there exists the notion that classical music is for fuddy-duddies with one foot in the grave. So there's an automatic self-exclusion for anyone under a certain age. Immature and frankly ageist though this thinking is, my time with teenagers, younger students, and not to mention my contact with 20- and 30-somethings, repeatedly reinforces this perception. A kind of division, if you will, between our music and yours. Yours, of course, being the aged. Now the irony here is that time will ultimately jinx you anyway.

There's another name for this, of course, and that's musical bigotry. And as with all bigotry, this stems from formal and informal educational inadequacies. But the home situation, school, society, and indeed the marketplace, have a part to play in a person's overall formation. But in general, the burden of responsibility unfortunately has to be placed on educational programs, institutions, and teachers. My musical education at school essentially consisted of doing, singing ad nauseum, recorder, and that was about it. I took violin and piano lessons privately, of course, but even here, and up until an advanced level, I did instruments, technique, scales, pieces. You know, it seemed that music was about acquiring knowledge only through doing. University radically changed things. I was asked to question, make links, debate, discuss, and challenge myself and my own preconceptions. Through this, I realized that the small pieces that frankly should have been put together years back were only just now coming together and taking shape. And that made me annoyed. The intrinsic beauty or interest or dislike or whatever of a piece of music had never had the chance to be fully examined. And it's the same today, variations in regional, national curricula permitting. My daughter's school, for example, continues this trend. Sure, she's learning to read music through recorder studies and sings ad nauseum, but I've yet to hear her come home and explain to me what an opera is or that she's heard dreamy music, which would be impressionism. Or that she's even had a discussion where musical likes and dislikes are talked about in her class, you know? Basic justification of personal taste. Whilst our children do the listening, analytical, discursive experience of music...arguably the most important for building a repertoire and constructing the basics for intelligently discussing and independently exploring music...well, that becomes delegated to the external market of children's programs and MTV. The musical aesthetic, if you can call it that, is therefore formed by the time you're 10 and the musical bigotry to which I referred earlier, well, that's complete. That lasts a lifetime.

Dwindling audiences are the result of a listener's conformity to the omnipresent cultural marketplace, but also to education's well-meaning but inadequate response to this. People are completely disassociated from and unable to possess their musical heritage. The anecdote? Ha, well, I'd like to hear what you've got to say for this. For my part, whilst I recognize that orchestras are much more open to popular concerts, we need to recognize that this is simply a market response and by definition superficial, especially given the vast repertoire of fantastic music that we've inherited from our past. So I'd encourage the integration of music meaningfully with the world so that dialogue is at the heart of musical experiences. Get members of orchestras to informally chat, dialogue, and debate with audiences during concerts, through Facebook, whatever. You know, get them to do interactive mob flashes. Avoid alienating formality. As regards education, well, change classroom music from the earliest years so that students can build and develop a more analytical, open-minded approach to music via listening and which encourages lifelong, independent musical exploration. If we don't, I fear there'll be no audience left in 20 years and therefore no orchestras. So am I being dramatic and hysterical? Have I read our society all wrong? Have I drunk too much red wine? Most probably. Get in touch. Share your thoughts. And please don't hold back. Really looking forward to hearing what you've got to say. Bye.

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