Slashdot Mirror
Live Tweeting the Symphony?
Lasrick writes "Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard describes desperate attempts to engage with younger audiences on the part of arts organizations who are scrambling to make their productions more interactive. But who really is more engaged: A live-tweeting audience member, or someone staring silently at the stage? Quoting: 'Not surprisingly, many performers and older patrons of the arts hate this idea, which they regard as pandering to the young. But thankfully, the debate over participatory art needn’t devolve into a depressing bout of intergenerational warfare. The controversy raises a number of questions that are hard to answer: Is sustained focus even possible in mass audiences anymore? If not, what have we lost?'"
I don't think the "younger generation" (read: damn kids) necessarily need interactivity. Although they don't watch TV much, they still watch a lot of video. Although they play games, they have an unprecedented tolerance for cutscenes. Just because they tweet all the time does not mean you need to have the tweetstream intertwine with the Now that you present.
What places like the symphony need are simply content that is more relevant to those they want to attract. It's hard to sell traditional symphonic material to younger crowds, so provide that but also a bit of more contemporary stuff.
They've already been doing that in a limited way with movie scores. An more advanced form of this is the rock band Guster, who is going around to a few select cities and playing many favorite songs that have been re-cast to work with the full symphony playing. The results are spectacular.
That way you get younger listeners to understand why you might want to attend a full symphony, and will probably get them to attend more events. But you have to get them interested first.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"But who really is more engaged: A live-tweeting audience member, or someone staring silently at the stage?"
I know this is Slashdot, and I'm going to take a leap and say most folks here aren't in the performing arts, but I am, and your comparison is a false one. A live-tweeting audience member isn't necessarily engaged with the performance, but more importantly, audiences seldom sit silently and stare at the stage. The whole point of live performance is that the audience provides instant feedback to the performer and vice versa, and to each other. Some of the most energetic audiences of Shakespeare plays are teens (or younger children) who haven't learned to loathe the classics yet. The real question is what do audiences and performers gain by adding interactivity via twitter (et al) to the mix vs. what is lost.
I'll float out there that, in many circumstances, phones and other wireless devices can cause interference with wireless microphone and backstage comm systems, so asking audiences to turn of their devices is a matter of ensuring that we don't get noise through AV systems. This will not affect all circumstances, of course, but it is a hard-deck restriction in many.
I've been to Video Games Live several times, often at Wolftrap in VA. The house is constantly full to capacity, everyone has a great time, and the volunteers all say the same thing: "This is such a bigger turnout than _insert_classical_music_here_". Classical music is great and wonderful to listen to, but you shouldn't be surprised it doesn't draw the under-40 crowd.
Is sustained focus even possible in mass audiences anymore?
Nope, and you can blame information overload for that.
Someone tweeting blow-by-blow from the audience should be considered a promotions worker, not the same as someone who paid to witness the performance. Quite different. The former works to entice future concert attendance by young people. Completely legitimate function.
Is sustained focus even possible in mass audiences anymore? If not, what have we lost?
As an associate professor at the university, I can tell you many students have lost sustained focus, even in very small groups. If an explanation takes longer than 5 minutes, you lose them. If a problem takes longer than 5 minutes to solve, you lose them too. Starting 2 years ago, I modified all my lectures to have like "breakpoints" very often, so that no-one gets lost.
However, I think we already lost the Cartesian approach to breaking problems into smaller tasks. If you give them a rather simple but big problem, very few students are able the break it down and solve each part. Most will just try a global solution for a few minutes, then try the internet for a global solution, and finally get bored and say it's too complicated. One of my hypotheses is that the internet permits to solve most of the problems instantaneously, so you don't need sustained attention anymore. For the few cases where it is needed, well, that's the difference between the elite and the others...
Video of some good progressive thrash music
This isn't a movie. These are real human beings performing in front of you, for you. Have some decency and be there instead of connecting to someone somewhere else. And GTF off my lawn!
So these young people of today are unable to maintain concentration for the usually under an hour of a typical classical concert either side of the interval?
What is going to happen when they have to drive more than a couple of miles and will have to maintain concentration on a boring road with little excitement to recommend it.
It is true that if you are even a little adventurous in your classical music going then you are going to have times where the music totally fails to engage you and the mind wanders. Fortunately, your and other peoples lives do not depend on you concentrating and all that is expected of you is to sit still.
Tim.
BBC Proms goer standing through 40+ classical concerts over 8 weeks each year.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
"Is sustained focus even possible in mass audiences anymore? If not, what have we lost?"
Of course it is possible. It requires only one thing: quality performance. If you pick the wrong topic, and you combine it with awful realization, all you get is a couldn't-care-less audience. A lot of people say that it's because today's audience is inferior in many ways, but I don't agree with that. If you create a really good performance, people will like it. And that doesn't mean that you have to make something shocking, disruptive or gory, and it doesn't have to always be interactive either. Also, I'd like to add, that I'm not an "older patron", but if I'd see someone playing with their phones during a performance, I'd just like to smack'em hard. It's not like someone forces you to sit through something you don't like. And even if you don't like it, that's no reason to worsen others' experience.
One more thing: "The core audiences of the theater, opera, and symphonyâ"older, white, well-to-do elites [...]" - Really? I mean... really?! This seems crazy to such an extent I can't even easily wrap my head around it. Holy crap. You people should really visit Europe more. I'm serious. I've been to a number of theatres and concerts (meaning jazz, classical, and similar, not big summer festivals) in some european countries, and sometimes even I'm surprised by the percentage of younger (i.e. approx. 16-30) attendees.
"More and more Americans, for instance, hail from cultures in which art tends to be participatory [...] rather than something to passively observe." - I have to say, I've never felt "passive" during a couple-of-hours long concert. If you do, either the performance is junk (it happens, unfortunately), or you really should find something that you like and stop torturing yourself.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Well, are we listening to the complete Der God-Damn-Her-Dung (I'd be tweeting my ass off) or La Mer? All seriousness aside, however: in defense of those darn kids, most of the music heard at such events was made before there was recording. Lots of repetition. Certain performers have tried to deal with that by editing out (or down) thematic repetition. Yet that, too, is considered blasphemy in most quarters: how dare you not play every single note that Mozart or Beethoven wrote?
But what probably matters more than that is quality. Once upon a time in America, about 75 years ago, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Bartok lived in the same hood, within blocks of one another, in L.A. Toscanini, Stokowski, Horowitz, Rubinstein, Bernstein, all lived in this country and gave life to our culture. Walt Disney made a famous film with great music; our American Mozart, Gershwin, was an icon. Now, orchestras can't pay their musicians and a once-great culture is draining or drifting out of our cities. What rotted first, the chicken or the egg? Did we abandon quality or did it leave us? And, leaving America alone and taking a broader view: where are the new great composers? Since Shostakovich died (1975), has there been a significant symphonic composer? Can you name one?
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
But who really is more engaged: A live-tweeting audience member, or someone staring silently at the stage?
The person staring at the stage is more "engaged" as far as the production itself. When you get immersed into media the point is to forget where you really are and the distractions that come with it (like your smartphone). Hence, someone who stops to tweet about a performance by definition has to break some of their focus on the stage to do the tweeting, and if they were that tuned into the event they would forget to do it.
Remember when you went to the movies and something really fantastic or unexpected happened in the film? Remember how fucking dead quiet it got in there (when the movie itself wasn't playing any music)? No babies crying, nobody getting up to go to the bathroom/concession stand, half the audience forgetting they have popcorn in their hand? That is what they call "riveted to their seats" engagement. And nobody is tweeting or doing anything because they don't want to take their eyes off the screen or miss any dialog from crunching popcorn.
The controversy raises a number of questions that are hard to answer: Is sustained focus even possible in mass audiences anymore? If not, what have we lost?
I don't think any of this is really about focus or engagement. It's about money. Or to be more precise, marketing. Advertising loves social media, and viral marketing especially. It's not enough you come to the movie/concert/performance and paid admission. If you're not using social media to talk about -- and by extension advertise -- the event you're not giving enough back to the makers for the entertainment they gave you they feel now. These theater groups, symphonies, etc are all dealing with the same thing: an aging audience. They need fresh blood, and not just fresh blood but fresh blood that will get the word out. In today's world social media is the hottest thing in advertising, so they want tweeters in their performances.
I was, and when I got older, it got easier for me to relax and take it slower (I'm 30 so I'm not that old, just recently grown up). It's all about getting into the right mood. I don't see why they should make some radical changes to appeal to the young. Come on, sure we have Twitterz and all kinds of silly entertainment, but we're still people. Technology is just a detail. People still think fireworks are cool and they still make babies and want a safe neighborhood despite playing war games in their spare time.
Are we really that afraid of the younger generation being alien to us? And why is everybody trying to be "cool"? The kids look up to you, it's not the other way. And if they think you're stupid, they either change as they grow or make sure they don't become like you. What value does it have trying to appease them by being someone you're not?
Beethoven got dat fully sik bass. #yolo
2300 years ago Plato was complaining that the invention of writing had affected memory and attention span.
The complaint that things aren't as good as they used to be, and the young don't have the wisdom of the old, is not a new phenomenon.
The assumption that sustained focus in mass audience was possible in earlier age is just fanciful, ppl did and will always find things to distract attention from the subject. If the subject is not good enough to capture the attention of the audience the minds are going to wander no matter what
'Not surprisingly, many performers and older patrons of the arts hate this idea, which they regard as pandering to the young.
Well, the alternative is you can remain a venue for only the old, in which case your art form will die with the Baby Boomers.
You think that's preferable, right?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Do you tweet during sex? Why not?
Symphonies and Opera are pretty much the pre-electronic definition of the total multi-media experience. A big orchestra in a big hall with great sound can be mind blowing even for the drippiest online-phone addicted loser. The issue is that so many of these concert halls are still playing the same pop-classic stuff for the last 100 years. Play something by a composer who's not dead! Change the arrangement a little. Update your design and posters to be more modern and provocative. Just add one or two electronic instruments! This tweet stuff misses the point entirely. You already have a really compelling format for media saturated people, you just need to find stories, sounds and a communications style that younger people can get excited about.
It could be true that your average Jock is progressively loosing the ability for sustained concentration (did they ever have it, really?) but I see no shortage of talented young coders writing complex code. You can't do that if you can't do sustained concentration.
Maybe we're going to end up with more of an intellectual elite again compared to the masses - which would not be desirable of course, but I don't think we're going to loose that ability from the population, per se
There is more than one way to attract young people. Twitter and Facebook are unlikely since you're already telling people about something they already know but aren't particularly interested in. Youtube might work, but I doubt watching a video clip will attract most people. And then there's this: educating people while entertaining them. I learned more about appreciating classical music from this than I did my entire schooling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodame_Cantabile http://www.youtube.com/show/nodamecantabile
Like waiting for the music to end when you applaud. As a (amateur) musician, the greatest disrespect you can give me is when you applaud directly after a solo. And yes, I know it is not meant disrespectfully. But please think of the musicians.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Fret not the hour. Rather, try to figure out why you're living in 1935. I blame voters.
That's all swell and spiffy, but consider that popular culture has been given a general dumbing-down, for decades.
You can blame a lot of people, e.g. Godless Commies, and the Semi-Conscious Liberation Army, the Tri-Labial Commission, and so forth, but the bottom line is with the individual. We all have to spend time finding useful bits of culture, and preserve them.
By the time my little guy is a teen, we'll go enjoy that symphony. I myself have been mostly a slacker in this regard, but the occasion of being a father and understanding the importance of passing the torch to the next generation cannot be understated.
It's about our Precious Bodily Fluids.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I don't think the question should be whether a tweeting teen is focused, but how much their tweeting is distracting others. Even in a performance hall (as opposed to a movie theater) the light from a cell phone or tablett can be extreamly distracting. If I was in a performance hall that allowed tweeting, I would probably look for another performance hall (I just happen to be in an area where there are several I can choose from). Yeah, I may be attached at the hip to my phone, but I know when to turn the thing off!
On top of that, many performances and arrangements are copyrighted (despite the fact that the source material is public domain). AFAIK, any mobil device that can tweet is also a recording device. Any hall I have been in in the past couple of years, if you pull out your phone at all in the hall, either before, after or during the performance, you are first given a warning, then asked to leave, as you could be using it to capture the performance. Now, I guess all I have to say is "I'm tweeting" and I can bootleg an entire performance.
No, I don't like this at all. Have enough respect for other patrons and turn your mobil devices OFF (not just to silent or vibrate) when you go to a theater or performance hall. If you are on call or something that night or that week for your job, don't buy tickets for that night, or get someone to cover for you.
It starts a bad precidence. Soon, people will be tweeting in broadway shows, then in movies. We need to stop this, not encourage it!
While at our regional team's hockey games I regularly observe around 1/3rd of the audience on their various smartphones. This isn't just during intermissions or even slow parts of the games, but during fights, people smashing into the boards in front of them, etc. I think they look up when the crowd goes mad for a goal; I think.
I don't understand as these tickets aren't exactly cheap but unless these people are somehow interacting with the game (say voting on who goes on the ice next or if the last call was a good one) then I would be willing to bet that these people are going to wake up one day and say, "For this year the budget says Season's tickets are out and awesome data plan is in."
Next time I go I plan on bringing binoculars, not to watch the game, but to peek over people's shoulders to see what fascinates them so.
Nice things.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Tweeter mostly appeals to those losers who have been raised up by over-indulgent boomers and taught that their every thought and action was valuable and meaningful and MUST be shared with the world at large. I hate when TV shows think its cool/trendy to post tweets of viewers in real time, 99.5% of which are moronic and distract from the viewing experience for everyone else. However, I grant that it can be useful to broadcast breaking news of importance to citizens, not including tweets from entertainers and politicians.
Why would kids go to a concert when they can just wait for the torrent to download? If they are too cheap to spend $.99 for a song, why do you think they would shell out $25+ for a Symphony ticket?
Of course sustained focus is *checks incoming e-mail message... nah, just spam* possible all you need to do *need to remind myself to update my to do list... ah, I'll just do it now... ok, done* is cut back on distractions and *wonder if there are synonyms for distraction.... looks them up on Thesuarus.com... ooh, "divertissement" is nice... nah, I'll stick with distraction. Speaking of sticking, I wonder when the next episode of Spider-Man is coming on and what it will be about. Maybe I should check Wikipedia.*
(5 hours later)
What was I posting about again?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Old people wondering why young people are not going to live performances anymore? It's called cost. Price of tickets has been going up and up, and young people's incomes have been going down and down. A live performance is too damn expensive for young people anymore. I'm middle aged and I seldom go to concerts because they cost so much.
The only way to get the "younger generation" to go is to take them slightly against their will a la family outing, school field trip, dating guilt trip, etc. Most of them will not "get it" in the short term, and those looking at the short term will think they've failed. But try again and avoid making the experience itself horrible to get there.
In a few years you'll see if your investment paid off or not... or it might take 10 years , but once the teen need to be "cool" settles down they're a lot more reasonable and open to these sort of things. One of their peers will ask them if they've ever been to the Symphony, and they'll remember when you took them and they will have the familiarity enough to not be afraid to branch out socially themselves.
They might even dress up, and not wear their sneakers.
I don't see how tweeting about the symphony while watching the symphony is a bad thing. you are reflecting on/discussing what is going on around you.
how many people here have regularly attending the symphony? My wife went to IU music, played in symphonies for years, and we have been BSO season ticket holders for years so i speak with some knowledge here.
The symphony does not require full attention.
why do they give you the huge program full of info on the works, the performers, the hall, etc? to give you something to do. check out how many people are flipping thru it during the performance.
we usually zoom out immediately at intermission to grab a few drinks (clearly not a help to sustained attention), after having a few before the show as well.
i can easily listen to a work and pound out a few emails/tweets if i wanted to.
that said, i'm not a fan of many of the contemporary works (legend of zelda, etc). sorry, just not my thing. imho. if it brings others though, no nuts.
I think Jacobs doesn't understand the economics of the performing arts. The performing arts are largely a legacy of the feudal systems of the Middle Ages. Symphonies, like theater troupes and opera companies, depend on patronage to survive, not the box office. Ticket prices for a given performance are set high enough to keep the riff-raff out, with the gap between the production costs and the box office being closed by wealthy patrons. For a symphony to survive, they would be better served to figure out how to keep and increase their patronage, not their audience. Wealthy people aren't always motivated by the lure of profit (they are already wealthy, after all) but being recognized by their wealthy peers as a patron of the arts does have value. That is what symphonies should try to exploit, the enhanced social standing that those performances provide to their wealthy patrons. I guess a case could be made for attracting the children of their wealthy patrons, but that is decidedly not the same case as attracting the children of the riff-raff that are already structurally excluded on purpose.
I recall as a middle school student having a music class as part of the curriculum. In this class we explored many different instruments, singing and even had one day each week devoted to listening to different music genres. This was my first exposure to classical music, and specifically Mozart. It was from this early introduction that I had classical music in my mind as an enjoyable form of art and later in life have come to enjoy it even more. I wonder how many more young people could discover their own appreciation of classical composers and symphonies if they were simply exposed to the music?
I would be in favor of the ushers having stunguns to take care of anybody making noise (loud enough to be heard outside of a 1/2 meter circle).
But yes i would say that having some more "modern" stuff and stuff that Rocks would help things.
A Challenge to The Beiber (or whoever the current TweenStar is) have a performance where you are backed up by The New York Philharmonic (or any series of Named Orchestras). Bonus points if you sing Live and UnTuned.
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Is logical argument even possible on the internet anymore? If not, what have we lost?
The core audiences of the internet—older, white, well-to-do elites—are not replacing themselves as they age out of their DSL connections. To survive, news websites must create vapid articles full of made-up controversies and straw-man arguments. By making up a series of "facts" without any valid support, these sites are able to trick their readers into believing that they are using their reasoning faculties to address an important issue. Not surprisingly, many web journalists and older netizens hate this idea, which they regard as pandering to the young. But thankfully, the debate over made-up journalism needn’t devolve into a depressing bout of intergenerational warfare. The controversy raises a number of questions that are hard to answer: Is the use of facts and reason even possible on the internet anymore? If not, what have we lost? But part of the discussion, taken on its own terms, boils down to a fairly tractable psychological question: Who, really, is more engaged? Is it the reader who zips through a dozen poorly-researched or made-up articles and posts them to Slashdot, or the one who realizes that it's all a bunch of bullshit and decides to get some real work done?
So few kids actually get exposed to classical music these days that they don't even know what it is. People deride "music appreciation" classes, but we are now raising entire generations of people (starting with the Millenials, 'natch) whose entire exposure to classical music and the performing arts comes in the form of its brief appearances in cinema and perhaps a few songs during the Fourth of July (here in the States, anyway). And funding for art education in schools keeps dwindling.
If you need a slightly more contemporary example, take the popular video game Grand Theft Auto III (2001), and its most recent successor, Grand Theft Auto IV (2008). In GTA3, there are a handful of radio stations to listen to and a handful of music tracks for each -- but one of the radio stations is for opera music. The following games culminating in GTA4 all contained more music and more radio stations to choose from, but no classical music at all.
Live tweeting is already happening at a lot of nonpop concerts ... chamber music, especially, and even at symphony concerts -- by the performers. I follow a harpist who tweets and posts photos during long periods of rests.
The whole discussion is really deep desperation on the part of orchestras, and not just in the U.S. Orchestras are shutting down across Europe as well. As likely one of the few actual composers on Slashdot (this is me), I'm not awfully sorry about it. I've written a few dozen orchestral compositions, with half of them played. Audiences of all ages -- I recall one SRO with listeners ages 15-20 paying for tickets with whatever cash they had just to hear my new piece -- want to hear new music, and not just game or movie music rewritten for orchestras. But the orchestras depend on those conservative and wealthy patrons for whom the boxes at a symphony concert are a status trinket.
I'm neutral about live tweeting ... just so long as the sound is off and the screen is dim, because there are other folks who really do focus on the performance and not broadcasting their reactions to it. There's room for everyone from my point of view. But just get in there when there's new music on the program ... let the powers-that-be know that you'll come back for more new music. Otherwise it's more Beethoven for you.
I've heard some talk about encouraging live tweeting at my Church too. We are not one of those new touchy-feely casual contemporary churches, and our services are about as old-school as you can get without doing it all in Latin. We don't really want to change that, so I guess there is a lot of searching to find some way to freshen our appeal without changing what our current membership loves. This seems to be exactly the situation you are in.
Where livetweeting is really successful is sporting events. Having participated myself, and thought about it a bit wrt. Church services, I do have some thoughts on the subject.
Livetweeting has two basic flavors for two different purposes. The first is "official" tweets, which can be used live to report on the action during an event. This cheifly only for the benefit of those who cannot watch live or follow a radio feed, but still want reports of the "action." The question here is what would the "action" of a symphony or a church service be? In your symphonic case, I'm no expert, but I'd guess that if a particular piece or movement was particularly well-received it might be worth mentioning. At the least, you might report on the peices being performed. Again, not being a symphony fan I'm not sure how useful one would find that.
The other kind of livetweeting done for sporting events is unofficial tweets from fans. The main value of this is actually for them to discuss events with each other as they happen. It is a bonding experience between fans, and can significantly enhance the experience for those watching. I liken it to watching the game in a big virtual sports bar. This could add value for an event like a symphony, but it would be difficult to get a good critical mass of live tweeters at an event that is being witnessed by at most a few hundred people.
This is the old school of thinking. Symphonies no longer have the status they once had -- because younger audiences (and that includes the younger rich audiences) no longer see them that way. In the U.S. they've been educated out of equating the symphony with something important.
Totally seconded. Even the local "city" orchestras charge an absurd amount of money for a ticket to attend a performance. I went to one and everyone was 50s 60s+ for the most part, except for some quiet and respectful teenagers who were attending with their class for school and didn't mix with anyone.
Demanding "no recording" and then having obvious mikes everywhere which apparently "are making recordings [for the local radio station]" none of which I've ever heard was a bit of an insult, considering how much taxes the common person and corporation throws at supporting the buildings and equipment for these things.
On the other hand, I've listened to a lot of the recordings that orchestras have posted on their own sites for consumption, so it's obvious that they COULD be making this stuff available. At least put CDs in the local library!
Sadly we have been subjected to a culture of unreasonable and negative tolerance for several decades. Young people who should have no place in a normal school setting are now blanketed with a bunch of supposed disorders and then we have a school system eager to pretend inclusion of the unfit rather than rejection of those that can not toe the line. So disruptions in classes become the norm. The teacher teaches to the level of the slowest students and in effect all is lost. As the process has degraded the possession of real diplomas means less and less for most working class people. To compound the down fall we have a plague of certificates supposedly showing education in subjects rather than diplomas and then we have the ever present phony colleges who supposedly educate from a distance, are not really accredited and are essentially a pack of thieves. So what you get is a generation of young people with poor concentration and zero knowledge of anything like music or literature or history.
Do you hear the swirling sound that spins right before the bowl does the big gulp?
I think augmented reality could work well in cases like these. Inobtrusive, low/little light pollution compared to 3-5" screens, and not distracting the user from still taking in the sights before them. Sure, it's not traditional, but if done in such a way that it doesn't spoil the experience for others (in particular) and adds something for those visiting.. more power to them.
If that is truly the economic model symphonies still operate under then good riddance.
"Desperate attempts to engage" us drove me and my wife away from our local symphony , the Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa, CA. We had season tickets for several years. Then they started showing video on a huge screen at their performances -- not all the performances, but about half. It was incredibly annoying. They'd play something that was supposed to be pastoral, and on the giant screen they'd put pictures of mountains and forests and streams -- not the landscapes that I wanted to imagine while listening to the music, but the landscapes that they wanted me to see. They'd do a piano concerto, and for the entire duration of the piece, they'd project live video of the soloist's hands from above, moving around on the screen. Incredibly annoying. We started trying to figure out which concerts had video, and we wouldn't show up for those. When it came time to renew our season tickets, we didn't. We figured we'd just buy tickets to individual performaces that we knew wouldn't have video, but in reality that was too much of a hassle, so we never went back.
Hey, Pacific Symphony, want me and my wife back in your concert hall, helping to fill seats and keep you afloat financially? Then please bring a bunch of musicians out on the stage and have them play good music really well.
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I think Jacobs doesn't understand the economics of the performing arts. The performing arts are largely a legacy of the feudal systems of the Middle Ages. Symphonies, like theater troupes and opera companies, depend on patronage to survive, not the box office.
What you have stated is true to a certain extent however;
I grew up in the backwaters of Sault Ste Marie Ontario listening to CBS Live From Lincoln Center and especially the Sunday broadcasts of Leonard Bernstein and his young persons concerts.
Now there is absolutely no way to have children exposed to things like this other than the occasional tidbit on PBS!
What we have lost is the support of the arts by the media moguls. Our media content is dictated by the likes of Rupert Murdock and Sony Entertainment, who have reduced everything to the least common denominator. The classical recording industry has been killed off because we no longer have the mass exposure to great art, with the exception of the underfunded PBS and the BBC in the British Isles.
The promise of digital communications has not been realized to the extent it could be. For instance I would gladly pay for subscription to the MSO (Montreal Symphony Orchestra) on a basis of digital broadcast if I could choose the performances and then save a copy of the performance. I would even pay just for the audio NO VIDEO.
And this is the problem the audience is not listening they are watching. If I lived in Montreal I would attend concerts, where I live in Victoria BC there is an Orchestra but rarely do they perform anything other than war horse concerts of things like Johann Strauss Gala Events and perhaps on occasion Mozart's piano concerto 21. Now and then they make an ambitious attempt at some Beethoven or Brahms but only when they can afford to pull in outside help to bring up the horns and woodwinds to a reasonable level. They have surprisingly good strings however!
I am afraid that the entertainment industry has become so mediocre that even a good performance of the great violin concerto number 2 of Shostakovitch or even Berlioz Symphony Fantastic is now beyond the capacity of most performing ensembles today whereas in the 1960's even the Detroit or Toronto Symphony could pull it off without trouble!
We are losing our musical heritage and thus are losing the very incentive for composers to write truly great music.
Think of it this way, the stupid attitude that classical music is beyond the realm of the common man is killing our musical culture.
All the great composers throughout history used so called pop music as a basis for their melodies, Stravinsky did it unashamedly as did all the greats. Now we are so screwed up that we have lost the ability to truly listen and our musical life is little more a cacophony of disparate sounds all of which kill the mind for real music listening.
My favorite button on the remote is the mute when it comes to the entertainment of this so called digital age.
Interestingly, the local symphony here in Long Beach just started an initiative obviously designed to appeal to a younger audience - changing the rules for the upper balcony to include, yes, "feel free to take your phone out and tweet" (which I think is dumb, but whatever, if you want to, as long as you dim it and leave it on silent...), and "feel free to leave and buy drinks during the concert and then come back" (doesn't appeal to me, but I bet they make more that way selling their overpriced drinks...). But the tickets for the upper balcony are also 20 dollars, compared to like 75-150. Guess what? We're going to the symphony now! I like classical music, and I like supporting local music, I just didn't like it 75 dollars worth.
So yeah. They're doing something right.
This is just an example of the older generations 'not getting it'. This has all happened before and it will all happen again, and again, and again.
Your parents said the same sort of things about you at one point. The specifics were different, but the people acting the same.
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There is a loss of live events of this type but there is a great deal online. Many of the major orchestras make their concerts available through sites like Instant Encore and especially YouTube. This is good video and audio in many cases -- if you have broadband, it's the way to go for any interesting nonpop (classical) music.
At this time in history, there is no reason to be deprived, or have any children deprived, of a rich concert experience -- and with far better visuals than from a seat in the house.
If I'm at an expensive show and some nitwit with a cell phone is banging a keyboard I will have them thrown out. Normally all devices are supposed to be off. If I see your display light, I'm coming after you. Or at least I'll be winging spitballs at you from my balcony seat.
Thanks for your honesty. I'm not as smart as you but I did feel this disconnect you describe in your last paragraph. Instead of trying to change the system, I had to learn to adapt to it, because this "system" is what works on most people. The exception are left to sink or swim. It was a difficult time for my pride. But as Robert Frost once said about life: it goes on.
It is pretty impossible for geeks to understand how the average young person relates to long term focus and concentration. By our very makeup, we routinely tune out all distractions and focus laserlike on abstract concepts for long periods. I think there is very little difference between being immersed in debugging a block of code for a few hours and listening to a 90 minute Mahler symphony. I think it is more than a coincidence that I like abstract music and computer coding. But if the public at large continues to lose their ability to concentrate on one task and one task only for long periods of time, our civilization will suffer. We are already too distracted with the information overload of the technological age as it is.
It is not just logical argument that the internet hinders, it is ANY thought process that requires extended and deliberate thought. The ability to quickly jump to another website if one gets bored makes it difficult to do the deep diving necessary to really understand abstract concepts. When I was obtaining my education, pre-internet, I only had physical libraries with a limited number of physical books on a topic. If I found a section of a book boring, I couldn't just hop to another one, there often wasn't one. As a result, I read books cover to cover and followed the author's train of thought from beginning to end. Now I find myself only "skimming" or reading a portion of a wb page. Followng the tedious path of watching the author build and expound on abstract concepts is just simply too boring. I end up knowing a little about a lot instead of understanding a lot about a little. You can't reallty learn without being bored some of the time and working through it. The internet makes it too easy to bail on boredom.
The best way to get a younger crowd interested in the symphony is to NOT require formal attire. Make it casual, and I'm sure a LOT of young people will show up. See how the BBC does it, with their Proms. No need to resort to fancy technology.
Sadly, the American symphony system will not get it.
Excerpt:
The very clever Schickele writes music in the name of P.D.Q Bach which pokes fun at the greatest classical works, but at the same time, by poking fun, he demonstrates the utmost respect for it.
Who else would make Beethoven's Fifth Symphony the subject of sports commentators? P.D.Q Bach does in New Horizon's in Music Appreciation, possibly the funniest segment of classical music ever written. And yet, without realising it, you actually learn about the music too. The ideas of themes, motifs, cadenzas, solos and even sonata form recapitulations are painlessly expressed. ://www.good-music-guide.com/reviews/070_pdq_bach.htm
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Tweeting isn't going to really help. All you REALLY need to do is what has always been done to make symphonies, ballet and opera interesting, time immemorial: learn the story and something about the musical structure BEFORE you sit down and watch it. Even for oldsters, classical forms are prone to being boring and impenetrable without knowing the story and something about how classical music is constructed for the particular era the piece is part of. If you know the story and the structure, ONLY then does it get interesting even for us.
ob PDQ Bach http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0vHpeUO5mw