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? 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!
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
Glass, Copland, Britten? Tomita, Schnittke, Khachaturian? Khodaly, Salonen, Takemitsu? I've limited myself to significant symphonic composers (feel free to engage me on the error bars around "significant") who were alive as of your (pretty arbitrary) date of 1975. Do I need to go on, or are you satisfied that you were just fucking wrong?
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?
"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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