The Fredösphere

I can't help but react to Alex Ross' piece on how recording technology changes live music performance.  Brace yourselves -- I'm going to extrapolate wildly from a single experience.  Years ago I attended a concert by a pop group whose name was "Feet of Clay" or some such.  I enjoyed it well enough, since they stuck mostly to reproducing their CD work with which I was familiar.  Nevertheless, because I get overstimulated and exhausted by noisy, crowded environments, I found myself in need of a break.  Wandering the lobby, I was stunned by how many concert goers were already there.  I realized that these kids attend concerts with an expectation that it will hold their continuous attention no more than a baseball game.  Maybe less.

Then it hit me.  For lots of people -- maybe most people -- music is what it has been for many since at least the time of Haydn:  incidental.  For these people, all music aspires to the condition of incidentalness.  It is background music for a drama; the drama of daily life.  They never expect to have what I always believed was the ordinary music experience:  you sit quietly, you give your full, uninterrupted attention to the music performance, you are moved emotionally, you give the performance your white-gloved applause, and you leave.  For these people, music does for their ears what a Glade air freshener does for their noses.

My goal is not to indulge in snobbery so much as to remark what a rare accomplishment it is to get an entire crowd really, really with you when you perform for it.  Indeed, I can't help but wonder how many classical concert goers are faking it in the standing ovations they give out so promiscuously.  Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when Ian Moss asks why it's so hard for new music to move people.