The classical concert – an institution in decline?
Composer Christopher Fox examines the ways in which orchestras are keeping up with contemporary ideas of spectacle.
It’s an odd sort of theatre. The stage is full of people, men and women. They wear a sort of uniform, men one style, women another. They hold musical instruments, which they play as directed by a figure at the front of the stage. Their focus is on him – and it usually is a him – never us; we have paid to see them but they barely acknowledge our presence. They get on with their work and we watch and listen. It’s odd, but it’s popular, too. In cities across the industrialised world musicians and audiences regularly enact the strange rituals of this cult in halls built specifically for the purpose. The rituals have evolved over many generations but we are doing something that our grandparents, and their grandparents before them, would recognise.
When, 40 years ago, I first started to go to orchestral concerts, I was convinced I was observing an institution in decline. At the heart of the orchestral repertoire were the symphonies of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, but the flow of new work into the repertoire had been arrested. Orchestras were still commissioning composers to write for them but the results didn’t seem to please anyone. Composers deconstructed the orchestra, parodied its traditional forms and yet expressed surprise when orchestral musicians and their audiences were less than enthusiastic. A circle of distrust developed: composers were daunted by the prospect of writing for this large, regimented ensemble; orchestras regarded new music as an irritating interruption of normal musical life... Keep reading on The Guardian
It’s an odd sort of theatre. The stage is full of people, men and women. They wear a sort of uniform, men one style, women another. They hold musical instruments, which they play as directed by a figure at the front of the stage. Their focus is on him – and it usually is a him – never us; we have paid to see them but they barely acknowledge our presence. They get on with their work and we watch and listen. It’s odd, but it’s popular, too. In cities across the industrialised world musicians and audiences regularly enact the strange rituals of this cult in halls built specifically for the purpose. The rituals have evolved over many generations but we are doing something that our grandparents, and their grandparents before them, would recognise.
When, 40 years ago, I first started to go to orchestral concerts, I was convinced I was observing an institution in decline. At the heart of the orchestral repertoire were the symphonies of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, but the flow of new work into the repertoire had been arrested. Orchestras were still commissioning composers to write for them but the results didn’t seem to please anyone. Composers deconstructed the orchestra, parodied its traditional forms and yet expressed surprise when orchestral musicians and their audiences were less than enthusiastic. A circle of distrust developed: composers were daunted by the prospect of writing for this large, regimented ensemble; orchestras regarded new music as an irritating interruption of normal musical life... Keep reading on The Guardian