Intoducing Others to the non-standard Repertoire.

[eschiss1]

Alan is absolutely right on - many folks simply don't know any better.  If they listen to public radio here in the States, they might.  But they surely won't learn it in the concert hall.

Friday night, after a fire alarm evacuated Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis (a short in the elevator) we got a Rossini Overture, Dvorak 8th and the Cello Concerto of William Walton.  Now, on Saturday, how many of the 2000 listeners will remember ANYTHING about the concerto?  Except that it wasn't particularly pleasant listening.  I kept thinking,, why not one of Julius Klengel's concertos?  Or Emil Hartmann?  Or even Victor Herbert? 

And it goes onand on, season after season.  For 50 years I've tried to get them to do Dream of Gerontius - without succcess.  And that doesn't even put them into "unsung" territory.

huh? ... about the Walton concerto??? ok...never mind, topic for another conversation.

[Ilja]

Last weekend, I had an unexpected hugely gratifying experience. I was asked to provide questions (with examples of music) to a 'ludicrously difficult' pub quiz a friend was organising. The aim was to seek out the corners of people's knowledge (Mark, maybe an idea to try here too?). Not only was there a lot more knowledge available than I had thought (there were actually THREE people who knew of Hendrik Waelput's Flute Concerto), but quite a few people (out of the fifty-or-so attendants) came up to me afterwards asking for details on the various bits I'd played (most of the fragments in the quiz were very short, but I played longer excerpts when giving the answers) and where they might buy or download the music. Especially Rangström's Divertimento Elegiaco seemed to draw a lot of fans. It just shows that the device you use to reach people is everything; getting them to be receptive, that's the trick.

[Delicious Manager]

As a manager and promoter of concerts here in the UK for more than 30 years, this is a problem that has had me pulling my metaphorical hair out time and time again. Most casual audience members (even regular ones) are lazy and ultra-conservative. Those that might lap-up a new novel or play, eagerly attend a new exhibition of visual art or queue-up for hours to see a rarely-screened or new film are the very same people who run a mile rather than listen to some 'new' music. I don't necessarily mean new 'contemporary' music, but ANY music they haven't heard before (and perish the thought they should actually entertain listening to the music of a COMPOSER they haven't heard of!).

The dreaded words "I know what I like and like what I know" have me reaching for the disemboweling knife. People have to hold me back. No, really! I have asked these people "Were you born knowing Vivaldi's The Four Seasons or the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto? No, of course you weren't!". I wonder what leads these people to think that most composers only wrote a handful of works. Or that these composers had no lesser-known (bit not necessarily less good) contemporaries? I tell these people that they had to hear The Four Seasons for the first time at one point in their life. Before that, they didn't know it; they didn't know ANY music once upon a time. So, why are they reluctant to hear 'new' pieces after a certain amount of time?

I once ran a chamber orchestra in London which specialised in 'audacious' programmes ('audacious' being the word given to our concerts by the then managing director of the London Symphony Orchestra, who wrote to us expressly to congratulate us on our new season). On one occasion I placed Haydn's 70th Symphony (in itself a rather daring choice!) alongside an equally colourful work by another Hungarian-born composer - Melodien by Ligeti. After the concert, many people admitted enjoying the Ligeti. They would never have dreamed of hearing it if it had not been foisted upon them in the middle of an otherwise relatively 'harmless' programme. But they LIKED it (not all of them, admittedly).

With another orchestra I inserted works by composers like Enescu, Gerald Finzi and Heino Eller into programmes. People loved these works (and the orchestra were particularly grateful for having some decent new music to play!), but would never have listened to them unless someone like me 'fooled' them into doing so. I have even programmed 'unsung' works by very well known composers (eg the lovely little Tantum ergo K197 by Mozart and the Concerti a due cori by Handel).

The majority of orchestras in the UK (and particuarly in London) are boring, unadventurous and 'safe' to the point that I hardly ever bother going anymore. There are exceptions, of course, but these are comparatively rare. They are worried about getting 'bums on seats' but, in programming the same tired old warhorses time after time, they are perpetuating a most unsatisfactory situation; they are encouraging the 'lazy listeners', as I call them.

I think the stealthy 'drip feed' approach needs to be adopted by ALL performers. this way, people will get to recognise the names of the composers they never knew before and appreciate that, instead of a few dozen great works to hear, there are THOUSANDS.

[eschiss1]

I've seen the concert schedules of orchestras in the UK (as listed in places like the Musical Times and BBC Music Magazine at least), though, and compared them to those I know in the US- give me those in the UK (especially in the London area) any day. Relatively speaking.
Eric

[jerfilm]

I guess what amuses me is that at least here in Minnesota, the orchestra is perfectly willing to program new "music" by contemporary (and often unheard of) composers full of percussion clanking, squeaking violins and sliding trombones but refuse to program "new" (to the audience at least) works by unsung 19th century composers - music that I suspect is more likely to be enjoyed and remembered by a higher percentage of the audience. 

But then it's probably just as well - I would most surely drop dead of a heart attack if I were to pick up next season's program listings and discover a Raff symphony or a Ries piano concerto.....

I would undoubtedly fall into DM's catagory of "conservative" music lovers -I don't care for "music" that makes absolutely no sense to me.  But I am willing to listen to and purchase every new CD of works by Romantic era composers.

[Ilja]

I guess the overall ethic of going to concerts has something to do with it. A painting you can ignore, a film you can walk out of; but in the case of a concert you're locked in a hall with a thousand or more people all scrutinising each other to see whether everyone is serious enough. The Concertgebouw here in Amsterdam, for instance, has a series that never strays beyond the confines of the iron repertory because they know the audience is there for social just as much as musical reasons. It also explains why the CD-buying public is so different from the concert-going one.