How Do We Encourage Audiences to Listen?

After considering Sarah’s last post on the curiosity of art demographics, I spent much of this week speculating about why it often seems to be considered cool to "consume" culture in the form of films, plays, gallery exhibits, etc., but not to seek out new music. 

Is this because we are such a visual culture? Music is contextualized for us on an everyday basis as providing an emotional backdrop in movies, TV shows, commercials, etc. People are becoming more and more programmed to understand the visual as the foreground and the auditory as the background, no matter how important and vital that “background” may be in shaping aesthetic, tone, and meaning. Perhaps this commercial reality bleeds over into the artistic realms?

Or could our lack of audience be due to the fact that we no longer have an oral tradition? This might be a stretch, but sometimes I wonder if the loss of the oral tradition has weakened not only our memory muscles (which IS relevant for following a musical idea through an hour-long symphony…), but also our overall aural perception. 

Also, because of the reality of recording technology, music has become as commonplace as hotel art and, in a similar way, fades into the background of our busy, multitasking lives. Ipods and other devices encourage us to listen to music privately and on-the-go—two concepts that are in complete opposition to the concert hall experience.

Implicit in all the above is something that I have found myself coming back to this week, while speculating: I think people have trouble with the idea of sitting down and spending time just listening to music by itself. The idea of music having more than a background, passive, or subservient role is, perhaps, somewhat alien to a lot of people (sadly, some might even say “boring,” given our over-stimulated, media-age senses). It seems like if the visual element is not being adequately satisfied, people become fidgety and our entrenched sense of the “importance” of multitasking might take over. I can easily imagine someone thinking during a concert, “I wish I'd brought my work!” Something they might not think (or be able to get away with) at a movie, a play, or an exhibit (for the record, I have seen people reading at the symphony).  

To take this from another angle, does the art-music demographic suffer due to the elusiveness of auditory clues? When you look at a painting, you have it right there in front of you. Your reasoning for liking or disliking it can be tangible, no matter how educated your opinion: “I don’t like those colors,” “These shapes create an overall unity,” “His expression really conveys pain,” “This piece emphasizes her ongoing use of line and shading in her works,” etc. Unless you’re a musician or a music geek, talking about music can be a lot harder. Sometimes I hear people say about a piece, “I don’t know anything about music, so I really can’t say,” or, “I don’t like it, but I don’t know why.” How can we give non-musicians a vocabulary or entryway into communicating about music in a way that allows them to feel involved, to feel some sense of ownership over the cultural exchange? 

I definitely don’t have answers to any of these questions. But I think the main thing that I do know is that we are somehow missing the boat in terms of finding a demographic for new music and some of these topics may be relevant. How can we make it cool for more people in the mainstream to go to the symphony or the local new music concert?

And some other questions to ponder… Do we accept an overall visually-based and technology-based culture and focus more on multimedia pieces, collaborations, opera and theater pieces, and electronic music? And, on an even broader level, do we accept music’s role as a “backdrop” or do we try to figure out a way to create a cultural need for art-music to come more into the foreground?

Posted by Natalie