Читать книгу Musicking - Christopher Small G. - Страница 9

As we wait for the orchestra to assemble on the stage, it is worth taking a look behind the scenes in the hall. A concert hall is a very complex place, and just to contemplate the technology and the logistics of the events that take place here can tell us much about their nature.

Very little takes place here spontaneously. Every event needs a great deal of planning and organization, both inside the hall and outside it; and an extensive infrastructure, most of it invisible to the audience, has to be brought into action if the event is to take place at all. In the first place, programs have to be planned and artists engaged well in advance of the concert. These days artists who have drawing power are probably members of the international jet set and may have to be engaged as much as years ahead.

This is quite unlike the situation that prevailed in Europe up to well into the nineteenth century, when a musician might arrive in a town or city, contact some of the musically most influential people there, and arrange a series of concerts, all within a matter of days. There were even handbooks for traveling musicians, giving the names of such people; the composer Carl Maria von Weber compiled one in the 1820s for every town of any size in Germany. No musician would give a whole concert on his own; local performers, amateur and professional, would be called in to collaborate and possibly the local orchestra with whom he would play a concerto of his own composition, the orchestra playing generally at sight or with at most a single rehearsal. Among the first to give entire solo performances was Franz Liszt, in the 1840s, who at first called them “monoconcerts” before settling on the term more familiar to us, “recital.”

Artists with the kind of charisma that gives them real drawing power today would appear to be as scarce as diamonds and as hard to cultivate as orchids. The critic Norman Lebrecht (1991) notes that the shortage of star conductors is becoming a real problem for orchestras today, with a consequent inflation in fees. But orchids thrive in the rain forest without human assistance, and diamonds lie around in many places waiting to be picked up; in the same way one is led to wonder if the scarcity of stars is not created and maintained artificially. If the number of young aspirants emerging from music colleges and conservatories every year, possessing technical powers that would make Liszt or Paganini blench and trying to gain entry to the major concert circuits, is an indication, there would appear to be no shortage of musical talent across the concert and operatic world; indeed, the problem seems to be the opposite, that of finding gainful employment for this overabundance of talent and skill.

It is obvious that virtuosi and those who profit from their labors should have an interest in keeping their numbers low; as with diamonds and orchids, it is scarcity that creates their value. In this they are no different from the members of all professions, whose requirements in terms of entry qualifications are designed as much to protect the status of the profession and to maintain the price of their services by restricting numbers as they are to protect the public.

There are plenty of mechanisms for restricting entrance to the big-time concert circuit. Competitions are one; although they purport to function as devices for the discovery and nurture of talent, they in fact operate in the precisely opposite direction; no young artist these days can hope to gain entry to the big time without having been taken up by a major agency, and no major agency will touch a young artist who has not gained at least a second place in a major competition. As the number of competitions is limited, so also is the number of winners; and since competitions are a zero- sum game, for every winner there have to be losers. Those losers, unless they undergo some miraculous stroke of good fortune, are consigned to the minor circuits—although those today are rapidly shrinking because of the dominance of megabuck agencies that are interested only in stars—or to teaching, arts administration, criticism and other such fallback occupations. For every young artist who makes it to the big time there must be dozens at least who are just as good or who, since success breeds success, would be just as good if they were to receive the encouragement and experience that working in the big time brings.

As an aside, we note also that competitions by their nature favor those who are at their best in a highly competitive situation. The reticent pianistic genius Clifford Curzon once remarked in an interview that he would not have got to first base if he had been required to enter a competition; fortunately for us he belonged to the precompetition era. On the other hand, I remember hearing some years ago the winner of a BBC young conductors’ competition, when interviewed on TV in the first flush of his success, announcing, rather truculently I thought, “Up to now I’ve been competing with others. From now on I’m competing with myself.” It is in this way that the culture gets the artists it deserves.

There is plenty of evidence of manipulation by major agencies of the market in virtuosi. Over the past few years there has been a series of takeovers of of artists’ agencies by megabuck operators, resulting in a small number of superagents who virtually control the market. This has resulted in an outrageous inflation of fees for a few star conductors and soloists while the orchestras they conduct and with which they play frequently teeter on the edge of bankruptcy—a process in which the stars themselves have for the most part cheerfully colluded.

In addition, a conductor’s agency will often put pressure on him to employ as soloists artists who are on their books, to the point that those agencies have some of the world’s major orchestras and opera houses virtually sewn up, not only for live performance but also for recordings and videos. In view of the fact that these orchestras are generally subsidized by public money, the channeling of so much of that money into the pockets of these stars, and of course of their handlers, might seem morally questionable, but it is no more than normal business practice in the contemporary world of unregulated “market values.” It does emphasize the extent to which concert halls partake of the nature of that world and do not exist in isolation from it. Here, as elsewhere in the modern world, it is the passing of money that mediates relationships.

Putting together programs for a concert season is also subject to a number of constraints. The first is that most concert artists today, and to some extent conductors, have at the tips of their fingers, vocal cords or batons, ready to play or sing or even to conduct at any one time, only a relatively small repertory, and they are reluctant to spend time learning anything outside it, especially if it is to be for only one or a few performances. In addition, for many artists the choice of works is to a large extent dictated by their own management, which is naturally interested in having them please as large a public as possible.

The second is that the repertory of works that will today attract a sizable audience virtually froze around the time of the First World War, and little that has appeared since then carries the appeal for the average audience that earlier works do. There is thus only a finite number of pieces to be shared by a large number of virtuosi and orchestras, and the hall’s management naturally does not want a series of performers all playing the same works night after night. The number of performances of even, say, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that can be accommodated in a season is limited.

Third, there is the question of the availability of scores and sets of orchestral parts. With the great warhorses there is no problem; most orchestral managements either have their own or rent them on a permanent loan basis. But with less often played works, publishers are usually prepared to print only a limited number of copies for their hire library; and with symphony concerts an international business extending over every continent no orchestra can afford to program a work from a publisher’s hire library without checking well beforehand—and that may mean months or even years ahead—that the score and orchestral parts will be available for rehearsals and performance.

All this means that who plays and what is played at each concert is the result of extensive negotiation, in which those who actually attend the concert and pay for tickets are hardly, if at all, represented. With star performers jet-setting over the face of the globe, computers as well as telephones, faxes, and E-mail are essential management tools.

Then there is the question of publicity. The potential audience has not only to be informed about the concert—about what is to be played and who is playing it—but has to be made to want to attend. Concert halls, and orchestras, are businesses like any other, and like all businesses they have a product to sell, namely, performances. The fact that most concert halls and orchestras receive a degree of state, municipal or private subsidy does not alter this fact; what counts is, as they say, bums on seats. Concert halls and orchestras stand in relation to their audiences as producers to consumers, and like all other producers they tailor their products to the assumed preferences of their consumers, while at the same time manipulating those preferences as best they can by deploying techniques of advertising and marketing similar to those that are used for other products.

Concert advertisements in newspapers used to confine themselves to a simple announcement of venue, date, time, performers and works. But as the competition has heated up in recent years (not so much between orchestras, since most cities have only one, but between symphony concerts and other urban entertainments), we find extensive use made of more sophisticated advertising techniques. The style of the advertising is interesting, for it often uses language and images that are similar to those used to sell high-class goods such as expensive perfumes, watches and luxury cars. It is clearly aimed at the same kind of public, or at least at a public that likes to identify itself with the buyers of such items.

I treasure a full-page advertisement that appeared on November 28, 1989 in the New York Times, for a series of concerts in which all of the string quartets of Beethoven were to be played. Under a large “artistic” representation of the head of the composer and a facsimile of his signature, both of them familiar icons to classical music lovers, was this text, printed in an elegant Roman typeface: “The greatest music of the greatest composer the world has known, distilled into a rare and unforgettable experience for each privileged listener by the supreme mastery of the world’s greatest string quartet . . . the whole-souled dedication and devotion to the master’s work of this unique ensemble has earned clamorous ovations and paeans of press praise in performance after performance the world over . . . one of the rare unforgettable experiences of a lifetime, a spiritual renewal for those who return year after year, an indescribable revelation for anyone encountering this marvelous music for the first time.” And so on, with at the end the salesman’s pitch: “Subscribe now and Save $15 on 6 Concerts.”

Such advertisements reinforce the idea that musicians and their performances are as much a part of the modern world and its commerce as is the field of popular music, and indeed as are expensive perfumes and luxury cars and that they are equally governed by its imperatives. What one might find irritating, even a touch hypocritical, is the pretense often encountered, and clearly implied in the above advertisement, that the musicians are doing what they do for pure love of music without a thought for worldly ambition or financial gain—in contrast to rock groups and other popular performers who, of course, are only in it for the money.

Another important functionary of the modern concert world is the critic. The profession of critic developed over the nineteenth century, contemporaneously with the growth of public concerts and concert halls to which one paid for admission, and with the takeover of public performance by professional musicians. As active amateur participation in public music making declined, so did the confidence of many people in their own musical judgment. Today, with so many virtuosi, so many composers and so many orchestras and conductors vying for public attention and offering their performances as commodities for sale, it is not surprising that people should feel the need for a consumer guide, both to tell them what is good and what is bad, what is à la mode and what is passé—in short, what they should and should not buy—and to give them confidence in the rightness of their choice.

Given the mercantile and nonparticipatory nature of today’s concert world, criticism is a perfectly honorable profession, but we should remember that wherever people participate fully in musical performance or where musicking is part of a larger social, religious, or political ritual, there is no need for critics. In the medieval and Renaissance church there were no critics, nor were there any in the world of palace or castle or royal or ducal opera house; as like as not it was the archbishop, king, or duke who decided what was good or bad, and everyone else agreed with him. In general the prince’s ability to dictate musical taste related to the strength of his political power; Louis XIV of France, in his day the most powerful man in Europe, was also its leading tastemaker. On the other hand, among the egalitarian Ewe of Ghana, John Miller Chernoff (1979) tells us, when he played the drums badly for the dancing, people danced their criticism, either by dancing in a listless manner or by simplifying their dancing to help him.

Once people have been attracted to the performance and have ordered, paid for and received their tickets, in itself no mean logistic feat, they have to be brought to and taken home from the hall. Many people will have traveled considerable distances, and few will have come on foot, without relying on some form of public or private mechanized transport. Without a highly developed system of transport extending into a sizable hinterland, none of today’s big concert halls would survive. This means that any concert in such a hall depends not only on international managements and advertising agencies, not only on sophisticated means of communication, but also on means of transport: airplanes, buses, trains and automobiles.

Then there is the internal organization of the hall itself. Like any other enterprise in our society, it is organized hierarchically, with its boss and its administrators as well as its proletariat, whose joint task is to keep the place running smoothly and produce concerts throughout the season without the appearance of effort. It needs accountants, lawyers and clerks; secretaries and computer operators; ticket collectors and ushers; program sellers; electricians, sound men, piano tuners, and other technicians; hefty men to shift the piano around and arrange the orchestra seating; and staff for the bars and restaurants, not to mention the cleaners, those Nibelungen of the modern industrial state without whose underpaid services not only concert halls but also school, factories, offices, and airports would quickly choke to death on their own rubbish.

Most of these people are invisible to us or at least taken for granted and unnoticed even when we do glimpse them at work, but all are working to create the illusion of a magical place set aside from everyday life, where we can contemplate, in stillness and in silence, the works of master musicians. All are contributing to the nature of the musicking, and their working relationships, and those between them and the audience, are an essential part of the relationships of the events that take place in the hall and thus of the meanings that the performances generate.

If we imagine a performance in which the members of the orchestra sold the tickets themselves, arranged their own seating and moved the piano around and where everyone, audience as well as conductor, soloist and orchestra members, stayed afterward to clean up, there would be brought into existence another set of human relationships, another kind of society. It would not necessarily be a better society, but we may be sure that those taking part would not remain strangers to one another for very long. Another set of relationships again would be created if one person were to pay the expenses of the performances and if all the audience were to be his guests, as in the old days of aristocratic patronage, or if everyone concerned in the performance were to give their services free and no admission charge were made. It is a matter of choices; there is nothing inevitable about the arrangement that prevails in today’s concert halls. It was not ordained by nature but is a social arrangement.

For each concert there are a thousand details to be attended to. Program notes have to be written and edited, the program booklet designed and printed with its photos of conductor and soloist, the piano tuned and its depth of touch adjusted to the exacting demands of the famous pianist, the orchestra’s seating placed in the conductor’s desired manner and the correct orchestral parts for tonight’s works placed on the music racks that stand before each player. The flowers that are presented to an artist with such apparent spontaneity at the end of the performance do not materialize on their own, nor does the bottle of his favorite brand of malt whisky discreetly placed in the famous conductor’s dressing room. Even the disembodied hand that pulls aside the curtain or opens the door to admit the conductor to the stage belongs to someone who was told to do it.

Before a note of music has been played, the building and its mode of organization have created among those present a set of relationships, which are a microcosm of those of the larger industrial society outside its walls. As we have already noted, all the relationships of the concert hall are mediated by the passing of money. To put it flatly, those who pay for admission, whoever they may be, are entitled to enter and to take part in an event, while those who do not pay are not. And on the other side, those who get paid will play their part in making the event happen, while those who do not get paid will not. There is in our society nothing very remarkable about that, of course; what is remarkable is the care that is taken to conceal the functions of administration and accounting, to create the illusion in the great building of a magical world where things happen of themselves, where nobody has to work and nobody needs money. It is none of the audience’s business how much the performers are paid—and in the case of many conductors and soloists it is remarkably difficult to find out.

If this link between the lofty ceremony of the symphony concert and the down-to-earth values of industrial society as a whole seems farfetched, consider this. In countries outside the older industrial heartland of Europe and the United States of America, an early sign that the conversion to the industrial philosophy and the social relationships that belong to it has taken place and become interiorized is often the takeover of the country’s musical culture by Western-style musicking. As the relationships of industrial society take over and a middle class develops that has grown prosperous on the wealth generated by industry, so professional symphony orchestras appear in the major cities, along with opulent centers for the performing arts built to house their performances. Conservatories of Western classical music are opened and infant-prodigy virtuosi, mostly the sons and daughters of the newly wealthy middle class, begin to astonish audiences in the concert halls of the older musical centers, often showing a freshness of approach that must reflect the newness of their encounter with the musical works of the Western tradition.

On the other hand, the Western-style popular music that frequently develops at the same time tends to explore, affirm and celebrate other desired relationships and other identities, in particular that of the industrial proletariat that comes into existence to serve the purposes of the new middle class. As I noted in an earlier book (Small 1987), it tends, as a lower-status music, to be less concerned with notions of correctness and is thus able to absorb into itself elements of traditional ways of musicking, which the middle classes, in their eagerness to align themselves with the international industrial culture, reject, even though at the same time they may pay lip service to them.

It happened in Japan around the end of the nineteenth century; a marker of a kind is that the piano firm of Yamaha is now a little over a hundred years old. It happened in South Korea in the 1960s and is happening today in Indonesia and the People’s Republic of China. And if a 1989 article in a London newspaper is to be believed, the wealthier parts of the Arab world are becoming interested (Campbell 1989).

This article tells us, with breathless enthusiasm, of the formation of the Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra in the oil-rich Gulf state of Muscat and Oman, by command of the sultan himself. Teenage boys are being recruited from remote tribal communities and are being trained in the English language and in the disciplines of the symphony orchestra by a former British army musician. This orchestra, if it is anything more than a passing sultanic whim, may well be part of a new phenomenon, for Muscat and Oman is not an industrial state at all in the ordinary sense and has no middle class to speak of; its wealth comes from industry at secondhand, so to speak, through supplying the oil needs of industrial states. But the article speaks clearly of the desire, on the part of the sultan at least, to show that Muscat and Oman is a civilized state. Even the headline, MUSICAL OASIS IN THE DESERT, carries an interesting implication: at last, a real musical culture has come to the hitherto deprived Omanis.

This state of affairs has, of course, partly to do with the fact that symphony orchestras and concert halls are expensive and can be afforded only by wealthy societies. Today that means societies that have benefited, whether directly or indirectly, from the wealth generated by industrialization. But for the Western concert tradition to become established, it needs more than the ability to afford it; it needs the desire and the will to spend the wealth on this rather than on other things, including other ways of musicking. That has to do with the acceptance of the philosophy that lies behind industrial development. I discussed this philosophy at length in an earlier book (1977) and shall not reiterate it here, but it concerns the acceptance of the scientific worldview; of Western-style rationality, including the Cartesian split between body and mind; and of the discipline of the clock. Certainly, those values are clearly in evidence in this important ceremony of the industrial middle classes.

A modern symphony concert, then, is a very different kind of event from those at which most of the musical works we hear there today were first performed. It is not unfair to compare the modern concert hall with that other contemporary leisure phenomenon, the theme park, whose archetype is the various Disneylands. There, as here, all the resources of modern technology are put unobtrusively to work to create an artificial environment, where the paying customers are led to believe that what they are experiencing is a re-creation of the world of their ancestors, without the dirt and smells perhaps, but otherwise authentic. It is, of course, nothing of the kind but is a thoroughly contemporary affair that celebrates thoroughly contemporary relationships.

Similarly, in the modern concert hall we hear the ideal relationships of the past re-created, not as they were or in their own terms, which would in any case be impossible, but in contemporary terms, which is to say, in terms of the relationships that those taking part in tonight’s performance feel to be ideal. In this the relationships created by modern technology play an important, though largely unacknowledged part. The tension between those two sets of relationships is an interesting matter that I shall be exploring later.