Move to the music

One of my earliest musical memories involves sitting in a Honolulu Symphony concert (I grew up in Hawaii) watching, slightly mortified, my father on the edge of his seat, swaying to and occasionally air-conducting a Brahms symphony (is it the burden of children to be embarrassed of their parents??). Dad was an enthusiastic amateur musician and going to the Symphony was a regular Sunday afternoon activity. At nearly every concert he could barely keep still, so great was his need to move to the music and to participate in those performances.

A fairly recent New York Times article confirms what I have always suspected – that music directly affects those parts of the brain responsible for physical motion. Music should make us want to move. And yet, movement and participation is antithetical to the modern “concert experience”, where audiences are expected to sit still and silent until the very end.

This is something that I struggle with. On one hand, what takes place on stage during a symphonic concert requires a tremendous amount of skill and concentration, and it would be terribly distracting, if not impossible (how do you clap along to Webern?) for the audience to actively participate in any way. On the other hand, these constraints feel unnatural and forced – I mean, who really can sit still when listening to, say, the last movement of Beethoven 7? If people wanted to spontaneously leap out of their seats and dance for joy, I’m rather inclined to let them do so.

Of course, the standard concert hall is not entirely conducive to impromptu dancing (and you would probably get escorted out by an usher immediately!). Sometimes a change of venue can put a very different spin on how music is experienced; in my two seasons with the Richmond Symphony, the concert series I headed took place at a rock venue, the Canal Club. It’s all part of a larger trend (check out this article from Symphony magazine) to redefine the performance experience of classical music.

I bring this up because of what I observed during these performances at the Canal Club, where seating was limited and a majority of the audience stood for the 55-minute performance (and to be clear, although we were not performing complete symphonies, we were certainly playing movements of symphonies and larger works by Mozart, Ravel, Prokofiev, Janacek – “real” music, not “classical light” – although I don’t find anything wrong with that either…more on that in another entry). While not everyone did so (we are so conditioned to be quiet and still while listening to Mozart!), people were able to move to the music. Sometimes it was swaying or nodding. For the least self-conscious (and kids excel here), there was actual dancing, jumping.

I’m not saying that we should make audiences stand through a Mahler symphony (although sitting may not be much more comfortable – many halls have seats that feel worse than flying domestic economy class). So, the conundrum remains – if not as part of a conventional concert, how can we best experience symphonic music?