Musicians Behaving Badly

In recent years, it's become an article of faith among those who run orchestras that audiences are terribly turned off by the way orchestra musicians conduct themselves onstage. In particular, orchestras who continue to face inward when brought to their feet by the conductor are a favorite target, with the idea being that it's disrespectful not to face the audience that's applauding you. (The Minnesota Orchestra has had an unofficial policy of turning out to face the audience since shortly after I joined in 2000, and Osmo has occasionally reminded us that when we do this, we should try to remember not to allow the exhaustion of the concert to show on our faces, because it tends to look from the audience like either boredom or unhappiness.)

Other common complaints include musicians who look bored during concerts (especially if they are wind players who only play a few bars in a particular piece,) members of the orchestra speaking to each other during bows, and musicians whose dress does not appear to be up to the formal standards of the business. (This last type of complaint is nearly always directed at female musicians, who have a considerably less restrictive dress code than the men - we wear white tie and tails in the evening, black suits for matinees, while their dress code basically just says, "Wear something black.")

Musicians can get fairly defensive about these sorts of complaints, and I'll attempt not to do that here. There are those who believe strongly that we're on stage to play music, and that the visual component is irrelevant, and therefore not the audience's business. This is, of course, a ludicrous and self-defeating argument, since we're supposedly engaged in a life-or-death struggle of trying to convince people that the live music experience is better than sitting at home with your CD collection. Of course there's a visual component, and of course the audience will be affected if we look as if we resent them, or are bored by what we're doing.

That having been said, I have occasionally been stunned by some of the complaints orchestras receive, and amused by how contradictory they are. I've seen letters from patrons complaining that a particular musician was moving too much while s/he played, and letters complaining that the orchestra ought to move more, so as to indicate interest. (That different musicians have different physical styles which are not easily changed never seems to occur to anyone. I tend to be a mover, largely because I have a small frame and short arms for the instrument I play, and therefore I have to adjust my arm angles more than someone with longer arms would. I also find it easiest to play exactly with my principal when I roughly mimic his breathing and movements.) I've heard complaints from the audience that musicians look too unhappy while performing, but also know of at least one circumstance where a specific member of the Minnesota Orchestra was sharply upbraided for having been smiling too broadly at some orchestral inside joke during a concert.

An old friend of mine who started her career as the acting concertmaster of a Deep South orchestra reported that her employer received regular complaints about what she wore to concerts. One letter would blast her for wearing heels that were too high and therefore provocative (she is a tall, willowy sort,) and the next week, another complainer would write in to ask whether it was too much to ask that the concertmaster not wear ugly flats to a formal concert. Her black nylons were derided as too sexy, but even a flash of bare leg would draw another complaint. Interestingly, no one ever seemed to complain about anything to do with her performance as a musician.

It's easy to dismiss a lot of complaints about our comportment as nitpicking by the type of people who read newspapers only so that they can look for supposed examples of left- or right-wing bias. An analogy you hear musicians go to frequently is that of athletes on the field of play, who are hardly expected to adjust their facial expressions to suit the crowd. (It's a flawed analogy, of course, since athletes are constantly assailed by press and public for supposed violations of protocol and appearance that have little to do with the game.) But the reality is that musicians are just as concerned as anyone about the way we appear before the public, and debates rage regularly on industry message boards concerning what visual standard we should hold ourselves to.

I've always sort of fallen back on the idea that we ought to concern ourselves primarily with being whole-heartedly engaged in what we're doing on stage, and with enjoying the music ourselves so that our energy will be infectious. But that's a bit of a dodge on my part, really, since I've also spent time on this blog describing the various shenanigans engaged in by our viola section, both in rehearsals and in concert. Is it disrespectful of the audience for a handful of string players to occasionally get a bit silly during a show? Does the answer change if the music itself is silly and fun? Do we have a responsibility to always treat the music we're playing as Great Art That Must Be Respected, or has our genre gotten over itself enough to allow for a variety of atmospheres in the concert hall?

Those weren't rhetorical questions. I think it's safe to say that most of the readers of this blog don't fall into the stereotypical category of Stuffy Classical Music Fan, so I'm genuinely interested in what you think an orchestra's comportment ought to be. Fire away in the comments, if you would...