Behavior Modification

Chicago-area violinist Holly Mulcahy has an article up over at The Partial Observer that has been making me cringe all week. The title is "How to Alienate Your Audience In 10 Easy Steps," and it's a full frontal assault on the subculture of professional orchestral musicians. Among the sins Mulcahy outlines: glaring at audience members rude enough to cough or shuffle during concerts, rolling eyes when a colleague on stage makes a mistake, refusing to smile (ever), deflecting compliments from the audience, and noticably sneering at anyone who enjoys "light" classics or pops.

It's a difficult article for me to read, because I've seen everything on Mulcahy's list go on in orchestras I've played in (the Minnesota Orchestra included) on a regular basis, and for most of my career, I've wondered how exactly we as an industry get away with it. More than that, I've wondered why I often feel like the only one who thinks it's a problem. (I'm sure I'm not the only one, but you'd be amazed how many musicians become hugely offended when told, even politely, that their onstage comportment could stand to be improved.)

So why is it that members of symphony orchestras seem to think that it's perfectly all right to look sour, glare at the audience, or hold involved conversations while standing to acknowledge the audience's applause? (That last one's a personal pet peeve of mine.) I've been thinking about it for a while, and I've come up with two theories.

The first is that we do it because we literally don't know any better. Musicians, alone among performing arts professionals, are never, at any point in their training, taught to be performers. We're taught how to play music, and how to take direction. No one ever teaches us the tricks that actors, dancers, and singers learn, such as how to make the whole auditorium feel like you're looking at them, how to walk across a stage without ever putting your back to the audience, or how to take a curtain call. The full extent of our exposure to the choreography of the stage is that, at some point, we'll probably be told of the tradition that, if you are a man, and you are performing with one or more women, you should allow them to leave the stage ahead of you. (I don't know why we still do this, actually, but pretty much all of us do in solo and chamber music situations.) But we've simply never learned about how one goes about looking engaged while on stage. (Important note: looking engaged is very different than actually being engaged. Either one is possible without the other.)

But many of the same musicians I've seen sporting wrinkled, stained tuxedo shirts and looking like they just ate a lemon during the bows wouldn't think of dressing or acting this way for a string quartet performance, and that goes to my second theory, which is that there's actually something about playing in an orchestra that leads to a lack of awareness of how one's behavior might be perceived.

Bear with me, here. While most of us who play in orchestras for a living love our jobs, it is a very different profession than many people imagine it to be. While musicians now have much greater control over workplace conditions than we used to (thanks to collective bargaining,) we still have essentially zero control over moment-to-moment artistic decisionmaking. The conductor, regardless of whether s/he is a genius or a moron, has absolute power over how we shape every phrase, whether we follow the directions in the score to the letter, what speed we play each piece, and countless other minutiae that, in any other musical situation, would be the province of the people holding the instruments.

Now, of course, there's a very good reason for this, and it's that you can't reasonably give 98 people an equal voice in these things without chaos erupting, so someone's got to be in charge. But the lack of artistic control does lead some musicians to feel like little more than cogs in a huge machine. (This is exactly why some musicians wouldn't join an orchestra for anything.) The sheer size of the ensemble also makes you feel pretty small and insignificant at times, especially if you're a string player surrounded by 10-15 other people playing exactly the same notes that you are. You can grow to feel downright invisible, in fact, and that, I think, is what leads some musicians to believe that they can do whatever they want to do on stage, because no one's really looking at them, specifically.

This is an industry-wide issue, and I've never seen a professional orchestra that really seemed to have the problem licked. In fact, orchestra managers and staffers frequently throw up their hands when asked about it, believing that musicians will be so resistant to any attempt to change our comportment that it's not even worth wading into the muck. And while I'm not going to deny that there are a few musicians out there so disconnected from reality that they don't think the audience has the right to expect anything but pretty notes from them, the vast majority of us are horrified when we hear that we've offended the people who paid good money to come see us.

Here's the bottom line: if there's one thing that orchestra musicians are good at, it's following directions. We may be a bunch of prima donnas at heart, but when we're given an order from someone in authority, we grumble and snarl... and then we do as we're told. If an orchestra, any orchestra, wanted to change the way we look and act during bows, all it would take is for someone in authority to make it a new rule - no different from the rules that control what we wear for our concerts and what time the rehearsals start. And someone ought to.