In this post, Steven Winn — arts journalist, critic and co-moderator of our live events in San Francisco — explores some of the questions we’ll be asking as part of the American Orchestra Forum.
Try talking about this topic without mentioning technology in the first 30 seconds. Then try saying something meaningful about where that’s taking us. Since no one saw Facebook or Twitter coming, no one knows what’s coming – or going away – next. Measure by measure commentary streaming along with a concert? Synesthesia devices that translate music into images? Electronics that become so sophisticated and life-like that concert halls go the way of single-screen move theaters?
The rise of a visual culture, and the change in the way people relate to the printed word, does seem worth musing on. Will music making, as MTT is exploring in Miami, become more of a visual experience over time? Less mediated or explicated by prose? Will audiences become more active listeners, shaping and guiding what gets played and how they experience it? Will they become more autonomous and less likely to gather for a concert at a set time and remain in their assigned seats in an auditorium for two hours? Or will they crave that very thing in a micro-segmented world?
I’m very excited to see this forum! The first burning question that comes to my mind with your question is, WHICH audience are you talking about? There’s the traditional audience we bring into our concert halls, then there’re the concert-goers who AVOID classical music altogether… at last count, about 95% of Americans. I believe you mean the former but I hope in a hundred years we might include a significant part of the latter group because I can’t imagine a future for top orchestras without some of them.
If we are going to maintain that this music is for all people, we’re going to have to share it in ways that people who avoid us prefer to have it… in a club setting, enhanced by volume and visual elements, as a small ensemble or even altered. Don’t get me wrong. I love the pure experience too… and we should always offer that… but it is now possible for our orchestras to offer symphonic music both on and OFF the pedestal. (Has it been 30-seconds yet?)
I have alot of progressive ideas. Many of them occurred to me just by imagining a variety of concert experiences in the 22ND-Century! Try it. You’ll find a continually expanding menu of choices including traditional, virtual, enhanced and interpretive formats. Repertoiry orchestras and new music orchestras. People who like to move, walk or even dance while they listen will have a space to do that without disturbing sitters. Piping the concert into the symphony club is obvious by now, but remember soon we’ll be piping concerts directly to our cellphones or wireless earbuds. Reading a running commentary over your cellphone is just the beginning. How about sitting in the hall and someone is wispering thru your single earbud what is so remarkable about this performance? That would be great for beginners, who can adjust the earbud to still hear the music.
We’re always behind the curve when it comes to using new technology. Perhaps because we’ve been equating “world-class”, whatever that means anymore, with art-centrism. If we faced the music, so to speak, and became more new-audience-centric, perhaps we could pioneer a new use of technology that others would covet.