WXQR, New York’s classical radio station, is currently streaming a concert performance of Varèse’s remarkable Amériques for eight hands on two pianos.
Originally scored for large orchestra, including an eleven-player percussion section which uses sirens, it’s a vibrant and often alarming tone-poem depcting the city of New York itself.
Hearing it in Varèse’s own two-piano transcription, which was not discovered until recently, offers a remarkable perspective on an already notorious work.
As consumers, we should have a lot of power. It’s our money that companies want, that marketing strategies are devised for, to help us to part with our cash for things we either want, or didn’t realise we wanted. Audiences are turned into commodities, entities with profiles and habits towards which companies can tailor their marketing campaigns to achieve maximum efficiency, which supermarkets can index and target with specific adverts for products relevant to particular consumer groups. Products are matched with relevant consumers, with advertising crafted to appeal specifically to them alone.
The culture industries are no exception to this: as consumers of culture, we are also labelled, profiled and targeted: how often have you been asked to fill out a questionnaire that came with a CD, or sign up for promotional features by an arts organisation’s website, or been confronted by a pop-up survey on a website saying ‘your views are important to us ?’
The cost of producing a cultural commodity for popular consumption is balanced against consumer group spending power: cost-effectiveness is key. Ticket prices for concerts and exhibitions, the number of dates on a performing tour, number of nights’ run on a show: all these are factors in off-setting production costs against income recovered. Competition for audiences in the cultural sector must be huge.
If, as consumers, we are so important to arts industries, if companies and organisations are so desperate to attract our custom, and hence our cash, why aren’t we wielding more power ? Why aren’t promoters offering us things that we do want to visit, to see or to hear ? Why isn’t competition for audiences and for ticket-sales translating into a Golden Age of Artistic Production and consumption ?
The loyalty-card schemes run by supermarkets are a tool for helping them define customers in terms of the products they purchase regularly. A person who buys nappies and powdered formula milk is probably a good target for money-off vouchers for baby food and clothing; but it’s getting harder to divide consumers so easily across the wider spectrum when looking at their cultural consumption.It’s easier to run a list of products someone purchases from a supermarket, and ascertain what they purchase regularly and what related products might be of interest. It’s perhaps less easy to do this with someone’s cultural predilections (unless companies can access one’s browsing history, and assuming one does most of one’s reading and listening on-line).
As Nicholas Garnham writes, ‘’What analysis of the cultural industries does bring home to us is the need to take the question […] of cultural resources seriously, together with the question of audiences – who they are, how they are formed, and how they can best be served’ (my italics) (from ‘Concepts of Culture – public policy and the cultural industries’, printed in Gray and McGuigan, Studying Culture, 1993: 60-61). That last part is crucial: as far as dis-empowering the spending power of cultural audiences is concerned, companies are more likely to prefer ‘how they can best be manipulated.’
Why are we often dissatisfied with what we are offered ? One only has to read the critics’ columns in the papers to read of another disappointing exhibition, an artist’s newly-released album that’s a let-down or another mindless summer action blockbuster film.
Perhaps it’s complicated by the plurality of society, both in terms of consumer group identities as well as the multiple streams by which culture can be created and consumed. Society is too diverse in its interests to be formed into meaningful or significant groups, easily able to be defined. With everything from medieval music to Muse, Botticelli to Bacon, Chaucer to Chomsky, it’s difficult to define individual consumer bases as having a specific taste that makes them a marketing consultant’s dream: the intellectual who reads Schopenhauer, listens to Slipknot and Webern, is vegetarian, likes Studio Ghibli films and paintings by Monet would be a marketing nightmare. Television schedules of course have to please as wide a spectrum of viewers as they can, and what is enjoyable to one is dross to another.
I don’t have a simple answer to the question of why we, as cultural consumers, don’t have more power in our wallets. Perhaps the realisation that we ought to is enough to start with. It’s time to start using our power more effectively. How we begin to do that is another question.
The near-complete version of the Colyer-Fergusson centre for Music Performance model made the trip from London to Canterbury last Friday, unscathed, in a Golf.
The hall itself is now fully realised, as is the reception foyer with its performance stage and enjoining social space. You start to get a real sense of what it will feel like to sit in the audience seating (pictured to right), with the breadth of window on the west wall and recessed aperture in the roof admitting plenty of light.
The model also gives a sense of how the interior spaces relate to one another and lines of sight: from the social space, there’s a view straight down the length of the foyer, whilst someone on the foyer’s performance stage can see through the doors and into the main hall.
It also begins to give a sense of the exterior of the building: not yet present in the realisation is the north section, with the practice rooms on the ground floor and suite of offices and rehearsal rooms on the upper floor.
It’s starting to get very exciting indeed! Feed your anticipation by viewing the gallery of photos taken at the meeting.
With the summer term at Kent now over, time to reflect on all the events and activities that have contributed to another fantastic year of music-making at the University.
From large-scale concerts in Canterbury Cathedral and Eliot College to informal events such as the Eliot College Soirée and Carols Round the Tree, jazz gigs and alumni events, developments in plans for the new building and singing for ‘Children in Need,’ (not to mention the crowning glory of ArtsFest!), there’s been something to suit a diverse spectrum of musical tastes.
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A series profiling musical alumni of the University of Kent. This week, Suzannah Lipmann.
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When were you at Kent ?
2005 – 2009
What subject did you study ?
Social Anthropology with a Year in Japan
What occupation are you now engaged in ?
I am a Minor-Metals trader.
If music is not your profession, do you participate in any musical experiences now ?
Yes, I have weekly singing lessons and I am going to be singing Bernstein’s Mass with a choir from the Southbank Centre in July at the Royal Festival Hall. I also am in a band (Jazz/ Rock) with a family friend and my old art teacher from school!
How were you involved in music whilst at Kent ?
In my first year I was a member of the Chamber Choir and in my final year I was a member of the Chorus and a permanent fixture in the first year of Jazz at 5 (Sept 2008 – Jun 2009).
What was your most memorable musical experience at Kent ?
Singing with the Chamber Choir in 2005 in the Christmas concert in Cantebury Cathedral.
What would you say to current musical students at the University ?
Take every opportunity and make time, because no matter how little time you think you have at uni it is nothing like life after uni when you work! I missed a whole year of being involved with singing at uni, because I thought I didn’t have enough time. This was a big mistake as that is a whole year in which you could have improved that bit more. After uni it is so much harder to find a good auditioned choir with people your own age. So definitely do as much as you can while it’s on a plate for you. At the very least you can make friends with whom you share an interest which is rather rare.
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If you’re a musical alumnus and would like to be featured, get in touch via the Music Department website: we’d love to hear from you!
Ahhhh: with only a week to go until the BBC Proms season begins, it’s time to start getting excited. With every concert broadcast on Radio 3, and some of them televised on BBC4 (mainly) and BBC2, it’s possible to enjoy Prom season even if you’re not living in, or planning to go to, London.
If the excitement’s almost too much, then you can alleviate it slightly by browsing the new BBC Proms Archive, a veritable treasure-trove of information, covering every single Prom performance since Sir Henry Wood first stepped up to the podium in 1895. That’s 115 years’ worth of music-making, catalogued for users to explore.
I’m sure cultural historians are drooling at the prospect of being able to discern listening trends, composer popularity and how tastes in music have changed over the years; viewers can trace how often a work has been performed, who is the most-often performed composer (answer: Wagner – personal acquaintances of mine will know my reaction to that!), and see how the vogue for particular pieces and composers has ebbed and flowed over the years.
It’s one way of distracting yourself from the excitement of waiting for this year’s season to get underway, especially since England’s departure from the World Cup.
In the meantime, vintage footage of Sir Henry Wood in action to tide you over until a week on Friday.
Another hot day last Friday saw us travelling to Tim Ronalds Architects in London to discuss plans for the seating in the new Colyer-Fergusson centre for Music Performance, as well as to see early incarnations of the model of the new building.
This is a truly exciting moment: when the two-dimensional paper plans begin to translate into a three-dimensional representation of the building, and you start to get an idea of what the all the plans, meetings and discussions have actually been driving towards.
The model of the foyer, with its small performance stage, viewing balcony, social area and lobby (pictured left) gives a real sense of the interior which will greet visitors as they arrive. Musicians on the small foyer stage will be at the focus of the reception area, and viewers on the balcony will be really involved with the performance. The social area in the corner will be a suitable place to listen to music, catch up with e-mails (or up-date your Facebook status on your phone!) whilst waiting for rehearsals and concerts in the main hall to begin.
The glass wall running the length of the foyer’s external east wall will offer enticing views to passers-by and those walking up to the building, of small chamber music performances on the foyer’s stage or audiences congregating before entering the hall itself.
Early designs for the concert-hall (pictured below) also show the great flexibility that the space will afford: without the modelling of seating, you get a great sense of the performance space itself, with the surrounding balcony.
More photos of the finished model will follow in the next few weeks, but to whet your appetite, here’s a brief selection of photos from Friday’s early stages.
Call me what you will, but I believe there’s an inherent snobbery about how concert audiences are expected to behave.
In the sacred cathedral that has become the Modern Concert Hall, audience members are expected to adopt an almost religious state of silent obeisance before The Music: they must enter the hall with trepidation and awe, with veneration in their hearts, and are expected to listen in a state almost bordering on ecstasy. Not until the end are they permitted to move a muscle, at which point they are then permitted to clap politely – nay,enthusiastically (although not too much of course) – and, if at a jazz gig or a promenade-type concert, they are occasionally allowed to whoop.
Now don’t get me wrong: I understand that listening to music is a deeply personal experience, and I can get as annoyed as anyone by inconsiderate or rude behaviour from someone in the same audience as myself. But if someone has been so moved by a piece that they feel the need to express this, why shouldn’t they ? I have a fantastic live recording of a performance of Walton’s First Symphony by the National Orchestra of Wales at the Albert Hall; for anyone who doesn’t know this piece, the first movement is of such epic proportions (it’s about fifteen minutes long) that it seems like a whole work in itself. It has pounding rhythms, stirring melodies, and a relentless energy that drives the music to a tremendous climax in a fierce final gesture, punctuated by timpani. In the recording, a smattering of enthusiastic applause breaks out spontaneously at the movement’s conclusion amongst some of the audience who just can’t help themselves: the music is so rousing, it just demands a response.
Yet the Apostles of the Sacred Mysteries of the Concert Hall frown upon those who don’t know any better than to actually clap between individual movements, rather than waiting until the piece is finished. The slight rustling of a programme attracts fierce stares.
But perhaps it’s a cultural thing: after all, the etiquette of modern concert audiences is relatively recent. Until the end of the nineteenth century, audience behaviour was completely different; people went to be seen as much as to see the concert: it was a social occasion at which they talked, ate, and drank during a performance. Modern rules were laid down, according to Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise, by the composer-conductor Gustav Mahler, who instilled in audiences the ideas of complete, attentive silence and no applause until the end of a piece.
And some semblance of the old culture still survives: Italian opera-goers give standing ovations (or vehement boos) after a particular singer has given a great (or disastrous) rendition of an aria. In the middle of an opera. It’s an accepted, even expected, part of the performance experience. Conductors will pause at the end of arias where they know this will happen, even if the music is supposed to carry straight on. The audience are expected to voice their reaction during a piece.
As long as their response isn’t disruptive, I don’t mind if someone is so moved by their experience that they applaud between movements. People go to concerts to be moved, to be emotionally engaged.
How do you think audiences should behave ?