Recently in The Guardian, Tom Service suggested the classical music exponents stop trying to misrepresent the nature of the genre. He feels it does the music a disservice to try to create appeal by packaging it into short snippets when it requires a long attention span.
…it’s no wonder that classical music is in a psychological state of defensiveness and a perennial struggle for relevance, and ends up trying to do things on terms that are set by the streaming companies and social media, not by the art form or the artists themselves.
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The embarrassment comes in what can all too easily happen when classical music tries to get down with the kids with new formats. Visuals! Apps! Short excerpts instead of whole symphonies! All of which can patronisingly say: we’re just like the pop cultures you love: we’re groovy too! With, er, our public subsidy and private sponsorship and expensive instruments. No. You’re not.
I take his point about organizations allowing social media to dictate the terms of how classical music is delivered and consumed rather than letting the art form be the art form.
However, the use of visuals and short excerpts has been around a long time. Looney Tunes was integrating classical music into cartoons back in the 1940s and 50s. Blue Danube Waltz in Corny Concerto in 1943 and What’s Opera Doc in 1957. (I am not saying these are the first time theses pieces were in a cartoon.)
To be clear, I was not alive in 1940s or 50s but regularly consumed these cartoons so multiple generations were exposed to the music in this manner. Plus many of these compositions have appeared in movies as short snippets for closing in on a century. I find the suggestion that just because the delivery mode is a cell phone this combination of short snippets with engaging visuals is problematic to be a little disingenuous.
Yes, people listening to the whole composition it came from may find the unfamiliar parts to be a little boring. But people who are familiar with those sections can find their attention wandering as well.
The music isn’t so sacred and special it can’t survive being chopped up and slid into popular entertainment. As many like to remind us, the composers were rock stars of their day after all.
That said, arts organizations having a handful of programs every year targeted to appeal to younger audiences and then reverting to their usual programming has been a problematic bait and switch for decades. If people are creating visuals that misrepresent the baseline experience of a frequent attendee that is an issue.
It is valid to criticize organizations for promising one thing and not adjusting their programming to include at least a respectable part of that promise.
