Bridging The Music to The Audience
Is there a piece of music you wished you liked, but just find it too difficult to follow and understand? Is there a classical piece you instantly understood the first time you heard it? Please share a comment below.
4. Bridging the Music to the Audience
After many unforgettably stormy and profound studies with Leon Kirchner, I received my Ph.D. at Harvard. I won several competitions and had performances in many contemporary concerts. The listening gap remained. People say many nice things after these concerts, but most of us composers know that they aren’t really hearing the music. On one level it makes perfect sense. A Beethoven symphony we’ve heard hundreds of times. A piece of mine (or of 99% of contemporary composers) is usually a premiere. A one-off. Still, did the gap have to be so wide? An elitist divide between sincere open-minded seekers (and yes, many pretenders) and the cognescenti?
I moved back to Los Angeles and experienced a different kind of language divide. The West Coast new music scene had little interest in the serial-atonal music on the East Coast. The East Coast scene openly disparaged the experimental and microtonal musical languages of the West Coast. Different languages, different ears. Implacable politics. In one sense no different than the feuding Brahms and Tchaikovsky, except that both of those guys wrote in the same tonal language.
Onward. I taught at UCLA and began to ponder: could I teach an audience to follow music the way composers understand it? I had long noticed that audiences aren’t puzzled only by contemporary music. They aren’t really following Beethoven either. Yes they adore his music, understand his language and his themes. But the transitions—all those marvelous parts that connect everything together and evolve the story? Most people get distracted and lost, waiting for the tunes to return. And that’s missing a lot of Beethoven, because he’s building a story from the tensions inherent in his opening measures. Get distracted and you miss the plot!
From the opposite perspective, how is it that we effortlessly follow the story of a 2 hour movie, but can get hopelessly lost following a 15 minute movement by Brahms? Let alone Ligeti?
In the dozen listening courses I created at UCLA Extension, I tried out different approaches to answer these questions. One important realization: musical time is psychological, not chronological. It is measured in events, not minutes and seconds. In other words, an event may be brief or long, but it is still just…an event. I drew a series of cartoon-like boxes for each event and found I could fit an entire symphonic movement on just a few pages. I called it an AudioMap. (scroll down from the link to watch a video that explains it) No music training required. Five minutes of instruction, and boom! You can follow a piece without getting lost. I found other tricks. Orchestra music is easier to hear when it is first played on the piano. Humming melodies deepens the ear to become aware of the parts not hummed—the bass, the accompaniment, the counter melody, the harmony.
These techniques worked with classes. Now it was time to test them with concert audiences. Three local orchestras—the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New West Symphony, and the Santa Monica Symphony—gave me this opportunity. To be continued…