To Lecture Or Not To Lecture?

[Note: This post has been edited as of 4:49 AM Eastern on 30 Oct to add a footnote.]

Over at The Classical Beat, Washington Post chief classical music critic, Anne Midgette, cites the San Francisco Symphony's ambitious Keeping Score project, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra's more modest, recently launched online offering, Classical Companion, the current edition of which latter is devoted to illuminating the intricacies of Beethoven's nine symphonies, and wonders whether these educational ventures, as well as a number of others that, on a smaller scale, attempt to accomplish the same classical music educational ends, are the right way to go about the thing. Writes Ms. Midgette:

It's true that the more you know, the more you can appreciate what you hear or see — in any art. But do we really want to be conveying the idea that it requires a special education to enjoy a concert? Or to equate concert-going with school? I realize that Bernstein's Young People's Concerts were wonderfully inspiring, but I still wonder if lecturing at audiences — particularly younger audiences — in the 21st century is really the way to win them over.

Well, we wonder whether Ms. Midgette has missed the almost certain fact that the overwhelming majority of those who do and will constitute the audience for these educational ventures are already won over to classical music and simply want to learn more about it. (Majority is actually the wrong term to use here as we would guess that something upwards of 95% of the audience for such ventures are those already sold on classical music who simply want to increase their knowledge.)

It's an often overlooked circumstance that Leonard Bernstein's paradigmatic Young People's Concerts were so hugely successful in gaining new audiences for classical music not simply because they were televised, and not simply because of Bernstein's prodigious gifts as a musician and his perfect genius as a mass educator, but because in the years of the televised (by CBS) series' run from 1958-1972, middle class people — and by middle class people we mean middle class parents; parents when parents were still parents and not buddies to their children — still thought classical music important; important enough to, along with themselves, sit their kids down in front of the TV set during the telecasts, and let it be known to them that this was something not only important and worthwhile, but something that every educated kid was expected to be familiar with.

Well, we've come a long way — and a long way away — from those culturally more enlightened times* courtesy of the populist culture of the Sixties whose rock- and folk-music besotted denizens — most of whom managed to live in the Sixties throughout the remainder of the 20th century and beyond — grew up (so to speak) to become parents themselves, and passed on to their children whose buddies they were their own impoverished, diminished cultural horizons, with the result that...well, you know the result.

So, my answer to Ms. Midgette's wondering if "lecturing at audiences — particularly younger audiences — in the 21st century is really the way to win them over," would be to say to her that she's not understood this matter correctly, and is conflating two different issues. On the one hand we have the issue of lecturing at audiences that are likely to attend such lectures, which is to say those who've already been won over to classical music and simply want to learn more about it, and on the other...well, that's the problem, isn't it. There is no other, and there's no point whatsoever lecturing at empty seats wherever they may be located.

So, how to fill those empty seats? That's another issue, one conflated wrongly by Ms. Midgette with the lecturing-at issue, and one that's old business here at S&F, very old business indeed. We've been through this matter numerous times over the years, perhaps most famously (or as famous as anything can be originating on S&F) in this July 2004 post from our inaugural year (it was in fact the second article ever posted to S&F, the very first being an article on Gould's readings of the Goldberg) entitled, "An Audience For Classical Music", and, pardon us, we've no intention or desire to cover the same ground here yet again, but instead recommend to your attention the above article as what we had to say therein in 2004 we would still say today, and say in just the same way.

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* By our, "culturally more enlightened times," we did not mean to imply that those times were more culturally enlightened because American middle-class folk of the time were intellectually, emotionally, and morally superior to American middle-class folk of our present time. In fact, we would say quite the opposite was the case. The mindset of the post-WWII middle class in America — a mindset that lasted into the mid-'70s — was numbingly bourgeois and conformist, and largely intolerable for those of independent mind. The Sixties didn't happen for nothing. It was, however, a time when American middle-class folk, contrary to Modernist thinking, and for reasons laudable and contemptible, had not seen fit to, wholesale, toss overboard the rich European cultural legacy of the past, classical music very much included, and so the reason of the times's more enlightened cultural outlook and sensibilities.