Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
The Desacralization of Classical Music
From a very young age, I remember thinking classical music concerts were penultimately boring. I love classical music to death and I think it is a very worthwhile pursuit and something to dedicate one’s life to. Hey, I even plan to have my ashes scattered over Mozart’s grave at St. Marx Cemetary in Vienna, Austria. Nevertheless, classical music concerts are not terribly fun to go to.
The term “sacralization” comes from making a place or experience sacred, as if a museum or a classical concert were the same as going to a church. You have to sit there in utter silence, with a dozen to several hundred other souls who have to sit through a two-hour concert (save intermission). You can’t talk, cheer (only at the end of certain pieces or at the end of the performance) or move your body very much, stultifying the entire musical experience. And I must say, most music is not that awesome for one to have to sit and ponder its profundity and structure. Unless it’s Mozart’s or Verdi’s Requiem, or any number of dramatic and wonderful classical pieces, I don’t like sitting for two hours through a piece that is pretty, but okay.
Because of this, I love going to jazz, rock and world music concerts. There, you can totally get your groove on! You can cheer when someone improvises beautifully on their instrument, talk, move around and dance, play games, get something to eat during the performance, or just sit there and enjoy the music. But most classical music venues do not give you all of these options, which make it a very estranging experience for most people, especially young people and ethnic minorities.
My mother was skeptical about classical music concerts when she moved to this country from Mexico, and figured she would not enjoy them very much. But, when I was a teenager, I made her take me anyway, and she was bored the whole time. Once, she did have a good time and told everyone about it. We went to go hear the Los Angeles Philharmonic play Mozart’s Don Giovanni. There, my mom could cheer, laugh, and talk to me a little bit, because there was so much action going on onstage. And my Mom could understand what was going on by reading the marquis. To this day, she tells me how much fun she had and how Mozart was “such a pervert!”
We had a great time listening to all of the street musicians in Vienna, Prague and Venice. We would sit for hours, listening, with no external order telling us how to properly enjoy classical music. We would cheer, get up to grab a bite to eat and come sit back down, request certain pieces from the musicians, and chatted with each other as the night wore on. We had a lot of fun then. And we have the pictures to prove it.
I once frightened a professor of mine in Davis, California after a performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. I absolutely love all the percussion and the jarring rhythms of that piece. It was revolutionary for its time. So, during the concert, much to my best friend’s amusement and the people around me, I would start headbanging at certain points. After the concert, my Beethoven professor came up to me and asked how I enjoyed the performance. I replied, “Hell yeah! I was totally rocking out to the percussion.” The look he gave me was priceless. He just stared at me, said “okay,” and awkwardly turned around to leave with his TA. My friend and I giggled and made fun of him. When I later saw him at a Beethoven piano sonata concert, he told me straight out that I was a weirdo, but he doesn’t hold it against me! Hey, I still aced his class!
Yeah, so the fact that there are many structural obtacles in place that make it so people like me can’t enjoy classical music in their own way make it an often alienating and humiliating experience. It will be nice when people can be a little more free at a classical music event, as such stuffy experiences will simply be the demise of classical music as the younger generations do not appreciate it as their elders do.
Of course, there are people in the classical world who actively work to make classical music relevant to our society. Marin Alsop, one of the few women conductors of a large orchestra, has made it her goal to desacralize classical music concerts. And there are so many young musicians that wear fun and vibrant clothing during their solos, that it’s hard to not want to go and just look at them! The violinist Anne Sophie Mutter is a great example of this. So, along with all the other things I would like to do in life to make the world a better place, I want to desacralize classical music and reclaim it!
What a gorgeous dress!
This Composition was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Desacralization. You can follow any responses to this Composition through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.