“Bah, kids these days and their rock n roll!”
Everyone acts like you’re supposed to like classical music, and if you don’t then you’re dubbed “an uneducated simpleton who’s single-handedly responsible for the degradation of society.”
I’ve heard directors and conductors countless times before public concerts complain about how “we have to get more young people to come out to our concerts.”
They lament the budget cuts that are taking arts programs out of schools (which really are terrible).
They talk about “the youth nowadays having the attention span of a goldfish.”
And sometimes, they’ll put on pops concerts where they’ll play popular movie scores or rock songs or that one famous Beethoven symphony that everyone knows to supposedly ease the general populace into the wondrous world of Mahler and Rachmaninoff.
I have to wonder...
How much of this complaining about young people is really valid? Are pops concerts really a logical way to get people interested in classical music? Let’s take a look.
I don’t feel like talking about the arts programs in schools being cut because everyone already seems to know about the problems in that. So let’s take a look instead at the “the youth nowadays have the attention span of a goldfish” claim.
Ignoring the fact that the whole “kids nowadays have short attention spans” thing is outrageously pretentious, I’m going to just say that that statement is false.
I’m not even going to dig up some obscure study to back this up. I for one can play Assassin’s Creed 2 or Bioshock Infinite for some 6–8 hours straight, forgetting and forgoing the basic human needs to eat and pee. If that’s not complete and utter focus, I don’t know what is.
Think about it. When you’re involved in any activity and you’re “in the zone,” you lose track of time. So it’s not that you can’t sit through a traditional orchestra concert, it’s that you simply don’t want to. And fyi, that’s fine. Because it’s better to do something you enjoy than to trudge through something you don’t.
When your heart is in something, when you’re fully present with an activity, you do better work than if you were half-paying attention or being forced to do it. It has to do with fulfilling your “why” and discovering your inner drive.
So I say, when your attention is pulled abruptly from one activity to another, don’t fight it! You’re going to do better work with an activity you’re fully engaged with. And the less time you spend fighting the urge to shift focus, the more time you’ll actually spend 1) getting shit done and 2) being happy while doing something you want to do. But I digress.
Basically, everyone has the ability and attention span to enjoy classical music. The real question is “do you actually want to?”
Pops concerts
Moving on, let’s talk about the tactics used to get young people down to the concert hall. Specifically, pops concerts. Conductors and directors everywhere complain about the fact that so few young people come to their performances.
The usual solution is to have these concerts where they play some real foot-tapping music: medleys of film scores like Harry Potter and Star Wars, arrangements of rock songs, and sometimes, if they’re feeling gutsy, the finale from Saint-Saens “Organ Symphony” or the overture from Mozart's Magic Flute. This is all in the name of “getting young people comfortable with classical music.”
So what, they think that young people don’t like classical instruments? I’m sorry, tell me again, how many subscribers do The Piano Guys have? Have you ever heard of Lindsey Stirling or The Vitamin String Quartet? Aubrey Logan, who is still relatively unknown, is selling out concerts left and right. A singer with a trombone.
It’s not that “kids nowadays” don’t like the sound of traditionally classical instruments. Inviting people to your pops concerts with the intention of luring them into the world of Schubert, Ravel, and Britten isn’t the best marketing technique.
Spoiler alert: nobody is going to want to binge listen to all 15 of Shostakovich’s string quartets after listening to an arrangement of Paint It Black for symphony orchestra.
There are some steps missing in the sequence.
We don’t need pops concerts to get us interested in classical music. We’re not lazy or stupid, and we don’t have short attention spans. What we need is some help with the navigation process. We need help understanding what the music is all about.
The problem is that classical music is unfamiliar. It takes a long time to get familiar with a single composition. And then after you finally start to recognize the music and predict what’s going to happen next, that’s when the really hard (fun) stuff begins, because you have to train yourself to really listen to what’s going on. There are no lyrics to follow. The patterns are subtle.
Geez, it’s like the universe is working against your learning about classical music.
But seriously.
There’s nothing wrong with you or “kids these days.”
The diversity of music styles in existence and circulation is really amazing. You can learn something from any type of music. Classical music isn’t innately superior to any other kind of music.
The point of this series isn’t to hate on popular music. It’s to present classical music in a simple, digestible way for people who are interested. We’re going to fill in the missing steps from the “pops concerts to all of Shostakovich’s string quartets” sequence.
So let’s get to it! We’ve got a long road ahead of us after all.
Please follow and recommend so you and your friends can fulfill your long held dreams of becoming hat-tipping, monocle-adjusting, classical music enthusiasts!
