Words Before Music: Questioning our pre-concert babble

Pre-concert talks form a staple source of music education for today’s listeners. Although the presentations are often relegated to a visiting professor, passionate amateur or local radio figure, the educational role remains highly influential. The choice of works for discussion, how we talk about them, and why we talk about music, all set the framing of our cultural value of classical music. In consideration of this importance, today’s pre-concert talks deserve a closer look. Do these talks offer valid frameworks for today’s listeners? Do they even advocate for orchestral music?

First, the selection or avoidance of pieces as a topic for a pre-concert talk sends subtle messages to listeners. At one recent pre-concert talk for a program of Seeger, Berg and Brahms, for example, a gentleman spoke merely about Brahms’ Piano Concerto. For another orchestra’s program of Fauré’s Requiem and Elgar’s almost hour-long Symphony No. 1, the pre-talk gentleman spoke exclusively of the Fauré work. How useful. What are we saying about the pieces we ignore? Too complicated? Too much work for the presenter to study? Obviously self explanatory? Or ‘over your head’ anyway, so we won’t bother trying to enlighten listeners? What are we re-affirming when we gather people around to yet again discuss the motifs and tonal centers of Brahms’ Piano Concerto? Every time we open our mouths or re-print program notes we create a frame for how one ‘should’ approach classical music, and where, within music, value lies. When we ignore pieces we subtly suggest a vague inconsequential value in the work.

When talking about music, we love to present a textbook version of music. Mostly, music is expressed as an historical specimen, a specific work within a historical progression of development, built from measurable ingredients. Historical framing currently exists as the only view of musical works that we present to concert goers, whether in pre-concert talks or as program notes. Within this singular framework we are allowed to speak freely of facts, measurable structures, and definable pitches, without surmising, wonder, or a human connection to the music. (What if wines were approached this way? How much beauty and magic would be ignored and disrespected!)

History is seen, in Western thought, as linear and progressive, so historical framing of music emphasizes development. This concept is passed along within our textbook version of music as the significant source of music’s perfection and beauty. The composer who ‘completes’ a form or structure, who pushes construction to its ‘limits,’ becomes a genius hero of art. We are saying, then, that the artistic quality and value of a work resides inside its historical and progress-framed context.

I’m reminded of a comment from a listener who said the reason he loved Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata was because it was the last ‘classical’ sonata of Beethoven, composed prior to a noticeable shift in style. Is this listener saying that historical context makes a piece endearing? What if Beethoven handed you his freshly composed Waldstein Sonata and asked for your opinion? Would you say, “Well let me wait and see if something better is yet to come?” So this listener loves a piece for its sequential significance, not the work’s own attributes. This curious yet typical response reflects how we ‘educate’ our listeners to know a work’s value according to its historical framing. Our pre-concert talks and program notes fulfill the message that music’s value resides in its historical context. The quality and enjoyment of a piece depends on our understanding of the work’s position within a linear line of progress. Masterpieces form the most significant examples; we re-enforce through the word ‘masterpiece’ itself that a work has artistic value because of its sequential role in the development of Western music. This mind set, with its seed in the 18th century and deepened throughout the 19th century by the new aesthetics, philosophies, sciences, the industrial revolution, the Darwinian concepts of progress, etc., still drives our framing of music today, in the 21st century.

Form and structure dominates as a favorite pre-concert subject, and within the textbook version of a work, we may freely discuss form, tonal centers, themes and motifs to our heart’s content. Does identifying the existence of a theme or motif contribute to meaning or metaphor? Would it be more insightful to offer how a musical idea and motif offers a metaphor through the use of orchestral color, orchestral texture, orchestral motion and duration, etc.? Identification might be a fun ‘birdwatchers’ version of music listening, but quite conceivably most people love the beauty, character and wonder of the bird more than its proper species name. Unfortunately we offer few words for developing a vocabulary around this wonder and use of imagination.

How many people become excited about experiencing form? “Today I heard the best ABA ever! The composer did something, then did something else, and then returned to the original idea – I just love it when music does that!” Rather than the structural components themselves, perhaps the between-ness generated by realms of individualized character and familiarity all juggling around each other through time create meaningful impressions. The act of stepping into something unknown, new, without expectations, or a sense of acquaintance of something familiar, or familiar yet changed. The tensions of transformation unfolding through time hold the thrill and magic. Structure provides signposts and maps, but the journey is in the tension between changing landscapes.

Why so much anxiety around Sonata Form? We take pleasure in viewing works through a cool lens of form; chord progressions, explaining keys changes, and how the composer got from ‘way over there’ to ‘way over here.’ When a work doesn’t comply with the Sonata Form, instead of bringing in new vocabulary, we frame the work in terms of how and where it lacks sonata form. Music is sonata form, or not. This dualist perspective limits our current vocabulary. (A theater cross-analogy interests me. Do theater-goers discuss the form or structure of a play, or do they talk over the content and premise, and how they as audience members connected to characters, the plot’s metaphor or messages? Are we the only art form that believes we must teach audiences to identify structural components before experiencing the art?)

In addition to spoken words, written program notes also provide a framing for classical music. It almost goes without saying that most program notes treat musical works as historical specimens that we visit in concert with the assistance of the tour-guide found in the program. We currently assume that one standard tour-guide description suffices, regardless of when, where, or by whom a work is performed. What’s implied with this one-size-fits-all approach? We present the standardized facts of a piece, and suggest that knowing these facts will get you closer to understanding. Because facts remain unchanged, program notes needn’t be individualized. Our habits of writing and speaking about music this way certainly suggests a listener should think along the lines of, “Oh but if I just knew the One Way to think about a piece, then the lights would go on and I’d hear a piece with complete bliss.” If you write notes meant to suffice for every performance regardless of the current performers, space, time, and listeners, then a historical perspective becomes the only possible version.

I’m reminded of a concert where the players absorbed one concept of a piece in rehearsals, another version appeared later in the group’s newsletter. Then yet a third version appeared in the program notes from a re-print of generic material readily available online. I wonder what version the pre-concert talk presented! All these versions, yet it seemed perfectly fine to re-print someone else’s program notes because the textbook version of a work remains the automatic norm.

In addition to words, whether spoken or written, pre-concert talks often include musical examples. Most commonly the pre-concert presenter uses a piano to offer insights into an orchestra piece. What, however, does a piano have in common with an orchestra? A piano shares no color, texture, or motion with orchestral sound. Played on a piano, an example gives the listener equivalent pitches and an idea of when pitches occurs, whether sequential or simultaneously. Pitch and order. How does this relate in the least to what an orchestra presents? Hearing notes on a piano doesn’t explain, investigate or enhance for the listener how an orchestra sounds or creates musical events or metaphors. Certainly we wish to share the thrill of the orchestra with all its amazing sounds, textures, motions, color, and energy? Does playing a piano help me hear the goldenness of a flute tone? The vibrancy of a tutti cello line? The twinge of pain from a muted trumpet solo? The countless possibilities of delicately inflecting a single note through time? The abundant shades of texture from strings playing in five octaves unison, con sordino, sul punt? Does a piano enhance our perception of expression created by vibrato and breath? The power and nuance of sustained harmonies? How does a piano sound open the ears to hearing the orchestra’s teeming permutations of instrumental variety and exotic characters? Let’s ask our pre-concert talk and program notes to advocate for the event at hand, a live performance by an orchestra.

Obviously sound order and pitch make up just two aspects to ‘know,’ yet the use of piano examples implies that the listening experience requires extensive awareness to these aspects. This creates a very one dimensional view of what an orchestra offers to the ears. Unfortunately we re-enforce this further with the addition of program notes and pre-concert talk of mere historical context.

Our pre-concert talks carry extensive, yet subtle messages about music, judgment, and music’s values. Today, we need to take a fresh inventory of the words we use before the music and consider their consequences. The existing historical and textbook versions of music remain about as tasty as the textbook version of wine; neither engages the imagination or inspires metaphor. Let’s consider how enchantment occurs and provide listeners with insight for using their ears and discernment for taking ownership of their place in the cycle of enchantment between composer, performer, and listener.

An updated version of our music-speak might see the purpose of pre-concert talks and program notes as opening our receptivity to music as presented by an orchestra. The musical play of color, texture, motion, image, metaphor, and time, all bring the sounds in our ears to life, diffuse with imagination, and full of potential for music as a connective art. With this language we give listeners an approach to music that allows for personal interaction, the creation of metaphor, a perhaps the discovery of a personal masterpiece. Let’s move from presenting our classical music as an historical specimen to introducing our art and our orchestras as vibrant, creative, and living sources of music.

For an example of an approach to music that awakens the listeners’ palette and presents music as an art to explore, savor, and enjoy, see The Classical Connoisseur