Are Our Brains Being Rewired Against Classical Music Concerts?

When I worked at Chorus America, I spent a lot of time around choruses and talking to them about their pressing issues.  I have sung in more choruses than I can count (not true, I am just too lazy to count them), and there are a few issues that spring eternal.  One issue was the lack of young people singing in choruses.  Everyone felt that if they didn’t get some new younger people into their choruses that eventually the organization would die out.  That never concerned me though, because they have had that problem for decades.  Young people are often too busy with starting careers and families to put in that kind of time and effort, but once the kids are a little older and their schedules are more stable, the people that want to sing in a chorus will find one. 

The biggest problem always seemed to be concert attendance, and this was by no means limited to the choral groups.  Orchestras, opera companies, recitals, and most classical music has seen dwindling attendance (even though we don’t really want to talk about it in public), and we wanted to know why.  One could blame the economy, as almost all artistic endeavors have seen fewer butts in seats, classical or not, but I wonder if there is a deeper, more troubling force at work here.

I have read article after article on how technology is rewiring our brains.  We actually think differently now than we used to even twenty to fifty years ago.  We are constant multitaskers and information comes at us fast and frequent.  Taking it slow?  People bring their laptops and cell phones on vacations with them, because slowing down doesn’t mean actually slowing down anymore, it means doing fast and constant things that we want to do, rather than what other people want us to do.  Kids have a harder time focusing in school.  People are texting at the movies.  Laptops are used while watching television, now encouraged by the “interactive” shows.  Even the shows themselves display moving station logos and commercials for other programs on the bottom of the screen during the actual program.  Standing in line?  No problem.  I have Angry Birds.

So what does this mean for classical music?  Well, the thing about classical music is that it is, in its very nature, old.  In a culture when we are attracted to the new and the updated, classical music presents a look to the past.  People spend a great deal of money and effort trying to recreate the piece exactly as it was originally performed.  We use period instruments.  We write books and volumes on how to interpret specific sections of well known pieces.  There are “standards” of practice that we follow, and one thing we don’t do is “update” the music.  Playing a Mozart piano concerto on a synthesizer would be akin to staging a civil war reenactment with machine guns.  But there is a very small section of the public that is interested in civil war reenactments, except as a once or twice curiosity bucket-list kind of thing, and I wonder if people feel the same way about classical concerts.

I want to be very clear about where I am going with this though.  It’s not the music.  The music is timeless, and people still love the music.  We listen to it in our cars as we are driving.  We put it on while we make dinner.  The melodies from centuries past show up in movies, car commercials, and pop music videos.  But it is all multi-tasked listening.  What I am talking about is the experience of going to a theater or a concert hall, and sitting quietly for multiple hours and doing nothing but listen to a piece of music.  I wonder if it is not a matter of taste, but now rather a matter of brain chemistry.

If our brains are really changing, what can we do about it?  Is the classical music industry destined to just die a slow death?  We certainly have our supporters, and they are a fierce and vocal bunch, but they do seem to be in a shrinking minority these days.  At the concert I just sang in Carnegie Hall, we performed Carmina Burana, and during the performance they displayed projections behind us.  A giant eyeball appeared and looked at the audience.  Lazy color lines drifted across the wall as we sang.  It became a multimedia event.  The conductor was excited, because he told us that in the original score, Orff had written that glowing lanterns should be used during performances, and here we were, using our modern glowing lanterns.  That is certainly one way to engage the audience on a second, visual level.  And many opera companies do “updated” versions of shows, setting them in modern times, or filling them with gangsters, hippies, and other unexpected populations.  Is this pandering, or the salvation of an art form?

In some ways I would set opera apart from this discussion because, while it has its own problems, opera has always been about multitasking.  The combination of orchestral music, singing, dancing, sets, lights, special effects, costumes, etc. has been there from them beginning, and has evolved over the years into something that ought to keep people’s attention away from Words With Friends for at least an hour or two.  But what about a concert opera?  What about a choral concert?  What about an orchestra concert?  What if it’s not a choice anymore, but simply how our brain functions?  What if we can’t help but be bored, or at least long for some distraction halfway through a long, but beautiful piece of music?  In this case, perhaps there is good reason for concern.  The older generation that supports the arts also tend to be less addicted to technology, but when the torch passes to a new generation, will they take it up this time?  Or will they be too busy watching YouTube videos while driving?  I don’t have the answers, but maybe I finally found one of the right questions.