by the Melos Chorus, technical-scientific committee
Audience in the hall during a concert, Sydney Opera House. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The sentence that kills more tickets than any price is always the same, and anyone who works in music hears it at every dinner party: I don’t understand classical music. This magazine has an official answer, and we are putting it in writing once and for all: there is nothing to understand. Or rather: understanding is an optional pleasure, like knowing the chemistry of wine. No sommelier ever demanded that you pass an exam before drinking.
The misunderstanding has a precise history, which we told in the piece on the theatre that became a museum: a century of concert liturgy has convinced people that art music is content to be deciphered, with a code in hand that someone possesses and everyone else lacks. But the real experience of listening doesn’t work that way, and never has. The audience that walked out shaken from the Ninth in 1824 didn’t know what a sonata form is; the one that wept at La traviata wasn’t analysing modulations. It felt. The body recognises tension and release, expectation and surprise, long before the head and far better: these are mechanisms that work on anyone with a nervous system, exactly as a thunderstorm does.
Let us go further: not understanding is often an advantage. Someone who listens to Tristan knowing everything about the avoided cadence spends the evening checking whether it happens; someone who knows nothing simply has their breath taken away. Expertise adds a second pleasure, it does not replace the first: and it is for the second pleasure that our listening guides exist, written for those who want to return to a piece that has already overwhelmed them, never as a pass to get in.
So here is the practical advice, to be framed: at your next concert, walk in the way you walk into the sea. Nobody understands the sea, you get in. If the music is performed well, it will do its work without asking for your papers; if it bores you, you have every right to be bored, which is a legitimate critical judgement even when what’s on the stand is a certified masterpiece. The only thing forbidden is feeling inadequate: the inadequacy is not yours, it belongs to a century of ceremony that mistook silence for respect and respect for subservience. Music does not ask for subjects. It asks for ears, and you already have them.