Musician's Alphabet (eBook)

Susan Tomes (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013 | 1. Auflage
160 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-31144-6 (ISBN)

Infos

Have you ever wondered whether musicians notice the audience or are influenced by them? Wanted to know how performers might learn particularly difficult pieces? Thought about the terms 'old' and 'young' in reference to music? Using the letters of the alphabet as her starting point, Susan Tomes presents a series of lively reflections on performing music, and on the classical music world. Drawing on her international experience as a solo pianist and chamber musician, she offers intriguing insights into rehearsal and practice, coping with nerves, and on the relationship between musicians and their audience. The book also contains thought-provoking meditations on the role of classical music in society, and the most rewarding attitudes to performance. This pocket-sized musical 'A to Z' is an invaluable guide and is a must for anyone interested in what makes musicians tick.

Susan Tomes is an acclaimed pianist specialising in chamber music and long popular with audiences as the pianist of Domus and of the Florestan Trio. Her book Beyond the Notes (Boydell and Brewer) was published in 2004 to great critical acclaim. She writes from time to time for The Guardian and for several music magazines, and broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio 3.

Rezensionen

I found myself completely enthralled by each thought-provoking entry ... Wise, contentious and questioning by turns, this engaging little book will be of as much interest to Tomes's fellow professionals as to the more discerning members of her audiences

Tomes writes intelligently and fluently about the act of performing. It is a glimpse of a world that the unmusical can appreciate as listener's but never enter.

Fascinating ..... like a chocolate box of philosophy of music

Textauszug

A is for Audience

Whenever I go to a classical concert as part of the audience, and find myself planning what clothes to wear, I realise that I am subject to mysterious rules. Why should it matter what I wear when I’m only going to listen?

When I am actually playing in the concert, clothes seem even more crucial. One of my recurrent dreams is that my luggage goes astray on the way to the concert and that I have to walk on stage in my ordinary clothes. No silk, no high heels, no jewellery or cosmetics. I did once turn up for a music festival having left my whole array of concert clothes folded neatly on the bed at home. The festival was in a rural setting with no shops nearby. But I was staying with kind people who asked around, delved into their own wardrobes and put together several outfits I could borrow for the concerts. They were even more uncomfortable than I was about the prospect of me appearing on stage in jeans and a jumper.

What is actually going on when we worry about what clothes to wear for a concert? Clearly going to classical concerts has a social meaning as well as a musical one. I like to think I’m ignoring the former in favour of the latter. But I still seem to have a finely calibrated sense of how formal I may (or must) look, both when I’m in the audience and when I’m on the stage. As a listener I must look smart, but not as smart as the performers. When I am a performer, I must look more special than the listeners. These cultural modes vary from country to country. In some Mediterranean cities, the audience dresses up extravagantly to attend a concert. Sometimes they are so lacquered, so bouffant, so dripping with gold and fragrant with expensive perfume that we performers in our much-used concert clothes feel positively underdressed. No matter how well you play, and how focused you are on the music, it is not a good feeling if the audience looks as if they consider the occasion more important than you do.

That we all consider the occasion important is demonstrated in many different ways. The musicians show it in their dignified demeanour on stage, their deportment as they walk on and off, their tactful blend of modesty, grandeur and friendliness. The audience show it in their silence and good behaviour. For the last century it has been the done thing to listen to a classical performance in rapt silence. It wasn’t always so, but it is so now. The music is felt to be a precious cultural possession, and the audience acknowledges the importance of the performance by being still. At other kinds of concerts, with other kinds of music, it is different. The audience’s participation is welcomed. But in classical concerts it is felt to be disturbing and wrong if anyone makes a noise or moves around; both the musicians and the rest of the audience will protest if this happens.

When I was little I sometimes played my piano pieces to friends of my parents who came round for coffee. My performance was surrounded by chat, and I didn’t dress up. But as soon as public performance came into the question, the subject of special clothes and behaviour arose. It was somehow linked with tickets, money, the fact that people had actually paid to come and listen in a special building. The same people who might have eaten biscuits in our living room as they listened to my piano piece would have to go to a box office, buy a ticket, put on smart clothes and sit in silence to hear me doing the same thing in a concert hall. Clearly they were buying into more than an opportunity to hear music played.

I still think of this phenomenon today when concert promoters offer artists a complimentary ticket for a member of their family. It’s understood that a player’s family cannot be expected to pay full price every time they come to give moral support. Yet they get the same experience, the same comfortable seat in the concert hall, as the people who’ve paid money, and indeed, their being there may prevent someone from buying a ticket. Sometimes, if I have a guest ticket but no guests, I give it to someone in the ticket queue. They’re always happy, of course. But the random nature of the gift no longer pleases me. I fret about whether some other person in the queue deserved it more. The whole ticket-buying transaction starts to bother me. I’m aware that if I got my hands on dozens of guest tickets and gave them all away to strangers, there would come a point when the management would inform me that there was no income out of which I could be paid for playing the concert. And this would distress me more than giving away lots of free tickets would please me. Meanwhile, I feel that as long as people are parting with hard-earned cash to hear me, the least I can do is go out and buy some colourful silk thing to wear. And don’t get me started on the expectations placed on women! Why do I feel I need to vary my outfit from concert to concert, when my male colleagues wear the same suits night after night for years on end? Nobody insists that I vary my outfits, but from the comments people make, and from the way that they seem to keep track of what I wore on this or that occasion, I feel the imperative as clearly as if it were written into the contract.

The fact that we seem to need a special building in which to listen to music (or to look at paintings, or to watch people dance) is a whole sociological and economic subject of its own. I still remember my surprise on encountering my first ‘real’ concert hall. Until then, any performances had taken place in rooms where the listeners and I entered by the same door and were literally on the same level. The concert hall, however, had its own apartheid. There were two entrances, one for the audience (at the front) and another for the players (at the back). This didn’t seem fitting. Artists at the back? Once inside the building, I realised that the artists’ entrances were at the back because they gave on to the dressing rooms and rehearsal spaces behind the stage. Here one was isolated from the public, who had their own foyer at the front of the building. As a player one need never, in fact, meet the audience face to face! This was supposed to be a protection, but it came as a disappointment. One arrived on stage through a special door, usually to find oneself elevated above the audience. Going through this door (just after the house lights were dimmed) became a moment of enormous, nerve-racking importance. Judy Garland in one of her late films shows us the way she had to stand in the wings and summon up the nervous charge she needed to burst on to the stage. Seeing her revving up like a motorbike made me smile at the memory of all the doors behind which I and my colleagues had stood, jiggling from foot to foot, checking that we had everything, trying to calm nervous stomachs.

Are we there for the audience, or are they there for us? The music can be played without them, and usually is – in private practice and rehearsal. But this is neither a performance nor an event. A performance cannot take place without an audience, and to make the performance feel like an event depends on the willing collaboration of the listeners. Moreover, an audience is needed to generate money for the musicians. The days of court or aristocratic patronage are gone, and musicians need to get money from somewhere. The fact that we depend on audiences for our living should make us bend over backwards to please them, but it is not nearly so simple. We want them to please us too. I even have a musician friend who claims to despise the audience for admiring him, but that’s another story – his, not theirs.

These days, because so much music is available on disc, people do not actually need to come to the concert hall to hear music. But they like to come for all sorts of reasons, ranging from the social to the artistic. If you watch the New Year’s Day concert from Vienna on television, you will be struck by the look and demeanour of the audience. Expensively dressed, indistinguishable from one another, perfectly behaved with no unseemly displays of emotion or surprise, they run every year through a well-drilled repertoire of responses to the familiar sequence of music by the Strauss family. These days one can see all kinds of nationalities in the audience, but they dress and behave exactly like the Viennese. People go to enormous lengths to get their hands on tickets. Members of the orchestra fight to be ‘on’ this particular date, because of the extra money paid for television rights around the world. The orchestra is, in fact, superb and the conductor is usually very fine too. But the meaning of the occasion is far beyond the programme of waltzes and polkas. It says, ‘We can afford all this, and we know how to behave too. We are here to affirm the stability of this society.’ People watching TV around the world are impressed that so many obviously powerful and wealthy people should have the time (and inclination) to sit perfectly still and listen in silence to music designed for dancing.

The message is, ‘Now we don’t even need to dance. We have passed beyond frivolity to a place where our status is its own spectacle.’ This is an extreme example, of course. Every concert hall (especially the symphony hall and the opera house) contains its quota of people who are there to see and be seen, and if one is honest, there is probably an element of this for everyone present, including the performers. But there are also many listeners who ignore the social benefits and hungrily concentrate on the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.11.2013
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Instrumentenkunde
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Instrumentenunterrricht
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Klassik / Oper / Musical
• Schlagworte: Musicians • Society
• ISBN-10: 0-571-31144-X / 057131144X
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-31144-6 / 9780571311446