this means that who plays and what is played at each concert is the result of extensive negotiation, in which those who actually attend the concert and pay for tickets are hardly, if at all, represented. With star performers jet-setting over the face of the globe, computers as well as telephones, faxes, and E-mail are essential management tools.
Then there is the question of publicity. The potential audience has not only to be informed about the concert—about what is to be played and who is playing it—but has to be made to want to attend. Concert halls, and orchestras, are businesses like any other, and like all businesses they have a product to sell, namely, performances. The fact that most concert halls and orchestras receive a degree of state, municipal or private subsidy does not alter this fact; what counts is, as they say, bums on seats. Concert halls and orchestras stand in relation to their audiences as producers to consumers, and like all other producers they tailor their products to the assumed preferences of their consumers, while at the same time manipulating those preferences as best they can by deploying techniques of advertising and marketing similar to those that are used for other products.
Concert advertisements in newspapers used to confine themselves to a simple announcement of venue, date, time, performers and works. But as the competition has heated up in recent years (not so much between orchestras, since most cities have only one, but between symphony concerts and other urban entertainments), we find extensive use made of more sophisticated advertising techniques. The style of the advertising is interesting, for it often uses language and images that are similar to those used to sell high-class goods such as expensive perfumes, watches and luxury cars. It is clearly aimed at the same kind of public, or at least at a public that likes to identify itself with the buyers of such items.
I treasure a full-page advertisement that appeared on November 28, 1989 in the New York Times, for a series of concerts in which all of the string quartets of Beethoven were to be played. Under a large “artistic” representation of the head of the composer and a facsimile of his signature, both of them familiar icons to classical music lovers, was this text, printed in an elegant Roman typeface: “The greatest music of the greatest composer the world has known, distilled into a rare and unforgettable experience for each privileged listener by the supreme mastery of the world’s greatest string quartet . . . the whole-souled dedication and devotion to the master’s work of this unique ensemble has earned clamorous ovations and paeans of press praise in performance after performance the world over . . . one of the rare unforgettable experiences of a lifetime, a spiritual renewal for those who return year after year, an indescribable revelation for anyone encountering this marvelous music for the first time.” And so on, with at the end the salesman’s pitch: “Subscribe now and Save $15 on 6 Concerts.”
Such advertisements reinforce the idea that musicians and their performances are as much a part of the modern world and its commerce as is the field of popular music, and indeed as are expensive perfumes and luxury cars and that they are equally governed by its imperatives. What one might find irritating, even a touch hypocritical, is the pretense often encountered, and clearly implied in the above advertisement, that the musicians are doing what they do for pure love of music without a thought for worldly ambition or financial gain—in contrast to rock groups and other popular performers who, of course, are only in it for the money.
Another important functionary of the modern concert world is the critic. The profession of critic developed over the nineteenth century, contemporaneously with the growth of public concerts and concert halls to which one paid for admission, and with the takeover of public performance by professional musicians. As active amateur participation in public music making declined, so did the confidence of many people in their own musical judgment. Today, with so many virtuosi, so many composers and so many orchestras and conductors vying for public attention and offering their performances as commodities for sale, it is not surprising that people should feel the need for a consumer guide, both to tell them what is good and what is bad, what is à la mode and what is passé—in short, what they should and should not buy—and to give them confidence in the rightness of their choice.
Given the mercantile and nonparticipatory nature of today’s concert world, criticism is a perfectly honorable profession, but we should remember that wherever people participate fully in musical performance or where musicking is part of a larger social, religious, or political ritual, there is no need for critics. In the medieval and Renaissance church there were no critics, nor were there any in the world of palace or castle or royal or ducal opera house; as like as not it was the archbishop, king, or duke who decided what was good or bad, and everyone else agreed with him. In general the prince’s ability to dictate musical taste related to the strength of his political power; Louis XIV of France, in his day the most powerful man in Europe, was also its leading tastemaker. On the other hand, among the egalitarian Ewe of Ghana, John Miller Chernoff (1979) tells us, when he played the drums badly for the dancing, people danced their criticism, either by dancing in a listless manner or by simplifying their dancing to help him.
Once people have been attracted to the performance and have ordered, paid for and received their tickets, in itself no mean logistic feat, they have to be brought to and taken home from the hall. Many people will have traveled considerable distances, and few will have come on foot, without relying on some form of public or private mechanized transport. Without a highly developed system of transport extending into a sizable hinterland, none of today’s big concert halls would survive. This means that any concert in such a hall depends not only on international managements and advertising agencies, not only on sophisticated means of communication, but also on means of transport: airplanes, buses, trains and automobiles.
Then there is the internal organization of the hall itself. Like any other enterprise in our society, it is organized hierarchically, with its boss and its administrators as well as its proletariat, whose joint task is to keep the place running smoothly and produce concerts throughout the season without the appearance of effort. It needs accountants, lawyers and clerks; secretaries and computer operators; ticket collectors and ushers; program sellers; electricians, sound men, piano tuners, and other technicians; hefty men to shift the piano around and arrange the orchestra seating; and staff for the bars and restaurants, not to mention the cleaners, those Nibelungen of the modern industrial state without whose underpaid services not only concert halls but also school, factories, offices, and airports would quickly choke to death on their own rubbish.
Most of these people are invisible to us or at least taken for granted and unnoticed even when we do glimpse them at work, but all are working to create the illusion of a magical place set aside from everyday life, where we can contemplate, in stillness and in silence, the works of master musicians. All are contributing to the nature of the musicking, and their working relationships, and those between them and the audience, are an essential part of the relationships of the events that take place in the hall and thus of the meanings that the performances generate.
If we imagine a performance in which the members of the orchestra sold the tickets themselves, arranged their own seating and moved the piano around and where everyone, audience as well as conductor, soloist and orchestra members, stayed afterward to clean up, there would be brought into existence another set of human relationships, another kind of society. It would not necessarily be a better society, but we may be sure that those taking part would not remain strangers to one another for very long. Another set of relationships again would be created if one person were to pay the expenses of the performances and if all the audience were to be his guests, as in the old days of aristocratic patronage, or if everyone concerned in the performance were to give their services free and no admission charge were made. It is a matter of choices; there is nothing inevitable about the arrangement that prevails in today’s concert halls. It was not ordained by nature but is a social arrangement.
For each concert there are a thousand details to be attended to. Program notes have to be written and edited, the program booklet designed and printed with its photos of conductor and soloist, the piano tuned and its depth of touch adjusted to the exacting demands of the famous pianist, the
