in cash or in kind, it was as part of the system of mutually binding obligations that linked the whole community.
Those music specialists were socially necessary for the central part they played in the rituals of the community that celebrated the mythologies of birth, marriage, death, harvest and the other great events of life. Since everyone took part in the singing and the dancing, the distinction between performers and listeners was generally blurred—if indeed anyone could be called a listener pure and simple. Certainly, just sitting and silently contemplating the performance was no part of the experience. The musical performance was part of that larger dramatic enactment which we call ritual, where the members of the community acted out their relationships and their mutual responsibilities and the identity of the community as a whole was affirmed and celebrated.
In a different way, that was true among the aristocracy, for whom musicking also played its part in the social rituals that maintained their conceptual universe. Music was as much for performing as for listening to, and when musicians were employed, they were there as much to help their employers perform as to perform to them. The musicians were customarily the patron’s servants, and often doubled as gardeners, valets, footmen, and grooms—only the superrich had full-time orchestras—and the listeners were his family, his dependents, and his guests, a tight community. Many of the pieces that the composer-music director composed were not so much for the patron to listen to but for him and members of his household to perform. In addition, the patron himself might well be a composer as well as performer, sometimes of more than amateur competence, as was Henry VIII of England, Frederick the Great of Prussia, and many of the princes of the Hungarian Esterhazy family which in the late eighteenth century was Haydn’s employer.
As for the music of the medieval and Renaissance Christian church, it was a communal offering to their God, in which the choir, should there be one, sang not to but on behalf of the congregation, who approved what they sang with their response of “Amen.” And of course, as is still true today, congregational singing needed no audience.
In none of these forms of musicking did anybody pay for admission to the performance. You were there by right as part of the community, or you were not there at all. Even the first concert societies, from about 1730 onward, were essentially private affairs, limited to a circle of subscribers, who were strictly vetted for their social suitability before being admitted. The practice of selling tickets, throwing open the event to anyone who had the price of admission, originated in the emerging mercantile society of England in the late seventeenth century, but did not become the rule until well into the nineteenth.
Even in modern industrial societies, sharing with strangers some of one’s most profound and personal cultural experiences is not the invariable rule. Not only do there remain smaller communities in which the traditional intimate patterns of performance survive, but even in great cities there are pockets where they remain strong: working-class social clubs; blues and jazz clubs; local repertory theaters; ethnic communities whose ceremonies of birth, death and especially marriage provide occasions for the affirmation of community; groups of friends who meet to make music together; sports and other activities clubs; and of course churches and other religious groups. But they are islands of community among the great sea of impersonal relations of the modern city.
Those attending tonight’s symphony concert come as strangers to one another and seem content to remain so. Even those who have come with friends sit, once the performance begins, still and silent in their seats, each individual alone with his or her own experience, avoiding so much as eye contact with others. Whatever may be the nature of the performance, they experience it, and expect to experience it, in isolation, as solitary individuals.
Strangers they may be to one another, and yet in certain respects not strangers at all. Those taking part in any musical event are to some extent self-selected in terms of their sense of who they are or of who they feel themselves to be, and this event is no exception. Any number of surveys, taken in a number of industrialized countries, confirm that audiences for symphony concerts are overwhelmingly middle and upper class in composition, which is to say, crudely, that they are either members of a group of occupations that includes business, management, the professions and government or are in training for or aspiring to those occupations.
In terms of formal education the well-educated, which is to say those whose schooling was extended beyond adolescence, are in the majority. In terms of income they tend to be above, often well above, the average, and they tend to be older rather than younger. This composition has hardly changed at all over the years since such surveys were taken, despite generations of well-meaning attempts to widen the social base of the audience.
I mention this not to talk about elitism, which is no part of the purpose of this book (the word has in any case become so loaded that it can hardly any longer be used in rational discussion) but to suggest that in the concert hall, as at any other kind of musical event, there is an underlying kinship between the members of the audience. In a certain sense they are at ease with one another, knowing that there are certain kinds of behavior they can expect of one another and other kinds that they need not.
The members of this audience know that they can rely on one another to make the effort to arrive on time and to accept without protest their exclusion if they do not and to keep still and quiet as the musicians play. They expect to be treated with courtesy and respect by the staff of the hall and will complain if they are not so treated. But there is a wider range of behaviors also: not to overdress vulgarly or wear cheap perfume, not to belong to unacceptable racial minorities, not to take too much alcohol or other drugs before the performance or in the interval, not to go to sleep and snore, not to belch or fart or breathe garlic in people’s faces, not to make improper sexual advances, not to pick their pockets or mug them.
In a word, a concert hall is a place where middle-class white people can feel safe together. In this respect its relationships resemble those of an ideal city as imagined by the sociologist Jane Jacobs (1961), which, she says, is a place where strangers can encounter one another in safety. But Jacobs envisages the possibility of an infinite variety of human meetings. What takes place in the concert hall is a narrow range of impersonal encounters among people of more or less the same social class, where each goes his or her own private way without being impinged on to any significant extent by others. It is, we might say, an ideal Westchester or Wimbledon rather than the untidy variety of a Brixton or a Lower East Side.
I remember a tiny and seemingly insignificant happening in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall that, for me, illustrates this feeling of safety. It was during the early 1970s, at a concert of avant-garde music, where the audience was mainly student, bohemian, and intellectual. The night was cold, and I was wearing a bulky sheepskin coat. Not wanting to wait in the long line for the cloakroom, I had the momentary thought that I could hang it in the gents’ washroom, that with this audience it would be safe there. Then I checked myself, remembering that middle-class intellectuals were just as likely as anyone else to knock off a nice sheepskin coat left hanging in the gents’ if they thought they could get away with it. But the thought had come so pat, so unbidden, that it could only have originated in that feeling of being among my own kind, strangers though they may have been to me. In the event I kept the coat on my lap, causing discomfort to myself and annoyance to my neighbors.
Above all, the members of the audience expect one another to respect scrupulously their privacy in the face of the musical experiences they are all undergoing. The aloneness of the individual during the performance is felt not as a deprivation but as the necessary condition for full enjoyment and understanding of the musical works being played. It is not that people do not socialize at a concert; they do, and the socializing is an important part of the event. But we have seen that that takes place in the foyer, before and in the interval of the concert, not in the auditorium. The two halves of the event are physically separated from each other, and the experience of the musical works themselves, the center of the night’s event, is a solitary one.
Orchestra and audience, too, are strangers to
