that no society, no sociability, not even in the Age of Aquarius, can exist without constraints on behavior.
At rock festivals, as at any other kind of musical event, there were, and are, right and wrong ways to behave, right and wrong ways to dress, to speak and to respond, both to one another and of course to the musical performances. To dress or behave there in ways that come naturally in Symphony Hall would be to invite ridicule, if not downright hostility. There are even right and wrong drugs to get high on; I remember some hash-smoking friends at one rock festival registering fierce disapproval of a nearby group who were drinking alcohol—cider, for god’s sake!
What was extraordinary was the speed with which these norms of behavior became established. Virtually nonexistent at the beginning of the 1960s, they were firmly in place, and even too conventional for some, by the end of that decade. A whole generation of young people was aware of them, even those who did not subscribe to them.
That they were felt by those present not as constraints but as liberation only goes to show how lightly norms fall on those for whom they represent ideal social relationships. But then, that is true of behavior, including dress, at all musical performances, symphony concerts not excepted. The fact that those who enjoy the event do not feel constrained but feel rather that they are behaving in a way that is natural and normal suggests once again that a musical performance, while it lasts, brings into existence relationships that model in metaphoric form those which they would like to see in the wider society of their everyday lives.
It looks as if the relationships that are established in a symphony concert mirror those which we might call the official relationships of our society. At any rate, to take part in a symphony concert, as in other classical music performances, is an activity that earns complete approval from those authorities who provide and attempt to enforce the norms of our social and political lives. As I have already suggested, we behave there according to the canons of middle-class good manners, and we police ourselves for signs of deviance from them. No policemen or security guards are needed to enforce them, no one searches us for weapons or drugs, and we expect to be treated by the hall staff with courtesy and respect.
The further performance behavior deviates from these middle-class norms, the heavier becomes the enforcing presence; even today it is quite common to see security guards patrolling rock concerts. I remember, too, a performance in a London cinema in the late 1970s by a group of Jamaican actors and musicians headed by the distinguished vernacular poet Louise Bennett. Naturally, Jamaicans came in hundreds to see and hear them. It was a happy crowd, mainly middle-aged, with a strong residual sense of their Jamaican roots; there were a few whites, and we all waited good- naturedly in the cold outside the cinema until we were admitted, only a few minutes before the performance was due to start. Finally, we were admitted in single file through the only one of the half dozen entrance doors that was open. Each face was scanned, as its owner passed, by tense and anxious uniformed staff clearly expecting trouble.
As one of the few whites present, I found their attitude offensive, but my black friends shrugged it off, not wanting to spoil their evening by showing resentment too overtly and being refused admittance. During the performance the audience was hardly ever quiet; the buzz of comment and laughter rose and fell with the music, the jokes, the sketches in Jamaican patois, the recitations by Miss Bennett herself, who would probably have wondered what she was doing wrong had this audible reaction not come back to her. It was an essential element of the performance, the audience’s contribution, and without it the performance would have been a sad affair indeed.
At an even further remove from the norms of and the social approval accorded to the symphony concert, there is a description in Tricia Rose’s book on rap, Black Noise (1994), of the indignities that thousands of young black Americans had to endure before being admitted to a rap performance in a big New York stadium. She describes how the initially very good-humored crowd was divided by aggressive security guards into male and female lines, how each individual was separated from others and subjected to a humiliating body pat-down and scan with a metal detector and even a search through handbags and pocketbooks, and how the cheerful, expectant atmosphere rapidly soured. Such procedures not only serve to exacerbate the very attitudes that they purport to control, but they also indicate how heavily the enforcing presence falls upon those whose style of musicking does not fit the approved social norms.
It is not, of course, just the behavior itself that produces anxiety in the authorities—that is for them merely the sign and signal of the identity of those taking part—it is the identity itself that is disturbing. The mere presence of a few hundred middle-aged Jamaicans at a London cinema was enough to inspire fear in the staff and that of thousands of young African Americans coming to enjoy a performance in a New York stadium seems to have caused something approaching panic.
This leads us to an idea that I shall be developing later: that the way people relate to one another as they music is linked not only with the sound relationships that are created by the performers, not only with the participants’ relation to one another, but also with the participants’ relationships to the world outside the performance space, in a complex spiral of relationships, and it is those relationships, and the relationships between relationships, that are the meaning of the performance.
An unsympathetic observer might even find a certain hypocrisy in some popular music situations. Consider, for example, the relation of performers to audience. Many popular artists make a great show of their unity and their solidarity with their listeners; I remember an aging and justly famous star of country music sitting on the edge of the stage with his feet dangling over, thus symbolically breaking through the barrier between himself and the audience, and announcing, “We’re gonna be here all night!” We all cheered, even though we knew no such thing was gonna happen; neither the theater management nor the star’s own handlers would allow the performance to run much over its allotted two hours or so. But we appreciated the gesture, and—who knows?—perhaps he was wishing as sincerely as ourselves that it might be true. I doubt if sensitive artists enjoy the conditions under which they have to perform any more than do sensitive members of the audience.
Again, some popular artists go the the point of behavior onstage that under other circumstances could be interpreted as an invitation to sex. But woe betide any deluded member of the audience who takes the invitation seriously and tries to join the performer onstage. There will be a team of heavies, hired for the purpose, waiting to bundle him or her off, and not too gently either. The nearest anyone not in the performers’ charmed circle will get to them will be in the line for an autograph at the end of the show.
Such pretenses are, of course, absent from symphony concerts. Performers, however glamorous, do not issue sexual invitations, not onstage at any rate, and so do not need a team of heavies to keep people off the platform, and no one feels the need to pretend that the performance is going to go on all night. No hypocrisy there, if hypocrisy it is. But hypocrisy has been called the tribute that vice pays to virtue, and the pretenses that are made in these situations show what it is that those taking part, performers perhaps as well as audience, are looking for in the performance. We might read it as the quest for an ideal of community and conviviality as an antidote for the loneliness of our age.
A festival of folk music shows a similar quest more coherently, through a deliberate informality of presentation that goes beyond that of the usual rock concert. There is a studious avoidance of glamour. Stages are generally small and unpretentious, and amplification, if it is used at all (some folk artists righteously eschew amplification altogether) is discreet. Performers are expected to avoid the kind of forceful self-presentation and domination of the audience that characterizes the rock star and, in a different way, the concert soloist, and to fraternize with the audience when not performing.
This is of course as carefully cultivated a set of behaviors as that which is exhibited in any other musicking. Stars remain stars, even if they shine less ostentatiously than some of their pop or classical colleagues, and a paying public remains a paying public. That the experience is more of the desire
