Some wine and a lot of talk about contemporary music

Last monday I attended a small gathering in Kaapelitehdas, where the chamber orchestra Avanti has their rehearsal space. (The conversation was in english, and so is this post.) There was wine, of course. I had white. But there were also two presentations (by Heather Maitland and Tomas Demidoff) on the subject of ”how the hell can we make people listen to and pay for contemporary classical music that most people don’t like to listen to at all right now but without which there will never be the new classics that people will love in a matter of centuries or even decades.” Or that’s how I interpreted it. Another interpretation: ”How the hell can we make people listen to and pay for contemporary classical music that they would really, really love – if only they were raised surrounded by it from early age like they are surrounded by popular music right now?” In short, it was all about marketing contemporary classical music.

So basically most of the evening was spent discussing whether young people would go to more contemporary classical gigs if only they were allowed to drink beer simultaneously. The consensus tended to be towards ”yes they would”, even though there were also voices pointing out that it’s not the boring classical concert form (with the tuxedos and all) that is wrong – it’s the people, who don’t like to be bored by classical music anymore. In my opinion, this latter is actually a very important point of view.

I loved it, when Meta4-quartet played short pieces of new music in a bar in Uudenmaankatu and we all drank beer, felt like friends and enjoyed the music. Nobody was bored and it was great. But nevertheless: in my opinion, the best thing a person can do to become a calmer, more easy-going and especially a more creative being, is to get bored. This is the whole point of fastly growing meditation trend (which admittedly is still quite minimal compared to an even faster growing trend of being constantly active and ”on line”). And this field is also where classical arts have a lot to give. (In the field of boredom? I know, it doesn’t sound too good… please let me explain.)

According to some interesting research results that we were presented by Heather, the audience in a concert starts to breath in syncrony – and even their heartbeats find a common rythm. A a great piece of information for the growing amount of people who are also interested in creating a sense of unity through meditation! Above all, I find it absolutely fabulous that a concert hall is a venue where it is allowed and even encouraged to sit still and do nothing, not even think. There is nothing to see for our visually addicted brain, nothing to do for our restless hands – only something to listen to. And preferably something (like new music) that you just can’t understand and interpret into words, even if you wanted to. What a great challenge and a vast opportunity to our itching, twitching, mouse-switching mind and body! Thus the whole point is not to ditch old concert form, where musicians play weird sounds dressed in tuxedos and audience sits still – but rather just to make it more easily approachable for different kinds of people. On this there were many great ideas.

Now the problem is, that even if we succeeded in doing this, vast majority of us humans are still obsessed with ”understanding” the music. Especially the ones that like to be analytic. And when it comes to contemporary music, specifically this understanding-business is well known to be quite hard. A most interesting bit of information was offered by Heather about a brain research. It showed that while listening to music, people who play or have played an instrument (even just for three years as a child) activate much bigger parts of their analytical left brain than the people who haven’t. The conclusion was made that the former (like all of us there in Kaapelitehdas) are ”analytical listeners” while the latter are ”emotional listeners”. Now I would like to argue. Not with the point that was made – that in marketing and presenting new classical music we should definitely appeal more to the emotional right brain half and catch the non-musicians who don’t care about ”understanding” and comparing but rather are concerned on the whole concert experience. Definitely we should.  For after all, new classical music is supposed to be art, dominated by the right brain half – sometimes crazy, free and controversial – not just conventions and (god forbid) mathematical comparisons.

But with the division between ”analytical” and ”emotional” listeners, that’s where I have a problem. It’s got nothing to do with the subject matter in Kaapelitehdas, but interests me greatly as an art student. In a previous post I talked about painting and how the idea of an artwork has to ”land” from head to body before it can be made. In the same way it is crucial for a musician to ”land” the piece from left brain half (where all the note reading is done) to the rest of the body. Otherwise we get a technically good piece with no personal contents at all. In the same way: even if a listener is trained as a musician or even a musicologist, it is crucial to be able to leave most of the messages of the left brain aside while immersing to music. Otherwise we might know exactly what we heard – but there was no personal contents by the listener and thus no contact with the art, and no effect to our being.

It is known that being an ”emotional” right brain listener doesn’t mean that you couldn’t tell good from bad or distinguish even the finest qualities of music. On the contrary: you might know things much more accurately than by trying to logically understand and cathegorize them. You just can’t tell exactly how you know. I have a great example on this. I once took part in a research concerning acoustics in different European concert halls. In the first part we were required to listen to an extract of music four times, and distinguish wich of these was played in a different acoustic environment. Then this was repeated with different extracts and different acoustic environments for 90 times. Quite an exhausting task! I started listening to the pieces. First four sounded exactly the same to me and my answer was a guess. I sharpened my ears. I thought I might have been able to tell the difference in the next few sets, based on how they sounded. But I was never sure. Then I kind of gave up, relaxed my ears and my thinking shut down – and I literally felt how the music poured freely to my body. Suddenly it was completely obvious, which of the each four extracts was different to others. I happily wrote down all the right answers, and every time my analytical brain tried to take over I just concentrated on ”hearing” the music in my chest.

As I said, a musician has to be both analytical and emotional listener to make the art ”land” from analytical brain to the rest of the body. Unfortunately, this landing doesn’t always happen in classical music teaching. We do a great job with teaching the theory to kids and learning the pieces technically and dynamically right and the ”interpreting” or feeling comes only after that – if the child is persistent enough. The point where we should start with every new piece is ”how is this piece meant to feel? How does playing this bit feel like to you?” And maybe even ”Where in your body do you feel it?” Luckily there are also teachers and teaching methods who do have the right brain half as a starting point. But it is a shame that many children in our music schools are trained to use dominantly their analytical brain while listening to music, and not encouraged to make a contact with music as an inexcplicable artistic experience. In fact – maybe this is why (according to a finnish research study) the people who have been educated in music as a child actually go to less concerts as an adult than the people who have no background in musical education at all?

Unfortunately we ran out of wine before the conversation got this far. And now – it’s off to the art school. Next I promise you a posting with a lot less writing and a lot more pictures! (Ja seuraava postaus on suomeksi. Pahoittelut tästä kielellisestä hairahduksesta!)