"Too mainstream"

Last night I had that scary experience that celebrities must have all the time: complete strangers sat down next to me at a show and familiarly greeted me as “Ah, it must be Mr Brown.” No one I know calls me that (except to mock), so I knew I was not having a senior moment. They were, in fact strangers, or rather they knew me from East Neuk Festival stage announcements. In the same cheery jolly tone, they went on to tell me that they had come to loads of shows at ENF last year but were not coming to ANY this year. Not one. Broad smiles.

“All too mainstream.”

Wow! Normally I would cheer at the idea that my audience is so adventurous and broad minded that I disappoint them by not sharing the wilder, stranger, more challenging of my latest musical highlights each year. There are plenty of them, believe me. But long experience shows that this is a pipe dream. The presence of any contemporary music at all – even the Pärt, Glass, Reich safer zone – leads to a minimum 25% drop in sales for a concert, usually far worse. Hell, even Haydn, Bartok or Debussy on a concert bill has a negative effect. Even so, this is the first time ever that someone has relished telling me that I have lost a sale because of being too “mainstream”.

Set me thinking.

First I checked that they really had read the brochure. The Oud concerts for instance, surely they are not mainstream? They murmured agreement. And the David Lang commission, that’s not mainstream is it? I mean, he got the Oscar nomination and all but that’s not really robbed him of his edgy status? I had them there. Then they told me their favourite show last year was a jazz/Balkan act which is about as ‘mainstream’ in my book as can be. So I concluded that we simply had different definitions of the word. Fair enough, but I do not need to lose sleep over it.

There is a deeper issue here about how programmers and audiences understand each other, and what it is that makes us chose which concerts to attend. If ‘mainstream’ is genuinely the issue here, try this. There is a piece of music by Beethoven in this festival that I have only once heard live before – and which one of Scotland’s leading music critics – now in his later 60s – had only ever heard live twice in his entire 50-odd year career. There is a piece by Liszt that is almost never programmed, a Martinu quartet I can’t remember seeing on any programme in Scotland before. Are these mainstream? Or is it simply the familiarity of their composers’ names that justifies dismissing them? We’re all guilty of broad brushstroke decisions of different kinds in some part of our lives: I do it all the time but I wouldn’t deny the shallowness of it. Usually blame it on being too busy… And anyhow, there is another, more troubling issue about how and what we listen to music for at all.

Say a concert programme includes an oft-programmed classic: would that make it less worthy of attention? A wonderful pianist once told me “every performance must be like a world premiere – or why else am I doing this?” I feel the same way as a listener: if I am not listening afresh to a piece of music every time I hear it, why am I listening? A live performance is a two-way exchange: performer and listener in the same room. The performer gives his interpretation and the listener gives his attention, his brain’s processing, his emotional response. The shared space between the two is where the magic happens. So if all it takes is the sight of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Beethoven on the bill to bore you, should you not ask whether you yourself aren’t a boring listener? And are you really so overfamiliar and jaded with everything they wrote that you can justify turning your ears against them?

Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances aimed not to tell its audience anything about its concerts ahead of the event itself, bar the time and place: they had to come and discover with an open mind. Without going quite that far, I do dream of an audience who will come to rediscover the fresh delights of Eine kleine Nachtmusik as readily as to hear the latest Mira Calix. But perhaps the horrible truth is that the majority of listeners allow names and preconceptions to govern their choices rather than really opening their ears to the music itself, regardless of who wrote it and when. So where does that leave us when it comes to building audiences?