We believe that music is such an important part of our lives that we should listen to it, even if we don’t like it.
— Anna Russell
So decrees the wonderfully bumbling music club president in Anna Russell’s bang-on parody of your typical club president introduction. You probably know the routine: not only does the introducer mangle Shakespeare and give the impression that one of the club members is having an illicit affair with her doctor, but she never actually gets around to announcing the name of the performer—that being the one thing she just can’t remember.
Like so many great comics before and after, Russell manages to tuck in some universal truths into her routines. In this case, she hits a critical topic square on: that oft-encountered shibboleth that art isn’t necessarily there to be enjoyed, but to be appreciated. Liking it isn’t so important. What’s important is that we support it, we appreciate it, we value it.
McLean Stevenson in the TV version of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, after being dragged to the SF Opera yet again by his social-climbing wife: why is it always the Marriage of Goddamn Figaro? Why can’t it be South Pacific instead? But no, it’s always the Marriage of Goddamn Figaro. Nothing bores his character more than yet another go at Mozart. So he retreats to the Pacific Union club and drinks. A lot. He’s a meat-and-potatoes guy being forced to eat quiche, and he doesn’t like it one bit.
I sympathize with him a lot more than one might think. I’m the last person in the world to advocate dragging kids to the symphony or the opera or the ballet, especially if that dragging is accompanied by tucking said kids into iron-maiden Sunday finery and plastering them with warnings about behaving and keeping their mouths shut. You’re going to be exposed to culture, you little barbarians. Whether you like it or not.
Heck, I loved music but I didn’t like being dragged to those things. My starched collar itched and I felt like I was strangling from that damn tie. (Even though it was usually a clip-on.) I didn’t want to sit there and listen to Beethoven and Mozart. I loved listening to my records at home—many of which were Tchaikovsky and Beethoven and the like—but those concert halls, yecch. I always had to pee. My feet hurt from the shoes. I was bored silly.
Worse yet were the piano recitals. Endless sloughs, one kid after another playing ghastly stuff by Mozart and Haydn and Clementi or ridiculous pap by William Gillock or other such kid-piano illuminati. Given some time to take a breather, run around for a bit, have a snack, pee, I might have been OK. But no: the things ran on and on and on and on. I got bored fast, then jumpy with that desperate squirmy restlessness that hits kids so dramatically. We adults forget just how all-consuming a case of the fidgets is when you’re eight. It’s beyond torture, a hell realm of the most exquisite demonic design. Add to that a sore fanny from sitting too long, a disapproving parental unit sure to hiss a dire warning in the ear should my little legs start doing their swing-dance, and an overall feeling of imprisoned doom: Gitmo, the Bastille, and the Black Hole of Calcutta all wrapped up in one.
No wonder most Americans don’t attend concerts. Too many ugly memories.
The cure: let’s all agree to ix-nay on the ulture-cay. Just let the music be the music, and let kids be kids. Present the music in situations where the kids can hum along, tap their feet, kick each other, rattle around, march or dance. Let it be fun from the get-go, the way it should be. Because what’s music without fun? Sure, music is far more than just fun—there’s nobility there, wonderful expression, sometimes a look at the icky underbelly of it all. But mostly, it’s fun.
And if you don’t like it, don’t listen to it. Don’t play it. Don’t sit there with jaw clenched, determined that if I just listen to this enough, or carefully enough, I’ll start to like it. No you won’t. A piece of music attracts you or it doesn’t. Maybe later in life something that bored you as a kid will turn out to be interesting, just as some of those kid’s pieces—Khachaturian, anyone?—progressively lose their chic as one’s hairline recedes. At no point should one ever do culture as a grim duty. There are such better things to do with one’s time. Nice walks. Gardening. Cooking. Shopping. Playing with one’s dog, or one’s kittens, or one’s kids. Lounging in a hammock, lapping up a long cool one on a hot summer’s day.
Which is why I’m so happy to see formal dress codes disappearing at both the Symphony and Opera. Some might want to look nice—that includes me—but for others it’s just a bother. Nowadays you’re likely to see a guy in sweats and a hoodie right next to a couple dressed to the nines, and I say bravo. Wear what you want.
Now for the next step: I would like to see a return to applause between movements of symphonies, concertos, and the like. I would also like to hear the occasional whoop or the like in response to some particularly cool playing onstage. That’s what our great Western composers heard from their audiences, and what they relished. Let’s enjoy ourselves at the symphony. Maybe we shouldn’t go all the way downscale by serving hot dogs in the auditorium and encouraging everybody to yuck it up during the performances, but we could be a lot less stuffy than we are. Let it be a living, breathing art and not a museum piece. No culture. Just life, love, and joy.