Debating the Visuals of Sound

By Al Rudis

What do you see when you hear famous classical music?

For many listeners, when they hear Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” they see a masked man galloping on his white horse.

Whenever Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” is played, some shudder as they think of the evil Peter Lorre in “M.”

Mozart’s Piano Concerto 21 evokes doomed young lovers in period costumes for those who remember the film “Elvira Madigan.”

The bone-rattling first notes of Richard Strauss’s tone poem “Also Sprach Zarathustra” were written in 1896, even though they’re really about space travel and monoliths in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

And of course, nearly everyone knows Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is Mickey Mouse.

Classical music can be visual, but there’s not much to look at when the Long Beach Symphony, or any orchestra, is playing it. You’ll be hearing music purer and clearer than in any movie or recording because it’s being played live in front of you with usually no electronic enhancements.

But all you’ll see are a bunch of dressed-up musicians sitting in their chairs and one short conductor jumping around on a small platform in front of them.

And that’s a problem, according to Jack Fishman, the symphony’s executive director.

“We’ve become more and more of a visual society,” he said in an interview last week. “Our parents grew up at a time when there was the morning newspaper, the evening newspaper and the radio. Now people are growing up barely ever processing information that way. It’s all visual. And the orchestra industry understands this.”

Funded by several foundations, most notably the Knight Foundation, symphonies have made a number of interesting experiments in recent years aimed at giving symphony audiences more eye candy.

The Philadelphia Orchestra put video screens up in their concert hall and had cameras focused on the orchestra during concerts. “It was a sort of ‘Live From Lincoln Center,”‘ showing the melody,” said Fishman. “When a trumpet player played the melody, you got a picture of the trumpet player.

“This pretty much failed, and everybody who’s tried this has stopped the experiment. One reason is that it is hard to have the visual experience as high in quality as the music.”

Fishman says there’s an even more basic problem with this approach, one that affects any attempt to introduce visual elements into symphony concerts.

Unlike audiences at pops concerts, which responded 96 percent in favor of video screens when the Long Beach Symphony surveyed them, “people who go to classical music concerts have a different frame of reference. They are looking for some sort of emotional or maybe even spiritual experience.”

At the first concert Enrique Arturo Diemecke conducted as music director in 2001, a camera was put into the clarinet section and aimed at the conductor, and the video was projected onto a screen. “We just did it for one piece, eight minutes long, and then we asked the question,” said Fishman, “do you want to have this never, occasionally, frequently or all the time?”

One third of the respondents said they liked the idea and wanted it all the time. Another third said, “Well, if it’s appropriate to the piece, maybe occasionally.”

But the final third was by far the most vehement. “They said if you do this, I’m never coming back. It destroyed the experience for me.”

“A lot of people said, ‘I like to close my eyes at concerts and let the music wash over me. I don’t think about what the music’s about. I don’t want to know the story. I don’t want to know the history of Beethoven. I want to know that it comes into me, and I’m transformed. I’m transported to a new place.’ People use that kind of emotional language.

“What they all were saying was we’re looking for that emotional, spiritual experience, and we don’t want the Long Beach Symphony to tell us what we should feel.”

There is one kind of music that is directly connected to powerful visuals, and no one objects: ballets. “There’s a long tradition of great ballets in classical music,” said Fishman. “And nobody complains when there’s a visual element for ‘Swan Lake’ or ‘The Nutcracker.’ And there are also lots of abstract ballets. I remember loving Balanchine’s ‘Concerto Baroquo,’ set to the Bach double violin concerto, and of course there’s no story to the concerto.”

Nature photographer James Westwater took the ballet approach in creating his “symphonic photochoreography.”"He said, ‘I’m going to go out to Appalachia and take pictures for Copland’s ‘Appalachian Spring,”‘ said Fishman. (Copland didn’t name it that. He called it “Ballet for Martha,” but Martha Graham decided it reminded her of Applachia and created the title and the theme of her choreography.) He did it with “Sinfonia Antarctica” by Vaughan Williams and lots of pieces that have in their titles suggestions of nature.

“He comes with his photographs, multiple slide projects and three huge screens and actually sits in the audience and choreographs it. He knows the scores really well, and when you get to the main theme, it’s picture 17. When the trumpets come in, it’s picture 25, that kind of thing.

“And he’s popular and successful, and we’ve done it here, and I’ve done it with other orchestras. For children’s concerts, it’s 100 percent successful.”

But with adults it was another story. There was a sizable, outspoken group that resented the photographs. “He was a brilliant photographer, but he was trying to tell me what to feel,” is how they put it in Fishman’s surveys.

Videos were part of another experiment by Roland Valliere when he was executive director of the Kansas City Symphony. His idea was to give each concertgoer a choice of technical information or something to look at.

He created what he called the Concert Companion, a handheld device similar to a Palm personal digital assistant.

“When you walked into the concert hall, you were handed a PDA, and there was wireless transmission throughout the hall,” said Fishman.

“So when you sat down to listen to Beethoven, you had options. You could follow along with a text commentary that might be technical: ‘This is the main theme; this is the main theme now being played by the oboe; this is the main theme inverted being played by the clarinet.’ “You could also hit a button and get video. They had a camera on the conductor or roving to where the melody was.”

This experiment also failed, partly because the technology wasn’t quite advanced enough at the time, partly because creating the content was expensive, and mostly because of that percentage of the audience that didn’t want distractions.

After these experiments and others, symphonies now know what doesn’t work. Is there anything that does work?

According to Fishman, the answer is stealth visuals: Give the audience something to look at while acting as if it’s no big deal.

Here are some of the techniques used:

Schedule a concerto, especially a piano concerto. “Every orchestra in the country knows that the seats on audience left sell better than audience right,” said Fishman. That’s because from the left, you can see the piano concerto soloist pounding the keys dramatically. “We program more piano concertos than any other instrument,” Fishman said, “everybody does. They sell more than other concertos.”

Schedule music that offers possibilities of visuals that it’s hard to argue against. Diemecke wrote a piece that the symphony performed featuring children playing “street instruments” such as garbage cans and brooms. A concerto played earlier this season presented a visual of two women virtuosos in front of the orchestra, one playing a tiny piccolo and one a gigantic contrabasson.

And recently Colin Currie was the soloist in a percussion concerto, with his myriad instruments set up in front of the orchestra. “He is a good looking guy, and he had one section of instruments on the left and one on the right, and he had to run back and forth,” said Fishman. “But it wasn’t contrived. It was sort of part of the piece.”

Hire a flamboyant conductor. Fishman said that most conductors exaggerated their movements beyond what was necessary to give cues to the orchestra. For they audience, they are like pantomimes interpreting the music. The diminutive but energetic Diemecke is certainly a focal point for audiences at Long Beach Symphony concerts.

Walt Disney’s movie “Fantasia,” with its imaginative and colorful animations themed around great classical works is considered a masterpiece by many. But when it was released, a large number of musicians and aficionados despised it for spoiling the audience’s personal emotional connection to the music.

That was in 1940, and the argument is still going on – at the Terrace Theater and across the universe of classical music.

alrudis@yahoo.com, 562-499-1255

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