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The Hong Kong Rieger in an empty (and quiet) hall |
It wasn’t that they did not like the music. In a programme that ranged from Zachau and
Krebs to Nigel Ogden and Zsolt Gárdonyi by way of Karg-Elert, Hindemith and Gabriel
Pierné, I really think there was something for everyone (except, of course,
died-in-the-wool Bach or Messiaen fans).
They were not there under sufferance – children had been queuing up excitedly
over two hours before the scheduled start and adults had been anxiously chasing
around trying to find the correct ticket counter (inexplicably hidden away on
the opposite side of the concourse to the box office) – and they certainly were
not there under false pretences – the occasional Saturday early evening organ
recital in Hong Kong is a pretty well-established feature and while star names
appear once in the season, most of the players, like myself, are pretty much
nonentities in the overall scheme of things.
No, there was a genuine desire to be there in the hall while the organ
recital was one. There just did not seem
to be a genuine desire actually to listen to the music once the recital had
begin.
Performers instinctively know how effectively they are
communicating to an audience and how the audience is reacting to the music. When
I felt an audience slipping out of my reach during a performance of Britten’s
dreadful, dreadful Prelude & Fugue on
a Theme of Vittoria (included in my programme only because of the
stipulations laid down by the concert organiser), I subtly hurried it along,
giving it more lightness and skipping loosely over its dire textural
intricacies (having thought that it was these which would possibly appeal to an
audience). When an audience became
deeply hushed during the Fugue of Hindemith’s Second Sonata, I tried to prolong
the spell by making a little more of the rests and the silences in the
piece. And when the crowd at Singapore’s
Esplanade started clapping along to Nigel Ogden’s Saints on a Spree I confess I hammed it up even more – no apologies
due, I’m sure Ogden would have done the same with knobs on.
In the event I enjoyed myself hugely for, in the absence of
a clear lead from the Hong Kong audience to which I could react, I decided to
play everything as if nobody was there and simply enjoy myself. The audience clearly liked what they heard –
they stayed through to the bitter end, toilet visits notwithstanding, and many
came to see me afterwards to thank me and to recall bits they had particularly
liked, they even asked me to go back and play again sometime – and the applause
was loud, generous…and frequent. Every hint
of a silence, every moment when the organ descended below the level of
audibility, they started clapping. Less
than two seconds into the Ogden, applause broke out; the grand pause just
before the end of the Lanquetuit Toccata elicited
a premature cheer, and a quiet moment of intense reflection during the Pierné Cantilene was disrupted by an enthusiastic
clapper.
A moment when nobody was clapping
I blame the music examination culture.
What? You cannot be
serious?
I blame the music examination culture!
Music is taught to the tens of thousands of children in Hong
Kong not as an art form requiring inner concentration but as something akin to
a competitive sport testing physical stamina.
The enjoyment is derived from the visual effort of the protagonist rather
than the intellectual effort of the composer.
Emotions like excitement and panic are more prominent than those such as
passion and pathos. Music is taught as an
activity with definite goals in mind, those goals being Grades 1-8, ATCL, LTCL,
LRSM etc. etc.; panic comes when there is a fear you might not achieve a pass,
excitement when there seems to be a real chance of distinction. And it is easy to transfer those concepts to
being a spectator to a musical performance.
If it’s usual practice to cheer and talk while sportsmen are doing their
stuff on the track, it’s got to be all right to behave the same way when
musicians are in the concert arena. What’s
the difference?
On top of that, music, for the exam candidate, consists of
single stand-alone pieces. You play
three totally different pieces none of which is more than a few minutes in
length. Extended structures or complex
journeys across emotions have no place in examination repertoire. So, obviously, when there is a break or a
change in mood, the piece must have finished and, in place of the examiner’s
stern admonition - “And your next piece please” – the void is filled with
applause. Candidates at diploma level –
in Hong Kong disastrously attempting a diploma hot on the heels of grade 8 - invariably
fail to appreciate the concept of a multi-movement Sonata and will often treat
this as three totally independent pieces.
Indeed, the habit of playing an isolated movement from a Sonata or a
single piece from a multi-piece work, is prevalent whenever candidates are
given free choice over repertoire. No
notion here that a musical work can encompass a wide range of styles, moods, tempi
and technical demands, and it’s almost customary for candidates randomly to
miss out whole sections of a work simply to keep it within a specified time-framework;
time-keeping taking precedence over musical integrity, because a weakness in
the former can lead to failure while a weakness in the latter is not seen to
impact on the exam result. How many
times I’ve had to ask why certain bars or complete movements are cut out, only
to be told that “It would have gone over time if I’d played that” – the idea
that, perhaps, another programme choice would have been better is
inconceivable.
All this leads is something which music examiners and alert
teachers have long seen as a cause for concern - the notion that exam culture has
become detached from performance reality.
But I now believe it impacts on audience behaviour. The more an audience
comprises those who have been through the examination system, the more they
will begin to regard musical performance as the public manifestation of their
own experiences in the examination room, and when they sit in the concert hall,
they see their function as a vague amalgamation between spectator and examiner
There is a solution to this growing problem and, as ever, it
rests with teachers. The sterile
instruction to pass physical goals has to be removed and replaced by a desire
to enrich a student’s intellectual and emotional development. Exams are important, but they are, musically
as in every other field, essentially artificial and detached from the reality
of everyday experience. Once a student
is made aware that the exam situation is false and the concert situation the reality,
they will then understand the concept that there is such a thing as concert
etiquette. Sadly, Hong Kong shows too
much the signs of the exam being the reality and the concert the artificial
situation, and while 1300 people might have enjoyed themselves on their own
terms, I wish I could tell them just how much more they would have enjoyed themselves
if they had known what was really going on in the concert hall.
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