Call me stupid, I dare you

Maybe I've missed something in A.C. Douglas' ongoing snit about Take a Friend to the Orchestra and the iPod generation(s), but I haven't found anywhere on Drew McManus' blog anything about building the "core audience," as A.C. calls it. The idea of TAFTO was to bring in new people who haven't gone to an orchestral concert before and see if they like it and maybe give them some tools to help. I wrote one of those essays myself.

This differentiation between lay audiences and experts reminds me of an experience in graduate school when I was reading something by Curt Sachs or Paul Henry Lang, one or another of those old-school musicologists. He fretted about the man next to him in the concert hall being unaware of the manifold mysteries and charms of Mozart's handling of sonata form and pitying him for not being able to appreciate it the way he did himself. It turned my stomach.

The core audience will take care of itself, so long as orchestras don't do anything to upset it to the point that it decides to leave. Such projects would probably include having Andrea Bocelli in town repeatedly, laser-light shows and having conductors talk endlessly before conducting, by which I mean for more than seven minutes. (Though there are conductors who can talk brilliantly for much longer than that.) Building that core audience is a worthy goal, but it's not the goal of TAFTO, at least the way I interpret it.

If we read those TAFTO essays as ways of bringing in new listeners who could become occasional audience-members, then we've done our job. To do that, you've got to reach them where they are and not expect them to become experts in sonata allegro form beforehand. Maybe they'll become part of the "core audience," but as long as they're in a seat and enjoying themselves, it's good enough for me.