TV Generation Demads More Form Symphony Event

The caller to National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” complained that at symphony concerts, “I can’t walk around, get things to eat, or play with my kids.”

The radio panelists’ nonplussed silence that followed showed that orchestras were dealing with a different population base from that which might have discussed concertgoing a generation ago.

Orchestra managements are vividly aware of the difference, for everything about the relationship between orchestras and listeners is changing rapidly. Now, in Philadelphia, for example, big screens - not unlike the live video projections set up at stadiums during rock concerts - show the bowstroking, horn-blowing action as it happens onstage.

But that’s only the latest twist. Long subscriptions are out; short ones and single sales are in. The arcane is out; Beethoven is in. Distance is out; intimacy is in. Since audiences don’t currently bring to concerts a childhood of piano lessons, involving school experiences and knowledge, it’s small wonder that the packaging of concerts has become paramount. How distant is that time when music lovers went to concerts to listen intently to the music played.

Orchestras are trying to show a more human face, open their rehearsals to those who help fund the music and concerts are designed to appeal to ethnic and national groups.

Now, challenged by a grant from the Knight Foundation, the Philadelphia Orchestra is experimenting with video presentation of its concerts - not for a national audience, but for the listeners in the hall.

The Knight Foundation’s grant has been designed to support programs “which have the potential to transform the relationship in the concert hall between the orchestra and the audience.”

Other orchestras are testing the idea.

Video does change things. People watch the screen instead of the orchestra. If proof were ever needed that this is an age of visual gratification rather than an aural one, these concerts provide it. Ears may atrophy in the age of video and computer screens.

Listeners can see who is playing, can see behind that formidable front row of formally dressed musicians. Informed camera work and directorial choices can trace the music’s architecture, heighten its drama, and clarify the conductor’s role and the highly physical act of playing an instrument.

The process is still evolving. Cameras are intrusive. Most are just offstage, but some are in the hall. Camera work, while generally helpful, sometimes produces images of players not playing, emptying spit out of horns and scratching noses.

In the Philadelphia Orchestra’s November concert, the camera tried to show Tyrone Breuninger playing the euphonium solo. Sitting in the back row, he was out of camera range. There finally emerged, however, a curious view of what appeared to be a man with a brass bell for a head. He was becoming his instrument before our very eyes.

Part of music’s fascination is spatial. That euphonium solo, coming from back there, lends mystery in the music. Cameras remove spatiality and pop the solo instrument onto the screen.

The camera work has improved since the Philadelphia Orchestra’s first experiment at the Mann Music Center during the summer, and the level is close to that of network telecasts from theaters designed to accommodate cameras. For a generation that cannot claim an experience until seeing it on a screen, the orchestra is making the right move at the right time. It is addressing the needs of that caller who complained about the immobility of symphony listeners.