Friedman 1
Good afternoon everyone! My name is Max (he/him), and I am a masters student in music composition and theory here at Brandeis. I am also a person who stutters and experiences social and performance anxiety. I am beyond thankful to Anna and Marie and the musicology grad students for organizing this wonderful conference and welcoming me into this space. And a huge congrats to the fantastic presenters this morning. My topic ended up a little different than what I had originally planned, but it is connected through my intended theme of deconstructing ableist ideologies of perfectionism in public speaking and performance. I will be presenting a short paper I wrote a few years ago, lightly edited for clarity, and adding a handful of fun little musical examples and a brief reflection before Q and A.
I try to ignore the obvious interruption of what I was actually there to hear. This was not a new experience; inevitably, at a symphony concert someone will always cough or shift their weight in such a way that disrupts the music emanating from the front of the hall. Creeeak. This time, it happens in the middle of a particularly soft, delicate section of the slow movement. The solo vocalist has just finished a phrase, and the strings are holding the prolonged chord, a suspension gradually resolving to the tonic. Some other time, this moment in the music might have brought tears to my eyes. Creeeeeeak. The joints of an old, squeaky chair are the foreground. I was genuinely annoyed at the creaks and squeaks, but I should have expected them. Unwanted noise is a given at symphony concerts; I can’t think of a single concert I have attended that hasn’t been disturbed in some way. Usually it’s just an isolated cough, creak, or croak; sometimes, however, a child’s cry or a cell phone ring tone (followed by an embarrassed shuffle toward the nearest door) interrupts several seconds of performance. Of course, these sounds are simply accidents, but even in the absence of human-generated noise, the hum of a heater or some
Friedman 2
Ambient Silence
An Ethnography of Accidental Offstage Performance at Boston Symphony Hall Creak.
other louder-than-intended structural mechanism can also be overbearing during the subtlest sections of music. Some extraneous ambiance is always there, no matter how engrossed in the music I am, no matter how much my mind is wandering elsewhere, and no matter how hard the audience collectively strains to avoid it. Here, however, I would like us to reconsider the role of these “imperfections.” I use the word “ambiance” instead of “noise” intentionally, given the latter term’s frequent weaponization to classist and racist ends. I encourage us to suspend judgment of these sounds for the time being and view them in the context of the unique physical and social space that is the western concert hall. In another framing, can instances of accidentally-improvised ambiance carry their own sonic, even musical value? At the very least, I argue, their omnipresence despite the best efforts of classical music norms shines a light on the absurdity of the concert hall utopia.
Symphony-goers are expected to sit quiet and still for many minutes at a time, usually observing sound that comes from one location in front of them. There are a number of select behaviors and traditions in which the audience is expected to be fluent (and tends to be); it is acceptable to applaud, cheer, laugh, discuss with friends, and get up to leave after a piece is complete, but certainly not in the middle of or, God-forbid, between movements. Anyone who intentionally breaks the silence is hushed and stigmatized. This strange ritual in which an audience is expected to observe a performance without interacting with it physically or verbally ensures that any non-intended is an imperfection of the Art being brought forth from the stage. Yet, this is a space, often catering to elderly audiences, in which hundreds of people are sitting on old, uncomfortable wooden chairs for well over an hour straight. Someone is going to happen to
Friedman 3
Friedman 4 be unable to hold their cough until the end of the slow movement; flies in the music’s ointment are inevitable considering how the performance event and the space are structured. Then, one might ask, why are they considered imperfections? Ambiance seems to be unable to be separated from the Western concert hall. This is by design: because the orchestra does not interact with the audience through space, the sound must travel an enormous distance. The hall is structured so that sound from a particular corner can resonate and seem to emanate from the hall itself; this has the side effect of amplifying squeaky chairs as well. But this would directly contrast the expectations that tradition places on the audience; music and its intangible affect are the top of an implied hierarchy. The Western classical tradition strives to construct an impossible environment in which the music must exist on its own, uncorrupted by either the limits of performance or the disturbances of any interaction with it. Paradoxically, it is implied that music is purer than human efforts are; yet, we are the ones who conceive of, organize, create, and receive it. By all measures, the performance I observed that night – in late October, 2018 – was stunning. One of the top orchestras in the world, the Boston Symphony, was performing in its legendary concert hall, and the featured composition on the program, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, is one of my favorite pieces from the Western classical canon, at once from the perspective of a composer, a performer, and a listener. Despite its unwieldy length of around an hour and a half, for me this music is incredibly exciting, filled with the composer’s signature thematic ideas and orchestrational signatures and leaping between all sorts of emotional and stylistic extremes (within its own musical language), but always calling back and returning to its focus on growth
Friedman 5 and buildup to the full-force chorale (led by organ, offstage brass, vocal soloists, and a massive choir as well as a large orchestra) that concludes the final movement. It is both physically and emotionally taxing for everyone involved, yet so cathartic to experience. I have listened to this piece many times before and since this concert and have made an effort to memorize and practice (on trumpet) many of the most salient moments. But somehow I did not come away with the transcendent audience experience that I wanted and was expecting. Perhaps the space impacted my perception of the music; there are several aspects of the BSO’s Symphony Hall as a space that have put me off in the past. For example, the seats are unbearably uncomfortable – thin, cramped, and noisy – unusually so even for a concert hall. They are perfectly constructed for ill-timed ambiance, and they certainly delivered on that unfortunate promise in this performance. Symphony Hall is also massive and over-the-top conspicuously affluent in its architecture and decorations, and its audience, as classical audiences tend to be, is almost uniformly wealthy, older, and white, plus a handful of fellow conservatory and university students who had managed to survive the lottery and nab tickets on discount for odd, partially obstructed places of the hall (such as directly below the overhang of the balconies, where I was seated). It is cold and unforgiving, as if, rather than an excited young patron there to enjoy an exciting performance, I were a not-altogether-welcome guest with temporary access to a sacred ground. Because I feel such a strong connection to the music, this sensation is all the more jarring. It would be disingenuous to say that I was particularly uncomfortable in this environment, however. I grew up around symphony halls; several members of my family were (and still are) active in professional orchestras, and I attended concerts frequently from a young
While this is by no means anything remotely resembling a remedy for classical music’s racism and inaccessibility, its dwindling audience, or its laughably corporate, non-communitarian response to these issues, I would like to conclude by offering an alternative framing for the chair squeaks about which I have complained. If the classical symphony truly strives to realize its music-performer-audience hierarchy, then the result of this goal would be a technically perfect
Friedman 6 age. However, Symphony Hall is such an overt example of classical music’s inaccessibility, the manifestation of many people’s perception of this tradition as an activity only for a narrow elite. Attending concerts in that space is as much a status symbol as a way to embrace the music’s affect and to appreciate the performers’ incredible artistry and labor. Because Boston also holds such an elite status in the context of classical music, in this context it is much more difficult than it is back home to ignore the social connotations of the activity in which I am participating and the tradition I am perpetuating.
The audience’s presence in the symphony hall is conspicuous and performative: we willingly accept the tradition’s overbearing quirks and paradoxes, we uphold its status and its connotations, and we choose not to challenge the norms that have been built over time. When I attended the BSO concert I assumed the persona of a thoughtful young intellectual experiencing great artistry, as I will likely do next time I make the effort to see a symphony performance; and by reacting positively I will continue to affirm that the great artistry I am experiencing is, indeed, great artistry. When I wince at an unfortunately timed cough or squeak, I mourn its interruption, even though this is usually the only active interaction the audience may make with the music and the space, given this set of parameters.
Friedman 7 performance. This, of course, begs questions concerning the relevance of individual compositional voices, the various performer interpretations of these compositional voices, and the countless possible audience perceptions of these artist interpretations; in this context the concept of a “right” way to perform is meaningless. However, operating under the counterfactual, in a given set of technically accurate performances of a given piece, the main distinguishing factor between occasions of music-making would be the spaces in which they are performed and, furthermore, the interactions these spaces have with the music. The hall’s intrinsic resonance and any ambiance audible from anywhere other than the stage, be it from outside the hall or from the audience, are now the individuality with which the performance is imbued. In a sense, the “imperfections” are the music – a creatively-productive source of play for composers constructed as “avant-garde,” and, arguably, a vital part of the performance practices of some non-classical musical traditions (such as klezmer). And yes, while I am unaware of any existing composition which makes use of them, this must include the dreadful chair squeaks.
The next is very different: a recording from Belf’s Romanian Orchestra, one of the few recorded examples we have of a pre-Holocaust klezmer ensemble founded in Europe. The song is called “Simchas toyre.” Klezmer music tends to revolve formally around a cycle of repetitions. It seems that in this instance one of the clarinet players didn’t get the memo. https://muziker.bandcamp.com/album/belfs-romanian-orchestra-vol-i [1:40]
Lastly, if you will indulge me, I would like to share a brief excerpt of a piece I composed in 2020, aroyskumen, beautifully recorded by Brandeis’ own Lydian String Quartet. Here is a sonic element I didn’t exactly plan to take place during a dramatic pause, but which I decided to leave in my public-facing YouTube https://youtu.be/I7EdOhtbwYs?t=617upload.[10:17-10:55]Myperformanceethnographycanbedeepened
The first is the “Urlicht” movement of Mahler 2 that was the primary piece of music in mind in my original paper. Vladimir Ashkenazy is conducting the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and Michelle De Younge is the soloist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzGGcsW2ing [beginning to 0:37]
by placing it in conversation with two topics I have become very interested in in the three and a half years since I originally wrote it:
That was my paper from 2018, which I wrote for my undergraduate introduction to ethnomusicology class. I would like to follow up with a couple of brief, bite-sized musical examples. Due to a lack of public availability and the Boston Symphony’s understandable interest in curating its professional image, I was not able to access any of the specific examples I mentioned, but hopefully these get the point across. I encourage you to listen particularly to sounds that the performers or composers might not have intended.
Friedman 8
Friedman 9
the theoretical field of disability studies, and analysis of historical klezmer recordings. While on their surface only tangentially related to each other and to Boston Symphony Hall, I think that these topics enrich each other through the common theme of radical acceptance and embrace of heterogeneity in resistance to a hegemonic cultural value of perfect, standardized production.
The application of critical disability studies to music has exposed a frequent cultural understanding in popular and classical music that disabilities are things to be performed as novelty for a short time by able-bodied individuals, before being discarded. This narrative resonates in a couple of articles I read recently. Daniel Goldmark’s analysis of the representation of stuttering in Tin Pan Alley songs between 1890 and 1930 displays a veritable chorus line of lovesick men rendered unintelligent, unattractive non-agents by their speech disfluencies.
Meanwhile, in Webern and Schoenberg’s musical obsessions with symmetry concurrent with growing societal awareness of disability, Joseph N. Straus reads, I quote, “an extreme avoidance reaction to the threat of deforming asymmetry and imbalance, now made shockingly real.” What is more, disability does not exist in a vacuum; it is a fundamentally economic as well as a social construction that should and has been brilliantly analyzed intersectionally. As the western concert hall ideal reinscribes hierarchies of music over sound and noise, it links the production and enjoyment of superhuman artistic experience with its overt displays of white wealth and mind/ body normativity.Thisothering dialectic is challenged in musical practice by the Belf recording I shared earlier. While it is notable for the instance of the clarinet player skipping the last repeat of the characteristic klezmer “shout” and spending the next two bars trying to find their place, I am fascinated by the performance of heterogeneity across this recording and many other klezmer
recordings from this time period. Let’s listen to a little more of this recording. The clarinets in Belf’s orchestra are all playing the same tune but, rather than trying to blend into one homogenous unit, they ornament the melody, detach from each other rhythmically, and drop in and out in slightly different ways all at once. This creates a cycle of varied repetition ingrained with a joyful instability: in klezmer from this time period, the ensemble’s subjectivity is dynamic, negotiable, and enhanced by the heterophonic variation within it. I think that this is a beautiful and compelling response to the notion that there is only one acceptable way to perform as a musician or as a public speaker, and just exist as a human being. I hope that these two brief discussions weren’t too much of a detour. My thoughts on this topic are still very much in the planetesimal congealing phase, but I hope to spend quite a bit more time analyzing klezmer group listening in conversation with various realms of critical research. In addition, I believe that these topics belong in a broader consideration of mediation’s active role in shaping musical practice and perception. I’d like to close this presentation with two musical memes you may be aware of. I am struck, not just by quality of the incidental and planned comedy of both of these situations, but also the joy evident on the faces of everyone shown on camera. I’d like us to consider how these two unique musical moments, through genuine good humor and perhaps a little bit of help from social media, transform the musical “work” into a universally enjoyable and accessible
Friedman 10
Thankhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhBktFVTjf8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnMv6-XTROYexperience.youforlistening!