Giancarlo Roach Rivas
COMENTARIOS FINALES
The emphasis on familiarity from all participants raises questions around repetition and over-exposure to pieces of music. The Inverted-U model shows that enjoyment increases with familiarity until the music becomes too familiar and the listener tires of hearing it (Hargreaves, 1984; King & Prior, 2013; Russell, 1987). Greasley and Lamont (2013) have shown that listeners carefully regulate their exposure to musical recordings to avoid this boredom, but how this is achieved within concert attendance is unknown. Some participants were happy to hear the same pieces played regularly at CBSO concerts.
Michael Even if I saw a piece like the Eroica [Symphony] a couple of years ago or even last year, I’d come back and see it this year!
Mark There is such a wide range with Beethoven, really. You don’t hear them that often and it’s not something I play every night at home so, you know, even though it’s very well-known, I think you can get away with doing it once a year.
Ken I would always come to hear [Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony]. Even if they played it every year, I would still come.
Mark claimed that he does not reach over-saturation with Beethoven’s music because he rarely listens to it at home. This suggests that, for audience members whose classical music listening almost exclusively occurs in the concert hall, they are unlikely to tire of pieces of music, even if they are programmed every season. His belief that the CBSO could ‘get away with’ playing Beethoven symphonies annually is slightly puzzling; perhaps he believed that there are other audiences like him who would happily hear it played every season. Furthermore, as Mark fervently rejected hearing unknown music, his request to hear Beethoven every year seems to be a plea for the orchestra to stick to music that the audience knows and enjoys.
Mark, Michael and Ken’s comments once again draw attention to the interaction of preference and familiarity. While Ken claims he would be happy to hear Bruckner’s Seventh each year, he did not make similar comments about any other piece of music. Their requests were not for narrow programming, but for more frequent performances of pieces that they love, conflating familiarity with preference. There are undoubtedly pieces with which they are familiar but that they would not want to hear every season. It suggests that the Inverted-U model may need to be adapted for music that is particularly enjoyed by listeners, who can perhaps hear it far more often without growing bored.
Nevertheless, some other participants did become tired of pieces that they had heard too often, adhering more closely to the Inverted-U model of familiarity. Trevor was the most vocal about this; interestingly, in contrast to Michael and Mark, he specifically singled out Beethoven symphonies as pieces he did not want to hear again.
Trevor We’re starting off next year with all the Beethoven symphonies, but you know I could really do without [that]. There are two or three of them that I really, really like, but the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, if I have to hear it again…! [They played] Pictures at an Exhibition last year. That seems to come around every year and I always enjoy it when I listen to it, but after we’d heard in the first half of that concert something that was new and really exciting, I didn’t feel as if I wanted to sit through Pictures at an Exhibition again.
Trevor was particularly prone to becoming bored with the same pieces being played repeatedly. He offered an interesting counter-argument to the above discussion of the risk of unfamiliar music, contrasting the staid predictability of over-familiar pieces and with the vibrancy of new works. In actively seeking out new music, Trevor was in the minority amongst the participants; it is worth nothing that Trevor has been a highly frequent attender for decades and has therefore heard Beethoven’s symphonies performed live more times than most. Nevertheless, other less frequent participants agreed that they did not want to hear the same works each year.
Gordon In fairness, it does get boring that I have gone to about three or four of these movie [programmes] over the last three years and the same themes... you get the same John Williams pieces come up every time.
Julie We looked once or twice in some of the concerts last year although it’s film themes is almost the same films we’ve heard two years ago under a different banner. […] Do you go and do that again, or something you haven’t seen or heard before?
As some participants justified their conservatism through the effort-risk-reward framework, so too did Julie justify choosing to hear new music in concert. She claims she would rather spend her time and money hearing a piece that she has not heard live before. This is however complicated by the fact that Julie’s husband, William, was quoted above as saying that they ‘rarely’ go to music that is unfamiliar. Julie’s comment therefore draws attention to a distinction between live and
recorded music in the perception of familiarity. Participants were especially keen to go to concerts that featured works they knew well from recordings but had never heard live; I explore the role of live performance in the regulation of familiarity in Chapter 12.1.
The relationship between musical tastes, familiarity and knowledge means that concert programming cannot please everyone. The same piece may be over-familiar and boring to one person, an exciting opportunity to hear something live for the first time for another, and a risk-filled unknown for a third audience member. Even people with similar musical tastes and knowledge of classical music may differ in how often they want to hear the same piece repeated. Likewise, while some enjoy concerts that expose them to new pieces, others wish that the orchestra would only play pieces that they know and enjoy. When deciding whether to attend a concert, participants bring both their own knowledge and experience of classical music, and their own views on whether they want to hear familiar or unfamiliar music in order to determine how confident they are that they will enjoy their listening experience.
Conclusion
Across the dataset, concert attendance was driven by familiarity, regardless of participants’ level of engagement. Familiar music reduced the risk of attendance because participants could have more confidence about whether they would enjoy a performance. Discussion of familiarity often disguised musical preferences, as participants did not simply look for familiar music but for music that they knew that they liked. For unfamiliar music, participants used their knowledge of other pieces to make educated guesses about whether they would enjoy a concert. Sometimes this led them to try music they had not heard before, but were still confident that they would enjoy because they liked other pieces of a similar style or by the same composer. Other times, participants brought preconceptions about musical styles to their decision to attend, believing they would not enjoy certain pieces, despite not having tried listening to them before.
Lack of knowledge could make people more open-minded or more conservative in their tastes. As participants were asked to reflect on their concert choice, many became aware of how focussed they were on familiar music, judging themselves for being too conservative, one even vowing to try harder with unfamiliar music after the interview. Nevertheless, they justified their conservatism through the effort-risk- reward framework which again highlights the sense of investment and commitment involved in concert-going, especially in comparison to listening to recordings at home. How do these ideas play out in populist attendance? The following chapter considers ideas of familiarity, risk and conservatism across core and populist programming.