This Saturday, Spaulding Auditorium will be full of students, professors and community members listening to the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra perform its final concert of the year. As a violinist in the orchestra, I hope that the crowd will be less gray than it normally is, but past trends indicate that community members will vastly outnumber my peers. I have long since learned to accept this unfortunate demographic inclination, though I still fight the good fight of guilting friends into showing up. However, I really struggle with the assumption that this trend is inevitable, that the elderly are better suited to "get" classical music. Stereotypes aside, I believe that classical music has an inherent and specific appeal to younger generations that is not represented in concert turnouts.
Modern society provides a unified front against classical music. Pop culture displays classical musicians as the stuffy, conservative old-guard, the people who try to shut down the fun of the new generation. The music itself exists primarily in ringtone form to lay people. It is nice that Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth symphonies can be expressed in 20 seconds of beeping as it saves us all so much time. Many people who do listen to classical music conceive of it as a series of brief moments of recognition followed by long waits. The 1812 Overture is thus rendered 12 minutes of dull boredom with a three-minute gift of "Hey I know this part!" at the very end. I know that for many in the audience, those 12 minutes often are simply the price they pay for an augmented internal sense of culture. In particular, at tomorrow's concert, there might be more than a few people in attendance who feel the need to regain some self-respect after the debasement of Green Key. These people might think themselves too modern, too progressive or too young to actually enjoy the music.
Contrast that view with the one offered by a professor I had last term. When talking about Mahler's Fifth Symphony, he claimed that he could not listen to it as much as he grew older because it was not every day that he wanted to "see God." While he was partially joking, I really do think that so-called "insiders" think of the music we play as spiritual. For my fellow musicians and myself, the act of performance is communal, emotional and all-encompassing. This obviously is on the opposite end of the spectrum from the idea that the genre is cultured, refined or subdued. Many people, particularly those leaving adolescence, seek meaning or spiritual awakening in a variety of forms. Commonly, people might experiment with drugs or indulge in the Bacchanalian behavior promulgated by events like Green Key. However, I doubt that the 3,000 people at the Programming Board concert looking for a sensual or substance-induced transcendence would so readily listen to Schubert, Sibelius or Saint-Saens.
I know that I certainly do not involve myself in classical music to enhance my self-image or feel more refined. When I think of the value of classical music, I think of the chills I get at the recap of the Scherzo in Mahler's Fifth, I think of the stunned silence after concertmaster Emily Hyun '13 finished her senior recital but before the riotous applause that followed. I think of moments of pure, visceral transcendence. And I think, why should people only join in on that experience when they retire? Why don't my friends, especially the ones who look for similar experiences in other places, realize that we commit ourselves to classical music largely because of the spiritual satisfaction it provides?
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time," T.S. Eliot wrote. I think that classical music is, in many ways, an aural expression of that same exploration. Mahler himself said, "To write a symphony is to create a world." I hope that those who read this choose to join in our exploration of the incredible, emotional and tragic world he created with his seminal Fifth Symphony. Maybe you will not see God, but when the music arrives where it started, all of us, musicians and audience alike, will know that place a bit better.
