I went last night to a concert organised by the music society. We had a young soprano and accompanying pianist, performing some lieder, a Handel oratorio and some Donizetti, before easing off the high culture in the second half with a Britten setting of a humorous poem by Auden, a little song from The Tempest arranged by Arne, some traditional Tyneside songs, and a few hits from the shows. Given a straight choice between that and curling up in front of series three of The Sopranos with a bottle of red and a Chinese takeaway, I'd probably have given high culture a miss and saved myself a drive, but since I have a season ticket I have taken the view that I might as well sample everything on offer and broaden my musical horizons. Besides, I had a hunch it wasn't going to be our best attended event of the year, and as a member of the committee felt a vague sense of obligation that I should go and try and make one row look a little fuller. I did not take the Systems Administrator, who given the choice between an evening of lieder and another dose of root canal surgery would have found it a hard call.
The audience was on the sparse side. I don't know whether that is because quite a few of our regulars share my general lack of enthusiasm for young sopranos, or just that the music society is competing with lots of other events in the run up to Christmas. The act was comparatively cheap to book, since they are sponsored by a charitable scheme that supports young artists at the start of their careers, but against that we did have to hire a piano. My guess is that the chairman and bookings secretary would have liked a few more bums on seats, but I'll find out at the next committee meeting. Those that did come I mostly recognised as hard core, season ticket holders who support everything. They were very polite, even clapping the person credited with doing the large floral arrangement on the stage, so it's difficult to tell how much they enjoyed it.
I struggle to judge lieder, and Handel arias, on two levels. One is that they are so unfamiliar I'm really not sure whether I like them or not. It's like being confronted with some elaborate piece of Chinese art in a museum, and not being able to say whether it is beautiful or ugly, because it is so far from my normal frames of reference. And I know that I am utterly unequipped and incompetent to judge the performance, and say whether it is being done well or badly, because I have so little idea what it's supposed to be like. It's a strange feeling.
When I go into a garden for the first time, I form a view pretty quickly whether I like it or not. That's an aesthetic and emotional judgement. At the same time, and without having to think about it consciously, I'm forming an idea of what the garden is about and how it works. When it was made, by what sort of people, for what purpose, how space is organised, what plants are used, how they are trained, how the garden is maintained. It exists in the context of many other gardens, and carries meanings about history, taste, fashion, status and wealth. I've probably read about the garden before my visit, if it is a famous garden open to the public rather than a friend's private space. I'll start analysing how it works, and why I like or don't like aspects of it, and take notes, and probably try and read more about it later on.
Faced with lieder I am like the garden visitor who doesn't know about gardens. I might notice appreciatively that there are a lot of flowers, giving plenty of colour, and decide I don't much like the modern sculpture, and that would be about it. And with the young soprano there was plenty of colour. She acted more than singers of traditional folk generally do, smiling, grimacing and pouting as the plot dictated. I still find the classically trained female soprano voice so alien that I couldn't say if it was beautiful, or ugly. I certainly didn't instinctively respond to her the way I do to Dido's Lament when that comes up on the radio, or some counter tenors, but whether that was because I'm not familiar with or don't particularly like sopranos, or because she wasn't a great example of the type, I couldn't tell you.
I read an intriguing article in one of the papers a while back, about the truly innocent ear. Sadly I didn't keep the reference, so can't give you the link. Some psychologists asked musical experts to judge recordings of various classical musical performances, and gave them a photograph of the performer. A given performance scored more highly when the performer was smartly dressed in their photo than when they were in jeans. And Joshua Bell, who can fill the world's largest and grandest classical venues with his violin, played largely unnoticed when he went busking on the Washington Metro system. The video recording of the passengers hurrying by showed that only 7 out of 107 people who passed stopped for more than a minute. A little boy who tried to listen was dragged away by his accompanying adult. Context shapes our perceptions of art. Perhaps my judgement when visiting gardens is not as objective as I think.
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