Last weekend, the Cleveland Orchestra performed Mozart’s Mass in C Minor. Here’s the first movement (free, legal and complete):
I sometimes find myself interested in checking out a performance but it’s been years since I actually did it. I’m never familiar with the music – even the stuff that everyone is supposed to know – and I’m intimidated by choosing between dozens of options which consequently seem indistinguishable. I listen to classical music. Like other genres of music, I find much of it unremarkable and some of it inspiring. But I’m a casual fan and I don’t make a point of tracking down titles and composers and remembering it all. Attending a concert would focus my attention on individual works. I’d anticipate the performance. I’d read (skim) the program notes. And I’d hear the music as it was intended, not with my $4 Boze earphones. Attending a concert would educate me and help me appreciate future concerts but I need help with the first steps.
There’s been a lot of ink spilled about the classical music community’s need to reach beyond their traditional audience. Cleveland is far from immune from these pressures. The orchestra should do all that it can to make selecting a concert as easy as possible and the biggest thing they could do would be to embed real, representative samples of the music. I have no way of knowing but I suspect that a lot of people have the same feelings as I do. So, this is an easily implemented suggestion that could have a big impact.
This post is a quick demonstration. It took enough work that I won’t be doing it often but it would still be measured in minutes. Just like when I cobbled together a post about the Kent State Folk Festival, I grabbed the first result of a search for “mass in c minor.” In the same time that this took me, someone familiar with the music could choose a section that would give the best idea of what to expect at the concert. It’s a natural evolution of program notes to the internet. The richness of the web is a huge advance over traditional program notes. One could add recordings of similar works to help illustrate musical concepts… previous works to trace musical influences… subsequent works for the same reason. There must be countless further ideas that didn’t occur to me in a few seconds of brainstorming.
Incidentally, the orchestra posts their program notes online. I was pleasantly surprised by that but disappointed that they’re presented as pdf’s. Send .pdf’s to your printer. The web uses HTML. The last time that I checked, people hated .pdf’s. Has that changed? They still annoy me. It took me a minute to repost a couple pages as a scribd widget. (Press the button at the right of the bar at the top to enlarge the document to a readable size.) It’s better but I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be HTML to begin with.
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