Music to look at

We seem to have invented for ourselves a new dilemma.   The demand for old music in our concert halls continues undiminished in strength, though the listeners grow older, more tired and, most likely, less perceptive – for how far away can we be from the conception of a Beethoven symphony and still participate in the fraught and silent passions that drove the composer to create without pictures?

But the players of this old repertoire gradually become jaded, and the concert organisers, aware of the need to supply the old in a new format, brighten the presentation and keep the hall at least 75% full, must invent new ways of doing it.  To attract and excite the young, re-ignite a fatigued market and invigorate the dry academic routine, music has been forced to go visual.  Inspired no doubt by the vast retail in pop videos and the impressive technical wizardry put to service in their production, the classics must now have an accompanying optical stimulus.
Although not new, experiments linking music and colour have given rise to occasional interest in the past: Louis Castel invented a clavecin oculaire in the 1730s which much interested Telemann, and colour organs appeared in the early 20th century in England and USA.    Scryabin wrote a tastiera per luce part into his Prometheus (1910), and soon after, Schoenberg prescribed projected colours in his drama Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand, or the Knack).  But those were challenges to creative thinking produced by the creators themselves.
Now we are asked not only to listen to, but watch re-created 17th- and 18th-century scores enveloped in stage lighting and effects, with teams of actors and acrobats generating the ‘value-added’ dimension that is, apparently, so much needed for our continued appreciation of the music.    Maybe we have arrived at a time when seeing Bach’s contrapuntal lines flying around the concert hall, multi-coloured and computer-generated, or witnessing the storm in Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony with terrifying lightening and real rain (bring umbrellas and waterproofs) will add just what is required by audiences that prefer creativity to be applied to packaging rather than content.   Perhaps a few performances of this kind may make us rather more admiring of Walt Disney’s original Fantasia, and the great Stokowski’s warm handshake with Mickey Mouse.
Meanwhile, the opera house is even more bedevilled with pseudo-creativity by the equally phoney profession of ‘Opera Producer’ (see Hans Keller’s Criticism, Faber 1987!) who would rather direct Mozart into a modern metal scrapyard, psychiatric ward or American airbase than follow the lead of a composer whose instinct for the stage was remarkably astute by any standards – and far superior to those arrogant phoneys now.   It seems to be a lack of creativity among the new multitudes of people who desperately wish they were creative and have too much opportunity to show they aren’t.
If we can’t listen without also needing to have our eyes entertained, the craft of making pure music must be as near extinction as grammatical language and punctuation are through emails, text messaging and shameful advertising.  In any case, by keeping your eyes open you do in fact hear much less!

---