We can learn much about what is by considering what is not. A building for musicking that must surely have encouraged a different set of relationships was opened in London in 1742. Its interior was portrayed by Canaletto in a painting that hangs today in London’s National Gallery. It was the Rotunda in Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens.
I have discussed pleasure gardens and their musicking in another book as a “feature of London’s social and musical life . . . until well into the nineteenth century. They must have been agreeable places, to which admission could be gained for a modest charge, where the finest musicians of the day were pleased to appear and some of the best musicking could be enjoyed by all regardless of social class, not as a solemn ritual but as part of an enjoyable social scene which included eating, drinking, promenading, and, occasionally, watching fireworks. They catered to a public that was not at all selected in terms of social class, and the single public enjoyed a single repertory known to all—folk music, songs, operatic and orchestral music alike” (Small 1987).
The Rotunda at Ranelagh was a remarkable and beautiful building, the grandest music room in the two hundred or so pleasure gardens of eighteenth-century London. It could not be more unlike a modern concert hall. Canaletto’s painting shows a big circular space three stories high and a 150 feet in diameter with, in the center, an enormous and ornate octagonal fireplace, open on all sides, whose chimney doubles as central support for the roof. In the whole big space there are no seats.
Warm sunlight pouring in through the second-story windows and an open door shows us at floor level a continuous row of tall arcaded niches; above them is a colonnaded gallery, and above that is a row of arched clerestory windows. Big candelabra of shining brass hang from the ceiling, with a smaller one in each ground-floor niche. It must have been a glittering scene at night. At each compass point there is a two-storied arched and pedimented doorway, one of which has been blocked off to make a canopied orchestra platform on which Canaletto shows us, not very distinctly, an orchestra playing. It might be Mr. Handel directing one of his organ concertos or a concerto grosso; or that remarkable phenomenon, the eight-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, presenting a piano concerto of his own composition; or the regular music director, Dr. Thomas Arne, directing his new symphony—they all performed there. Whatever it is they are playing, we can be sure it will be a piece that modern concert audiences sit in stillness and silence to listen to.
But that is not what the people in this picture are doing. They are standing or walking about, talking in pairs and in groups, or just coming and going, in much the same way as people do in the foyer of a modern concert hall. It appears that the building has not caused socializing and enjoying music to be divided into two separate activities as does a modern concert hall, and the members of the audience seem to be perfectly capable of doing both things at the same time. We have to assume that they were no whit less sophisticated or discerning in their musical judgment than modern audiences, since this is the period, around 1760, that is generally regarded as one of the high points in the history of the Western tradition.
Most of those present seem, at least to our eyes, to be treating the performance as background to their other social activities—there is even in the foreground a couple of small boys engaged in a bout of fisticuffs—but there is a knot of people gathered around the musicians’ platform, as in a later day jazz enthusiasts would gather around the bandstand in a dance hall when one of the great bands was playing for the dancing. If the musicians are part of the social scene and do not dominate it, it is to large extent because of the circular shape of the building, which allows no direction to be the dominant one. Even the musicians’ platform is unobtrusive; it looks like the afterthought that we are told it was, since the musicians were originally placed at the center of the space. Another detail emphasizes what is to our eyes the informality of the scene: in the niches around the circumference can be seen diners seated at tables. In one niche I think I can even see a waiter bending over obsequiously, taking the order. It looks like a very agreeable scene.
As we listen today, in the concert hall or on record, to the early piano concerto of Mozart, the organ concerto or concerto grosso of Handel, or the symphony of Arne, we might recall that, while the patterns of sound we hear are more or less the same as the audience in Canaletto’s painting was hearing, they are an element of an experience that is very different—not better, necessarily, or worse but different. That audience took from the performance what they wanted, and we take from it what we want. Like any other building, a concert hall is a social construction, designed and built by social beings in accordance with certain assumptions about desirable human behavior and relationships. These assumptions concern not only what takes place in the building but go deep into the nature of human relationships themselves.
CHAPTER 2
A Thoroughly Contemporary Affair
As we wait for the orchestra to assemble on the stage, it is worth taking a look behind the scenes in the hall. A concert hall is a very complex place, and just to contemplate the technology and the logistics of the events that take place here can tell us much about their nature.
Very little takes place here spontaneously. Every event needs a great deal of planning and organization, both inside the hall and outside it; and an extensive infrastructure, most of it invisible to the audience, has to be brought into action if the event is to take place at all. In the first place, programs have to be planned and artists engaged well in advance of the concert. These days artists who have drawing power are probably members of the international jet set and may have to be engaged as much as years ahead.
This is quite unlike the situation that prevailed in Europe up to well into the nineteenth century, when a musician might arrive in a town or city, contact some of the musically most influential people there, and arrange a series of concerts, all within a matter of days. There were even handbooks for traveling musicians, giving the names of such people; the composer Carl Maria von Weber compiled one in the 1820s for every town of any size in Germany. No musician would give a whole concert on his own; local performers, amateur and professional, would be called in to collaborate and possibly the local orchestra with whom he would play a concerto of his own composition, the orchestra playing generally at sight or with at most a single rehearsal. Among the first to give entire solo performances was Franz Liszt, in the 1840s, who at first called them “monoconcerts” before settling on the term more familiar to us, “recital.”
Artists with the kind of charisma that gives them real drawing power today would appear to be as scarce as diamonds and as hard to cultivate as orchids. The critic Norman Lebrecht (1991) notes that the shortage of star conductors is becoming a real problem for orchestras today, with a consequent inflation in fees. But orchids thrive in the rain forest without human assistance, and diamonds lie around in many places waiting to be picked up; in the same way one is led to wonder if the scarcity of stars is not created and maintained artificially. If the number of young aspirants emerging from music colleges and conservatories every year, possessing technical powers that would make Liszt or Paganini blench and trying to gain entry to the major concert circuits, is an indication, there would appear to be no shortage of musical talent across the concert and operatic world; indeed, the problem seems to be the opposite, that of finding gainful employment for this overabundance of talent and skill.
It is obvious that virtuosi and those who profit from their labors should have an interest in keeping their numbers low; as with diamonds and orchids, it is scarcity that creates their value. In this they are no different from the members of all professions, whose requirements in terms of entry qualifications are designed as much to protect the status of the profession and to maintain the price of their services by restricting numbers as they are to protect the public.
There are plenty of mechanisms for restricting entrance to the big-time concert circuit. Competitions are one; although they purport to function as devices for the discovery and nurture of talent, they in fact operate in the precisely opposite