Trump Renamed The Kennedy Center And Nobody Came - Or Is It Because Classical Music Now Is Just Granny's Night Out?

Natasha Littleton was an occasional, somewhat indifferent patron of the Kennedy Center, Washington, DC's home of classical music and named after former President John F Kennedy assassinated in 1963.

 

Natasha renewed her subscription when her twin daughters were old enough to appreciate a formal concert and were well-behaved enough to sit through a longish performance.  This might be the impetus to get her back in the swing of high culture.  She had attended concerts, recitals, operas, and ballet when she was much younger; but found herself falling asleep during the pianissimos.  

She appreciated classical music but never really like it.  Most times unless there was a lot of tympanum and loud brass she was bored silly, and wondered why she was spending her Saturday nights cossetted and cooped up in a somber recital hall instead of going out dancing. 

Besides, she was a closet rock fan.  The concerts were dutiful pilgrimages, a nod to her patrician upbringing.  A well-brought up girl learned piano, went to concerts, took ballet lessons, and grew up to be a model of cultural sophistication, and Natasha was a good example.  She was brought to concert halls at an early age, banged away at the piano under the watchful eyes of Mrs. Goldberg, who lectured her each and every lesson.  'Adagio, my dear, does not mean fortissimo.  Play Schubert gently, gently'; but it never took, and Natasha made Brahms sound like honky-tonk. 

Once free of the harridan Mrs. Goldberg and the hectoring insistence of her mother, Natasha never again sat in a concert hall until the present day when, since old traditions die hard, she felt it was time to introduce her daughters to fine art. She started them off with a bang - The Nutcracker, a ballet with enough musical Sturm und Drang to keep anyone awake and all children interested - and then proceeded on down the line until she finally decided to see if culture had really taken a hold, and she bought tickets to the New York Philharmonic's Brahms' Symphony No. 4.  If a child could sit still through that drudgery, she was hooked. 

 

Little Elena had to go pee three times, and Katarina had to follow her - 'Is that what Brahms does to people?', Natasha embarrassed and discomfited wondered as she took the twins to the lobby.  The outing was a flop - Natasha herself was glad for the bathroom stops and wondered how long to Intermission, and vowed never again. 

Richard Dare, CEO of the Brooklyn Philharmonic put it this way in an article in the Huffington Post (The Awfulness of Classical Music Explained)

But this was classical music. And there are a great many "clap here, not there" cloak-and-dagger protocols to abide by. I found myself a bit preoccupied -- as I believe are many classical concert goers -- by the imposing restrictions of ritual behavior on offer: all the shushing and silence and stony faced non-expression of the audience around me, presumably enraptured, certainly deferential, possibly catatonic; a thousand dead looking eyes, flickering silently in the darkness, as if a star field were about to be swallowed by a black hole.

I don't think classical music was intended to be listened to in this way. And I don't think it honors the art form for us to maintain such a cadaverous body of rules.

Dare, however, skirted the real issue - except for the rousing symphonies like Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique or Beethoven's Ninth or the great organist J. Power Biggs'  bellowing, blasting Bach D Minor Toccata and Fugue, most classical music is a thudding bore. There is no way to change what Schumann wrote.  The conductor can tweak the score here and there all the while respecting the composer, but it still is Schumann, an endless score of dull, musical story lines which would put anyone to sleep. 

Music critic Peter Heilman wrote an article for Esquire (the New York Times turned him down, for although its readership had veered away from the classical and into the weeds of politics, high culture was still part of the editorial ethos of the paper) which laid it on the line:

If there were ever a total waste of time, a self-important show of faux culture and patrician recidivism, it is a classical music concert.  It is only because a persistent arrogant fidelity to European high culture that these plodding, throbbingly boring pieces ever get played.  Outside the concert hall - in clubs, outdoor concerts, everywhere on social media and up and down the radio dial - there is real, live, relevant music.  Blues, the great black experience, American roots, a heady blend of folk, rock, and country, salsa and meringue, Brazilian samba...all shout relevance.  Those immured in concert halls, falling asleep, fidgeting, and wanting to be anywhere but there, are a dying minority, and may they rest in peace.  Classical music is finished. 

Realizing the death throes of the genre, concert hall owners rely on the canon. The fewer concert-goers there are, the more conservative owners and producers feel they must be.  Why take the chance of alienating both old and young with a complex Liszt or Benjamin Britten?  Ironically but not surprisingly, the more predictable and over-performed the music, the less people enjoy it and stay away in even greater numbers.

Most symphony orchestras rarely play any 20th century music, and even 'the sprightly Mozart' cannot draw big audiences for whom an unbelievable array of modern, contemporary music and entertainment is available. Secondly, the venue – the concert hall – is as formal, deadening, and insufferably enclosed as can be.  Compare this to a rock concert.  

Recently American President Donald Trump added his name to the Kennedy Center, and in a howl of protest from Washington's dyed-in-the-wool progressives, they stayed away in numbers.  The concert hall, once filled, was no empty. 

Now, to be honest, most of those who stayed away were secretly happy, for now there was a cover for their absence.  Subscribers had for years hesitated before writing the check, and now had good reason for doing so.  They were protesting the arrogant lunacy of Trump but were finally and once and for all ridding their lives of the intolerable boredom, the wasted, sedentary hours, the pretention, and the dumb supposition of understanding musical phrasing and key. 

There were rumors that Trump had plans to turn the Trump-Kennedy Center into a high-rent residential complex once the place went bankrupt - nice location overlooking the Potomac, convenient to downtown, easy access, and guaranteed fine living with all the amenities. 

'Putting the cart before the horse', wrote one unhappy editorial writer for the Washington Post who went on to claim that classical music was by no means dead, and that the next Democrat administration would revert to the Center's original name and restore Washington's high-cultural reputation. 

'Whistlin' Dixie', replied music critic Heilman, echoing the sentiments of all those patrons who had happily cancelled their subscriptions and were now back in the American saddle.