"appropriate for the concert hall"

[Alan Bern <avreml...>]

Hi, everybody! This is my first posting to this list, so please forgive any
newcomer faux-pas, at least until my second posting. I've just caught the
tail end of the discussion that seems to have started when Ari perhaps
quoted me saying that Brave Old World is trying to make music that's
appropriate for the concert hall. Well, I know that a statement like that
practically begs to be attacked from any number of ideological directions,
and sure enough, I haven't been disappointed. I thought it might interest
some of you to find out what I actually meant when I said that - how about
it? Here's the thing: it's a commonplace now, even in the hardest-boiled
corners of academic musicology, that different musics arise in response to
different social functions, and that the kind of judgments that are
appropriate to make about any music depend largely on its function. A
lullabye in its primary context (sung to a baby) should help a baby go to
sleep, and it's good if it does that well, bad if it doesn't. Now, though,
a lullabye sung on a concert stage should not put the audience to sleep.
Yes, _part_ of its appeal in concert can be that it's soothing and the
listener can feel what it would be like to go to sleep to it. But it would
be a pretty unusual critic who would write, "Mr. Bern sang the best
lullabye I've ever heard in concert - it put me to sleep instantly." So,
the general point I want to make is that, _whether we want to or not_, the
moment we play "klezmer" music in concert we're opening the door for a
different kind of audience reception, entailing different kinds of
judgments from those appropriate to the same pieces being played at a
simkha, for instance.

So the sense of my remark about making klezmer music "appropriate for the
concert hall" is simply that we have to be aware of this fact and _deal_
with it as performers. Of course, every performer will have his/her own
take on how to respond to this challenge, thank G-d, otherwise things would
get pretty boring. I'm holding myself back from going into more detail on
this, especially since this is my first posting. But I want at least to
make clear that the remark is not intended to exclude anybody else's
artistic direction, nor to posit the "elevation" of folk music. Also, I
know that I haven't offered a rigorous argument here, but the point for me
is just to let some of you know what I meant, not to prove that I'm
correct. Thanks!

Alan Bern

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