Musical stress

Asked about what is the role of the audience in a classical music concert, the Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache used to answer that none or, at most, that of bothering the performers. The idea is widely shared by the spectators: indeed, the concertgoer prototypical of classical is a kind of professional fussbudget who would kill to listen to their idols far from the noise of coughs and mobile phones, alone like a castaway in the sea of seats of an auditorium. The idea is somewhat hyperbolic because, although it happens on very rare occasions, noticing how a thousand people breathe in unison during a symphony or seeing how the neighbor in the seat cries bitterly by the work and grace of Puccini also has its charm. In any case, since the times of Wagner, the audience is left in the dark and –regarding what happens on stage– is required to kindly keep quiet until the applause or boos. 

Beyond distortion and aesthetic changes in music, modern sonority differs from classical by the direct intervention of the audience in the scores. My extraordinary interpretation of Dio! Mi potevi scagliar from Otello in the shower has little to do with the Verdian operatic tradition, but there is a consubstantial relationship between the musical fabric of I want to break free and the choral shouting of the attendees at the legendary Queen concert at Wembley. On the other hand, tradition dictates that the experience of a concert implies the silence that is practiced during the course of the music, but also when it ends; this is how the most important part of a recital comes just when the music fades and memory must patiently digest everything that has just been heard (for this reason, in many very civilized countries of the prosperous north, applause after a performance is strictly forbidden).

Raised in that school, I have always been struck by the rise of festivals. Their phenomenon of mass pilgrimage is not new; people travel to the stages of Primavera with the same frenzy as the sentimental ones who queued on their knees in Bayreuth. But, unlike the listening proper to the musical heritage of the West, contemporary festivals have had the grace (or the temerity) to bottle the omnipresence of music in our lives, forming a tremendously stressful listening system. Festivals like Primavera show the unequivocal pretension of eliminating the silence between concerts and are woven with the explicit will to squeeze time by equating it with music. Here there is no waiting time, the end of one concert overlaps millimetrically with the beginning of another and, at most, the listener can experience a very brief reset while going to buy a beer.

Deep down, the festival format takes to its ultimate consequences the presence of a perpetual musical thread in our lives. Evidently, the excellent music of Blur, Depeche Mode or Rosalía has nothing to do with the sonic racket we experience when entering a store, when we travel in a taxi or isolate ourselves from the noise of the world with the Shuffle of Spotify. But the attitude of the festival-goer is that of someone who wants to equate their leisure time with musical time and who, far from wanting to recall the listening, lives thirsty for a perpetual input in the form of a sound stimulus. It is not at all strange that the most faithful followers of festival life need an extra dose of doping in order to endure this marathon of emotions and that, at the end of the three days of an event like Primavera, there are many people who are forced to ask for a vacation because they have ended up truly shattered from so much musical happiness.

The attitude of the festival-goer is that of someone who wants to equate their leisure time with musical time and who, far from wanting to recall the listening, lives thirsty for a perpetual input in the form of a sound stimulus

It's nice to see how, with each passing day, you slowly turn into a nostalgic relic. Enjoy Primavera. Without pause, of course.