[Dixielandjazz] Re: Amplification thread in today's Rocky Mountain News

[G. William Oakley]

Only slightly off the OKOM thread.

Carroll: Will youth turn deaf ear to classical music?
January 25, 2003

You wouldn't be surprised to learn, now would you, that the Colorado
Mammoth, our new professional lacrosse team, keeps its fans at fever pitch
with a raucous soundtrack of music that thunders even as the game is played.

Or that the sound manager at the National Western Stock Show now pumps up
rodeo fans with AC/DC and other hard rock groups.

Or that, as you enter the Ritchie Center to take in a University of Denver
hockey game, you literally have to start shouting to your companion if you
want to be heard over the pounding din.

You wouldn't be surprised, I'm assuming, because you too have probably
noticed the unwonted infiltration of oppressively blaring music into your
life while attending public events.

At first, I thought something might actually be wrong with the Magness Arena
sound system when I took two kids to a DU hockey game not long ago.

But when a deafening noise is inflicted upon fans virtually every moment
that the puck is not in play, it isn't any accident. It's a deliberate
attempt to establish a mood - that mood being . . . what?

What is it that sports marketers yearn to create with such a din? The feral
atmosphere of Thunderdome, perhaps, or the Roman Coliseum?

Does DU's urbane chancellor, Dan Ritchie, ever attend games at his prized
sports complex? Did he really raise all that money for this campus jewel so
that it could be transformed into an aural torture chamber?

But perhaps I misjudge the modern audience.

Maybe they like this total immersion in pounding noise. If nothing else, it
takes the pressure off of socializing - although so would the blasts of a
jackhammer.

And come to think of it, the crowd that night was young and large and
upbeat, so maybe the marketing people in hockey, lacrosse, rodeo and all the
other venues where a mega-dose of heavy metal has become the unavoidable
norm know what they're doing after all.

This depressing thought was indirectly confirmed a few days later when my
son and I saw Itzhak Perlman at Boettcher Concert Hall. There the crowd was
also large and upbeat - and even a bit raucous at the beginning and end of
the great violinist's performance. But there was something else about that
audience that was just as pronounced: It was seriously old.

Every time I attend a Colorado Symphony Concert, I can almost hear the bell
tolling for classical music. Sometimes the only kid in sight seems to be my
boy.

A few more than usual did turn out with their parents to see Perlman - most
likely violin players, like my son. But if you overlooked these few
interlopers, and that was no great chore, you might have thought that
Perlman was playing Sun City, Ariz.

The aging classical audience is a perennial worry, of course, and the stock
response is to argue that people must grow into an appreciation of the
music. If the average age of a concertgoer is 50 or older, in other words,
it's only because that's when Americans begin looking around for something
more complex, rich, beautiful and enduring than the typical FM playlist.

No doubt there's some truth in this thesis, but is that all there is to the
matter? If classical audiences have always been so old, then of course this
one will replenish itself, too. But there is at least some photographic
evidence that audiences 50 and 60 years ago were a decade or two younger.
Meanwhile, classical radio stations have been faltering and classical music
labels can't seem to make a profit.

On the upside, there's no dearth of young musicians competing for spots on
youth orchestras and for admission to places like the Denver School of the
Arts. And to their credit, all 12 high schools and all but two middle
schools in Denver still offer instrumental music - although Stephen
Gonzalez, the manager of curriculum and instruction, tells me that interest
in stringed instruments has been on the decline.

I don't doubt it. When do kids even hear orchestral music these days? Movies
and TV soundtracks don't use it nearly as often as they used to. Many
schools have cut music appreciation to the bone, while the recordings that
surround us in stores and malls barely beat out white noise.

At least you can train yourself to tune out the mall music. You'd actually
have to go deaf before you could say the same about the music at a growing
number of popular spectator events.





Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at
carrollv at RockyMountainNews.com