Why do people think classical music is boring?

Amongst non-classical music fans (i.e. roughly 90% of the population), classical music has the unfortunate reputation of being boring. Or, at best, 'interesting', or 'relaxing' - like a warm bath, but hardly something to get you excited about and be one of the things that makes life worth living.

The problem, in my opinion, isn't the music. It's the way it's often played.

Here's the thing. As classical musicians, we're playing other people's music. This is so obvious it hardly seems worth saying.

Yet imagine if it's your own music that you're performing. You instinctively feel the responsibility to 'sell' it - to make it sing, to make it dance - to make it ALIVE for the listener. You wouldn't just 'play the notes' of your own music, and yet this is often the case with pre-written music.

OK - I get it, you say - I need to play as if I've written this music myself. Well, yes. That's a start.

But we need to go further than this. We need to look at pulse.

Pulse - the musical heartbeat - pumps the blood round the musical body just like our own heart does. Without it - we're not alive. But just as the human heart adjusts to the needs of the situation moment-by-moment in a dynamic way, so too does the musical pulse.

And not only that. There is a 'hierarchy' to musical pulse. If you're on this page you'll probably know that in a 4 beat musical measure (bar in the UK), the 1 - the 'down-beat' is the strongest and most important and the others are less important. You may also know that 3 is the next strongest. And that 2 and 4 are the 'weak beats'.

All well and good. But there's something they don't often tell you that's so obvious that makes ALL the difference when you really understand it. It's this: Music goes forward.

Music goes forward

Which means that the first beat is the RESULT of all the beats that precede it. 

This is a big deal. If you were to super-impose arrows pointing forwards, like little jumps, on all bar-lines, this might give a sense of this:

What this means is that as well as '1' being the start of something, it is JUST AS MUCH - if not more so, the END of the previous something. The crest of a wave.

That '1' is SENDING the musical energy towards the next '1'. And the next, and the next, and so on.

So in the video above, what makes the difference is feeling the whole 3-beat measure 'in one' instead of 'in three'. 

One whoosh per bar instead of three, carrying the listener forward.

It's an energetic thing. So many of us are taught to think of music - especially when we're sight-reading - which - as we're performing PRE-WRITTEN MUSIC - we have to do - in 'bar-by-bar units' that we miss this entirely. The result is we get 'nice', 'well-meaning'. 'Polite' performance.

Instead of dynamic, exhilarating, transformative, life-enhancing experiences.

As a conductor I don't do my job unless I'm able to embody my gestures with just this sense of motion and I'm very grateful to conducting for teaching me this. But this is for all music, not just for conducting.

As performers I think we're advocates every time we step on to the stage for the MUSIC we're playing, whether it's Beethoven, Mozart, Mahler - whatever - to bring it to life as if we wrote it ourselves. If we do our job well, those listening will get a kick out of it, no doubt.

And that will be one less person in the world thinking that classical music is boring.

Which in my world, is a much better world.