It's Good You're Bored at the Symphony, Actually
The Luxury of Fidgeting in the Age of Distraction
I recently sang a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, one of the cornerstone works of the early classical music canon. I’m not Christian (not even close) but Bach’s telling of the Passion is divine in its humanness: take God out of the picture, and the crucifixion is a story of human fault and feeling: our susceptibility to prejudice, to mob mentality, to apathy and learned helplessness. Rather than the stoicism of faith, Bach casts his lens on the fear of someone who knows no one is coming to save them, and the grief of those who loved them and are left behind. It’s devastating, beautiful, and almost blasphemously theatrical.
It’s also three hours long.
I gave a comp ticket to a friend and warned her about the length. I told her to come prepared for the duration and to stretch her legs at intermission.
I’m used to this type of preemptive apology when I invite friends to my shows.
“It’s on the long side but -”
“It’s kind of a weird one but -”
“It’s a little slow but -”
I’m always bracing the people in my life against my expectation they will find my vocation and thing I love most in the world boring. Never mind that they’ve been attending my shows since my freshman showcase in undergrad, never mind that they still come to my shows enthusiastically a decade after we’ve left the nest of university behind. Never mind that they usually remark that they liked the music.
Never mind that I usually zone out a bit at shows and I still go to them.
Never mind that we all agree, when asked, that a bit of boredom is good for the soul.
Classical music is a very different experience than a commercial music concert.
For one thing, it’s unamplified. At its heart, classical music relies on the tenets of acoustic performance. Sure, there’s the occasional electronic element, and as operatic technique declined in the mid-1900s, venues began using microphones to discreetly amplify their opera singers (to the detriment of singers and audiences alike, but that’s another soapbox for another day, and one already well-trod by others) but fundamentally, classical music is built around the purely-acoustic.
Even with subtle amplification, classical music is a very different sound experience than even the most ethereal commercial music performances. In a folk performance, the singer may be singing and strumming a guitar quietly - but there is a microphone near the guitar and their mouth, carrying that quiet sound directly to you through the speakers. In classical music, the kind of quiet sound produced by the violins or piano must travel through the air to you without that support. The quietest sounds in classical music therefore have a sort of ringing intensity at their core that amplified commercial music has the option of doing without.
And yet, despite that ringing core, you still have to lean in to listen.
With few exceptions, classical music will not crash on your eardrums the way the guitars will in a rock concert, the bass will not thud in your sternum as it does at a club.
Even if you do go to a superlatively-loud classical music performance - a Mahler Resurrection Symphony, a Bartok Bluebeard’s Castle, a Scriabin Poeme d’Extase, a Verdi Requiem, perhaps even a Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture that decides to employ actual firearms in the finale - the loudness only comes in moments.
I performed a Mahler Resurrection a year ago, and while we were offered earplugs in rehearsal to buffer against the volume of the loudest moments (let’s hear it for the “Death Shriek” in the third movement, yes?), the entrance of the singers is also one of the quietest moments in classical music, requiring such incredibly delicate tuning and control that we have been singing for several measures by the time the audience is usually able to convince themselves that they are actually hearing human voices and not the lingering echo in their ears of the hour of extraordinary intensity that precedes our entrance.
These are the most opulent, dense works of the repertoire. Most do not impose such volume on their listeners. Your ears are aware how they must reach across the space between your body and the performers to meet the sound. The space heightens your sensitivity.
Classical music also takes more time to develop an idea. Many of the structures we hear in popular music have analogues in classical music - the introduction of a melody, adding harmony and embellishment, moving into a different key, and then returning to that main idea - but classical music walks through these ideas over miles where commercial music operates on a smaller scale. A long commercial song may hit 5 minutes. A short complete work of classical music is typically not less than 15.
This also requires a leaning-in from the audience. A key change may be hinted at in one instrument a full minute before it happens in the rest of the orchestra or ensemble. Melodies are more thoroughly fragmented, re-arranged, and re-assembled than in commercial music because they have the luxury of time and space to do so in a format that presupposes your full attention. Classical music was not written with the intention of being played in the background, so it speaks differently. One of the great joys of listening to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is hearing in the first three movements the nascent glimmers of the musical ideas that, once all brought under one roof, become the famous choral finale in the fourth. You are trusted to have the attention to follow along in this gradual construction. You share in its culmination.
Classical music is also less sonically dense than commercial music, even if it is often more harmonically complex. The most beautiful moment of that St. Matthew Passion is the violin solo interspersed in the alto soloist’s aria, “Erbarme dich, mein Gott”, in which the aching violin solo fills up the cavern of the concert hall or cathedral, accompanied by nothing other than a gentle pluck of low cello and bass strings in the interludes between the singer’s ideas. There is such tension, such edge, in the choice of violin and in the melody it carries, that it strains against the ear with the grief and anguish of the subject matter. As you listen, you are acutely aware, not just of the melody, but of the space it strains and fails to fill. You are aware of the sonic distance between the high pitches of the violin and the low pitches of the continuo - of the space between roof and floor, of how the most resonant and piercing violin still leaves a sense of space in the hall, how it cannot fill every architectural corner with sound.
In these places - in the gaps in sonic density, in the meanderings of harmonic development, in the wash of music that has to reach out over 80 rows of seats to you instead of hitting you like the ocean from speakers, the mind has room to wander.
It’s rude to be on your phone at a classical music concert. You absolutely should not film it, though filming a pop concert is not so much accepted as assumed. You’ll more than likely be sitting in a seat of indeterminate comfiness, and if you want to get up mid-concert for a drink, you’ll have to smush past ten to fifty other people, without a loud speaker to cover the sounds of your “excuse me, just gonna scooch past you”s in a space designed to make the smallest sounds audible to all. You must sit relatively still for 20 or 30 or 40 minutes, and while you don’t have to listen for that time, you do have to entertain yourself in the quiet of your own head unless you want to actively disrupt the proceedings.
My friends who have come to my concerts have universally described this as a positive thing.
“I zoned out a bit, but it was nice to let my thoughts wander.”
“I don’t have a lot of chances to just sit and be. It’s very meditative.”
“Actually, I started to zone out, but then I recognized a melody from a movie somewhere and then I couldn’t stop listening for it. I was surprised by how quickly it went.”
When I go to the symphony as an audience member instead of performer, I turn my phone off. Sometimes I lean in, eyes closed, conducting along, brain on fire as I engage to internalize and understand the music. Other times, I lean back. I zone out. I drift, not quite napping or dozing, but floating up and away from myself, buoyed by music I may not be actively listening to, into a world of daydreaming or reflection or catharsis.
There are not many places left to us, in a digital society, where this is possible - not without coughing up a few thousand dollars for a meditation retreat or taking the willpower aspect out of our hands by locking our phones in a Faraday cage or chucking the thing off a bridge altogether. We check email while waiting in line for coffee, listen to the news on the drive to work, reflexively scroll social media during pauses in meetings or between customers at work. Our attention rattles around like a pinball in an arcade, complete with as many flashing lights and manufactured distractions.
But in the concert hall, by mutual agreement, we go analog for an hour or two.
In the TikTok days, when commenters asked me about going to the symphony or opera for the first time, I always reminded them that it’s okay if they’re bored. It’s okay if they zone out. It’s okay if they get fidgety and aren’t sure if they like it. At the time, I usually meant it to give nervous first-timers permission to treat classical music as an acquired taste, to relieve them of the assumption that it’s just not “for them” if they felt they couldn’t fully understand or appreciate it on a first pass.
But I also mean it because it’s a luxury in our Brave New World to ever be bored, to ever be fidgety from the sparseness or singleness of input. Stillness is a gift. Beautiful things happen in boredom. Release and restoration happen in empty space.
In the back of a quiet theatre in a sweaty Roman summer, listening to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, I finally cried over the terminal illness of a parent. Sitting at attention through the first four movements of the Resurrection symphony with my music on my lap, I finally accepted leaving one vision of my musical career behind and embraced a different, happier one. In a hundred others, more quotidian griefs and anxieties chattered loudly in the first 10 minutes of boredom before settling into something calmer, more regulated, more present for the remaining hour - a calm that remains long after I exit the hall or opera house or cathedral.
Friends have given me a dozen versions of the same story from their seats.
They tell me how refreshing it is to have a chance to focus, to meditate, to be without distractions and pings and notifications and other calls and demands for their attention.
“It’s such a relief to have a chance to not look at my phone,” a friend who works in law told me, “it’s the only time I can really get away with being offline”.
Another remarked that it was a little digital detox, and she didn’t feel like checking her email on the subway ride back - she just sat quietly until her stop, feeling centered and calm.
“Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I had to actually sit and just be a little bored,” another told me, “and once I got past the first discomfort, I started to really enjoy myself.”It’s not, of course, that classical music is actually boring. What classical music does is ask of us a state of mind to which we are unaccustomed in the atomization of modernity. Our first response, when confronted with this foreignness, is to label it with the closest familiar thing at hand – boredom – even if that is not our final conclusion.
In the frustration of rehearsals, I often remind myself (and occasionally, colleagues) that the music no longer belongs to us once the sound leaves us. It is not up to us to dictate how any individual in those seats responds to our work. We approach our preparation and technique with such control that it is often difficult to relinquish that will for control when it extends to the audience – and so we disparage. If the singer next to me rolls their eyes at a late entrance and telegraphs that mistake to the audience, they are communicating to them, you shouldn’t like this - there was a mistake, it is not perfect, if you enjoy this you are undiscerning and have poor taste. If we don’t deliver a bit of insipid libretto or asinine voice doubling with full conviction, we ask the audience to hold our self-consciousness and embarrassment for us.
So, what am I doing warning friends that the concert is long, that it might be slow, that they may experience moments of boredom?
Casual and committed audience members alike are not interested in or available to hold our egos on our behalf, our insecurity about a moment of musical imprecision or bad lyric-writing or the length of the concert itself.
They want a chance to leave a connected world behind for a bit, to be present in the of a new experience, to hear a piece performed in full they’ve only previously heard snatches of in movies, to hold their date’s hand on the armrest, to wonder what the heck the conductor is actually doing waving that stick around, to count how many people in the row across from them are wearing blue, to try to decide if they actually like the modern art chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, to float away in the music until the anxious chatter that has been rattling around their brain dissipates in the acoustic waters or they can finally get around to feeling the emotions that have been simmering away in a back room they lost the key to in their day-to-day rush.
And yes, maybe some will be fidgety, some will be bored, some will catch that the basses were late on their entrance or the soprano soloist kept scratching her left elbow and the flutes came in sharp and one of the clarinets or oboes or trumpets squawked somewhere. Maybe some will decide the symphony isn’t for them and they won’t come back.
But that’s not up to me to decide, is it?