It's Good You're Bored at the Symphony, Actually
The Luxury of Fidgeting in the Age of Distraction
I recently sang in a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, one of the most gorgeous 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; the fear of someone who realizes no one is coming to save them, 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 be sure 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 belief they will find the thing I love most in the world boring. I expect it, actually. Never mind that they’ve been coming to my shows since my freshman showcase in undergrad, never mind that they still come to my shows willingly and enthusiastically long after we’ve left the nest of university behind. Never mind that they usually remark that they liked the music and the chance the slow down.
Never mind that I myself 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 performance.
For one thing, it’s unamplified. At its heart, classical music relies on the tenets of acoustic performance. Sure, there’s the occassional electronic element, and as operatic technique declined in the mid-1900s, venues began using microphones to amplify their opera singers (to the detriment of singers and audiences alike, but that’s another article for another day, and ground well-trod by people other than me:)
But even with subtle amplification, classical music is a very different sound experience than even the most ethereal of commercial music performances. In a folk performance, the singer may be singing and strumming a guitar quietly - but there is a microphone near to 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 has to travel through the air to you without support. The quietest sounds in classical music therefore have to have a sort of ringing integrity 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 to classical music.
With few exceptions, classical music will not crash down on your eardrums the way the guitars will in a rock concert, nor will the bass thud in your sternum as it does at a rave.
Even if you do go to a superlatively-loud classical music performance - a Mahler Resurrection Symphony, a Bartok Bluebeard’s Castle, a Scriabin Poem d’Extase, a Verdi Requiem, perhaps even a Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture that decides to employ actual firearms in the finale - the loudness comes only in moments.
I performed a Mahler Resurrection a year ago, and while we were offered earplugs 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, that our notes aren’t the lingering echo in their ears of the hour of extraordinary intensity that preceedes our entrance. Both extremes of the dynamic spectrum are earned.
These are the most opulent, dense, hyperbolic works of the repertoire. Most do not impose such volume on their listeners. Your ears are aware how they have to reach across the space between your body and the performers to meet the sound.
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 slight leaning-in from the audiences. 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. One of the great joys of listening to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is hearing in the first and second and third and fourth movements the first glimmers of the musical ideas that, once all brought under one roof, become the famous choral finale in the fifth. You are trusted to have the attention to follow along in this gradual construction.
Classical music is also less sonically dense than commercial music, even if it is often more harmonically complex. The most beautiful moment (an objective fact) 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. There is such tension, such edge, in the choice of violin and in the melody it carries, and it strains against the ear with the grief and anguish of the subject matter, even without the alto’s words to impart the message verbatim. And yet, 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 Taylor Swift concert is not so much accepted as expected. You’ll more than likely be sitting in a seat of indeterminite 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. You have to sit relatively still for 20 or 30 or 40 minutes, and while you don’t have to listen in that time, you do have to entertain yourself in the quiet of your own head unless you want to actively disrupt thte 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, 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. At least, 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. 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, I always told commenters who asked about going to the symphony or opera for the first time that actually, 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 lack or sparseness or singleness of input. Stillness is a gift. Beautiful things happen in boredom. Release and restoration happens 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 and much, much 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.”
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 us. If the singer next to me rolls their eyes at a late entrance and telegraphs that mistake to the audience, suddenly we 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 embarassment 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 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 and decide if they actually like the modern art chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, to float away int he music until the anxious chatter that has been following them through their life 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 really up to me to decide, is it?