Starting around my last years at the University of Oregon, I had a very interesting question put to me:  how do we as musicians, performers, and artists deal with superficial and archaic standards of the art music concert?  At first I never really thought about this, as I did not have much of an issue with the standard Wagnerian concert setting that many of us have grown up with.  What always got to me, however, was how seemingly everyone around me would ignore the “rules” of a performance:  do not get up and move around during the performance, sequester coughs and sneezes as best you can until a break, hold applause until the end of a concert, etc.  Keeping in mind that these “rules” were established in the mid-19th century by simply changing the atmosphere of the concert hall (making it dark, close sitting quarters to eliminate movement, seats fully oriented to the stage), these changes have remained stagnant since, yet the general populous has not.

What has come out of this is now a concert practice full of unspoken, rarely taught rules with a venue that is shifting back to the comfort of the audience, rather than the “preservation” of art (lights remain just above black for ease of reading program notes, seats are larger and have more leg room).  Basically, the venue has changed, but the rules and process of the concert have not, and these two ideas are starting to collide.  These archaic standards are no longer enforced by noticeable means.

To address the superficiality of the standards, think back to the founding of the United States.  Many things in the upbringing of this country were new, fresh ideas based off of the knowledge of things that did and did not work across the ocean.  What seemed to have never been addressed, however, was the art concert.  The European standard was simply incorporated into the American concert, superimposing a practice that still seems very unusual and rather bogged down in formalities for no known reason.  Why is this?  Where is the evolution of a newer, more fresh approach to the art concert?

While still at the UO, I began to see a few different approaches to coping with this dilemma.  One rather successful one was a Collage Concert produced to showcase the various ensembles of the School of Music and Dance.  It was designed as a continuous concert in which all set changes were performed behind the scenes while a performance was going on either in the front or on the side of the stage to take the attention off the nonperforming tech crew.  The concert was a myriad of music and ensembles, and it was so beautifully organized that there were even moments where the last note of one piece ended up being the first note of another, though purely by coincidence.  There was no planned connection between the pieces other than all being performed by UO faculty and students.

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