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All your hard work is becoming a DRAFT of what will be your Strategic Plan after a few more steps are taken.
You have just received an email to get your input on that most important piece-your MISSION. We would like to see your thoughts on why TEF does what it does. It can start with "I think" or "TEF does ____________ because". It does not need to be in any format that would make it a "mission". It is the ideas that are important-the primary purpose. What makes TEF unique?
So get those ideas cooking.
Oh, and today's Smithsonian Moment (as my children called my daily efforts to provide interesting food for thought for them) are two articles below that relate to one of the things that came up in discussions with people who are new to being concert audiences, particularly classical music concerts. I found them both to be interesting and maybe could be helpful in communicating the perspectives either in person, on your website or as excerpts in your program.
Or, simply for your own enjoyment of reading points of view on topics germane to our work.
Looking forward to our next chance to meet,
Peggy
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The Listener's Job Description
https://www.naxos.com/education/enjoy_jobdesc.asp
Classical music concerts can seem intimidating. It seems like you have to know a lot. What if you don’t understand the music? What if you don’t know how to listen correctly?
What if you don’t “get it”?
The good news is this: there is no right way to listen, there is no correct experience to have, there is no one thing to “get.” Understanding is not required. Your job is not to be an expert on the music. Your job is not to be a perfect listener.
Your job is very simple:
Be affected by the music.
Be affected by the music.
Music is meant to trigger reactions, invite reflection, awaken feelings, activate memories, and touch the heart. So, just let yourself be affected.
Of course your knowledge of music, and your experience with it, influence how you are affected. If learning something about the music makes its effect more powerful, then by all means learn more. If repeated listening helps you to be more and more affected by a piece, then by all means listen to the music a few times before coming to the concert. Whatever helps you be affected is good to pursue. If it doesn’t help you, or if it gets in the way of your enjoyment, then don’t do it.
A wonderful and mysterious thing about live concerts is that everybody comes to be affected together. Everybody onstage and everybody in the audience shares in the same experience, each of us in our own unique way.
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Why
don’t we clap between movements?
From ClassicFM.com
By Maddy Shaw Roberts
There’s
a bit of a tradition in classical music that you only clap after a
piece has finished – and never in between movements. But why does
this ‘rule’ actually exist?
It hasn’t always been this way.
Like the music itself, classical concert etiquette has evolved over
time. In the late 18th century, classical concerts were more like
small aristocratic gatherings.
Composers like Mozart actually expected people to talk during their
concerts – and they enjoyed hearing spontaneous applause.
Individual movements were even played all over again if they received
a big enough reaction.
Then, claques were born.
When classical concerts became public in the 19th century, organized
groups of professional applauders called claques were often hired to
applaud particular performers.
Many composers strongly objected to them. Mahler even specified in
the score of his Kindertotenlieder that its movements should not be
interrupted by applause.
And he wasn’t alone. In 1842 at the debut of his ‘Scottish’
Symphony, Mendelssohn explicitly asked for it to be played without a
break, to avoid any interruptions. Schumann did the same for his
piano and cello concertos, as well as his Symphony No.4.
By the time recording equipment came around in the 20th century,
applauding in between movements came to be heavily frowned upon.
People started to think that clapping between the movements of a
symphony distracted from the unity of the piece, punctuating works
with unnecessary noise on live CD recordings.
Today, it’s still a bit of a faux-pas
People first wanted to leave the clapping until the end of the work
so that audience members could listen to the music totally
undisturbed, without the distraction of applause in between
movements.
And although not a major one, clapping between movements is still
considered a bit of a concert faux-pas today.
But many people in the industry disagree…
“Clapping does not bother me in the least,” says Marin Alsop,
conductor of the Baltimore Symphony and São Paulo State Symphony.
“When Beethoven pieces premiered, people would clap within the
middle of the piece.”
“The only time I am disturbed by applause,” she tells The
Independent, “is when it feels obligatory simply
because something has concluded rather than earned applause.
Chicago Symphony Orchestra bassoonist William Buchman thinks: “Unlike
a lot of other forms of music, silence plays an important role in a
lot of classical music.”
“The silence is as profound as some of the music, and when that
silence is not allowed its space, you lose a lot of the emotional
impact that the silence can otherwise generate.” (Chicago Tribune)
So, do we need to get more comfortable with silence?
Perhaps the answer to the problem is that we should get used to
hearing the sound of silence.
But if you can’t help bursting into spontaneous applause after the
epic crescendo at the end of the first movement of Rachmaninov’s
Piano Concerto No. 2 (and who could blame you!), ignore the
disapproving tuts and go for it.
