One strategy I saw to capture the interest of a younger crowd was to have the orchestra play in blue jeans and t-shirts instead of the usual tailcoats. I guess they wanted to start getting people familiar with classical music by changing the attire, but the fact is that the effort has fallen completely flat.
I meet Italians who learned the piano or violin when they were younger—sometimes playing for a short period of time, sometimes longer—but none of them seem disappointed that they gave it up. When I try to probe deeper, they end up making some stinging comment about the way their instructor taught or something like that. It must have a lot to do with the way the times have changed. When I learned to play an instrument, we got a Spartan musical education that made instructor support essential. Our teachers had absolute power and what they said was law. Lessons were conducted strictly, and we repeated the same thing hour after hour, day after day in the hopes of getting even a small word of praise. These days, though, everything happens at the click of a mouse or the press of a button. People have a different sense of the time it takes to do things, and it appears to have deeply affected the way people learn to play musical instruments. LP records and other forms of analog music have also fallen by the wayside as sounds are generated digitally, and the days of people listening to music through high-quality speakers and appreciating the sound of it are fading away. These days, music has become nothing more than something to keep us company as we travel to work or school, our earbuds sticking out of our mobile phones.
Even if people know intellectually that listening to music live creates a deeper experience, the Italians still seem to be going to performance or concert halls less and less. I wonder if the fact that we all just get whatever we want delivered to our houses by Amazon or other delivery services now is partially driving that trend.
But Milan has hatched a new plan that they think will get Italians, who are increasingly reluctant to get out and experience culture, to head to performance venues with hearts full of anticipation: musicals. The city has created a new project for an international-scale musical theater festival and awards program. Think of it as the Academy Awards of musicals.
In a way, I guess you could say that musicals are a kind of modernized opera. Both are integrative musical performances that combine a story, script, music, dance, scene changes, costumes, lighting, and other artistic elements. Many long-running musical titles are performed for a decade or more, and diverse audiences entertained by musicals, from children to seniors, surely offers proof of their ability to draw people in.
So I think it’s a great thing that Milan was selected as the site for the Musical Awards.
It makes you want to go and check them out, doesn’t it?
