Comfortably dumb

High concept has long since moved on from its Hollywood home, and now seems poised to take over non-fiction publishing. Books that attempt to capture a key element of the zeitgeist, in business, politics, or culture – and in one easy phrase – are all over the place. If it’s not the ‘tipping point’, it’s the ‘long tail’. A recent addition to the ranks is Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You.

Johnson is on to something a bit more interesting – and counter-cultural – than many of his peers. While every newspaper screams about dumbing down (often next to in-depth articles about Kate Middleton’s mum), Johnson points out that popular culture is in fact much more complex and dense (in a good way) than it has ever been before. I’m not sure he’s right that such developments are making us more intelligent (how on earth would you prove that anyway?), but evidence against the charge of mass culture dumbing down is overwhelming.

Even – no, especially – in television, that much-derided chewing gum for the brain, we can see the results of this smartening up right before our eyes. From the arcane web of plot that is The Wire to possibly the most intricately inter-textual sitcom ever, Arrested Development, this trend is particularly prominent in America – the capital of dumb if you’d believe half of the commentariat. And it’s popular, both in terms of ratings and – crucially – DVD sales, which allow much-needed repeat viewings.

But why is classical music not benefiting (in terms of both audience numbers and cultural prominence) from this surge of interest in more challenging cultural fare? A large part of the problem, on the traditional side of things, is the stultifying atmosphere of most concert performances. I’m not arguing for the desperate ideas of some promoters (‘speed-date to the sultry sounds of Mozart’s Requiem!’). But the dress and rituals of orchestral performance – not least the interminable multi-part curtain-calls, far more than at any play or musical I’ve ever seen – are unnecessarily off-putting. And as for opera, in the past few years only Opera North’s ‘Eight Little Greats’ season has really shown innovation in both repertory and presentation. It is hard to encourage new audiences, inspired by the vitality of the best of popular culture, to attend productions that are decades old.

There are signs of hope though, particularly at performances of contemporary classical music, where even traditional bands seem more comfortable pushing the boat out a bit. The London Sinfonietta have been doing some great stuff with Warp records, exploring in performance the connections between the likes of Aphex Twin and Stockhausen. They have also been keen to play around with the performing environment, incorporating massive projections into their concerts (gigs?). Wagner of all opera composers has historically encouraged the largest revolutions in production – and now he seems to be inspiring fresh approaches to concert performances too. Bill Viola’s central involvement in the Tristan Project (currently touring the US) takes the multi-media nature of Wagner’s intentions into new areas with the help of stunning high-definition video art.

We can only hope that these challenges to the orthodoxies of performance practice reach their own irreversible ‘tipping point’ – and encourage more fans of HBO’s The Sopranos to become admirers of Covent Garden’s sopranos too.