Palmyra concert. (c) Maxim Blinov / VisualRIAN. All rights reserved.An open air concert is a genre of its own. People see music as something that can hallow any setting and turn it into a concert hall. But a hall’s walls are not just an acoustic box to separate an auditorium from the outside world: an audience gathered in the box is a distinct social entity that varies according to what is being played on stage.
An evening of string quartets, for example, will attract an audience of more or less highbrow cognoscenti. A solo piano recital will bring an even more esoteric group that can remember the nuances of dozens of interpretations of a given work (or at least think they can). A programme of operatic arias, on the other hand, will draw a more middlebrow crowd that likes its music bathed in emotion. And a symphony concert is of course a gratifying example of social unity personified by the orchestra, that model of perfect harmony.
Music outdoors
All these loose definitions, however, only work as socio-musical hypotheses when confined within a notional concert hall space. When classical music ventures outdoors, it naturally becomes accessible to an amorphous multitude of listeners – it’s “music for all.”
