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The modern perception of "the brand" of the stereotypical classical symphony, with formal attire for performers and audience, completely silent audiences, etc, is the biggest reason that symphony attendance has been on a long, continual decline. It makes middle-class types who might otherwise like the music but don't want to get looked down on by snobs like Mr. Branch himself go elsewhere for their entertainment.

Compare, for example, to the popularity of musicals. They operate under the same basic "spend a lot of money to sit your butt in a seat for two hours and listen to musicians perform" principle, but many musicals have intentionally aimed themselves at all kinds of audiences, like politically-conscious artists (Rent), middle-class white girls (Wicked), families with children (Lion King), twentysomethings worried about their futures (Avenue Q), people who are into furries (Cats), etc.

But Rent adapts an opera, La Bohème!

Your note about the brand is so true that even their self-awareness lacks self-awareness, such as this note from the SF Symphony first-timer's guide:

6. What should I wear to a San Francisco Symphony concert?

Contrary to what many people think, formal attire—such as tuxedos and evening gowns—is not required at Symphony concerts. In fact, most people only wear formal clothing to our Opening Gala. At our other concerts, most concertgoers wear business or cocktail attire.

Just wow....

It is really the other way around at other places. The orchestra in my town (my old employer before tinnitus ended my carreer) has a big image of the solo clarinettist in a quite out-doorsy clothing saying something about how you should come as you are and ignore the fact that the whole orchestra looks like penguins.

And in my city they’ve started live-streaming the operas and concerts to big video walls in multiple squares around the city, most of which in low-income areas.

Perhaps, or perhaps the people who go to the symphony do so because they enjoy the snobby atmosphere and wouldn't go if the concert hall looked like a Southwest flight.

Meanwhile the Southwest flight people won't go to the symphony either, because they don't care. Unless, of course, it's video game music.

Eh... As a moderately frequent concertgoer, I don't recognise much of this. Possibly regionally specific, but in London, a ticket to a big-ticket repertoire symphony with the LSO or whatever can be had for about £10, and a pretty nice seat for £25-30, which is about what I paid to see Nile and Suffocation, surely more niche than Mahler, and probably half what you need to see a big pop act. (Opera is eye-gougingly expensive, though.) The orchestra dresses formally, the audience doesn't (unless they want to). Silence between movements is observed, however, which sort of freaks me out.

I'm ambivalent about the video game music thing, simply because what works in one setting doesn't necessarily work in another. A game score's primary virtue is to withstand repetition and respond to non-deterministic events (which may be a more interesting way to approach a VGM concert than just a tour of Final Fantasy's 'greatest hits' or whatever; certainly there are precedents in the post-war avant garde for that kind of thing). A symphony proper is designed ground-up for the sort of setting in which you are likely to hear it - an acoustically-tuned concert hall, with a highly-trained band of musicians extracting every bit of dynamic range and expressive potential out of their instruments. There's nothing quite like it when it works (there is also nothing quite like, since I've mentioned it, death metal, or techno, or ...)

The problem with 'high-culture' institutions going for populism is that it can be done in a really shallow, instrumentalist way: the VGM concert as the loss leader for Schoenberg frankly isn't going to do any favours to the VGM. It has to be treated seriously, or it won't even be fun - not used as a gateway drug for what the orchestra/concert hall really wants you to listen to.

I agree. A few years ago I attended a performance of Dvorak's 9th in Dolores Park and it was fantastic. People came out in droves, set up picnics, played frisbee, and had a great time. We need more like that: more clapping, more cheering, more t-shirts and sneakers — none of this stuffy suit-and-tie nonsense. Take a page from jazz, rock, or — really — any other form of popular music. There's certainly room for more focused, intense music appreciation, but that shouldn't be the default; most people don't engage with music like that.

Cats was not written for people who are into furries

Fairly confident that was a tongue in cheek comment :)

Then again, with Andrew Lloyd Webber never say never..

Or indeed a well-received musical about the life of a Founding Father (I did not see that coming): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_%28musical%29

To add to this, the musicians are enjoying this as well. As time passes and games stay with us longer, the perceptions of them will change, just as Shakespeare has.

Case in point: I was lingering around with a friend well after the "Music of Zelda" performance, when a group came out towards the parking lot. Struck up a conversation with them, and found they were all part of the NSO's flute section. One had built a harmonica into a Zelda NES cartridge, and brought that to the show with her, along with the Zelda t-shirt she was wearing under her suit. She grew up playing the same games.

The comparison of sangria versus Mouton Rothschild wine has nothing to do with "classic" versus "modern" and more to do with art appreciation versus entertainment. There is a rich tradition of art music appreciation that has grown in depth and nuance over centuries. This tradition and culture grew in respect and aesthetic value over time, yet today a smaller proportion of the population holds the same respect and aesthetic values.

There is nothing wrong with being entertained by orchestral video game music, but to an initiate in the world of classical art music it is disappointing if listeners don't want to engage with orchestral music more beyond reliving their gaming experiences. There are so many more thoughts and feelings an orchestra can inspire in a listener if they invest in absorbing that tradition.

There is nothing wrong with being entertained by classical music, but to an initiate in the world of videogame music it is dissapointing if listeners don't want to engage with videogame music beyond reliving their classical experiences. There are so many more feelings an orchestra can inspire in a listener if they invest in absorbing that tradition. :)

There is good music and bad music, genres are just sets of constraints, none is inherently better than other, what matters is how composer use them. Good chiptune can be a better art than mediocre classical piece. And I would argue more "non-classicaly-trained" people know classical music (even by accident), than the other way around. Everybody have heard Vivaldi, Mozart, Bach, and Strauss at some point in life. Most people never heard Flimbo Quest or Zelda soundtrack.

In 100 years there will be people with PhDs arguing over the merits of classical SID chiptunes vs the Amiga era mods.

PS if you're interested in trying something different I reccomend this presentation about chiptunes - it's interestnig and gives you some idea about the genre constraints and stylistic choices https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEjcK5JFEFE

Are you saying that video game music has more to offer besides reliving gaming memories? I'm genuinely interested in what is offered. For art music, there are already tons of resources for learning how to appreciate it more deeply.

> For art music, there are already tons of resources for learning how to appreciate it more deeply.

Could you recommend something? I'm sceptical about "dancing about architecture", but I'd like to give it a try. So far I like some classical music (the famous guys mostly, also some stuff from Chopin), but I never was hardcore about that.

> Are you saying that video game music has more to offer besides reliving gaming memories?

Would Chopin's polonaises be less worthy had he wrote them for a video game? There's any genre you can name in videogame music. Even statisticaly there has to be something good there. From non-chiptunes I particulary like OSTs for the first Witcher and Bastion.

And then there are genres that evolved with and for video games (and demoscene), like chiptunes or mods, and there's a lot of good music there, too. In fact chiptunes share a lot of constraints with symphonic music, and the amount of creativity there is great (imagine every classical composer had a private orchestra available for experimenting 24h/7 since he was a kid). For nice compilation of recent chiptunes see https://www.reddit.com/r/chiptunes/comments/pq72m/what_chipt...

Can't edit anymore. This album is probably my favorite http://music.disasterpeace.com/album/rise-of-the-obsidian-in...

I've been using the somewhat annoying term "art music" instead of classical music to unpack carefully and artistically crafted music from music purely for commercial entertainment / not intended for close critique. The instruments used largely don't matter -- Chopin is indeed beautiful in certain chip tune arrangements. I'll make a slight digression here though by asserting that keeping live performers in the loop adds an additional unreplaceable layer to the music, since the performer then gets to interpert the original music and highlight new patterns within the music.

Unfortunately I don't know specific books to learn this appreciation (although I know there are excellent ones out there) -- I was raised in this tradition and absorbed it through violin lessons, practice on my instrument, theory class, history class, and listening to a lot of classical music.

I agree. I see performances like these as a way of introducing symphony to a younger audience. Orchestra does sort of having that "stuffy" vibe to it, and when I took music in high school, there wasn't much that was done to change that perception, that was was unfortunately.

I went to both the Final Fantasy and Zelda concerts at Wolf Trap in Fairfax, and I was stunned at just how packed the show was. (It's an outdoor amphitheater.) And the ages. And here is the NSO getting ready to perform, and most of these people are in their teens to 20s. How fantastic is that, to draw in that many young people to see what a real orchestra can do? And not only that, but to witness what goes into making the music they enjoy when they're playing scenes from the game above the stage. Suddenly you're able to place musicians with the sounds you're hearing and the notes being played.

I dare say, many of them, if not most of them, appreciate and enjoy classical orchestra music. It's always been with them. Just they haven't always realized it. =)

It's not that classic things are inherently purer, but they are the best of the best. The classics survive over time while the bulk of their contemporaries are forgotten. Popular art is attractive because it's new, but after a while, most of it becomes tired. Only the best has a depth that people will appreciate many years from now, but it's impossible to judge if something will be a classic until you give it time to prove itself.

This is true and a fair point. You might say that even video games have been around long enough that we can start to name the "classics" (though we might judge more about the game than the music -- maybe this is like how some classical music we perform alone now, originated from opera etc.) On the other hand, the article does mention newer games like Halo and Mass Effect. So it would be more sensible to complain about hearing Mass Effect when you wanted Mozart.

Some people act like "classic" things are inherently purer or even different than modern ones, but for example Shakespeare has vulgar jokes and was performed to earn money, just as modern entertainment has "baser" content and motivations. It doesn't mean both can't also teach us about timeless themes, the human condition, etc.

Eh, I doubt that even this snob needs to be told that - opera (which was instrumental in the development of the forms that define the classical repertoire) is replete with sex, violence and bawdy humor and the giants of the repertoire are very colorful characters.

My hunch is that his anxiety has more to do with the constant fear of "the new" in orchestra halls, where anything less than 100 years old is looked at suspiciously.

As a nerd for all kinds of musical genres, including "classical", this kind of anxiety is evident just about everywhere in some shape or form - indie rock, metal, rap, country, etc, etc. Every genre is constantly changing and crossbreeding, and everywhere there are purists trying to hold on to their image of the genre and performance scene when they fell in love with it.

I think I can agree.

A lot of video game music was created by people trained in classical music. The Nintendo themes, a lot of Square / Enix games, etc. etc.

There are plenty of videogamers who take music damn seriously. The OC Remix guys are absolutely superb at what they do for example.

For less of a "Classical" feel, there is MAGFest (Music and Gaming).

In any case, you will find plenty of "serious" musicians trying to celebrate video games and music. I think that symphony orchestras have begun to realize how much video gamers enjoy music and are learning to merge the two fields. But Video Gamers have known this fact for many years already!

Ultimately, I welcome our classical music brethren to the party.

Haydn's Hashtags: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01mv2zh

I can't decide whether he's more like Niles or Frasier.