An Audience ‘Clap-Happy’ in Appreciation of Creativity

As a rule, few things are more futile than taking issue with reviews of cultural events that are past and over. But a recent Times review of the New West Symphony’s rendition of Holst’s “The Planets” was so wrongheaded and unperceptive that it requires a response.

The New West’s approach was, as your reviewer wrote in “Rudely Upstaged: Multimedia Show Distracts from Holst’s ‘Planets’ ” (Sept. 29), “something completely different”: an orchestra performance combined with large-screen images of the planets plus a brief commentary, between segments, by astronaut Gordon Cooper.

I do not object to your reviewer’s dislike of how the New West’s audiovisual approach turned out. What concerns me is the mind-set from which his opinion sprang. The review’s tone was a striking combination of elitism and petulance, from which a few particular points emerged.

It’s not easy to isolate the New West’s biggest offense, in the reviewer’s view. Certainly one of them was the inclusion of “pretty pictures accompanying the classics and making it more palatable to the restless senses in the MTV era.” Those restless senses presumably belonged to the audience the reviewer dismissed as “clap-happy.”

It’s an easy code to break: Those of us who filled the seats in the Oxnard Performing Arts Center were simply unqualified to attend something as elevated as a symphony concert. (In future, perhaps, a brief test could be administered at the door; those failing it could be sent to watch, say, “Fantasia,” that revoltingly successful betrayal of pure art.)

And in one respect the reviewer was correct. Many of the folks sitting around me in the mezzanine clearly hadn’t been to many concerts. Some had been drawn by the presence of a genuine hero, Gordon Cooper, or by the prospect of incredible images--a prospect amply fulfilled, by the way. The point, however, is that this presentation was exposing classical music--some of it entirely pure--to a lot of people who hadn’t heard much of it. And if they were clap-happy, maybe they were only expressing appreciation.

In the end, I guess, the New West’s most serious crime was “to surrender the fight for pure music.” Maybe I spend too much time listening to public radio, where “pure music” seems generally available, but I wasn’t aware that such a fight was going on.

What is going on, of course--what has been going on for centuries, if not millenniums--is artistic creativity. In the performing arts, the author is the first creator but then the performers put their own twist on the material--and may, indeed, change it entirely.

And even if they don’t, another author or the director may step in. For a perfect example of this, consider “House of Cards,” a banal British political novel that was transformed by a brilliant scriptwriter, director and cast into a TV series that has become a classic of black comedy.

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As someone who writes for a living, I’ve been angered by the way art directors have changed the slant of an article in the process of designing the pages. For old fogies like me, the trend in magazines, where the text becomes part of the design, is hard to get used to. I have even heard myself bemoan how some magazines seem to have surrendered the fight for pure literature.

But that, I suspect, is because I couldn’t design a note pad, never mind a magazine. I know a young man--my son, in fact--who can write, illustrate and design, and he’s not unique in his generation.

The plain truth, unpleasant as some may find it, is that combined media are here because, for many audiences, they work. We have been educated to appreciate several forms of art simultaneously, and I’d be willing to bet that the human brain’s capacity hasn’t been reached yet.

Part of the excitement of going to a production like the New West’s version of “The Planets” is simply anticipation--multifaceted anticipation. There will, of course, be failures. But if classical music aims only at purity--whatever that means--it seems likely to wind up as peripheral and sterile as icon-painting.

The audiences that have been trained by multimedia are here to stay. The artists’, directors’ and reviewers’ task is to keep up with them.