The aim was to take classical music outside of what philosophy professor Lydia Goehr has called the вЂimaginary museumвЂ™ of the concert hall, and to give young musicians and composers like himself the platform to engage with an audience put off by the unwritten rules that buttress the concert hall tradition. The grandson of the Russian composer and pianist Sergei Prokofiev, he founded Nonclassical in 2004 as a club night and classical music label. Prokofiev knows better than most the solemn weight of classical musicвЂ™s history. As he put it: вЂThe question of concert etiquette is only part, and perhaps a rather small part, of the complicated social dilemma in which classical music finds itself вЂ“ as a largely acoustic art in an electronic culture, as a mainly long-form art in a short-attention-span age.вЂ™

Ross covers the history of this particular issue well, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Some of these вЂ“ like the equally annoying вЂshush reflexвЂ™ that inevitably follows someone breaking the вЂno-applause ruleвЂ™ вЂ“ are largely of the classical worldвЂ™s own making. Starting with the concert audience convention of вЂno-applauseвЂ™ between movements, Ross expands on the wider impediments to classical musicвЂ™s appeal. How does classical music attract a younger audience that might not have, and might not care to have, any engagement with the deeply furrowed traditions ingrained in its production, performance and reception of the concert hall? The problem that Prokofiev is referring to was memorably raised by New Yorker music critic Alex Ross in вЂHold Your Applause: Inventing and Reinventing the Classical ConcertвЂ™, a lecture he delivered to LondonвЂ™s Royal Philharmonic Society in 2010. As he tells me: вЂItвЂ™s an ongoing problem.вЂ™ He is in New York a few nights after premiering his Concerto for Bass Drum (2011), with percussionist Joby Burgess and the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, which will later travel to Chicago before returning for its first UK performance with the London Contemporary Orchestra as part of Reverb, a five-day classical music festival at the Roundhouse. ItвЂ™s not a particularly new one but itвЂ™s one that composer Gabriel Prokofiev knows well. Courtesy Nonclassical, London, and Stuart Meldrum / Chris RansomД¬lassical music faces a dilemma. Aisha Orazbayeva performing Steve Reich's Violin Phas for Violin and TapeВ (1967) and a Nonclassical night at Cargo, London.

Musik senam orchestra