Unlike in the past, the recent popular music concerts which most young people have experienced are dramatically different. All aspects of the recent performance are also designed to appeal to the emotions, from the lighting to the performers’ attire. The audience is not expected to silently observe the performers, as they were in the past. In fact, the audience and its reaction to the music is an indispensable part of the concert experience. That is why live concerts continue to be important to young people even though the music is available on CDs. Increasingly over the last decade, worldwide, classical music is played in multiple venues, such as clubs, rather than in classical music venues. In Europe, club events in a style similar to the ‘Yellow Lounge’, such as ‘Nonclassical club night’ and ‘Groupmuse’ are being held. The ‘Yellow Lounge’, ‘PULSE’ and ‘The Night Shift’ are new formats of performances which are break away from the traditional form.
Through this study, we can see that the physical and psychological distance between the audience and the performer is reduced after performances in which the new audience can participate more easily than the existing performances. In other words, the informality of the performances resulted in a positive impact on the experience of classical musical performances for beginners in classical music. However, these programs must be careful of over-familiarity. According to Michael Foucault and Theodor Adorno, over-familiarity with a particular kind of listening makes people averse to any effort to “derail familiar.” In fact, even though many respondents stated that they would like to attend classical music performances in the future, it is hard to find the quantitative data which proves that the new experimental performances actually lead to increased future attendance or ticket sales. In other words, we cannot see the number changing by the experiments.
As classical music organizations continue to innovate formats and programs, they provide pathways to other kinds of musical experiences. Audiences will gain a broader range of musical experiences without leaving the product line, and musicians will gain a new appreciation for the many pathways to musical fulfillment. The next generation of classical consumers will not put classical music in the definitional box that the orchestra field has relied upon to define itself for so many years. In this ecology of rapidly changing musical tastes, the frontier of programmatic innovation in the orchestra field surely lies in exploring intersections across various types of music, and between music and other forms of artistic expression such as dance, poetry, spoken word, theatre and performance art. Therefore, it is considered that research on the formality of new formats is necessary in terms of new audience development.
In future research, it is necessary to recognize the positive and negative aspects of classical musical performances in order to design differentiated performances. Art administrators should design concerts for a specific target audience, not a wide target like twenty-year-old or young audiences. Otherwise, both big fans and new young audiences will turn their face away, and you will lose both. Fans may not be satisfied with non-traditional and fusion music, and it will not be interesting enough for new audiences. At this point, I think classical music organizations should carefully approach concerts in terms of programmatic developing and marketing. Lastly, the research on this topic has been conducted on recent models, so that it can deliver an objective report with quantitative data. It is difficult to find research on non-formal series performances, as opposed to one-time events.
