The Ever-Changing Unchangingness of Live Music
We head back to 1916 to understand how concerts have evolved in the last century
I released a new song last week. In the past, I’ve written full newsletters about how my songs come together. I wasn’t inclined to do that this time. Still, you will get a little blurb about the song at the end of this newsletter. But if you can’t wait, you can click the button below to listen. While you listen, enjoy this week’s deep dive into how live music has changed in the last hundred years. As always, this newsletter is also available as a podcast. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or click play at the top of this page.
The Ever-Changing Unchangingness of Live Music
By Chris Dalla Riva
It’s June 1916. You decide to head uptown in Manhattan to the Polo Grounds, the storied sports stadium home to both the New York Yankees and the New York Giants. You’re not there for an athletic competition, though. You and 4,000 other people are there for a massive concert. A chorus of 1,200 and an orchestra of 120 will be performing Verdi’s requiem mass. Tickets range from $0.50 to $2.50. You get to your seat just before the 3 P.M. start time. It’s a spectacular day to be alive.
This performance at the Polo Grounds always reminds me how live music hasn’t changed that much. Over a century ago, people were still heading to big sports stadiums to hear performances of music that they loved. And live music performed for crowds goes back even further than that. Literally thousands of years further. We have both written and archeological evidence of ancient civilizations, like the Greeks and Romans, staging live concerts. Nevertheless, when you read The New York Times’ coverage of the 1916 performance at the Polo Grounds, you also see that while certain things in the live performance world hasn’t really changed, some other things have changed dramatically:
Verdi’s requiem mass sung in the open air by a chorus of 1,200 voices with a full orchestra converted the baseball field at the Polo Grounds yesterday into a vast musical arena. More than four thousand persons seated in the grandstand listened to a rendition which was both impressive and interesting. Sung under a bright blue sky, the majestic measures of the requiem seemed to float away into infinite heights to be lost in the clouds.
As an experiment on a beautiful June afternoon, the open air performance of the requiem was as delightful as could be expected. From a purely musical viewpoint, it was to be regretted however, that the orchestra had no carrying power of the voices. And even the voices, too, seemed to lose themselves in the air before they could reach that part of the audience which had seated itself in the upper sections of the grandstand.
Again, this passage makes clear that there are some things that have changed in live music in the last hundred years. First, there were probably many people in attendance that heard very little of the performance. Why? The Polo Grounds was neither built for music nor was there any amplification. In other words, that chorus of 1,200 singers was partially for practical purposes. You needed a lot of singers to be loud enough for anybody to hear you in an open-air stadium. Compare that to today. Now, Ed Sheeran can play a concert to 80,000 people by himself with just an acoustic guitar. Amplification and stadium acoustics are just so much better.
The other oddity that jumps out when you read The New York Times’ coverage is that only 4,000 people attended the performance. The reason that is strange is because the Polo Grounds held over 30,000 people in 1916. I’m not sure anybody would let a stadium show proceed today if under 12% of the seats were filled. I think that fact actually highlights the biggest difference in large concerts today compared to a century ago. Of course, amplification has improved. But the less obvious thing that enables our current concert culture is improvements around process.
Buying tickets in advance. Security. Video feeds. Scalping prevention. Assigned seating. Sanitation. These are things that evolved slowly over time, so much so that while there are clear antecedents to the way these things work at live concerts today, you would probably say that the modern stadium show wasn’t properly achieved until the 1960s. Artists in the first half of the 20th century would just have to deal with smaller crowds until after The Beatles played Shea Stadium on August 15, 1965. Kind of.
In 1994, Frank Sinatra performed at Fukuoka Dome in Japan on December 19 and December 20. Those would be two of the final three concerts he would conduct during his lifetime. Opened the prior year as a baseball stadium, the Fukuoka Dome held 47,500 people. Assuming both shows sold out, Sinatra performed to 95,000 Japanese fans across those two nights. This was a far cry from the small venues that he was performing at when his career took off in the 1940s, like the Paramount Theater, which held just over 3,600 people.
This isn’t a fair comparison, though. One of the innovations of stadium music is that an artist can see all of their fans in one or two nights. Before that, popular artists often conducted residencies, meaning they would play the same venue for days to weeks. For example, Sinatra performed with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra at the Paramount Theater between March 13, 1940 and April 9, 1940. Again, the Paramount held 3,664 people. 27 days performing to 3,664 people each night is 98,928 total people, close to Sinatra’s two-night stand at the Fukuoka Dome 54 years later.
We see the same thing when we look at other stars of the first half of the 20th century. Benny Goodman, another popular bandleader when Sinatra first splashed on the scene, played Los Angeles’s Palomar Ballroom for 21 nights in 1935. The Palomar could hold somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 people on any given night. That means Goodman and his band saw between 84,000 and 168,000 fans during that run, on par with contemporary stadium stands.
In short, a lot changed between concerts in the first and second half of the 20th century. Amplification improved. Stadium design became more music-friendly. Processes around shows became more efficient. That said, popular artists aren’t necessarily seeing more of their fans these days. Back in the day, they just used to see them over a longer period of time. Frankly, that might have been better. Despite all of the stadium concert improvements, music is almost always more powerful in a more intimate space.
A New One
"Overloving" by Chris Dalla Riva
2024 - Indie Rock
When I sat down to write a song in 2019, I had one goal: wordplay. I wanted to write something that had a touch of lyrical cleverness. What I landed on was the phrase “over loving,” something that could mean you are effusive in your love or that your love had ended. Toss in a Hank Williams allusion and a subtle key change, and I was really happy with what I’d written. I had one problem, though. I could not figure out how to record the song. And I couldn’t figure it out until I met Max Rauch and Ken De Poto. They took my sappy ballad and turned it into a slow-burning torch song, replete with a sea of strings and hypnotic beat.
An Old One
"The Mountain’s High" by Dick & Dee Dee
1961 - Vocal Pop
Peaking at number two on the Billboard Hot 100, Dick & Dee Dee’s “The Mountain’s High” is quintessential 1960s’ ephemera. I don’t even think it’s great ephemera, though. The close vocal harmony can be grating at times. But any problem you have with this forgotten hit is easy to ignore when you hear the snare drum. I’d go so far as to argue that it might be the best snare drum sound that I’ve ever heard.
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“As delightful as could be expected.” A great example of faint praise from the NYT for that Polo Grounds concert.