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.
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