Music? At a concert?

July 21, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

We went to the Philharmonic concert one evening this week on the Great Lawn in Central Park. People come early, meet friends, spread blankets, put out all sorts of food. Most find the others in their group either by cell phone (“I see you now. Turn about a quarter-turn. I’m waving”). Some had more striking visual techniques, like waving the Turkish flag.


And when the concert starts, they listen to the music. Or not.

As a sociologist, I should have remembered that music is only one of the reasons that people go to a concert, especially a free, outdoor concert. I also should have realized that there’s a strong correlation between how interested people are in the music and how far they are from the stage.


In the diagram, the X marks where we were, nearly 200 yards from the stage, and the crowd stretched back to the farthest reaches of the Lawn. (You can get some idea of distances by using the baseball diamonds. The blue lines indicate emergency lanes the Park establishes – nobody’s allowed to sit there – that divide the area into quadrants.)

I know that the demographic for classical music tilts heavily towards the geezer end of the scale, but around us were thirtysomethings, people who in an earlier decade would have been called “yuppies.” And they never stopped talking, to one another or on their cell phones. Even when the music began, and all through the concert, they didn’t even lower their voices. I heard about baby sitters and hedge funds and the Yankees’ pitching rotation. I heard conversations I didn’t understand because they were in Italian or Turkish.

It was clear that almost nobody at this remove from the stage was listening to the music at all, even though the orchestra had selected “pops” pieces that might be familiar (“Til Eulenspiegel” “Pictures at an Exhibition”). But I would bet that if you asked them, “What did you do last night?” a lot of them would say, “We went to the concert in Central Park.”

Why would people come to a concert if they were going to completely ignore the music? They could picnic in the park any time. I speculated that there must be some attraction to doing something that many other people are doing. The presence of lots of other people makes the same activity more pleasant, more social.

One other reason became obvious at the end of the concert.



Still, I doubt that most of the people there knew about the fireworks in advance, and I’d guess that most of them would have come even without the fireworks.

Full disclosure: I could not get my own shot of the fireworks to print, and I grabbed this image off the Web. It looks much better than mine.