There is something very ambivalent about my attitude towards “culture” and “art”. I always gravitate towards it and somehow cannot imagine my life without it, and the closest I get to experiencing pure bliss is in fleeting moments when music (or any other artistic expression, for that matter) touches me so directly and deeply that it puts me in a chokehold without warning. But if I reflect on the moments when I feel the most miserable, when I am surrounded by people and feel like a complete outsider, I hate to admit that these experiences are usually either during some kind of cultural event or in a discussion about culture. Why? Is it because pain is close to pleasure? Is it just my own personality disorder which I associate with art and culture because that happens to be my line of work, and had I been a dentist, I would have started this column with my mixed feelings about teeth…?
I have to back up a bit. You might remember that I wrote my Master’s thesis about bluegrass music in the Netherlands and I followed it up with the publication of a book. After that, I spent a year looking for a PhD position at a university where I could continue studying bluegrass music, but unfortunately I didn’t find one. In the meantime, the college where I teach (I’m the music teacher at the academy for circus arts—I think it’s officially the coolest job in the world) put research higher on their agenda and developed a new policy for teachers who want to combine their teaching ánd performing practice with research. Research on music in circus arts is practically nonexistent (bar one PhD thesis about circus music specifically about the classical circus in Germany) I submitted a proposal about this topic. It was accepted, and since the beginning of this year I submersed myself in all things circus the way Scrooge takes his daily plunge into his warhouse full of coins. In the beginning, I was afraid that my new focus on circus would push bluegrass to the background. But the more I read, the more parallels I see, especially in the circus and bluegrass communities. The definition question (“Can this—still—be called circus?” is asked at every turn and elicits the same kind of responses as the question “Can this—still—be called bluegrass?”), the tension between purism and crossovers, between tradition and innovation, the need to identify and credit a “godfather” for the genre as a whole and for every innovation within the genre, the passionate and sometimes highly sensitive attitude towards the personal experience of the style, a need to talk about it and analyze it but at the same time a reluctancy to demystify it by putting it into words; these are a few things I have come across in my circus research so far that remind me of similar experiences in my bluegrass research. In the PhD thesis about circus music in Germany I’m currently reading (400 pages—in German), a statement about “mitklatschen” (to clap along) was the spark that lit up another one of those connections with bluegrass in my brain. I will keep on using the word “mitklatschen” because I think it’s such a funny word.
And now I’ll get to the point. When I’m in a big space with a lot of people and there is some kind of performance going on where the crowd is encouraged to simultaneously clap along to the beat—that’s a typical moment for me to feel utterly miserable and lonely. For me it breaks the fourth wall, it takes me out of my personal connection with the artistic presentation in itself and instead directs my thoughts to the social level: what is my relationship to the performers, and what is my place in the group as a whole? I can never help looking around to what others do. Most of the people don’t seem to even think about it and automatically do as they are incited to do: clap along. Some people do it with a grumpy face because they feel obliged to obey the performer, because they don’t want to embarrass whoever they went to the show with, or because they don’t want to stand out; but the majority seem to really enjoy this massive group behavior. It gives them a certain thrill, just like doing the wave with thousands of people in a football stadion or going to a supersized dance or rock festival.
For this instant orchestrated audience participation to work, the music needs to be really simple, so those “mitklatschen”-moments in circus are on very straightforward polkas or marches with the claps on the 1 and 3 or on every single beat. As musicians, you might recognize this: do you have the urge to prove you are more musical than the herd by clapping on the afterbeat, on 2 and 4, or even on every single offbeat (1 AND 2 AND 3 AND 4 AND)? Or clapping some kind of interesting interlocking African or South American rhythm? Seriously, when I studied Music in Education, half of my classmates would pull these tricks whenever we’d sing Happy Birthday. This type of behavior kicks me down to the next level of feeling miserable. I don’t want to be one of the herd, but I also don’t want to be a showoff. At the same time, I’m beating myself up over this, because I’m thinking: why do you have to make everything so negative? Why do you call it “the herd”, when you can also see it as an “organic collective”, which sounds much more warm and inviting, and why don’t you just go with the flow? Why do you call the people who are expressing their musical creativity and finding their own way to connect to the whole “showoffs”? Why don’t you just join them in their improv and get out of your head and back into the moment? Why don’t you just… do something??
There are different types of circus, just like there are different types of bluegrass (sorry, purists!). From the dawn of bluegrass, there have been groups who don’t mind playing for the larger audiences who associate the style with hillbilly clichés and who want to imitate barndances, clap and stomp to the pulse and yell “Yee-haa!”, but there is also “musician’s bluegrass” in which the bands play to a miniature audience made up of statues with their arms crossed and a frown on their face. It took me a while to get used to playing for these audiences, but now I know that it’s hard to distinguish a “judging look” from a look of deep concentration and enjoyment. Some people express their feelings of intense happiness by smiling, clapping and dancing—others move on the inside, showing only ripples on the outside. I know now not to “read” these audiences but just to leave them be. But that’s because this is how I like to be treated when I’m an audience member, and I know that makes me a minority. That’s why I like to seek out the performance arts that don’t cater to the masses, like highly technical crossover bluegrass, and the type of circus that presents itself as “artistic” (without animals and red-nosed clowns, instead borrowing ingredients from high-brow theater, music and dance).
How about you? What type of “mitklatscher” are you?
