It takes a lot to become a certified diver.
Diving can be dangerous, and it’s important to understand how to do it safely. According to the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI), after purchasing expensive equipment, taking a series of courses on safe diving, demonstrating substantial swimming capabilities, logging a number of confined water dives before at least four open water dives, and taking a comprehensive final exam to prove you have acquired a working knowledge of safe diving practices, you can finally dive freely and safely as a PADI certified diver.
But diving isn’t the only way to enjoy the ocean. You could just be a swimmer or a snorkeler, exploring just the surface of the water. You may be able to look down and see the wonders beneath you, but if diving makes you squeamish or uncomfortable, swimming is a perfectly fine option.
Swimming also might not be your thing. Sometimes wading through the water is enough to enjoy the beach. Feeling the salty wind on your face and in your hair, watching seagulls flock and wavers crash, and listening to the water’s gentle roar while only knee deep in the water itself is enough to enjoy the experience.
In themed entertainment design, this analogy of waders, swimmers, and divers is used as a framework to design the experience in such a way that it can appeal to everyone. If you’re familiar with marketing and advertising, the analogy is kind of an inverse engagement pyramid.
At the bottom of the engagement pyramid is where most of the people engaging with a product or service exist. As you ascend the pyramid, you become more and more invested in the product or service, and there are fewer and fewer people at each level. The most important thing to keep in mind about the engagement pyramid is that companies market their products and services to every level of the pyramid, and people identifying with every level get something different out of the product or service.
The experience design framework takes that kind of thinking and turns it on its head — literally.
At the top of the inverse pyramid, most of the people engaging with the experience are waders: people who are there to wander through the attraction, snap a few pictures in front of a castle, and have a very pleasant day escaping into an experience.
The next level is the swimmers: the people who are returning for more, who have planned out their day and determined how they want to curate their own experience. Swimmers are willing to explore the environment and develop a passing knowledge of the experience, building memories through an ongoing relationship with the attraction.
Divers are willing to delve deep into the lore of the experience, finding stories and details hidden within the attraction. They are inquisitive, active participants who develop and maintain an encyclopedic knowledge of the experience and its history. Divers crave the opportunity to engage as much as possible with the experience and will plan extensively to make sure that they are able to maximize their engagement potential with the experience.
The theme park designer knows that the attractions they design will be engaged by waders, swimmer, and divers, all at once, all the time. An effective experience rewards all three.
And that’s what’s so wrong with classical music — it only rewards divers.
Classical music’s greatest failure is its inability and refusal to reward anyone but divers. Only the people already knowledgeable of and invested in classical music are rewarded by our performances. This isn’t limited to followers of Milton Babbitt’s Who Cares if You Listen or classical purists who think Mozart is the best music that would ever or will ever exist. This failure is owned by everyone in our community, because we have all enabled it — or stood by and did nothing to intervene.
The people who have season subscriptions to their local orchestra and only go to the classics like Beethoven and Mahler? Divers. The people who have been taught (or taught themselves) to anticipate when the retransition transforms into the recapitulation? Divers. The people who come up to you after a performance and tell you about the past performances they’ve heard of the piece you played? Divers. And the worst part — we eat it up, every time.
The attention that we classical musicians get from divers experiencing our performances is addictive, because it’s the only way we understand talking about the music we make. Musicians are detail-oriented practitioners of whatever period of music we specialize in, and our education is aggressively technical to support that. We have been trained to appreciate when an audience member can speak our language — and we have been trained to encourage it.
The only time we attempt to reward waders and swimmers is when we see a potential opportunity to convert a wader to a swimmer to a diver. Classical musicians and music educators are specifically trained to funnel people into this pipeline so that we can expand our diver audience. We do not respect that waders may simply want to be waders and swimmers may simply want to be swimmers — if they are not willing to become divers, they have lost our attention.
And this isn’t limited to audience members. I have watched fellow students lose attention and resources from professors because they turned out to be swimmers and not divers (this is evil and reprehensible), and I have observed other musicians tear each other apart for not enough of a diver (over and over, and it’s exhausting every time).
Classical musicians only know how to work with, perform for, and be friends with other divers. This makes the experience of classical music very uncomfortable and alienating for waders and swimmers. Waders and swimmers feel like they will never be able to really understand all the nuance of classical music — because we’ve told them that they can’t.
And the problem is that there are significantly more swimmers than there are divers, and even more waders than there are swimmers. By alienating the waders and the swimmers with our performances, we lost
There are very, very few examples of classical music that reward waders, swimmers, and divers at once and in equal measure.
But there is one: The Nutcracker.
When I was about six or seven, I remember going to my first concert with my mother and both my maternal and paternal grandmothers. It was on a sunny, brisk day in December at Phoenix Symphony Hall, and The Nutcracker was being performed. I distinctly remember the moment when the magic first begins in the story and the Christmas tree enlarges before the battle with the mouse king — the backdrop lifted up and it blew my mind. I remember one thing rushing through my brain: I have to do this.
The Nutcracker is an 1892 ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky which sees thousands of performances every year as part of the overall worldwide Christmas phenomenon. According to Crain’s New York Business, it provides most North American ballet companies with about 40% of their annual ticket revenues. The Nutcracker is the story of Clara, who receives a gift of a nutcracker from her godfather on Christmas Eve, then wakes in the middle of the night to witness a battle with the mouse king, be amazed at the nutcracker’s transformation into a handsome prince, and visit the land of sweets to meet the Sugar Plum Fairy and her subjects.
In many ways, The Nutcracker was my first themed experience. It changed how I thought about entertainment, and it had all the hallmarks of an effective immersive experience: it was themed immaculately, it engaged all my senses, it eliminated negative cues and harmonized positive cues, and it created a sense of memorabilia. It pulled me in, and I immediately went from wader to swimmer to diver.
The experience of The Nutcracker is very interesting in itself, because it’s very hard to divorce it from the overall phenomenon of people celebrate Christmas in the 21st century. For many people, Christmas is a month-long affair — and it encourages as much participation as possible. People are encouraged to theme their homes with Christmas decorations, to eat cookies and drink eggnog, and to spend as much time as possible with their families to build lasting memories of good times together. The Nutcracker exemplifies the Christmas phenomenon, and many people who celebrate Christmas have fond memories of it because it harmonizes so well with the cascade of holiday experiences they already actively participate in throughout the month of December.
But the greatest magic of The Nutcracker is that, like all great themed experiences, it catered to all three kinds of participants. Waders could go to the experience and enjoy a charming ballet that encouraged the suspension of disbelief. Swimmers could attend a performance as part of their annual Christmas traditions. Divers could explore all the elements of the production of the show, from the fabulous score to the magic of stagecraft.
If we examined the power of The Nutcracker as an example of what classical music could be if it rewarded waders and swimmers in addition to divers. The Nutcracker is so effective because it lets people come as they are to engage with it, and it doesn’t (explicitly) suggest or demand that you need to invest time and energy into becoming a diver to understand it.
So… what now?
Classical music and all its derivative genres will continue to suffer because of its failure to reward anyone but divers in its performances. Unfortunately, unless there is intervention, this will eventual cause classical music to bankrupt itself.
For a lot of existing classical music, there’s not a lot that can be done. It’s very hard to reinvent Beethoven in such a way that waders and swimmers will see it as anything other than a shameless attempt to bring "classical music to the masses.” There’s still an underlying attitude there, a holier-than-thou-ness that makes it immediately and distressingly clear that there is a private circle of classical musicians and those they have deemed worth to stand among them — and everyone else. That’s why it’s not enough to simply reframe classical music in a nontraditional venue like a bar; that’s just superimposing a subculture onto a different space, encouraging the divers already invested in classical music to come to an event at which they can also drink alcohol, not making classical music itself more accessible.
It’s fine to have events that only reward divers as long as you understand you are only rewarding divers. Organizations can continue to present classical music in its current state, but they have to expand into programming that rewards waders and swimmers if they expect to be able to survive. Ideally, classical music programming will find a way to reward waders, swimmers, and divers alike, and here are some strategies to actualize that.
Show, Don’t Tell
Telling an audience more information about the performance, whether it’s through pre-concert talks, program notes, or any other means is diver catnip, but it sometimes has the effect of feeling condescending to waders and swimmers. The best thing to do for waders is to let the musical affect them without telling them how they should be effected, and the best thing to do for swimmers is to only tell them why the music affected them so when they ask why the music worked the way it did. Don’t draw attention to program notes or make it seem like pre-concert talks are required to understand the performance — the divers in your audience love the opportunity to find that information out on their own.
Deconstruct the Concert Environment
I’ve actually written a lot about this already, but the proscenium-style concert environment is terrible for presenting classical music. The proscenium is a story device, and it’s often irrelevant for the presentation of concert music — but still suggests a divide between performers and audience that alienates waders and swimmers. It’s a negative cue that waders and swimmers in your audiences find really uncomfortable because it reminds them just how uncomfortable they are. The proscenium works for The Nutcracker (because it’s a ballet and the proscenium is serving a functional role for the story), but Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony or Copland’s Rodeo? Not so much.
Experiment with the way you use the proscenium or find a way to erase the feeling that there is a proscenium at all. You will find that the waders and swimmers in your audiences become immediately and significantly more engaged in the work you perform.
Rethink Music Education
Music education currently encourages waders to become swimmers and swimmers to become divers. If we don’t know how to convert waders into swimmers or divers, or it turns out that we can’t convert waders into swimmers or divers because they’re just not that interested in music, we give up on them and focus our resources on those swimmers and divers we have already been able to engage. This is very bad, and a very easy way of making it sure that we alienate huge potential audiences who may have been okay with just being audiences.
Not all music educators do this, but it’s so important to make that no music educators do this. The best way to overcome this practice is to talk about the waders, swimmers, and divers concept with students — and recognize that’s okay to be any of them, and different people will get different things out of your teaching. Students would rather understand that there are different ways to interface with art than be left in the dust while students get more attention. Be honest — and they’ll respect you for it.
Perform New Music the Right Way
New music doesn’t have to have pre-existing connotations of what it is for audiences to appreciate it. A lot of new music is a lot better that way. The easiest way of alienating audiences with new music is telling them that it’s going to be weird or different, because that suggests that only some people (the divers) will understand the nuance of it. Expectations are premeditated disappointments, and new music doesn’t automatically come with the classist baggage that classical music does. There’s a lot of opportunities in the changing the world that new music is born into, and investing in a space in which waders, swimmers, and divers can be rewarded that present new music is paramount to changing the associations people have with classical music.
Collaborate with Other Media
Par of what make The Nutcracker so powerfully equipped to reward waders, swimmers, and diver simultaneously is its ability to engage more that one sense. It allows existing sensory associations with Christmas to be heightened during its performances, creating a lot of resonance between all the elements of its experience, which is something that waders and swimmers look for in their search for high quality experiences.
Collaborating with other media is key to creating a greater sense of sensory resonance. Pair performances of music with visual media on stage, reinforce that media with a curated menu of food and drink at intermission, and create merchandise that will deepen the memorability of the experience, things they can touch and remember the experience of the music. Be more curatorial about the experience and how you engage senses and watch as you attract swimmers and waders — and impress divers.
This is not an exhaustive list (and I could write more), but it gives a good idea of how rigid and exclusive classical music is. From the way that we educate people about what we do as classical musicians to the way that we present classical music, everything that we do is specifically designed to only reward divers or convert people into divers — all while alienating the vast majority of our potential audiences, which are waders and swimmers. By using lessons from The Nutcracker, we can dismantle the way we present classical music as we know it and shape it into something new and welcoming.
All we need to do is let the waders be waders, let the swimmers be swimmers, and let the divers be divers.