Read on to discover why feeling bored in a concert happens to even the most dedicated classical music fans...
We hate to admit it... but sometimes we feel bored in classical concerts
I have a confession. It’s probably an inadvisable one for a classical music writer to make in these illustrious pages, but I’m going to make it anyway. Sometimes I go to classical concerts and, while the musicians are giving their all for the works of great creative masters, my mind drifts. I think about what I’m going to eat later, or wrestle with something said to me earlier in the day. Sometimes I barely notice the music at all. It may happen in music I don’t know at all; it may happen in music I know very well... It may just happen. In these moments, I might even admit that what I was experiencing was boredom.
Now, this is a taboo subject in classical music. ‘Boring’ is so often the word used by people who haven’t been brought up with classical music to explain why they won’t listen to it, a way of dismissing it out of hand. Nothing boils my blood more quickly than hearing it from someone – particularly a celebrity – when asked about classical music, so I’m fully aware of the danger of the association. However, I’ve spent my entire life fully immersed in classical music, whether watching, listening or playing, and I still have these moments. So what is happening here?
Boredom or mind wandering? The science behind it...
Psychologists use a far more gentle term than ‘boredom’: ‘mind-wandering’. Dr Diana Omigie is senior lecturer in psychology and director of Music, Mind and Brain at Goldsmiths, University of London. She offers me reassurance: ‘We know that people cannot give sustained attention to any activity at full 100 per cent focus, even if that’s their intention. Statistics suggest that between 40 and 50 per cent of the time we’re actually mind wandering instead of doing the task we think we’re doing. With classical music, people find themselves sitting in a concert hall, listening, for example, to three movements of between seven and ten minutes each, which is a long time to maintain sustained focus. Their minds wander and that’s perfectly normal. It’s our brain’s way of taking stock.’
Psychologists can even track this mind-wandering, using electroencephalography. Attaching sensors to the listener’s head, Omigie and her students are able to interpret the oscillations in the visual cortex, at the back of the head, correlating the activity to when the subject reports visual images. Mind-wandering in itself doesn’t necessarily indicate boredom, though: ‘Visual imagery can happen when you’re disengaging, not because you’re even bored. It just means that we naturally disengage from tasks. Visual imagery can also happen when you are listening attentively. Some people see the musical score, or they create contours. It doesn’t have to mean you’re disengaged. That makes it a complex thing to study.’ So, does my imagination drift to fjords and swans because I’m bored or because I’m carried away by Sibelius?
Feeling bored in a concert? Perhaps you just need to be more curious...
Counterbalancing mind-wandering, psychologists also study the concept of ‘curiosity’. Omigie explains: ‘In general, curiosity is the desire to know – an intrinsic motivation. Things that tend to drive curiosity are experiencing something surprising, something you didn’t expect, something that changed. I look at music in terms of information theory – the idea that music is just one source of information. We can use models to look at how surprising music feels to a listener at a given moment, how information-rich it is, how much entropy and complexity there are, how uncertain they should be about what will happen next. The implication is that if you want to know something, you’ll attend to the source of insights or information that will help you gain that knowledge.’
For critic Fiona Maddocks, founding editor of BBC Music Magazine, curiosity is an essential state of mind: ‘You can be bored by anything if you don’t sit up and try to think: “What’s this composer doing? Where is this music going? Is it surprising me? Is it delighting me? Does it have a tune? Does it not have a tune? Is the percussion doing something amazing?” All these little questions are like following where a ball goes on a football pitch. This is how you find a way.’
Feeling bored in a concert? How you can train your mind to focus...
It doesn’t necessarily come naturally, though, she says: ‘It took me a long time to know how to listen. It’s about being active and really trying to engage. The more I’ve learnt how to listen, the further boredom is from my mind.’ Although even she has her off days, she admits: ‘If I go to something and I’m not on duty reviewing, my mind might slide because it feels like a night off. That’s the moment when I’m not listening properly, forgetting how to get the most out of the music. I might be very tired and think about my shopping list, which I have trained myself not to do if I’m writing.’
So, this professional level of engagement requires practice: ‘The realisation that every single note in a big symphony is interesting, for example, took a long time, because it’s like a muscle that you have to exercise. It’s not instant, unless you’re immediately taken with a piece of music. You have to work at it – like weightlifting.’
The more musical training, the less likely you are to feel bored in a concert
Psychologists also study the importance of this background work. Omigie recounts a recent study (as yet not published or peer-reviewed): ‘We showed that people with more musical training were less likely to be mind-wandering. The music was simple, but sometimes relatively complex – not quite atonal, but a bit unpredictable. People who have had more musical training are more likely to engage, compared with those who didn’t have that training. They’re more likely to try to understand what’s going on in the music and have ways of making sense of it.
We also showed that in moments that were more unpredictable, most listeners will disengage, because the curiosity model is that if something is very unpredictable, and you don’t think that there’s anything to be learnt or understood, you’ll disengage. We showed that experts were less likely to disengage at that moment, maybe because they were more able to manage that complexity.’
Perhaps it's healthy to feel bored sometimes...
Is there anything wrong with boredom, though? Philosophers have grappled with the question. Bertrand Russell saw boredom in evolutionary terms, as the opposite of primitive man’s excitement at hunting and gathering, devoting a whole chapter to the subject in The Conquest of Happiness, and writing, ‘The opposite of boredom, in a word, is not pleasure, but excitement.’ He argues for a balance between the two: ‘There is an element of boredom which is inseparable from the avoidance of too much excitement, and too much excitement not only undermines the health, but dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure… Too little may produce morbid cravings, too much will produce exhaustion. A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young. All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.’
He may be talking in general terms, but surely it applies to a concert too. Could one really sit through a three-hour concert in a constant state of engagement and thrill? And not just classical music: which of us watches a film or binge-watches a series without moments and sometimes whole stretches of ennui?
Why we're more likely to feel bored in the modern world
It’s a paradox that in our constantly connected, find-any-piece-of-music-in-seconds world, various studies conclude that we are actually more bored than we used to be. According to a study last year in Communications Psychology, ‘Digital media makes people more bored through dividing attention, elevating desired level of engagement, diminishing sense of meaning, raising opportunity costs, as well as serving as an ineffective boredom coping strategy.’ And yes, I have to admit that sometimes during concerts, my mind is wandering to what I’m going to post about the concert on Instagram, rather than actually attending to the concert.
For Maddocks, the live concert experience is a perfect antidote to all this. ‘We are all losing concentration in the immediate, digital world,’ she explains. ‘The magnificent thing about being in a concert hall is that all you are there to do is to listen, which is almost never the case in the rest of our lives. In a concert hall, if your mind wanders for a moment, you can watch what the oboe or percussionist is doing, for example. And if they’re not doing something now, they will be soon. Each aspect is a way of helping you to listen. It’s like reading. You can get something out of great writing by skimming it, but if you savour every word in the way the writer wanted you to, you’ll get something each time you go back to it.’
Feeling bored in a concert? Don't beat yourself up...
The worst outcome is for anyone to be put off going to concerts because they feel bad about their mind-wandering, or see it as anything other than natural. Maybe we shouldn’t overthink it.
‘In the end, music isn’t an intellectual pursuit,’ says Maddocks. ‘It’s a physical response to sound, and sometimes something extra, where your whole body almost quivers at the brilliance of a performance. That’s the most you can expect, but a very good performance is just as enjoyable in different ways. You might get to know a piece better or hear musicians you hadn’t heard before. Even if you’re coming from a slightly cooler standpoint, you can still get a huge amount of enjoyment.’