Culture and Accessibility of Classical Music

Wednesday, May 23, 2018 was jam packed with three incredible interviews and a few individuals that may very well be Waldo's relatives which made for one fulfilling, although exhausting, final day in Vienna. To start off the day, I met with Constanze Hell, who works in the Mozart Haus, which is a museum dedicated to Mozart (as the name implies) in the location of one of his many apartments in Vienna. As soon as I arrived, so did a class of kindergarteners, excited to see the interactive play the museum puts on for them. Constanze and I snuck down and watched for a few minutes, and I witnessed an adorable play about a new student trying to communicate with a cello. It was all about how the cello's music made the child feel, and learning how to understand what the cello was trying to say. It was supposed to make classical music more approachable to kids, who can see it as a foreign language, especially since sheet music looks like hieroglyphics and doesn't normally have lyri...

Now that I'm finally back home in the states, I can finish sharing my adventure. While I was in Vienna, I also went to a concert at the Musikverein, pictured above. It is a beautiful concert hall dipped in gold. I saw the Vienna Symphonic Orchestra playing a Bach piece and a Bruckner symphony, and I can now say that this was my favorite performance of my whole trip. Bruckner was so easy to listen to and sounded almost like a movie sound track, and the orchestra was great, although I must say I prefer the Vienna Philharmonic. Sitting in the Grosser Saal (main hall) of the Musikverein, I felt like I was in the Ark of the Covenant. Everything was covered in gold and the ceiling was painted with scenes that looked like they could have been on the ceiling of a church (picture below). The audience was mostly older white people and Asian people, still older but not quite gray-haired, that I guessed to be tourists. I was the youngest by far and received some surprised glances fro...