A "Slow Music" Movement?

Here's an interesting piece on classical music from The Guardian:

Mark Ravenhill was spot on in his remarks about "fun". "More than ever before, the word 'fun' has slipped into our everyday vocabulary", he wrote. "We are all learning to impersonate the Californian teenager who is the contemporary role model for the western world. 'How was your weekend?' 'Oh, yeah - fun.' 'How was the opera?' 'Fun.' After all, if you're not having 'fun', what kind of sad loser are you?"

As fun has climbed to the top of qualities desirable in a night out, we classical musicians have become rather sensitive about our perceived funlessness. Some years ago, I and my colleagues in the chamber music group Domus had an interesting skirmish with fun. At the time we were playing concerts in a geodesic dome, a white tent that we put up and took down ourselves. It could seat 200 people sitting on the grass inside. Our idea was to go to unusual places, present the music we loved and gain new listeners for it. Part of our approach was to talk about the music before we played it.

Thinking that fun would have to be of the essence, we began by saying what fun the music was, and what fun our audiences would have listening to it. We spoke about what fun it had been to rehearse. Then we played masterpieces such as the Schubert String Quintet, Beethoven's Archduke Piano Trio, the Brahms Piano Quartets, Ravel's Piano Trio, Fauré's Piano Quintet. As we played, the audience fell silent. Often they were gripped by the music, and sometimes they were moved.

It didn't take long before listeners started telling us there was a disjunction between the "fun" they had been promised and the actual experience they had had. They suggested that it wasn't helpful to describe such music as "fun" when it was actually moving, complex, absorbing, challenging and satisfying. We were well aware of those qualities, but we'd consciously decided it might be off-putting to flag them up at the start.

Reminds me of a Morrissey quote:

"I would never, ever, do anything as vulgar as having fun."