“When I was a young boy,” writer and entrepreneur Johan Idema tells me, “my uncle used to take me to classical concerts. He would whisper in my ear the whole time, things like ‘watch the trumpet’. He was giving me cues or tips for what to listen for, and that made quite an impact. That whispering meant I was able to really follow the music better with his real-time instruction.”
Idema’s memory of his uncle never left him through years of being half-in, half-out of music. Studying industrial design at Delft University at the same time as studying piano at the conservatoire in Rotterdam, he later switched to performing arts administration at New York University. On returning to the Netherlands, Idema worked for Amsterdam-based arts consultancy LAgroup before going solo as an author and creative producer with arts organisations, undertaking an array of diverse projects, in museums, visual arts, and in music.
Ten years ago, he turned the memory of his uncle’s whispered commentary into Wolfgang, a smartphone app which gives concertgoers a stream of information in short sentences about the music they are hearing, in real time. An example, from the opening of Mahler 4: “Tingling sleigh bells put Mahler’s Fourth – his sunniest, most accessible symphony – in motion. The strings introduce a classical, happy-go-lucky melody. One that Mozart or Haydn could have written.”
“Because he died long ago,” Idema explains, “I basically tried to bring back my uncle in the format of an app. But there’s also a more serious reason why I initiated the app: when a lot of orchestras and promoters talk about the quality of a concert, they tend to think only of the quality of the performance. Did the orchestra play well? Did the violinist play well? But I think that if you want to consider the quality of a concert, it’s more about the impact the music has on its listeners.
“For me, whether a concert is a success or not really depends on the extent to which the listeners understand, grasp, experience the music – whether they are really touched by it, or if they are intellectually stimulated. With Wolfgang, I am trying to shift the focus to the quality of the experience of the music, and the listener’s understanding. I think a lot of concertgoers are not even aware of what they are missing.”
It has been necessary to overcome the resistance of classical concert venues to smartphone use, which is why Wolfgang’s text is in grey on a black background. “We’ve put in so much effort to research and design this app in such a way that if you are not using it and someone next to you is, you won’t be disturbed. Actually, we found out in the research what disturbs people more is someone sitting next to you and going through the paper program brochure, when you hear the pages turn and the crackle of the paper.” Idema discourages the idea that the app should be made available only to certain sections of the audience, arguing that it should be available as widely as possible.
In any concert, there are a thousand different musical aspects one could write about – and listeners come with many different personalities and levels of knowledge. It’s impossible to be perfect for everybody, so how do the writers who create content for Wolfgang go about deciding what to include?
Idema doesn’t start with any dogmatic ideas, preferring to rely on audience research, which has been continuing ever since the app was first created. “We invite concertgoers to test the app and ask them questions like ‘Does this improve your experience of the concert? Does this improve your understanding of the music? Did it work for you? What did you think of the text? Was it written well for you?’”
That research has thrown up a clear answer about how often to refresh the text, which is approximately every 1½ minutes: “If we make it shorter, people feel rushed and feel they don’t have the time to enjoy the music and look around. If we make it longer, people say they want to know more.” It’s more difficult to define exactly what aspects to mention, but Idema identifies that the important thing is to keep it in the moment: “mostly, text appears in very logical places – when a new melody starts, or when something suddenly happens in the music. The choices the writers make tend to address what listeners hear at that exact time, what its meaning might be, or what the composer had in mind.”
Typically, Idema says, when an orchestra starts to make Wolfgang available, perhaps 10% of the audience will decide to use it, a figure that rises to around 20-25% as familiarity increases. The type of repertoire also has an effect, with uptake higher for large symphonies, programmatic pieces like Symphonie fantastique or Pictures at an Exhibition, or longer works with a lot of sung text like the St Matthew Passion.
The uptake also depends on how well the app’s availability is communicated to the audience, both in marketing materials in advance and in information displays at the venue. More surprisingly, the app seems to appeal equally to classical music novices and experts. Rather, Idema distinguishes between “emotional listeners”, who want nothing between them and the music, and “rational listeners”, who want answers to many questions about what they’re hearing in the music and why.
The content is created by a small team of writers who have steadily gained in experience. There’s now a library of around 500 works, the business model being that when an orchestra wants to add a new work, the writer receives a fee but the text becomes free for everyone else indefinitely. For orchestras and producers, the cost of using the app is in the region of €150 per concert (Wolfgang is set up as a not-for-profit), and in addition participating orchestras need to employ an operator to advance the app to the next item of text on cue. But for concertgoers the app is free to use.
Cost, Idema says, has not generally been a barrier – the harder part has been convincing promoters to allow smartphone use at all. Attitudes can be hard to shift: Idema recalls a moment where a loud bleep in the audience was immediately blamed on Wolfgang, whereas in actual fact, it had come from an audience member’s hearing aid. Responses from conductors have varied from the single (and as yet only) time a conductor blocked the use of the app – despite its having already been agreed with the orchestra’s management – to occasions where conductors have actively contributed to the content shown. In the end, it mainly depends on an orchestra’s appetite for digital innovation, and Idema argues that Wolfgang represents a low-cost, low-risk way of starting on that digital journey.
Idema himself isn’t a developer, but is very happy with Fabrique, the Netherlands-based agency who designed and developed the app. The biggest challenge, he says, was curbing the developers’ natural instinct to add features: he has been adamant that Wolfgang should do one thing only and do it very well. Having said which, to celebrate the app’s 10th anniversary, a new update is now in the works. Its main feature, dubbed “Wolfgang Anytime”, will be the ability to use the app both before the concert (for those who like to be well prepared) and after (for those who want to “listen again”).
Idema hopes that the app will make a tangible contribution to the future of classical music. “We see a declining audience for classical music. For many years, a lot of people considered an appreciation for classical music to be part of a good education and necessary for social status. With those aspects disappearing, one really has to ask why people would choose to listen to a classical concert. For me, the answer is because the music touches you or inspires you. Wolfgang and other educational efforts are very important because today’s audiences know less and less about classical music, and we need to make sure that when people do attend classical concerts, it’s possible for them to really understand what they are listening to.”
Wolfgang is available from the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. More information at wolfgangapp.nl
This article was sponsored by the ArtPublic Foundation
