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Have you bought anything on Ticketmaster recently? If so, my condolences. Ten dollars for a service fee? What in God’s name is an order processing fee? By the time all the fees, insurance and extra charges are added up, the tickets may have doubled in price. Not sure if you still want to go? You have 45 seconds to decide, or your tickets will be released forever. Not to mention taxes, or price gouging, or resellers, or whatever happened to Taylor Swift fans, or the screen on my phone never getting bright enough for the scanner at the venue to register my mobile ticket. All this to say, at a time when the joy of live music is more present and desired than ever, going to concerts has never been worse.
Apart from the obvious cost of concerts posing challenges to would-be live music enjoyers, if you live more than a few hours from a major city, the odds of seeing anyone from the Taylor Swifts and Harry Styles of the world to a great symphony orchestra is rather slim. Huge artists tend to stick to especially large cities, small artists often visit smaller cities but find it harder to tour farther from home, and foreign artists may only get the chance to play shows abroad every couple of years. Things like Spotify and bootleg concert recordings are great, but there’s nothing quite like the real thing.
So while, as far as I know, Lizzo will not be playing in Appleton anytime soon, I think the quantity of excellent, free music performed live on this campus is hugely underappreciated. I started working for the Conservatory tech crew recently, and before that, I had always considered myself someone who, as a musician, was pretty good about going to concerts and recitals. I wouldn’t dream of missing a fellow saxophonist’s visit to campus or a friend’s recital, but if it was music I wasn’t super familiar with, or maybe something at the end of a long day, or a large ensemble I had already seen a bunch of times, it wouldn’t be uncommon for me to skip it. The words, “oh, I’ll just check out the livestream” have been shamefully uttered thousands of times more than any livestream has been checked out.
And that’s cool! Things are busy around here, sometimes there’s just too much going on, and it would be physically impossible to get to everything a person wanted to see or hear. At the same time, since I started my tech crew job, I’ve been required to go to a number of events that there’s pretty much no chance I would have gone to otherwise, and while a few times I would have been okay with skipping it even after the fact, 99% of the time I’m really happy I got the chance to see the show. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why people yearn for their college days well into their 50s and 60s and noticing how pretty much every adult I’ve encountered seems to regret not taking advantage of something they took for granted in their early 20s. There are the classic examples of things like living in a walkable community, not having to cook for yourself, getting to learn about things you find interesting while surrounded by a bunch of people your age who are also interested in that thing, but I also think that the wealth of live music we enjoy on campus, and that most of us will almost entirely lack following graduation, fits into this category. You only have four years here, so perhaps it’s best to make the most of the opportunity while you can.
Here’s another way of looking at it: you have never forked over any cash at the door, or begrudgingly typed your credit card number into a parasitic website to go to a performance at Lawrence, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t paid to go. In fact, you have pre-paid for every single event you’ve ever gone to—and every event you haven’t. So if you’re the sort of person who complains about things like student activity fees and high tuition, consider that this experience is something you’re probably already paying for; it’s hard to imagine refreshing your browser for six hours waiting for Doja Cat tickets, only to stay home the night of the show.
Spring Term at Lawrence is an especially relevant one for this sort of consideration. With so many recitals and final concerts coming up, there will be weeks where you might think to yourself, “Do I really have it in me to go to a fourth recital this week?” And there’s a good chance you don’t, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re on the fence about it, I hope you can take a second to appreciate what a ludicrous privilege it is to get to ask the question in the first place.