Trouble at Symphony Hall
By rights a trip to the symphony hall should sooth, should calm, should comfort. It should lift the burdens of the world from your shoulders.
But to those whose nature leans towards the fretful this isn’t good enough.
This is a personality type that can find reason for disquiet in the serenest forest glade.
Serenity like a sylvan forest glade you might see pictured on a poster in the break room at work, whose slogan conveys the message that “with inner calm comes understanding,” or perhaps it goes “with understanding comes inner calm,” but which in any case to him always seems to be saying, “what are you looking at this picture for? Get back to work.”
See how it works?
Mixed messages like this confuse and sadden him and give him an abiding sense of unease.
He has a lot of this unease to go around, as though he has bought it on a whim wholesale at one of the big box stores and now finds it taking up all the room in his garage. Even at the symphony he finds a way to feel it.
Take the matter of today’s conductors.
Some of us have done this symphony hall thing for some length of time. In those earlier days the typical conductor’s demeanor was an equal mix of Marine drill sergeant, a congressman expressing alarm at the rapid decay of public morals, a banker about to deny you a loan, and Josef Stalin.
When he walked out on stage the message that he absolutely glowed with was that if things didn’t go his way it would mean nothing to him if he had to stop the performance long enough to make you do 150 pushups.
This applied both to the performers and the audience members, and for all that anyone knew, anyone passing by on the surrounding city streets.
In addition to the improving nature of classical music and the inner joy that it bestowed, this attitude of readiness to retaliate introduced a certain amount of stark fear into the proceedings.
It was clear that this conductor's feeling on the matter was that only through sheer force of personality could the tides of cultural rot – like you, for instance – be kept at bay.
There were pluses and minuses to this kind of presence on the stage, but one thing you were never in doubt of, and that was that the performance would go off flawlessly.
That performance might be one of the sleepier classics or it might fall into the ‘experimental’ or ‘modernist’ categories and include violin players being shot out of canons, all the while performing one of the more forward-looking works.
If however this is what the conductor asked for, then this is what he got.
‘Let us pack the gunpowder,’ the violinists would say among themselves, ‘climb into the barrel of the canon, and light the fuse. Who’s going first?’
The audience member in these cases could kick back secure in the knowledge that the performance was going to go off without a hitch.
These days, with the new breed of conductor, it is not so clear that events are under someone's iron control. Not so much, not so much at all.
These fine people are the friendly, unassuming sort, and one of them might make a point of coming out at any old time as the crew is warming up and wandering around with his hands in his pockets.
He might wave to one of the players in the French horn section, or shoot the peace sign to someone he sees in the audience that he went to junior high with.
His manner altogether is a relaxed one, and he seems to invite everyone in the hall to simply sit back and savor life.
Well, savoring life is well and good, but such an attitude runs the hazard of introducing error into the performance.
Does a Swiss watch savor life? Does one of those giant particle accelerators which are said to stretch for miles underground savor life?
Do we want in any of these cases a live and let live attitude, a casual acceptance of the world as it is with all its flaws? Or do we want something a little more ironclad?
Besides, how are we meant to savor life when we are anxiously studying the tuba player? I know I have not mentioned this topic before, but it weighs upon me and may as well be dealt with at this juncture.
This fellow is not the stout sturdy type that we associate with tuba playing. He is thinner and reedier all the way round, as though he was a clarinet player who always wanted to try the tuba and now sees his perfect opportunity.
‘How hard could it be?’ his manner or at least his slimness seems to suggest.
He can barely hold the instrument upright it seems, and he looks far too much like a sprinter at a track meet who is trying to get out of running the mile relay by taking up pole vaulting at the last minute.
You wish the novice pole vaulter well, but wonder if he hasn't bitten off more than he can chew. It may not be as easy as it looks! The same conclusion applies to the tuba.
A further source of disquiet is the fellow who clangs the cymbals. He makes me uneasy too.
If you want to know the truth, it has always surprised me that the other members of the orchestra do not turn on this fellow halfway through the rhapsody, or theme and variations, or symphonic poem, and start chasing him around the stage brandishing their instruments.
Even a casual observer can come to the conclusion that, note for note, the guy isn’t pulling his weight.
The violins are racing along double time while, by striking contrast, the cymbal guy is hanging around at the back of the stage waiting the better part of the evening to let loose with his one or two whole notes.
And that's about it. That's about it, my friends.
You would hope this disparity in effort would be reflected in the paychecks at the end of the month, but you can never be sure of these things. By rights this fellow shouldn’t even clock in until late in the masterpiece, but like I say, these things can be a mystery to the outsider.
So I worry about that, some sort of sudden uprising or mutiny, and I keep my eyes on the brass section to see if they are going to lead this witch hunt, they have always seemed quite a bit more temperamental than a lot of the other players.
I worry too that these people, none of them, really, know how to read music.
This seems like a reach as far as concerns go, but once you get into one of these worrying moods it is hard to shrug it off.
You know how it is, the way people raise children these days. There’s a trophy for this and a trophy for that, perhaps for something like perfect attendance at lunch in the school cafeteria, but while society has gone all out to make sure their self-esteem is overflowing, that same society might well have forgotten to teach them how to actually read music.
In fact, the awful truth of the matter is that they may be picking up their instruments for the very first time on this stage right now.
“This looks like an interesting instrument," they seem to say to themselves, ‘I’ll bet I’ll get another trophy just for trying."
The audience member, or this audience member at least, gets more and more worried.
And this conductor – I’m back to him – isn’t helping.
He’s still wandering around, just wandering around, chatting with the orchestra members as though wondering if something special was going on today. He could be at a company picnic seeing who was interested in a game of horseshoes.
As he walks by the piano he gives it a quizzical stare that no one else seems to pick up on save for me. I’ve been paying attention this whole time, see, and that looks says as clear as day that he’s saying to himself, ‘that’s funny, what’s the piano doing here?”
He has spent so much of his time rubbing shoulders with his people that he has forgotten that there is a piano concerto on tap for this evening!
Not everyone would notice this, nor the next set of clues that puts me further in a worrisome mood.
He goes over to the conductor stand itself and leafs through the score. This ought to give me comfort I know.
But just as with the piano he gives the same kind of humorously perplexed look to the score, as though wondering if someone is playing a trick on him.
He whispers to the first violinist something of a personal nature, which is not hard to guess at.
“Don’t tell anyone,” he seems to convey, "but I brought the score for Beethoven’s Fifth instead of Brahms’ Third. I think it’s close enough though, don’t you think? They’re both named for odd numbers.”
And then he ambles off, casual as can be, casual as can be, unaware that now at least one audience member will be sweating blood all the way through the performance, with the same tense attitude that we watch the gymnast girls in the early rounds of the Olympics fall and fall again off of that damnable beam they’re trying to land on.
Fall and fall again!
It appears now, almost certainly, that this orchestra is going to be performing with just about as much coordination as a pack of third graders who are jazzed up on the chocolate bars they were supposed to be selling door to door but which instead are now inside them. And tell me, how can they perform at all when the conductor has a completely different score than they do?
And all through the evening this young conductor will be looking baffled in that pleasant absentminded way of his, as though to say, “my, that sounds awful, I wonder what’s going on?”
Well, they somehow get it together and pull out a wonderful performance, but not before putting me through the wringer. I am on edge with every quarter note and every beat of the baton.
Staggering out through the audience with sweat running down my face and trying to unclench my hands which have tightened with the stress, I have to wonder how many more of these relaxing nights at the symphony hall my nervous system will let me live through.
