Erhu-ist on the Roof
John Williams made his annual appearance guest conducting at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday and Saturday nights. We went to see the performance on Friday--I think the fourth time we've seen him in the eight years we've lived in L.A. John Williams always gets a big crowd, a mix of film buffs and Star Wars geeks, of which there are tons of both in these parts. (Brad would be both; I, of course, am neither.) Williams generally tries to do half a program of other composers' film scores and the rest his own. I go because it's always interesting to hear film music by itself, without the accompanying visuals.
My favorite piece of the evening was a medley from Fiddler on the Roof. I'd forgotten how much I love the music from that. The concertmaster for the L.A. Philharmonic for their summer Hollywood Bowl performances is a Chinese woman named Bing Wang. She's an excellent solo violinist as well, which she proved during that piece. Watching her, it struck me that Fiddler on the Roof could be fairly easily reworked into a Chinese setting. I don't know--there's something about the structure of the society and the characters that reminded me of China. Fiddler on the Roof as Peking Opera. Maybe I'll do that some day when I'm bored. Right after I learn how to compose Chinese music and speak Mandarin.
Her solos also reminded me of one thing I hate about going to the Bowl. Well, not so much her solos but the audience reaction to it. Right after her very flashy solo for Fiddler, the audience broke into wild applause, BEFORE the piece was actually over. Never mind the fact that the rest of the orchestra is still playing, people feel compelled to clap NOW. The whole etiquette of attending classical music performances gets a little lost at the Bowl. What was even more annoying, however, was that the audience didn't clap after her solo during an earlier piece. A very beautiful solo, but since it lacked the flashy and visually obvious difficulty of the Fiddler solo, no one took especial notice. It's like watching figure skating--everyone cheers for the triple-axles, but a beautifully-executed spiral sequence looks so easy, no one thinks to clap.
The other thing I find disturbing about the Hollywood Bowl is the video screens. They put up six screens where they project shots from the various on-stage cameras throughout the entire performance. And I don't know what magical power video screens possess, but as soon as something is playing on one, your eye is immediately drawn to it, no matter what's happening elsewhere. Someone could be getting murdered in front of a crowd of people, but if there was a videocast of it off to the side, people would watch the murder on the screen instead. So, you're at the Hollywood Bowl, listening to a live orchestra play, and yet you end up watching it on a screen. Might as well be at home watching it on TV.
The screens did provide the comic highlight of the evening. (The phalanx of geeks wielding light sabers who conduct along with the "Imperial March" are there every year, so they don't count.) During the second half of the program, I noticed the cameras cutting to a shot of this guy in the orchestra who was just sitting there. The screen showed part of a clarinetist off to one side and some brass players behind him--but right in the middle, there's this guy doing nothing. At first it was just annoying--what's wrong with the director that he keeps cutting to this camera? But then, piece after piece, this guy--I assumed he was a clarinetist because he was sitting next to one--just sat there. Sometimes he yawned and scratched his nose, sometimes he bobbed his head to the music, once he bent over to play with something on the floor. Brad didn't see the guy until I nudged him and pointed him out, so I though I was the only one who noticed. But during the second encore, a whole section of the crowd started cheering out of the blue. I looked up, and there on the screen, was the idle clarinetist actually playing his instrument. He'd sat on-stage the entire second half of the program, just to play during the second encore.
My favorite piece of the evening was a medley from Fiddler on the Roof. I'd forgotten how much I love the music from that. The concertmaster for the L.A. Philharmonic for their summer Hollywood Bowl performances is a Chinese woman named Bing Wang. She's an excellent solo violinist as well, which she proved during that piece. Watching her, it struck me that Fiddler on the Roof could be fairly easily reworked into a Chinese setting. I don't know--there's something about the structure of the society and the characters that reminded me of China. Fiddler on the Roof as Peking Opera. Maybe I'll do that some day when I'm bored. Right after I learn how to compose Chinese music and speak Mandarin.
Her solos also reminded me of one thing I hate about going to the Bowl. Well, not so much her solos but the audience reaction to it. Right after her very flashy solo for Fiddler, the audience broke into wild applause, BEFORE the piece was actually over. Never mind the fact that the rest of the orchestra is still playing, people feel compelled to clap NOW. The whole etiquette of attending classical music performances gets a little lost at the Bowl. What was even more annoying, however, was that the audience didn't clap after her solo during an earlier piece. A very beautiful solo, but since it lacked the flashy and visually obvious difficulty of the Fiddler solo, no one took especial notice. It's like watching figure skating--everyone cheers for the triple-axles, but a beautifully-executed spiral sequence looks so easy, no one thinks to clap.
The other thing I find disturbing about the Hollywood Bowl is the video screens. They put up six screens where they project shots from the various on-stage cameras throughout the entire performance. And I don't know what magical power video screens possess, but as soon as something is playing on one, your eye is immediately drawn to it, no matter what's happening elsewhere. Someone could be getting murdered in front of a crowd of people, but if there was a videocast of it off to the side, people would watch the murder on the screen instead. So, you're at the Hollywood Bowl, listening to a live orchestra play, and yet you end up watching it on a screen. Might as well be at home watching it on TV.
The screens did provide the comic highlight of the evening. (The phalanx of geeks wielding light sabers who conduct along with the "Imperial March" are there every year, so they don't count.) During the second half of the program, I noticed the cameras cutting to a shot of this guy in the orchestra who was just sitting there. The screen showed part of a clarinetist off to one side and some brass players behind him--but right in the middle, there's this guy doing nothing. At first it was just annoying--what's wrong with the director that he keeps cutting to this camera? But then, piece after piece, this guy--I assumed he was a clarinetist because he was sitting next to one--just sat there. Sometimes he yawned and scratched his nose, sometimes he bobbed his head to the music, once he bent over to play with something on the floor. Brad didn't see the guy until I nudged him and pointed him out, so I though I was the only one who noticed. But during the second encore, a whole section of the crowd started cheering out of the blue. I looked up, and there on the screen, was the idle clarinetist actually playing his instrument. He'd sat on-stage the entire second half of the program, just to play during the second encore.
posted by tinatsu at 1:09 PM
3 Comments:
You know, this whole "etiquette of listening to classical music"? It's kind of made up. I mean, maybe you know that. I always found it hoity-toity and fake when I was a music student, and then I started doing some reading. When stuff like The Magic Flute and even Stravinsky's Le Sacre de Printemps were first performed, people reacted, in the middle of things. They booed things they didn't like, sometimes threw stuff. They cheered for stuff they thought wonderful. They rioted when pieces were too avant-garde. The best example was at the premiere of Le Sacre, the music was inaudible at times because of the ruckus of the crowds, of supporters hollering insults at Stravinsky's defenders, which led to outright fisticuffs. The composer fled the hall as a riot broke out and the police arrived to try shut the show down.
In other words, back when people actually cared about music in a deep, visceral way, people reacted to performances that way. It's the same with plays: the more this stuff gets repackaged as high culture, as beyond criticism of the audience, the less people are allowed to react to it. Which is sad -- it feels to me as if this might be a big part of why cinema and popular music have taken then place of staged theatre and classical music. *shrug* Anyway, as a jazz musician, it's only natural to me that people cheer when they're excited. I wish more people bothered to get excited at all. :)
Well, of course, etiquette is made up. It's always made up. People somewhere make up these ways to behave in order to show consideration for other people. And of course the rules also aren't carved in stone--they evolve as the values and standards of the people involved change. (Or hopefully they do.) At some point, some people decided that, "Hey, when you're listening to classical music, it's damn hard to hear and appreciate the music if people are cheering in the middle. And it's also kinda rude to the musicians. So in the interest of being kind to our fellow audience members and the musicians, we might want to hold most of our reactions until the end." I personally like that rule, because when I go to a concert to hear some music, I want to be able to hear the music. It's not like any of the music at these concerts is new; no one is reacting to the music itself because it's all familiar. They usually applaud because they approve of your choosing a piece they like or because you've introduced them to a piece they hadn't heard before but liked. But generally when someone goes to a classical concert these days, they know what pieces are going to be performed, they know what those pieces sound like, and they're going because they know they like that music. And in that context, the kind of reactions you're talking about are out of place. I expect and see more of that kind of reaction at a premiere, or at a rock concert when some unknown opening act comes on.
I was less upset about the actual fact of people cheering before the music ended than I was about them cheering over technically obvious fireworks. There's this tendency, I don't know if it's primarily an American thing or not, to applaud things that look hard, regardless of whether they actually are difficult or are any good. People weren't cheering Bing Wang because she played the music well (I suspect most people wouldn't know if she had or not), but because she moved her fingers really fast. And in such situations, people here feel as if they are expected to cheer. If they had actually been excited about the music, I would have forgiven them.
The part that I find really fake is the whole encore farce. They plan these concerts knowing they're going to do this set number of encores, everyone knows they're going to do the encores, and pretending that this is the end of the concert when everyone knows it's not... There has to be a better way to handle all that.
Two comments got eaten. Argh!
I'm gonna keep this short.
1. I agree that etiquette has to do with familiarity. Familiarity has to do with ossification, and ossification has to do with the pedestal the genre's on. Classical music concerts don't even have room for negative response, which is why so many contemporary composes foist crap on their audiences (and I like the avant-garde!).
2. Fireworks excite people. Even as a musician, I'm blown away by fast stuff, though I (quietly) appreciate the slow and beautiful stuff. I suspect it's just human nature.
3. Encores always messed me up when I was in a band. Saxophonists take longer to pack up than bassists and drummers, especially when they have gadgets as well as a horn that needs to be disaddembled and cleaned. Those sudden extra encores (on top of the planned one or two we'd give to receptive, eager audiences) always messed me up. I suspect spontanaeity is harder with a full orchestra. :)
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