Musings from the Orchestra Dungeon

A Collection of Thoughts From the Past Few Days

After finishing a run of an opera, it was fascinating to me to discover how much the show changes. It's been a while since I've played in one, so perhaps I forgot the previous times I noticed this. In an art form that has to be carfully coordinated between conductor, ensemble, and vocalist, I was aware of how much variation sneaks in. Musicians entering on the wrong beat of the melody, throwing things out of sync. Singers forgetting their lines, and a beat of noticable silence before someone else's ad lib covers the mistake. Bars usually in four get turned into two on the spot to compensate for someone who's talking too fast. Someone sings softer than usual, forcing a quick rebalance during a performance. Rhythms that still aren't played correctly. Unisons that aren't.

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I may have been paid for the performance, but I need to deduct a location fee from my gross receipts: someone stole my license stickers during one of the night rehearsals. Yay for parking in a bad part of town. I'm still not sure if it was a snub that my old car wasn't taken. Perhaps the stickers were the most valuable part...

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I drove to St. Louis immediately following the performance. At the restraunt where I stopped for dinner there was a grandmother/grandfather couple at a different table. For all the time since I entered to when they got up and left, they said not a single word to each other. I suppose after 50-some years of marriage, you've said everything. But come on! They looked like two sad individuals who just happened to sit at the same table without realizing.

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Two people are murdered off-stage, with three gunshots. Screaming, fighting, yelling. How could the line "For Christ's sake, what happened?" be delivered any more apathetically? I suppose the actor could have come in from off-stage, eating grapes, lain on a fainting couch, and then said it with all the passion of a patrician emperor reading a tax form.

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An old friend died this week. One of my first music directors, way back in third or fourth grade. Last year, I attended an evening's entertainment at her house, when she invited friends over to hear her and another lady play a piano duet arrangement of Rachmaninoff's "Variations on a Theme by Paganinni". Something amazing about hearing live music in a living room with 20 other people. Strange flashbacks from reading "Pride and Prejudice" in high school occured.

She was the sort of person you wish everyone could meet.

"Good evening, stars!"