RoadTrip

RoadTrip is the latest addition (if only a temporary one) to the Arts Journal blogs. Its main selling point is that it is a tour diary held by a violist from the Minnesota Orchestra. Very interesting and often funny stuff. A couple of unrelated enjoyable asides:

On our last European tour, the spectacular Peter Serkin was our soloist, and we were opening most of our concerts with a new concerto by Lukas Foss, which Peter assured me was not minimalist, but which certainly sounded minimalist to a non-musicologist's ear. Essentially, it was fifteen minutes of tone rows, repeated over and over with tiny variations, and our audiences throughout Europe visibly hated it. In Vienna, in fact, a man in the front row got up less than a minute into the piece and banged his way out of the hall. To me, the fact that Peter then played a stunningly beautiful Mozart concerto never quite made up for what we had inflicted on the audience to begin the evening.

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To anyone who has never spent time playing in an orchestra, this probably sounds strange. After all, the second and fifth stands of violas are no more than 15 feet apart on the stage, and with the stands so tightly grouped, you might expect the sound to be generally the same throughout the section. It isn’t. In fact, the best way to describe the audible difference between what I heard on Friday night and what I heard on Sunday is to give you an exercise to do. If you have a really good stereo, put on a recording of a Beethoven symphony (or whatever) and listen to it for a few minutes, standing just off to the left of the left speaker. Done that? Good. Now, play the same recording again, but this time, make the following adjustments:

1.Stand behind the speakers.
2.Move the subwoofer behind you. (This is the bass section, directly over your shoulder.)
3.Get a friend to stand ten feet behind you and off to your right, and have this friend play some loud trumpet solos while the symphony is playing.

That should give you a basic idea.