After spending the afternoon admiring sleek, shiny, and unobtainable toys, I met up with Querida to get a dose of culture from the Dallas Symphony at the Morton Myerson Symphony Hall. Despite a few crossed communication wires, we found Andrew and his wife Gwen waiting for us at the doors, where some kind soul had furnished them with two $100 tickets. With the cheap tickets on the floor sold out, the next cheapest seats were up behind the stage in the choir stalls, and our student IDs knocked the price down to only a couple dollars more than the cheapest tickets would have been.
As things turned out, the difference between our $10 seats and Andrew & Gwen’s $100 seats was about twenty feet, one of the giant columns that supports the auditorium, and a somewhat less comfortable bench seat. I highly enjoyed the position behind the orchestra, as it provided the opportunity to watch the conductor from the front.
It was evident from the way that he ran out on stage as if he were starring in a basketball game that maestro Giancarlo Guerrero has a markedly different style from that of the Longview Symphony’s Tonu Kalam. He conducted the first two pieces- Berlioz’s Roman Carnival and Mendehlsson’s Symphony No. 4- entirely without reference to music; he didn’t even stand behind a podium. I found it fascinating to watch him sculpt the music out of the air with his baton and his hand. His performance was almost a conversation with the orchestra as he focused his attention from the strings to the brass to the wind, and they serenaded him (and us) in return. At the climax of each piece, he was literally dancing to the music, completely lost in the beauty of the soundscape around him.
As I watched Guerrero at work, I thought it would be interesting to put one of those reflective ping-pong balls on the end of a conductor’s baton and track it with a motion-capture camera rig. The result would be a 3-D image of that conductor’s interpretation of the music. If you rendered it in real time, you could project it on a screen behind the orchestra, like a Winamp plugin.
I also wondered about a couple of things. What is the feminine form of the word maestro? Maestra perhaps? Whatever it is, why do we not see many of them? Conducting an orchestra seems to be a traditionally male-dominated position, but in this day and age, I’m surprised that maestras are not more common.
Which leads me back to the idea about motion-capturing the tip of a conductor’s baton, and wondering how such a musical image would vary from conductor to conductor, and if a maestra would necessarily interpret a piece in a different way than a maestro.
For one of my AP English exams, I remember having to comment on a piece by a famous composer (I forget exactly who it was), who was expressing his dislike of conductors. As I recall, the main thrust of his argument was because everyone in the audience focuses on him, and thus interpret the music according to the conductor’s emotive expressions, and the waggles of his butt. He prefered that everyone listened to and interpretted his music for themselves.
An interesting essay, the only one that sticks out from the many AP essays I read 5 years ago.
I need to get more “culture”, though. I’ve been to very few symphonies.
I think that at a live orchestral performance, the conductor is part and parcel of the show. If people don’t like the conductor being the center of attention, then they should come up with their own pure interpretation of the music by listening to the CD. I like it both ways, myself.
And I don’t remember any of the essays that I had to read for AP English.