WMV Music Web Log

Speaking of audiences, there was a pretty good audience at Galilee Lutheran Church in Pasadena MD Sunday night for my solo piano concert, maybe 40 people. The Galilee series is music director Joel Borelli-Boudreau's concert series, and he promotes it and runs it very well. Joel is a great all-around musician, with tremendous energy and charisma - he is also in the Naval Academy Band, with Ben Redwine. It was at Ben's recommendation that Joel asked me to play solo the first time, and I am extremely grateful to them both for making it happen. This was my second solo program at Galilee.

I think the audience consisted mostly of church members and some of their friends in the community, despite pretty good listings in the local press. They were very appreciative, and my playing responded well to their receptivity. Music requires an audience for anything meaningful to really happen; hence "Musica Viva"! This audience fueled some good playing, things I couldn't have done at home (or anywhere else) alone. Here is an example.

I've been thinking, or rather thinking that it would be a good idea to be thinking, about what makes people congregate, in the context of performance, which of course requires an audience. What sorts of restrictions, preferences, fears, motivations etc are involved.

So I had a dream last night: it was an open mike situation, the expected motley crew of guitars, keyboards, singers, drummers, poets, and unclassifiable. One young fellow was playing some wind instrument with earphones attached to a boom box - I guess he wanted the backup guidance to be audible only to himself. The scene was the stairwell of a chain bookstore, and every once in awhile the manager would storm out the door and tell someone to cool it, or that everyone had to move to the other side of the stairwell. No one protested and everyone was well-behaved until things would begin to heat up and get rowdy again and the scene with the manager would repeat. Apparently occasionally some lucky participant would get booked to perform inside the bookstore (for $25), or at least that was the hope, and part of the problem was that they didn't want the sound from the outsiders to compete with what was going on inside. A very informative and graphic dream, I think.

Issues of outsider/insider, level of artistic transgression, control of the venue - all these things arise. But really, the dream doesn't tell us much about audience - or does it?

Solo recital as autobiography: that is how I see the series of solo programs that I have played and am presently preparing. Because solo work seems more personal and brings private meditations before the public, and my familiarity with much of the literature goes back so far, into my distant childhood. Here is the upcoming program:

J.S. Bach - Partita #3 in A minor, BWV 827
Fantasia
Allemande
Corrente
Sarabande
Burlesca
Scherzo
Gigue

Johannes Brahms - Variations on an Original Theme in D, Op. 21 #1

Intermission

Igor Stravinsky - Piano Sonata (1924)
Johannes Brahms - Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118 #2
Charley Gerard - "Goldberg's in a Sentimental Mood"
William Bolcom - Graceful Ghost Rag
Scott Joplin - Solace, A Mexican Serenade

The way I think about this music - to me the Bach Partita is like "daddy" and the Brahms Variations are like "mommy". This Bach is dry, sardonic, skeptical, intellectual, hard-edged, agnostic. Music to watch the news by. Whereas the Brahms Variations are soft and mushy, personal, private, feminine, diaristic. I have lived with these two pieces of music for more than 40 years. I chose the Brahms, brought them to Leon Fleisher at my first lesson with him, summer of 1968 - but he refused to coach me on them, said he did not know them. I learned them essentially by myself, through years of trial and error.

My association with the Stravinsky Sonata dates from the year that Marilyn and I first lived together, 1969. Another very male composition, full of suppressed rage. My teacher at the time was a composer/pianist named Leo Smit, who himself was a student of both Stravinsky and Copland. He had very little to say to me about music or anything else, except "avoid the sticky in life" (he did), and "Banner, you've got juice!", which I took as a profound compliment. I had been practising the Stravinsky in a Queens College practise room the day that Marilyn was expelled from their MFA program by a panel of men who said she was doing mixed media work, and so should teach elementary school and have babies.

Devin Hurd's great review in HurdAudio of our Sunday concert in Edgewater put me in a good mood today. I told Charley he must have pretty good reviewer mojo - three reviews for two concerts in one month. Now we just need to work on our audience mojo...

We were driving out to Edgewater to play the concert, and I had "Love and Theft" in the CD player, which I listened to while Charley slept. When we arrived he woke up, went into the church, sat down at the piano and played "Floater (Too Much to Ask)" - he must have picked it up in his sleep.

I'm beginning to really like "Po' Boy" - here's a line:

Othello told Desdemona, "I'm cold, cover me with a blanket.
By the way, what happened to that poison wine?"
She says, "I gave it to you, you drank it."