I don't go to many concerts, unless I'm playing in them. Mainly I'm too busy. Chances are that there is a rehearsal or something I'm supposed to be doing. So it was a bit unusual for me to show up on the other side of the apron for a concert by the local symphony orchestra a couple of weeks ago. We have a town music critic and I'm not planning to take his job, so what follows has less to do with the musical performance than--everything else that managed to flow through my head at the time.

The first thing I noticed on opening the concert program is that the program notes are now being written by Wikipedia. I am not making this up. Apparently, in an effort to save bucks, and on the theory that the people can do a more credible job than some self-proclaimed/highly educated musicological expert, the good folks in the front office gave the usual note-writers the month off. Unfortunately, that produced results such as the following:

"The most striking feature of La Folia however is that the theme is not well-known to a larger public although made lots of brilliant variations."

I was going to print all the errors I've found upside down at the bottom of this page and have you find them yourself first, but let's just save time and mention the lack of comma, the lack of clarifying words toward the end, and the odd syntax in general. I think I get what the anonymous writer is trying to say though it is a strange way to say it, even if the grammar were intact.

Let's just throw out a couple more of these bon-bons before moving on:

"In most literature La Folia ceased to exist in the middle of the 19th century with a revival in the 1930's with the variations by Rachmaninoff and Ponce."

"The variations have been compared to Ravel's Bolero." {seriously???}

"Dvorak stood his ground until the published doubled his price." (I know, it's a typo)

This is just to give the impression that I did not single out one sentence I could pounce on--I am not acting in my capacity as critic, here--in fact, these gems were all over the place. Some of them may have been caused by the fact that the symphony was actually using two sources for each of their articles: one Wikipedia and one from another website, or in one case a named author. Not combining these sources very well, say, by using the cut and paste option in the middle of sentences and failing to notice the lack of continuity, may have been responsible for some of the linguistic effusions. Others may be accounted for if we postulate that some of Wikipedia's authors are not native English speakers. Even in situations where the sentences made sense, there were often redundancies and strange turns of phrase that reminded me of papers I read in college from some of my English-as-a-second-language speaking peers.

And then, there was the occasional revelation, as when the commentary claimed that "Salieri...enjoyed a reputation for being among the more innovative composers of his time." I don't really know Herr Salieri's work well enough to comment on this, but the piece offered on that occasion did not seem to back up that statement. It was 26 variations on the well-known tune (but not well-enough for Wikipedia's authors) La Folia (meaning "the madness"). It may be that Salieri's experimentation with orchestral effects was what was innovative. The substance of the piece was fairly pedestrian, and I had had enough well before the madness stopped, 26 variations later. As you might imagine, 26 is plenty of variations, even if we are dealing with character variations, and these were strictly figurative.

What I mean is that, as befits a denizen of the classical era, each variation is basically a reiteration of the tune in dimensions, harmonic outline, key, and tempo: only the tune itself is altered to contain faster notes, or to shoot up and down scales or arpeggios, or is removed completely so that only the harmonies remain. Whatever the gimmick, by the time the first measure is over you can predict exactly how the rest of the variation is going to go, because it is a mechanical filling out of the opening gambit following whatever chords are part of the opening presentation of the tune, in the same order, and for the same length.  Character variations, which are mainly the property of composers who came later, would stray into different keys, different modes (say from major to minor), radical tempo changes (from very fast to very slow), and produce very different emotional effects by the combined uses of altered harmonies and rhythms, so say nothing of the melody. Some of these variations seem very far removed from the original theme and only a careful listener will note the relationship. By contrast, Salieri didn't change much of depth at all, only the figurations of the melody, and then played those out over all the chord changes with no surprises at all. Mozart's figured variations are far more interesting; Salieri didn't even engage in the few standard variation tricks that he inherited, never mind finding more.

By the time the Salieri was over, the concert was about 20 minutes old, and the quality was set to pick up appreciably. I should mention that the program had opened with an occasional piece written for the Champaign-Urbana Symphony's 50th anniversary. After it was over I told Kristen that "well, it was only four minutes long." I should probably leave it at that, except to remark that the composer seemed to be having a lot of fun sampling various electronic sounds, playing with newly invented instruments, and writing a lot of in-jokes based on the orchestra's history, though the result was not something anyone need hear a second time.

Then it was off to the old standards. A Russian violinist was in town for Mendelssohn's violin concerto, which was done reasonably well. There were, of course, places where the ensemble didn't quite line up, or the intonation was a bit out the window, but this is not a large metropolitan area, with a large budget for drawing talent from all over the world to play 4th horn, so that is pretty much to be expected. Having begun to obsess more an more about compositional issues in recent years I actually found myself second-guessing Mendelssohn at one point near then end: should he have extended that harmony for an extra bar? But, unlike the previous entry, which the maestro had admit was not great music (during the time it took to get all the electronics off the stage after the first piece he made some remarks about the Salieri) this is a solid entry, and the only real problem I face is the prospect of hearing it so many times that it wears thin, regardless of the quality. Since I hadn't heard it recently, this was not a problem.

We had a bit of an intermission, and then the orchestra launched into the final piece on the program, Dvorak's Seventh Symphony. I have a recording at home, and I know the piece well, so part of the fun is in hearing different things from the orchestra: different instrumental balances, different tempi, different articulations, in short, a different interpretation than what I heard last time. I can argue with it, but at least it gives me something to think about.

A few nights before, when I went to get tickets, I heard the university's new music ensemble playing something for brass that was full of dissonance and generally the sort of crunchy noises that scare people away from the concert hall whenever they think something modern is going to take place there. (The CU symphony concert, by contrast, played it safe, which is more of an annoyance to me than it is to most of concert going America, which wants to hear all the old favorites.) I wasn't particularly in the mood for such 'trailblazing' sounds at the time of my unintended visit to this concert of new music, but maybe I'll make it to a similar concert in the future. It is interesting to read composers talking about their own music in the program (because they can't get Wikipedia to write notes for them) and it is nice to have to sort out the sounds for yourself and decide whether they make any sense. In most cases with symphony orchestras these days, the composers have been dead 100 years, and the work of sifting and sorting has already been done for us, by osmosis.

michael@pianonoise.com