Going to Boston’s Symphony Hall always makes me feel young and poor. Probably 80% of symphony-goers are retired with a money cushion plush enough to absorb Thursday evenings at the Symphony. Hell, I’ll be happy if I’m that age and not eating dog food. For many of the geriatric patrons, the Symphony is one of the few public outings they can manage, both physically and mentally. The most challenging aspect is finding and getting to your seat (and, for some, not dying during the performance).
Symphony Hall may be one of the last remaining public places in Boston where attiring yourself in outlandishly formal clothing won’t cause people to gawk in disbelief. Lord knows how many old biddies are eager to let the public meet their Saks Fifth Avenue finery. The old women compliment each other on shawls, dresses, and jewelry, hoping they choose someone cultivated enough to return the compliment. They look for people to exhibit rudeness so they can scoff at what bad manners that person dares brandish at the Symphony.
Similarly, they go out of their way to exhibit their well-bred habits. Waiting in a gigantic bathroom line, I thought about how much faster the line would move if every woman didn’t try to make small-talk with the attendant, like “I know I’m wearing a mink stole and you’re literally wiping my piss, but I need to prove that it’s not beneath me to talk to you.”
Still, for all the pretense of good behavior, when the music starts, all bets are off. The moment right before the conductor raises his baton to commence the first piece is the quietest the audience will be all night. I become acutely aware of all the sounds a human is capable of making. Last night the throat mucus was flying, exported in a range of hacking techniques ranging from abashed to aggrieved. People dozed off, their breathing sibilating to the timbre. Hundreds of fat saggy bottoms shifting in creaky wooden seats. And what the heck was the old man sitting behind me doing with his dentures?
Behind us sat two old couples who came together. These oldies really earned my ire when I heard the old man ask “Where’s the girl who looks like Susan?” “Who looks like Susan? You mean a girl on the stage? One of the players?” “The girl… you know, the girl I said ‘she looks like Susan.'” “No, I don’t remember. What’s she play?” “I don’t know,” the old man said, sounding frustrated. “There! That girl over there!” If he said “girl” one more time, I was going to turn around and on behalf of accomplished working women everywhere, of which I am not even one, demand to know if he would refer to a male professional classical musician as a boy. And then, as his ancient brain cells struggled to comprehend what was going on, I would give him a two-finger eyepoke.
Old people also appreciate how the Symphony qualifies as culture, but it’s not the type of culture that requires effort and analysis to appreciate. No need to get technical when a simple “Ooh, I really love the melody of that one! And the harp! Oh, how I adore the harp!” suffice as a critique. Which is why the first piece that the Symphony played was about as well-received as a chorus of flatulent monkeys. Robert Spano raised his baton to the all-string ensemble, and the players proceeded to make noises the likes of which I’ve never seen emanate from a symphony orchestra. Nymphea Reflections, a 2001 composition by a Finnish-born composer named Kaija Saariaho, whose music employs “myriad new ways of bowing, blowing and plucking, coaxing perplexingly odd sounds from familiar instruments” really blew my mind. Not because the music itself was particularly mind-blowing, but I was hearing it at Symphony Hall.
The sounds were not based on the traditional rhythm, melody, and harmony of classical music; each movement progressed in a series of dissonant tones crystallizing in a jarring cacophony of trembling strings and then diffusing again. The bowing was, indeed, amazing; the dynamic timbre would go from clamorous to cathartic in a single line. It was like a movie soundtrack for a horror movie, with no purpose other than to provide a backdrop of sonic tension for human acts so unnatural that they are natural. In the last movement, the musicians whispered a poem over the music, which scared the daylights out of people who didn’t read the programs carefully enough to know it was a part of the piece.
Nymphea Reflections was like a meta hallucinatory drug-induced freak-out being iterated by a fifty people all stroking a hair bow against a wire attached to a hollow wooden vessel, and I’m sitting in Symphony Hall surrounded by two thousand old, rich people who just want to hear the Beethoven and Sibelius and don’t want to be bothered by this tautological noise composed by a woman who is not only still living, she’s living in Paris.
When the Beethoven Concerto commenced, I heard the old man proclaim to his friends “This is music!” Ooh, he deserved a double eye-poke for that one. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ludwig, but coming right after Saariaho’s nontraditional sonification, Beethoven seemed boring and excessive. So many notes with the sweeping scales and melodies, blah. I applaud whoever at the BSO put Saariaho on the program at the risk of alienating the old fogey symphony stalwarts. It was a defilibrator for their minds.
