BY CAMPBELL BANKS
‘I bet that quarter-tone piano would have sounded amazing.’
Well, there’s a thought I could never have predicted would wind its way, earnest and devoid of sarcasm, across my mind.
Actually, it seems like I’ve begun with a joke, a straight-from-the-style-guide strong open, attempting to grab your attention and pique your interest with a nonsense juxtaposition (a quarter-tone piano sounding amazing, imagine! ROFL), from which I would proceed to address you directly, consolidate our writer-reader bond and thus ensnare you to read on, manipulated and against your better judgement, to the end of what will inevitably turn out to be an overlong and pleading rant on why we should all go to more concerts.
But it really isn’t a joke, and it really did cross my mind after watching the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra perform Charles Ives’ Fourth Symphony a couple of weeks ago. It is true that other experiences in Melbourne have provoked thoughts in my mind that have been confusing or alarming, such as ‘Prah-Ran? Pran? Pra? Prh?’; or ‘Why are there horses and carriages in the street, as in, the actual CBD? Yes, the busiest streets in the city, exactly…anyone?’. But such was the dizzying, mind-reshuffling nature of the music and its performance that wondering about the sadly malfunctioning synthesiser and what I was missing by its absence seemed entirely ordinary.
Of course, it is absurd to think ordinary the pondering of a quarter-tone piano that shat dishevelled itself* immediately before an enormous performance, transforming its betailed commander into a glorified but uncomfortably mute stage-crasher. In fact, this was a startling and highly unusual thing to witness in a concert hall, a statement which is equally valid when applied to the Fourth Symphony itself. I knew a thing or two about Ives before this concert, distant and dim memories about the Concord sonata and Ralph Waldo Emerson bobbing like ghost ships on the ocean of hazy and half-attended Bachelor degree courses, but I never knew anything about the Fourth Symphony. Not of the fact that it had never been performed in Australia before, nor that it required two conductors, a choir or an off-stage band. An exhortation by MSO pianist Leigh Harrold alerted me to its impending performance, and convinced me to go.
I bought a ticket at the box office on the night with the unashamed request, ‘I’d like one of the cheapest tickets, please’; proceeded to my seat in the absolute-very-last-row of the three-tiered hall, replete with vertigo-inducing aspect and lower oxygen count, and pleasantly enjoyed the concert’s first half of easily digestible Haydn and honey-trap Rachmaninoff Paganini Variations.** Up to this point, my mind was in its usual state, passing back and forth between attentiveness to the performance and various mundanities of existence. An entirely normal concert experience, in other words. The interval came about and having flouted two social conventions already (going out alone, and proudly purchasing the cheapest seat) I decided to go for the hat-trick, and drank a cup of tea.
Then came the Ives, a truly extraordinary masterpiece, a unique rendering of humanity, existence, the universe into sound. There is just so much in it: a separately conducted percussion group in the fourth movement symbolising the passage of time, a second movement ‘Comedy’ based on Hawthorne’s The Celestial Railroad, multi-metrics, an off-stage five-violin and harp ‘ensemble of angels’. That the first movement contains a choir singing the hymn words, ‘Watchman, tell us of the night, what its sign of promise are. Traveller, what a wondrous sight: see that glory-beaming star’, gives you further indication of the artistic ambition evident in this piece.
I am no scholar though, and cannot elucidate all of the symphony’s virtues in this context. Professor Wikipedia had this to say of the second movement: ‘It is his most extreme essay in overlapping thematic material…most complex in its use of multi-metrics and temporal dyssynchronies, and is compositionally his most complex orchestral work’.
I know, temporal dyssynchronies…that’s what we were all thinking. Basically, it was like this: imagine a filmic montage made from five-second snippets of footage that somehow encapsulated everything about humanity and the universe. Whatever comes into your mind, it doesn’t matter. Perhaps a time-lapse of a blooming flower; a child’s devastation as an overly melted ice-cream scoop slides off a cone to a splashy demise; a hiker’s exhausted last steps over a summit; a hand held to a lover’s cheek; a goose-stepping army; a dog chasing a car; a tennis racquet; an aurora; a cupcake. Anything. Imagine you’re viewing these images on 100 different screens, and they’re going so fast and relentlessly that you can’t possibly take it all in, but you’re aware of what you’re being bombarded with, nothing less than all of it. And each snippet has five seconds of a song that you know, but just as your ear is starting to pick out a melody to the point of recognition, it has vanished, elusive, irretrievable. This goes on and on, and more and more screens are flickering at you, and the songs are getting louder and louder and louder. Amongst the clamour, you’re at once aware of your anonymity and comforted by it, just another one of countless anonyms.
And then it all stops. Your ears ring out, your senses re-calibrate, and there, alone at the back of violas, one lone voice continues, unchanged, unaffected. One screen, flickering out its version of life. Far away on the other side of the orchestra, another voice begins again, not in unity, but nevertheless present, as if to communicate: ‘We’ll never say the same thing, but we’ll say it together’. Little by little, other voices rejoined and the music buildt up to yet another and then another enormous climax.
And there I sat, a lone observer, high up in the farthest corner of this space, deeply provoked by what I was witnessing. At first, I was struck by the very obvious existential questions that clearly arise from all of this, but I soon found myself focusing on the extent to which my own role as an audience member was affecting my experience of the performance. Certainly, my own isolation in that particular moment heightened my connection to and affinity with the solitary orchestral voices that were left stranded, but I looked around and knew that each audience member was engaging with that music in a completely different way. We were our own sea of flickering screens.
I started to pull at this thread from the perspective of a performer, as I am and many of you reading this may be. I wondered if audience members who don’t also perform realise how active their role in a performance is. In any great concert as a performer, it was great because the audience enabled it, were present and willing to be moved, to disconnect from an outside world of distraction and engage with other humans in ineffable communication. Recordings are wonderful things but it is in the live concert hall, the live pub, the live theatre, that the audience plays this crucial role, and I was struck by my own need to go and see more live arts. What I was witnessing was extraordinary, in the fullest sense of that word. It could not be replicated in any other setting, and it was for this reason exhilarating in the extreme. So to you, dear reader, the last one standing who made it all the way to the end, I say, go out! Play a vital role in a great performance simply by being an audience member. You never know, you might get lucky and actually hear a quarter-tone piano.
*No pianist was soiled in the making of this metaphor ***
**The 18th variation of which, I am disgusted to say, moved me. I was simultaneously aware of my emotional response and the extent to which I was being manipulated by the composer. Urgh. It’s like being physically attracted to someone who, for intellectual reasons, you deeply don’t want to be physically attracted to. The brain says NO but – well, you all know how it is.
***As far as I know
About the writer
Campbell Banks is an Alice Springs-born, Hobart-raised cellist now based in Melbourne. After completing a Bachelor of Music with Honours at the Queensland Conservatorium, Campbell relocated to Europe where he remained for eight years. During this time, he completed two Masters degrees in Zürich, Switzerland, studying with Raphael Wallfisch and Roel Dieltiens, lived in London for a year, had heart surgery, and became a vegan. A recipient of an Australian Music Foundation Prize, Campbell has performed in Wigmore Hall, Konzerthaus Berlin and the Zürich Tonhalle amongst many others; at the 2014 Amsterdam Cello Biennale, the St. Moritz Festival da Jazz and in front of 15,000 people with Glen Hansard at the Moon and Stars Festival, Locarno.
Image supplied. Credit: Daniel Aulsebrook.
