Day 50, May 5, 2020

- May 05, 2020

Painted Tigers

This morning, my father forwarded me a collaborative video done by the Boston Symphony Orchestra while quarantined at home. You may have seen these videos if you are on social media, and my own trio, Vimana, did one recently, but I've never seen one at the scale of compiling all the independent footage of an entire symphony.

And suddenly there are dandelions by the river!

If you are not aware of the technological limitations, it can seem like a magical union of collaborative musicianship, but we have all been experiencing the latency and jitters of limited bandwidth and Zoom, so we know the impossibility of that with current technology. Instead, what happens with these videos is that each musician plays and records the entire piece independently in their own home, hopefully all at the same tempo, and then the recordings are sent to a video editor who, like a conductor (or in this case, perhaps in conjunction with Keith Lockhart) matches the tempo of each of the videos, blends and mixes the audio, and chooses what to highlight visually.

While the end result makes the performance appear easy and seamless, I can tell you from my experience with just a trio, it is a tricky thing capturing a clean take, and then lining up the audio and video captured from a laptop, GoPro, or iPhone.

With Vimana, we all wore headphones and utilized a recording from practice as our backing track and played a live accompaniment so that the video recorder captured only the live performance. Since we all used the same backing track, theoretically, we would all hit the changes at the right moment and all end simultaneously.

Most of the symphony musicians weren't wearing headphones, so they must be keeping their own tempo, which is even more impressive, but they are professionals and there is a reason they are playing in a world class orchestra.

I enjoyed watching the details of where all the symphony members live. Some of the brass players have rehearsal spaces lined with sound absorbing panels. A French horn player seems to have a post and beam barn festooned with various horns. Behind the tympanist you can see French doors leading out into a yard and I imagined what it must be like to have a tympanist as a neighbor and what one might hear while trying to go to sleep.

I often do the same thing when I meet with my colleagues over Zoom. I get distracted by the color choices, the artwork on the walls, the antique writing desk, the plastic drawers filled with fabric. I want to ask about the stories behind those objects, to learn more about who they are as human beings beyond the sphere where I know them. It is a reminder that, just as my colleagues only know me in the context of being a dean at a community college, I only know them in their context as an English faculty member, a teacher of French, a professor of botany. I know very little about what life is like for them as a partner, as a parent, as a single dog owner. I suppose there are some slight glimpses in places like Instagram, but for most people those are highly curated glimpses, where as via Zoom you sometimes get images of an unmade bed, cardboard boxes, or as I experienced the other day, the aftermath of a cat peeing in a fresh load of clean laundry.

It is funny the things that move me these days. At the end of the BSO performance, one of the violinists, I think it is Julianne Lee, holds up a sign thanking all the healthcare workers and first responders. It is a heart breaking reminder about why the symphony is playing together in this way. Who knows when the symphony will next play together again, when Symphony Hall will open its leather lined doors to audience members, or when the lawns at Tanglewood will be filled with people sipping wine in lawn chairs. Just yesterday, Vimana's last booked gig was cancelled with the calling off of the Good Music Makes Good Neighbors music festival in Montague.

The Good Music Makes Good Neighbors gig is one of my favorites of the year. It is one of those cultural events in Montague that make it cohere as a special place. All across Montague Center and up Taylor Hill people open their living rooms and give up their porches to musicians. People walk around town going door to door and, in a real-life version of the Zoom peeping tom, you get to look at the books people have on their shelves, the hodgepodge collection of furniture, pet the longhaired shaggy dog, and you get to watch musicians close up in an intimate perspective you are rarely allowed.

Montague is a special place. It is no Symphony Hall, but it is another special place where people congregate who really appreciate music and the company of others. So, until the next festival, or the next Tanglewood concert, or the next performance at Symphony Hall, I am holding you all in my heart and looking forward to the next time we can see each other in person and I can ask you about that tiger painting hanging on your wall.

Take care and stay safe,
Leo