I went to see a chamber music concert this evening – short performances by ten chamber groups in two hours. The music ranged from Schumann to Shostakovich, and everything in between. My favorite was the “Violin Sonata in A Major” by Cesar Franck, a perfect study in soulful aching lyricism. Tonight, in the hands of a brilliant violinist and pianist, it somehow managed to be deeply sad and ecstatic all at once, like the very best songs by Tom Waits.<\/p>\n
Somewhere during the arrangement for flute, clarinet and piano of Debussy’s “Epigraphes Antiques” I had an epiphany. Each of the musicians on stage was focusing on giving the best individual performance possible – each mind on the stage in its own personal zone, a place that had been achieved through countless hours of practice. And yet each player was clearly keeping an ear open to all the others. You could see the occasional glances from one musician to another, the thoughtful pauses between the music as they all tried to sync to the same emotional wave as it surged and ebbed throughout the piece.<\/p>\n
And I realized that this is the same experience I have watching a great performance by a dance ensemble, or great actors on a stage, whether the play is by Mamet or Chekhov. In each case there is a dramatic illusion of tension between two opposing players – in the case of the Debussy it was the byplay between the flute and the clarinet. But in fact, they are all aspects of the same mind – and this is what makes it all wonderful.<\/p>\n
A good performer, whether in a ballet, a chamber orchestra or a theatrical farce or tragedy, is usually presenting a well thought out creation of a single brilliant mind. The people you see on the stage are not there to act solely as individuals, but rather to illuminate an inner dialog created in this author’s mind. In Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” Nora and Torvald are not really two people – rather they are artful illusions of two people, perfectly sketched representations of individuals, invented for the purpose of playing out questions that actually arose within the mind of the playwright.<\/p>\n
When you see this in a novel, it is all usually tangibly obvious. The reader knows that Darcy, Elizabeth and Collins are merely creations from the single mind of Jane Austen. In fact, Austen reminds us of this fact at every moment in the story – by making her own narrator’s voice the most vivid of all the voices we read.<\/p>\n
But in a performance it gets trickier. You can actually see the individual floutist or clarinetist there before you – flesh and blood humans who you know<\/i> have each spent countless hours to perfect their art. And yet the job of that floutist and that clarinetist is to illuminate the mind of Debussy, to bring you back to the vision of the individual creator.<\/p>\n
I think that it is this formal tension – the fact that even in the middle of a knock down, drag out cursing match in the blackest of Mamet plays, or the most devastating psychic wounds inflicted in a play by Conor McPherson, it is still the job of the players to act as an ensemble, to work harmoniously together on the meta-level of illuminating a single author’s story and ideas.<\/p>\n
To reveal to us, to the best of their abilities, the creation of an individual mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I went to see a chamber music concert this evening – short performances by ten chamber groups in two hours. The music ranged from Schumann to Shostakovich, and everything in between. My favorite was the “Violin Sonata in A Major” by Cesar Franck, a perfect study in soulful aching lyricism. Tonight, in the hands of … Continue reading “Ensemble”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}