No Flasher Photography Will Be Allowed During The Concert

All the great composers have flashes of inspiration – Mozart with some cheeky melody, Schubert’s haunting opening to the Unfinished, Beethoven with his 5th Symphony’s motif of fate knocking at the door. My own little burst of imagination came in rewriting the first line of the yodelling song from The Sound of Music to “High on a hill was a horny goat-herd, odelehee odelehee odele whoo hoo!” The markings of greatness, no doubt.

The culprit of my computer shut downs has been determined as a faulty fan on the VGA card, which at least lets me know it isn’t paranormal eyelids that was the cause of the blinking ensuing with the monitor.

The orchestra concert is over, and I’m looking forward to rehearsing chamber music this week: Mozart’s second violin-viola duo on Wednesday and a Beethoven quartet on Thursday. Yummy.

Another spot of imagination here comes:

Four things people outside of music probably don’t know about orchestra concerts

1. Musicians can hold their bladders for a three-hour rehearsal, but will still pack the toilets before a 45-min first half of the actual concert.

2. The mushroom cloud outside the hall straight after the first half of the program is not the conductor going nuclear after the concert mistakes, it’s the musicians’ Marlboro subscriptions in action.

3. If an unexpected boing happens in the middle of the concert, it’s not the overdose of the creamed radishes you had for dinner, it’s the timpanist making a boo-boo. If it happens twice, then it’s the timpanist had better have his CV printed. If it happens three times and the timpanist hasn’t been strangled onstage by the conductor, then yes, maybe it’s time for you to go to the toilet.

4. If the conductor collapses onstage and the orchestra keeps going, chances are either they never realised he was there, or an overdose of rehearsals has made the musicians memorize their music and they have dirty magazines on their stands instead. If the orchestra plays even louder, it’s to resolutely block out the sound of anyone shouting, “Is there a doctor in the audience?!”