Alright, in this segment we're going to talk about how to look smart at a concert.
I know this is a thing that novice listeners have a problem with all the
time. They go to a concert. They don't know how to behave. They don't know what the
performers are doing.
They just don't know what to do. So we're going to try to alleviate some of your anxiety
about that.
So let's start
by what happens when you get to the concert. We'll start with a symphony
concert because that's big, lots of people,
lots of things that go on that are special.
So we're going to watch a little video here.
So this is what it looks like from the
performer side. You'd be out in the audience. You see there are musicians just moving
around. Back stage we have the conductor.
We have a stage manager.
We now see that the musicians have stopped making noise.
And this gentleman comes out. This is the concert master.
He's the first violinist. He always comes out first. He will acknowledge the applause from the
audience,
and then he will turn around and tune the orchestra,
which we're not going to see here, but that's normally what would happen.
The next person that comes out is the conductor,
and you see that
even the people backstage start applauding so the audience knows to applaud so just
follow their cues, they will help you with that!
So that's what it would be like at a symphony concert concert, concert master,
conductor,
and then off they go.
One of the other things that would happen in a symphony concert is that they would
need to tune. And you will see that also in some smaller concerts.
So let's see what that sounds like.
If you've ever been to a concert you recognize this sound. Random
"A-ness" we would call it as the note "A" is what we all tune to.
And you see that that was pretty quick.
Some orchestras you would get
multiple "A's" - the brass will tune,
the violins would tune, he woodwinds would tune.
And then everybody will be ready and then the conductor will come out to
start the program.
Now what if it's a
small kind of recital not a
big orchestra?
This is one of the the times that students really get confused because
some sort of odd things happen.
So here is the beginning of a vocal recital
and we see that we have our singer come out
and her accompanist, and they're both going to graciously accept your applause
then the piano sits down
and the singer is ready
and that's really all there is to a concert like that. They don't need to tune.
They've already done all of that.
If it were an instrumentalist they might tune to the piano if they didn't do it before
they came out the first time.
So that's for the opening setting. Now you know when they come out everybody applauds
even though they haven't done anything yet.
If you think about it when you go a rock concert, or whatever your favorite kind of
music is
you do the same thing. When your group comes out you cheer madly!
We just don't cheer quite as madly
in the art music world.
So we now have this lovely singer here on the stage and she's performing,
and she's going to sing
probably one or two numbers before she takes a break,
and then she's going to leave the stage,
and that often confuses audience members who haven't been to this kind of concert.
Why is she leaving?
She's just sung like for five minutes, what's the problem?
The thing is that
usually a concert is broken into little segments. So
she might have done
music from a particular period first
and so she's leaving the stage and she would be sort of regrouping her brain because when she
comes back it's going to be a different kind of music.
It also gives her a chance to get some water,
take a breath,
you know sort of reset herself. You will see that in all sorts of recitals
that have small groups or individuals.
You don't see that in an orchestra concert. They're not going to leave the stage
between numbers and get something to drink.
So that's what happens when they leave.
Another thing that sometimes freaks out people who haven't been to small
concerts is
brass players who have to pour the water out of their instruments. People think
that's gross,
but it's just a fact of life. It's not spit. People always talk about people
pouring spit out of their horns but it's not.
It's condensation from blowing warm air into a metal tube
and it condenses. This is just
physics. We have to get it out of or you get a sound that goes...
(gurgling) while you're trying to play.
So they do have to periodically dump the water out of their horns. Nothing
disgusting about it,
but it's just a fact of life for brass players so...
don't think they're trying to make you ill.
So what about the clothes? You know when you go to an orchestra concert everybody wears black.
And students think that's kind of odd sometimes and why does everybody wear black?
Think about it like a sports team. On a sports team everybody wears the same
uniform.
Now they do have numbers on their backs and their names and things like that
but it's a way of telling that we're all as a unit.
In an orchestra or another big ensemble,
it's about the ensemble, it's not about individuals. We don't put our names on
the backs of our clothes obviously
but it gives a consistent look to the group
and it makes you know that this is a group effort. This is not a solo venture.
Compare that to the lady that we saw. You know she's got this striking red dress, very
flashy! She's a soloist. She gets to do that.
So when you have a solo singer in particular they're very good about wearing fancy
dresses.
They're probably going to get colorful.
Everybody else is pretty much going to wear black but it's because we want you to
focus on the music,
not on what the performer is wearing.
I'll tell you I saw a piano recital recently where the pianist had four or five
inch heels on and I spent half the time trying to figure out how they played the piano with
those shoes on.
That's distracting if you're trying to really listen to the music, so we try not to
distract you.
Now in a symphony concert you might see people,
not the entire orchestra, but certain people who leave after a particular
piece is finished.
That happens because the next piece on the program is something they don't
play.
As we will learn when we look at different kinds of compositions, we'll know that not
every instrument is used in every piece.
So maybe we started out the concert with a big overture that took all sorts of players
but the next thing that the orhcestra is going to play
is an intimate
Mozart serenade which wouldn't require nearly as many brass players, probably
no percussion.
So all those people will leave
rather than just sitting on the stage and looking like they don't have anything to do,
which they don't.
So they will leave the stage and then they would come back for any other
numbers that they might play.
Now, what if you go to the opera
or to the ballet? Those are very different
and you will see that
people
behave differently in the audience for those as well.
When you go to a symphony concert
you have to clap in the right place and we're going to talk about when that right
place is in just a minute.
When you go to a solo recital you have to clap in the right place and that's
another one us things that makes people nervous. What if I clap in the wrong
place?
Well, you won't clap for very long because you'll be alone and then you'll stop and you won't do it
anymore, but we're going to teach you how to do that correctly.
When you go to the opera or the ballet
you clap when you see something you enjoy.
Same thing applies in a jazz concert.
Somebody has played a great solo - you don't have to wait till the piece is over. You cheer
then! In the opera they just sang this wonderful aria...
when they finish
everybody applauds
and the actor will usually just stand there. They don't
step out of character and bow, thank you thank you, they just stay in
character, wait for the applause to die down
and carry on with the story, but it's expected that you would applaud for this
wonderful performance they just did.
In ballet they actually stop the action and they'll take their bows when you
applaud for them.
So things are different
depending on what kind of event you go to.
My best advice...
find somebody who looks like they do this all the time,
do what they do, pick out somebody who looks like they're a regular.
They're not going to be looking at all their program and fiddling
and trying to figure out what's going on. They're going to be very calm looking.
Take your cues from that person.
Now, let's look at a program itself. So, we have on the screen for you a typical
program
for a concert.
So let's start with a symphony program. So we see that this program has
an overture
'Le Nozze di Figaro,' which is just 'The Marriage of Figaro,' in Italian,
and it tells us
K.492, and it has the composer's name
and his dates.
These are things you would normally see on a concert program.
The 'K' tells us
that
this piece was the four hundred and ninety second piece that Mozart wrote.
He wasn't a very tidy kind of composer and he never
put anything on the piece to tell you when he did it so somebody went back later
that's the person who the K stands for and organized everything so we would know
when pieces were written. Why do we care?
As you'll see when we talk about different composers you'll see that they
wrote in different styles during their lifetime, so if we know it's from his late
period
we would expect something different than
say K.32. This helps us to know what to listen for.
The next piece on our program would be
the famous Beethoven Symphony Number 5,
which the full title is Symphony Number Five in C Minor
Opus 67 - OP stands for opus,
which is the Latin word for work.
Beethoven was a nice organized guy. In fact he was a little bit compulsive
and he made
lots of scribbles on everything so we have lots of records.
So he indicated that this was the 67th
piece that he composed.
So it's right there on the title for us.
We know it's a symphony because it's in the title.
We know it's his 5th symphony because that's in the title and we even
know that it's in the key of C minor which is all useful information from an audience
perspective.
You'll learn more about that when we cover those things later.
But then below that you see four more titles.
These are what we call movements, so in music,
if you think about this whole piece, this symphony is a book.
Books are broken into chapters, so these chapters, this book has four chapters
and we call those chapters movements.
They're all connected together, so just like in a book
the story keeps going from chapter to chapter.
In a piece that has multiple musical movements
the story keys going from movement to movement.
So we don't applaud in between those movements.
The reason for that is aurul. You need to be able to remember what you heard
and if you don't
if you clap, it sort of muddies up your thinking and muddies up what you've heard
and you won't remember the parts that you've heard.
So if you are listening very carefully to symphony number five,
you would hear in some of the later movements bits of things that he did in the
first movement and if you've sort of
fowled up your hearing
you won't remember that and it's harder to
make those connections between the piece.
So, when you have movements listed like that,
don't applaud, wait till the very end.
And then you will be right on with that.
And we'll talk more about what those titles mean later but for now you just need to
know how the structure is.
Now let's look at a vocal recital. So we have our lovely lady in red here
we have a very short little recital here, what she might do.
It starts with a piece by Handel whose a composer from the late 1600's
and you see that in quotations it says, "rejoice greatly."
And then it says from Messiah which is in italics.
This is useful information for an audience member.
If it's in quotations like that
that usually means it's
a segment of something bigger.
Singers don't usually do movements like orchestras do because the pieces don't
work that way, although we do have one piece
that functions like that.
When you have something like this, something in quotes, and then it says from
something else, in this case Messiah,
that tells us
that this is one little piece from a bigger work.
Messiah is actually about three hours long, so you'll be very happy that she's not
singing all of it.
She's just going to sing this one number from it.
The next thing on the program is "Ombra mai fų" from another Handel work called
Serce (Xerxes), again we have it in quotes.
We have from something else.
So if you happen to be doing a report for a class and they ask you the name of
the piece... the big piece...
that's going to be the part that its from... Messiah is the work, the
big work
and 'Rejoice Greatly' would be the movement so if you have to identify
things in that way for a class
that's the way you would tell.
So, we see that those two are grouped together, that's typical in a vocal recital.
She would sing these two pieces by the same composer
or they might even be by two different composers but from the same time period,
and then she would leave the stage as we said,
regroup, get her head on straight for the next thing. And th she's coming back and she's
singing Mozart
which is very different in style from Handel so she has to make a mental
adjustment.
So again, we've got a couple of pieces from something bigger, in this case the
Marriage of Figaro
and
The Magic Flute.
So, she would sing those again,
leave,
come back and now she's doing a massive work, she's doing Gustave
Mahler's 'Kindertotenlieder' which means 'songs on the death of children.'
Very cheery topic,
and obviously you would want to get your head in that frame. You know if your going to come
back and sing about children who are dying or dead
you need a mental
adjustment from
whatever cheerful stuff might have come out of the previous set.
So here we have Kindertotenlieder.
Notice that that's in italics.
That means it's a big work. The bigger it is we put it in italics.
Again referring to our book reference, the title of a book in a citation,
usually in italics.
The title of the chapter,
usually in quotes.
So that's a way that you can make that connection.
And we see that this has
five movements
and if you had a full program you would have translation so you would know what she
is actually singing about.
But again you would wait until she finished that last movement before you applauded
and probably in this case cry because this is about dying children so it's a very
sad piece.
So that's a typical vocal program.
Now let's look at this typical piano recital.
Again you see that the pieces are grouped
in little bunches.
And you notice it's kind of a chronological order
so the pianos will usually start with something early,
in this case Bach.
And you see that Bach doesn't have opus number or K number, it has a B-W-V number.
And that's an abbreviation for a very long German word which i won't even try and pronounce
but basically
it says this is one of the Bach's works so if you remember BW for Bach's works
you'll be okay with that,
and you see that this is the five hundred and thirty fifth thing that Bach wrote. He
wrote
thousands of pieces. His numbers are very large.
So they would do the Bach, and then like the singer
leave the stage
because you're changing style and coming back to do something different.
So when the
pianist comes back
they're going to play a Haydn piano sonata.
So that's right here in our title, piano sonata, which tells us this is a piano by itself,
and in fact all of these would be.
This is the fifty second piano sonata that Haydn wrote. He liked those, he wrote lots
of them.
It's in the key of E-flat major
and then we have any H-O-B number which stands for Hoboken and it doesn't
mean the town in New Jersey.
So again, this is a person who organized
his music into sections.
So that number tells us again where this fit into
Haydn's
set of works.
Again, we've got three movements so we're going to wait till the end
to applaud.
Performer leaves,
comes back, now we're doing Chopin which is a romantic period composer
and you see that this performer is going to do three ballads by Chopin.
These are actually freestanding pieces. He could come back, he or she,
could do just one.
But it's pretty typical to do multiple
pieces of the same type.
So you'll see that there are three of those ballads on the program
and again, it tells us which ballad, it tells us which key, it gives us an opus number
and you can see that he didn't write them all at the same time so that can be useful
information as well.
But again we would wait till they're all done to applaud.
Anytime they're grouped like that, that's a signal that you should just wait.
And the performer's not going to get up to
say thank you in the middle either so if the performer doesn't
get up from the piano, or turn to you and go...
then you know it's time not to applaud.
Then this performer would leave and come back again and finish this program up
with a
set of pieces by Shostakovich who is a modern composer,
again with lots of movements.
So as you're listening
sometimes it's easy to follow because if you know the terminology, like when you
learn what allegro and andente and all those terms mean, you'll know that
those are tempos and you can tell, 'Oh, that's a fast one, that's a slow one.'
But one with a title like this?
Hurdy Gurdy?
What does that sound like? We don't know but hopefully you'll know when they get
to that movement, and you'll say, 'Oh, I get how that sounds like a Hurdy Gurdy,
so the titles will sometimes be helpful, sometimes not so much.
So that's how you would get through a program.
Those are useful pieces of information for you.
Now you know when to applaud.
You know how to read the program.
One last thing is, you need to learn how to talk at intermission.
I would say that one of the important things about knowing this kind of information is that
you can go to parties at your job
and talk about something besides work
because
who wants to talk about work all the time? You can really impress people if you can talk
about something else.
So, you can say, 'Oh, you know I went to see the symphony last night.'
And you know, they played this great piece of music
by Mozart.
And people will go, 'Listen to that! Look how smart this person is! But if you
go in like 'Oh, I went to the symphony last night and they've played this
song by mows-art.
They're gonna go
really?
Mows-art?
There's your first error - didn't know how to pronounce the composer's name. The second thing
is if nobody sang,
it's not a song!
It's a really bad habit people have. If it's a piece of music with no words don't
call it a song. Songs have words. Call it a piece. Call it a work. Call it a
symphony. Call it what it was. Just don't call it a song. That's one way of
really showing people that you don't know what you're talking about.
The other thing that I hear people say a lot is
I didn't like the singer but I liked the music.
Well the singer is the music you can't have the music without the singer and
singers get really annoyed
when you act like they're not part of the process.
Like the singer is some special thing on the side.
When you mean the instruments, talk about the instruments. You know, I wasn't
really impressed with the singer but I really liked the instrumental
accompaniment. I liked the orchestra. I liked the ensemble.
Not the music. Together they are the music.
The instruments are their part. The singers their part. So that's another
thing you can do to avoid making yourself look like you didn't know what you're talking
about.
and that's our whole point in this particular segment to make you look
smart when you go to a concert