Engaging the Community

As an answer to Sarah Johnson, I want to talk about one of the programs I’m involved in producing here at the NSO. I started using projected images along with music in a chamber music setting years before we ever got to use them with the full orchestra. My education director was so taken with the idea that she too was anxious to try it out, but it took a change of administration before we could make the idea happen.

For the last 4 years, all of our children’s concerts have used Image Magnification (IMAG) during the concerts. (For those of you who don’t know, image magnification uses video cameras — we use two, one stationed on each side of the hall in the balcony in order to get the best possible camera angles of the musicians.) I work with our associate conductor, Emil de Cou, to illustrate his remarks using informational slides, and then switch over to IMAG when the orchestra plays.

For one of his programs, he chose a piece which the NSO commissioned, called March, by Jefferson Friedman. When Emil talked to the kids about the piece, I projected a photo of the composer on the screen hanging over the orchestra. (The photo saves time too – the kids could instantly see that he’s a young man, a living composer. The photo happened to show him with a backdrop of NYC, so the kids also saw where he was from.)
The conductor mentioned a few musical highlights to listen for — as the musicians played those short demos, we switched to IMAG, which allowed the audience to see (and hear) which instrument would be playing one of those.

While the orchestra played the entire March, I was sitting backstage with the score, telling the cameras which instrument to focus on next. That way the audience could not only see the musicians playing but also make a visual connection to what they were hearing.

That sounds simple — making a visual connection to what they were hearing. Simple, but more powerful than you think. At one point in the score, Mr. Friedman asks for the percussionists to play on the copper bowl of an overturned tympani, an unusual sound and an unusual “instrument,” so I made sure that we had a camera focused on it when that moment came in the music. I myself was stunned to realize that until I saw the instrument being played, I’d never been able to hear it in the overall texture of the music, even though we had rehearsed and performed the piece several times by then. If the image+sound is that important to someone like me, with years and years of trained listening experience, how much more important is it to the untrained listeners in our audience?

There were more surprises in store for me. We’ve been working with the same crew (two cameramen, a technician, and myself) almost the entire four years that we’ve been producing these “enhanced” children’s concerts. Between concerts one day, one of the cameramen said casually, “I really like this music, where would I be able to hear it again?” He explained further that he wasn’t ready to come to a subscription concert, but now that he knew what the different instruments sounded like and how they all fit together, he found himself listening to classical music on the radio, and that he wanted to explore the repertoire to see what other pieces he might like. He doesn’t have the confidence to start buying CDs, and he likes live music, but where can he find an experience similar to what he got at our children’s concert?

The other cameraman joined the conversation — he’s been filming the NSO during our residencies for 12 years. He agreed, “Oh yeah, once I found out how hard it is to do what you [musicians] do, I was amazed that more people don’t appreciate it. You guys are amazing!” (He was also stunned to learn on his first tour with us that we still practice — he thought that high level performers didn’t need to practice!)

I keep thinking there ought to be a way to share what we do with more people, and in my opinion, IMAG is one of the easiest ways to do that. Maybe I’m an impossible optimist, but I hope Leonard Slatkin’s not right that only 4% of the population will ever really be interested in what we do. I do believe the other 96% need a “translation” – education. (I’m checking to see where he got that number. Does anyone know if it’s an ASOL statistic?)

Postscript: I attended (OK, I spied on) another orchestra’s children’s concert at which they also were using IMAG – however, the person they had backstage directing the cameras must not have been a musician. The cameras were rarely on the right person, and believe me, it makes a HUGE difference. There’s nothing worse than having the camera focused on the oboe player (who’s not even playing) while you’re hearing a French horn solo, and then when the camera gets to the player just as their solo is ending, the audience is treated to another image of a player – not playing. The technology is there, the know-how is there, but it all has to be used wisely: not just for effect, or to be able to say “we offer an enhanced listening experience.” I believe tools such as IMAG can actively contribute to the listening experience.