Confessions of a Classical Musician

A collection of unfortunate, amusing, and odd occurrences that actually happened during performances of classical music.

I. Red Cats and Red Flags

One thing I have learned over years of performing music in a quasi-professional setting is that it is important to play the correct notes at the correct time. Beyond that, it is absolutely critical to play the correct instrument at the correct time.

My orchestra was putting on a children’s concert, our first ever, and the hall was so full it became standing room only. Peter and the Wolf was on the program, and for those of you not familiar with the piece, it has a highly exposed clarinet part.

So, a bit of background information. The clarinet solo part for Peter and the Wolf calls for both B-flat and A clarinets, but I only took my A clarinet backstage to warm up beforehand. The A clarinet was a school-owned instrument, so I was not as accustomed to it. I figured I could make my B-flat do anything; I didn’t need to warm that instrument up. Red flag.

It was time to go back onstage. The plan was to grab my B-flat clarinet from where it was standing on the risers and move with both instruments to my new seat, two rows forward, for Peter and the Wolf. When I got to the risers, I was standing in a sea of clarinets, and they all looked the same. Red flag. No problem, I thought, I know my clarinet, and my clarinet knows me. So, I grabbed mine and sat down, ready to rock my red cat solo like a superstar.

Everything was going well. The small section in B-flat was coming up. I switched mouthpieces on the clarinets and grabbed my B-flat. As soon as I picked it up, I knew something felt different. Red flag. Whatever, no time to think about that. I started to play nice and confidently, because that is what you need to be a soloist. To my horror, the notes coming out of the instrument were a painful half-step lower than they were supposed to be, adding a spicy neotonal harmony that was not in the score. I stopped playing, looked at the instrument, and said out loud, “Oh SH**!!!” I can only hope that the strings were playing loud enough to cover up my unintentional profanity. Instead of grabbing my own B-flat, I had picked up someone else’s A. The horror, the horror! There was nothing I could do, except for a mixture of transposition and improvisation, my heart fluttering fast enough to kill me on the spot.

Lesson learned. Boys and girls, always make sure to take the correct instrument out on stage with you. If you wind up with the wrong one in the middle of the concert, do not start playing it.

II. Baton Twirling

Conductors remind me of professional baton twirlers. They have to lead an orchestra by essentially dancing on stage in front of an audience, all while trying to maintain control of a baton. A difficult feat for anyone.

This was an important day for everyone, because we had only one chance to make a good recording of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The fact that we had very few rehearsals for this massive undertaking is beside the point – this orchestra is known to somehow put everything together right at the last minute. (In other words, at the concert.)

The recording equipment was all set up, and we were ready to go. Rite of Spring is a very exciting piece of music, full of dislocated accents and weird harmonies, and incredibly frequent meter changes. Our conductor was becoming, in his words, animated, using a lot of extremely powerful upward gestures to try and get us to put the accents in the right place. At one point, he thrust his hands upward with so much force that he let go of his baton.

I don’t know much about physics, but the conductor could not have let go of the baton at a better moment if he tried. We weren’t in a concert hall, we were in a glorified gymnasium. Which meant the ceilings were very, very high. I watched the whole thing, and I swear that baton brushed up against the rafters before it came crashing down among the violas, at what seemed like an eternity later. Needless to say, we did not get a good recording.

III. Percussion Woes

When a ninety-piece band goes on tour, it is inevitable that it needs a large amount of percussion equipment. And where there is a large amount of percussion equipment, bad things are bound to happen.

One time we played Maslanka’s A Child’s Garden of Dreams, which isvery heavy on percussion. Some of these movements are very loud and wild, but, of course, it was during a placidly quiet movement that it happened. There were multiple drumsticks resting on a horizontal music stand at some distance away from the percussionists. During a calm, reflective moment in the piece, the horizontal music stand slowly slipped toward a position that was anything but safely horizontal. The drumsticks didn’t crash to the ground all at once, which perhaps would have made the experience slightly more positive. No, the sticks decided to oh-so-slowly fall to the ground one by one in a loud, clattering commotion that lasted a painful several seconds. All the while, the wind instruments were holding onto a quiet, lovely chord. When discussing the situation afterward, one percussionist said sadly, “We all saw it coming. But there was nothing we could do.”

When on tour, we wind up performing in a large variety of venues. Sometimes the stage is so small that half of the percussion section has to perform offstage. Well, on this particular night, we were on a stage that had a downward tilt. Good for theater performances, I imagine. Not good for a concert band. Especially when some of the percussion equipment is on wheels. You can see where this is going. Someone forgot to set the brakes on one of the vibraphones. In the middle of a piece, one poor percussionist had to hurl his body over the vibraphone to save it from flying off the stage and into the audience. Luckily, he did catch the heavy instrument, with the entire audience watching. The band played on.

IV. Unwelcome Insects

Immediately before the last piece of an orchestra concert, the principal bassoonist turned to me, eyes filled with panic. “There’s a fly in my bassoon,” he stage-whispered. How does one respond to that? I don’t know if the audience could have detected it, but for me it was quite noticeable that his normally smooth and luscious bassoon tone suddenly had a distinct buzz.

V. Where is this Wind Coming From?

Some stages have mysterious breezes coming from nowhere, making music flap and flutter and sometimes fly away. In this particular concert, we were playing Sensamaya. I was playing E flat clarinet and was sitting next to the bass clarinet player. We both had important parts in the piece. Right before the bass clarinet’s big entrance, his music started blowing away. Hoping to save the day, I dramatically threw my clarinet on my lap and caught the music as it floated through the air, thrusting it back on the stand just milliseconds before he had to play his solo. He made it through just fine, though his eyes had that deer-in-the-headlights look as he played. After all this happened, I realized I missed the entrance to my own solo. The sacrifices we make for our friends.

We also played Valse Triste at this concert. The only percussionist onstage was a sole timpani player. The draft was still going strong. His music also flew away, but he had no one to save it for him. He went on, either improvising or playing from memory, I’ll never know. But then, a valiant flute player who was not otherwise occupied walked over to the timpanist and picked up the music. He stood by the percussionist holding the music for him, but by now the wind had ceased as mysteriously as it had started. Instead of walking back to the flute section, this flute player crouched down in front of the timpani for the remainder of the piece, hiding on hands and knees behind the second violins, ready to jump up and catch rogue sheet music at any second. What a guy.

VI. Inappropriate Noises (and Placements of Bass Clarinetists)

One night we performed in a beautiful church that didn’t have room for a full orchestra. This meant that the bass clarinet played from the pulpit. He didn’t mind.

The plus side about the venue was that they had pretty comfortable chairs for us to sit in. Not the hard plastic kind; these ones, for better or for worse, had much more padding. The conductor came out, we stood up to the applause of the audience. The flute player in front of me must have taken a little longer to sit down, because I distinctly remember the entire church being silent as that poor flute player sat down. There must have been some extra air in the padding of her chair, because when she sat down,  the chair let out the loudest, most inappropriate noise that has ever rung through that church. On that foul note, we had to start the concert.

VII. Don’t Be the First One on Stage

At a different church venue, the floors were all stone.  I don’t know what my rush was to get on stage that night, but I beat everyone else on stage by what seemed like an eternity. So it was just me up there, in plain view of a large crowd of people waiting in silent expectation. As I walked on stage, somehow the bottom half of my clarinet decided to become too loose and came crashing onto the floor with a huge, painful CLANK of wood on stone. As every member of the audience watched, I tried to appear as if nothing happened. I calmly picked up the lower half of my instrument and sat down. Miraculously, nothing was broken or cracked. Just my pride.

VIII. Rimsky-Korsakov Didn’t Write That

Our showcase piece for my last tour with my college orchestra was Scheherezade. This large work starts and ends with extremely quiet and exposed woodwind chords, a nightmare for us to tune. Every night of the tour presented a different issue. Bassoons were too sharp, flutes too flat, clarinets didn’t come in at exactly the right moment.

It was the last concert of the tour, and Scheherezade was the final piece of the concert. When we woodwinds reached those ending chords, we realized that finally, we had somehow gotten everything right. Everyone entered at exactly the right moment; everyone was exactly in tune. Our conductor’s face was one of utmost joy as he mouthed to us the word “perfect.” And then he gave us the cut-off. This cut-off was supposed to be a smooth and graceful fade-out into nothing. Immediately after we beautifully faded into nothing, another clarinet player’s (he shall remain nameless) instrument let out the hugest, longest, highest-pitch squeak I have ever heard in my life. The conductor’s face turned to horror and dismay. And, on that surprise note, the entire concert, and tour, ended. The audience’s applause that night was, unfortunately, rather hesitant. Afterward, all of us decided to carefully avoid the topic of the clarinet squeak. Nearly a year later, said clarinet player was ready to acknowledge the situation. He stated with a sheepish smile, “I ruined the whole concert.”

IX. Music is Scary Sometimes

Back on the first day of the thistour, we were somewhere in the middle of the first movement of  Scheherezade. It was during a nice, beautiful, quiet, calm part that an old lady in the audience let out a blood-curdling scream. Not just a little scream; it sounded like she was either on a roller coaster or being murdered. I think everyone in the hall, including the orchestra members, jumped out of their skin. For the rest of the piece, the second clarinet part just wasn’t played. I was too busy shaking from trying so hard not to laugh. Turns out, the screamer was a flute player’s grandmother. She had apparently been lulled to sleep by this calm section, and her husband had poked her to wake her up, which is what startled her so much. So, if you ever see someone sleeping during a concert, please, just let them sleep.