Problems

I came to San Francisco to see the San Francisco Symphony play a heart-filling piece written by Camille Saint-Saëns in 1886: his Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Opus 78, the Organ Symphony. They played, too, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Opus 40, and Prelude to Act I of Die Gezeichneten by Franz Schreker. These were bonus pieces for me; I had never heard of them before sitting down in the Davies Symphony Hall for the pre-performance music talk.

The problem with talking about orchestral music is that if I talk about the theory or the history of the music, it doesn't mean much in terms of the sheer emotional qualities that are present in performance. So while I can tell you that, interestingly, Rachmaninoff had hands about a thumb longer than the average hand, and so his music can be physically challenging for pianists of today, it tells you very little about the way you would hear the sound—the way it would impact your body, your soul...whatever it is that makes up the collection of you when you experience a glorious piece of music.

Conversely, if I can only tell you that the music I heard was beautiful (it was) or deeply moving (it was that too), you will no notion of the magnificence of the full orchestra: the sound of thirty violinists playing a figure, and the low brass adding emphasis with the string basses, all while the rest of the orchestra offers multiple other voices and rhythms so that you, listening, have no notion of exactly how many different parts are coming together to create this linear movement from one moment to the next. And that movement is where what we hear is no longer just noise, but music, and everything we think of music as being.

So I will distill my evening down to a single moment for you. I am looking down a long distance to the stage, watching the full orchestra: the bows of the violins moving as if they are all drawn by the same hand; the the bells of the trumpets and trombones flashing as they are raised, and a moment later, lowered; the conductor's arms and baton creating continuious, inclusive motion that brings each musician together so we, listening, are only aware of the culminated effect even as we can see so many musicians playing. Then—the organ sounds, the strings play that line, the woodwinds have gone all tinkly, the brass rises above the rest and I can feel my skin as though it is disolving cell by cell into the sound. It is induplicatable—this feeling is the reason why I come and sit in a hall full of other people, just to hear the crashing of music against me, to feel again a little like I felt the first time I thought I knew what love meant.