musical sketches
After the concert the musicians gathered in the event room for a reception fit for kings. On strawberries, marshmellows, crackers, cheeses, and pretzel sticks we gorged. And in the center, a vigourous fountain of pure chocolate bubbled. Bodies pressed tightly in the standing-room-only chamber against the table for a chance to dip their stick into the sweet stuff.
Aya's appearance at the reception caught me offguard. Aya belongs to my short list of old high school friends; she is not a musican.
"Aya, oh my god!" I said. "I didn't know you liked music!"
That came out all wrong. Aya smiled and then took revenge by quoting me on her doodle sheet. A half-Asian manga enthusiast and imaginative doodler, Aya spent most of her high school years doodling dragons, little animals, lackluster teachers--basically whatever caught her eye. She was always full of surprises. One year for my birthday she got me a bag of unpronounceable Japanese candy. Another year for Christmas she got me a spoon with a three-foot handle extension. Currently, she volunteers her time at the Center for Puppetry Arts, just a few blocks from symphony hall. "Why didn't you tell me you were playing in a concert?" she asked.
I ordered a glass of gingerale--I always order gingerale when I want to feel important--and sat down with Aya and another friend of hers from Chamblee.
"I had the hardest time pointing you out n stage," Aya told me. "I kept saying things like, 'Oh, Daniel's the one sitting next to that guy who looks sort of like Daniel'."
She next took out her doodle sheet. Written at the top in awful chicken-scratch handwriting was the quote of me she had just added. Under it was a scribble of a face. "So I tried to draw what you looked like, but it was hard because you had a giant mouthpiece sticking out of your mouth."
"That looks just like me," I lied.
There were several stickfigures below that. One had outrageous slinky arms. Aya explained: "Man, did you see that conductor? He kept doing this weird wooshy thing with his arms--"
"Oh, you mean the windshield wipers?" I waved my arms to and fro. Aya's face lit up with instant recognition.
"That's it!"
Poor Mickelthwate's conducting technique got talked about a lot. It's not that he was a bad conductor (his ictus could be clearer, though)--he just tends to prance on the podium now and then.
"So what did you think about the pieces?" I asked.
"Well, the first two I liked, but the strings-only piece was weird." I skipped over the strings-only piece Pentagram in my last entry, but Aya was right. It was weird. Composed in 2004, the score called for the musicians to play with their bows up to the nut, or even to slap their instruments with their bows. In one section, violins had to play random screechings in their highest tessituras. It sounded like the devil. When Jere rehearsed the piece Nick and I reenacted the scene backstage by puting our index fingers behind our heads, rolling our eyes backwards, sticking out out tongues, and shaking our heads side to side. "I tried to draw it." Aya pointed to a cloud of lines, short, jagged, and angular, in the lower region of her doodle page.
"What about that dragon you drew on the left? What does that signify?" I asked.
"Oh, that's just a dragon. I just felt like drawing it."