Was That the Music on the Program?

a time when I wasn't sure..

On a Saturday in the city, parents and children are huddled in concert hall darkness.

The lights have dimmed post-applause greeting the cortège of new performers onstage.

I’m sitting far enough from everything for the stage to look pinholed and enigmatic.

I’m also twelve, but what happened next is still stamped binocularly in my mind.

To recreate the stream of consciousness:

It’s taking them a long time to ‘tune.’

…

This is a really long time to tune. (Did the piece already start?)

Palpably, the audience is divided in its emotions. Factions are forming, with an overwhelming sense of belonging growing among everyone unsure of what they’re hearing; they know they aren’t the only ones in doubt. Meanwhile, the indignation (of some purists?) at such an ignorant, disgraceful conjecture is forming an equally countering pungent scent of dismay.

So much is going on offstage and onstage..

And then the players stop playing..and bow.

Tepid initial applause follows, prompting the rest of us to join in, raising the decibel level significantly.

Mystery solved; there wasn’t any tuning, that was the performance.

Still, what just happened? Amid waves of comprehension, thought bubbles asked:

Was that the piece on the program?

I still wish I had remembered to read it.

Usually, a performance is propelled by the suspension of the fourth wall.1

Independent of genre or setting, the charisma, it factor, or sheer power of the music and musicians (tour de force) makes each listener feel the physical distance between them and the artist(s) dissolving.

Simultaneously, while so unifying “outward”, there is a unifying inward; a harmonizing as the listener’s own unfelt emotions or materia resurface. Everything emotional that has lain dormant in the shadows of unawareness comes to light with feeling, and remembering one’s spirit (one is spirit).

Thus, the so-called division between performer and audience is facilitatory; like a boundary, not a barrier. It actually holds the frame and gives a structure for each one to freely experience—and contribute to—the concert or collective experience.

But incomprehension or misunderstanding—miscommunication between performer and listener introduces a third element: the fourth wall. Breaking the sphere of empathy-identification and closeness generated, this monkey wrench makes performers of the listeners and turns the (original) performers into muses; the audience’s muses.

Suddenly there are two simultaneous performances. And they’re not always interacting with each other.

What are your thoughts? Were you ever in the audience unsure of what you were hearing?

1 “The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imaginary wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see “through” the wall, the convention assumes the actors act as if they cannot.”

“Fourth wall.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 19 April. 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_wall. 23 April 2024.