@loz5
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Registered: 2 years, 9 months ago
I enjoyed our time together and am looking forward to coming back in less than a month.I pointed that out as an example of downward spiral thinking.Downward spiraling is everywhere about us and it is so easy to fall into the habit of thinking that way.You sat quietly for a long time before it began and then sang, laughed, and listened while a wild man roamed around on a stage for nearly two hours.Was it as quiet as it could have been?Did I keep everyone’s attention all the time?It was a great start!Now we will soon have a chance to be together again.I am really excited that you will get to hear their sound, and see what happens when I conduct them.I know you will be touched and delighted and amazed!Will you give some thought to how it will be possible to keep the hall really quiet while the orchestra is playing, so that everybody can enjoy it and the musicians can play their best?I hope that your truly amazing teachers won’t feel that they have to work so hard going up and down the aisles keeping discipline.They love music and want to be able to listen too.Do you think it would work to have them sitting down, just listening, like all of you?Anyway, I am looking forward so much to being together again to explore the music and have you find out more about how it all works.And I think the people at Arthur Andersen are super to make it all possible.See you on the 22nd of October.And meanwhile, see what happens when you give the people around you an A, not as a judgement, but like a gift.Eventually a huge warehouse was located, and forty buses were hired to transport the children.Chairs had to be brought in, a stage and a platform for television cameras built, and lighting and a sound system installed.The £2,000 price tag was simply too steep on top of all the other costs, which had now escalated beyond anything they had planned for.But I knew that without that view, half the meaning and interest of the event would be lost.I paid for it myself, and raised £10,000 from the Westminster Bank for the filming.The youngsters greeted my return with wild enthusiasm, assuring me that the first occasion had not been such a failure after all.Several members of the Philharmonia, who had assumed that the children would be inattentive and restless, looked quite perplexed and became genuinely interested in what I could possibly have done the last time to cause this tumultuous reception.The secret was, I believe, that I genuinely wanted to share the music with the children, and I trusted their ability to respond to it and to be partners with me in our whole undertaking.I began by having the Philharmonia’s cellos play eight bars of a gently undulating accompanying figure.Turning around to the young people, I asked, How many of you heard the cellos? Naturally, everybody raised his hand.Again a show of hands revealed that everybody could hear the sound of two voices together.Now I asked the audience to listen to the cellos and violas playing the same eight bars, with the added sound of a bassoon and a clarinet playing intermittent short leaps, one octave apart.Raised hands indicated that hearing four separate voices simultaneously held no difficulty for the Eastlea students.Returning to the beginning of the passage once more, we added the soulful, somber song of the double basses, easy to detect in the dark lower register.All that remained to add were two voices, the second violins and the first violins.When the second violins entered to play their part, I asked the eager listeners for their remarks.They are too loud, shouted back a confident youngster.Once these six voices were revealed in perfect balance, I predicted to the children that the first violins would play too loud, because they think they’re so important! Sure enough, despite the warning, their entrance blurred the carefully built clarity of the other six voices.The youngsters let them know that all was not well.Goaded by this challenge, the Philharmonia firsts added their running figuration to the texture at an exquisitely delicate dynamic level, and miraculously, all seven voices emerged in clear relief, each one held in effective balance with the other six.The silence in that huge warehouse was profound, as each child strained to hear everything Beethoven had to say.How many of you could hear seven voices? At least nine hundred hands waved high in the air.Now wait a minute, I thought to myself, as I looked out over the sea of hands, who would have predicted this? But then, who could have predicted any of this—the sponsors, teachers, children, politicians, film crews, musicians—all gathered together to celebrate the indomitability of the human spirit, all highly focused, engaged, and enrolled in the possibility of people succeeding together.The unselfconscious reaction to the music he exhibited in his seat did not prepare me for the highly energetic, utterly convincing conducting he displayed on the podium.For a minute and a half on the podium, this young man was a dynamic artistic force with powerful gestures and an ecstatic countenance.A few moments later, he was a small child again, covering his face in embarrassment as his schoolmates roared and stamped their excited response.And that night, on the ten o’clock news, all of Britain saw Anthony conducting the Philharmonia in the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth.Michael Rawlings, president of Pizza Hut in America, whose managers I was to address the following month, had eighty pizzas delivered to the Hall.We all saw a short film of the previous week’s performance.Now youngsters from Eastlea moved into the hall to hear the preconcert talk.I then spoke for a full fifty minutes, explaining our unusual approach to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and comparing it with performance traditions.Refreshing the audience’s memory of the story, I played parts of Strauss’s Don Quixote on the piano to show how skillfully the composer had turned the complex and moving tale into music.Was that the concert, Miss? Anthony asked his teacher after my presentation, reminding us how unfamiliar to him were all aspects of this venture.For the concert itself, the two hundred Eastlea students were placed behind the stage in the prominent seats usually occupied by the chorus, so they would be close to the action.I cannot deny that I had been worried that they might fidget and distract the audience, especially since by the time the concert started they had already been in the hall for over two hours.But they sat motionless and apparently riveted throughout Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, as well as through the long and quite taxing tone poem of Strauss.Could we really know what was going on in the minds of those children?Was fear of punishment the true source of their angelic behavior?Were they really listening to the music, or were they being merely dutiful?I stole a glance at Anthony, sitting high on the risers behind the brass section, at the very moment that the shattering burst of light emerges out of the darkness into the glorious sunlight of the last movement of the Fifth.Would he recognize it?To think that all of this occurred after Arthur Andersen initially turned us down in our request for the sponsorship of a single Philharmonia concert!
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