On 10 Apr 2007 at 20:11, John Howell wrote: > At 5:50 PM -0400 4/10/07, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > >And even that doesn't seem to me to be that much of an issue. Does a > >member of a major orchestra really arrive at rehearsal with not even > >5 minutes to spare before getting ready for the baton to be raised? > > Hi, David. The members of a major orchestra routinely show up ON THE > PREMISES 30 minutes before call time, are unpacked and on stage to > warm up 15 minutes before, and are already tuned and ready to start 5 > minutes before.
This is not any different from my viol consort. We meet at 7pm and start rehearsing at 7:30. But one can be a little bit late and still be in place, tuned up and ready to go by 7:30pm. Two minutes is not going to make a difference to the group at all. > NO professional is going to piss off a conductor or > an orchestra manager by being late. It's just part of professional > protocol, otherwise stated as "If you're early you're on time, and if > you're on time you're late!" And professional conductors show respect > for their union musicians by starting rehearsal as the second hand > passes the 12, and ending rehearsal the same, as Robert Shaw always > did. > > In other words, it may not be a 9 to 5 job, but a team player is on > just as tight a schedule as a customer service rep, even though it > might LOOK as if she has plenty of time. But surely if you're using public transportation and 30 minutes before rehearsl is your on-time point, you'd make sure you left to allow enough time for transportation delays so that you'd often arrive 10-15 minutes earlier than that. In the DC Metro case, the station was the *destination* for most of the people passing through -- they were only steps away from their final destination, though perhaps some had to transfer to a bus. The point is that surely out of 1,097 people, surely some significant number of them was almost at their final destination, and had also left home early enough that they had the few minutes to spare that it would take to stop and "smell the roses" for 2 or 3 minutes. > >But it seems to me that the law of averages ought to mean that out of > >1,097 people there ought to be more than a few dozen who both > >appreciate it and are in a position to express that appreciation. > >What surprises me is how incredibly few those who liked it and showed > >it actually were. > > I would put it differently. Since the incidence of attraction was NOT > describable by a bell-curve, but was strongly biased toward > indifference, this was NOT an example of "randomly normal human > activity" and not subject to standard statistical analyses, which > require a randomly chosen set of subjects. Wrong hypothesis for the > experiment, wrong tool to use for analysis, and very poor experimental > design, whatever the excuses for it happened to be. Which is pretty > much what people have been saying, in different words. Well, I don't think you can say that. We know what people *did*, but we don't know under what conditions they made the decisions that did. Perhaps 50% of them had 2-3 minutes to spare, but of those 50% only 7 stopped and listened for even 2-3 minutes. Tonight I had the experience of hearing a musician in the subway whose music making I *hate*. I've heard him many times (he plays often in the passageways at the south end of the W. 4th station), and he is just PHENOMENALLY UNMUSICAL. This was after, hile waiting on the platform at 42nd Street this evening, I'd heard an alto saxophonist. At first I thought "wow! what a beautiful sound!" The sound *was* beautiful, very round and clean and pure, and with a very elegant jazz-style inegal (the kind the Baroque players I play with just don't *get*). But after listening a while, I realized he/she (I couldn't see the player -- it was somewhere in the station that I couldn't see) had *no* sense of harmony whatsoever. There was the *appearance* of harmony, with lots of ornamental notes applied to whatever melody was being played, but the implied harmony beneath it was just completely incoherent, with no direction or progression whatsoever. It was very annoying to hear such fine tone and technique and basic musicality thrown away on harmonically incoherent playing. It reminded me of the kind of aimless Chopin-style improvizations I used to play for hours at the piano when I was 14. Anyway, when I encountered the flute player on the way home I thought about the Joshua Bell thing and wondered if I should *tell* him that I hated his playing. I didn't. :) -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
