Beautiful Music and Fireworks

Last night I played in the Tehachapi Symphony Orchestra's annual July 4th concert. After the concert we sat on the grass of the football field where we were playing and watched the fireworks. It was a very good day.

This concert is the one where we play "light" music: movies scores, musical scores, lighter classical music. This time it was heavier. We even played some Wagner. That made me happy. While some film scores are good, I don't care for them as much, and I detest musicals. Detest and Abhor. I was lucky this time. The only musical score we played was South Pacific, a really old and obscure musical that hardly anyone in the orchestra had heard about. Last night we played some good pieces, my favorite of which is Berlioz's Marche Hongroise. This piece is a delight to play. It has stormy, Berlioz-esque passages, followed by light, airy passages.

We also played Bizet's Carmen Suite, which is just pure delight, and Bach's Little Fugue in G minor, as well as a few others and some Sousa. We almost played Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, but it didn't come together in time. It was very disappointing. That piece is simply wonderful. It sounds good on all sorts of instruments, as well, especially the classical guitar.

Being away at college, I always forget how much I love playing in the orchestra. For a volunteer orchestra, the TSO is very good. And we have a superb director. He's no Barenboim or Karejan, but he's very good. And he always tells jokes. I think all directors should tell jokes. Whenever I come home in the summer and play for the July 4th concert life just gets so much better. Last night was no different. During a long rest in one piece, I began to reflect on how wonderful it is to be part of an orchestra. (I even started writing a story about it, which will come later.) I look around at my fellow musicians. Some of them do it because they are paid to do it. Some of them do it because they have nothing better to do, and some of them, like me, do it for no other reason than it is art. It would be nice to be paid for it, but I don't really care about the money. I do it simply because to be a part of this, this grand experience of recreating beauty, is worth more than all the wealth of the world. I work so hard, suffer through those hard, stratospheric passages simply so that beauty might be incarnated one more time. With my instrument I am bringing beauty to life, embodying the music that pours from the soul of the composer. The music is ephemeral, yet it is real. It is a part of that which we cannot see, cannot touch, but is there all the same, real and somehow tangible. And I am recreating it.

I always think how wonderful it must be to be an orchestra director. The director does not recreate the music himself; he does not play an instrument as we in the orchestra do. Yet he plays an instrument, and that instrument is his orchestra. With the movements of his hands, the director draws the music out of fifty different instruments, making them into a finely organized whole. A flick of his hand brings the trumpets in. With a pull of his hand, the music swells into a crescendo; he lets go and the music dies away into a whisper. What power he has! And he does not play a single note.

I am proud to be a member of the orchestra. That feeling of pride always increases when Dr. Newby steps onto the stage and smiles at us. That smile says, "We have worked together, struggled together, to make something beautiful come alive. I am proud of you." It does not get any better than that. And it does not get any better than the last movement of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.