I was at a concert last night in the Royal Festival Hall. It was Messaien’s Turangalila symphony, one of the longest and loudest symphonies you could come across, a piece that is ecstatic, rhythmically-driven, very loud, relentless, with an enormous percussion and brass section, a piano, a celesta, various glockespiels and xylophones and an ondes martenot, a weird electronic instrument which gives out sounds as if from a1950s sci-fi film and lasting about an hour and a half. I was sitting on the side but close enough to the massive orchestra and also with a side view of the main bulk of the stalls. Halfway through one of the loudest movements I heard this tormented death rattle come form the centre of the audience. When I looked across I saw a man of a certain age with his head thrown back letting out what seemed to be his last gasp. Over the next ten minutes concert hall assistants, security men and finally paramedics arrived and he was eventually taken away, fortunately still alive, in a wheelchair. Throughout all of this the relentless concert went on.
Before the incident I had been thinking about the music. Did it represent our reality? Or would a more domestic modest texture best reproduce the everyday? The soundtrack to the life and death moment was rather effective, though. Some moments are pretty ecstatic and life-affirming or life-destroying. It’s just that they are few and far between or that we don’t face them. Still, he did not die, so we can all get back to the domestic now.
peoplearerubbish 