art in the park

There is something quite decadent about hearing live music outdoors: sun on your face, feet reaching for grass, perhaps a picnic, and all accompanied by music. I had nearly forgotten these delights, but my memory was refreshed this past Sunday at a free concert given by the San Francisco Symphony in Dolores Park.

It had been a long time since I'd listened to a symphony--perhaps five years or more, truth be told. I attend many musical performances, but lately I've been more inclined to see bands that feature a lead singer sporting a ripped t-shirt than one in which the musicians wear tuxedos. This is not always the way things were. As a child, music was intermingled with almost everything I did. My father was a band director at a small high school in Montana and I attended every performance, whether it was a classical concert or the pep band playing snippets of songs during time-outs at a basketball game. As I grew, I played the piano under the tutelage of my father, learned the trombone and the euphonium, and eventually played in the symphony orchestra in my hometown. But as childhood loves tend to do, these fell away as life crowded in.

Here I was listening to a trumpet soloist (Alison Balsom--check her out here)--the instrument my father and sister both played--backed by a symphony, for the first time in my recent memory. I had been away from this world for so long, but the orchestra's affect on me, however, was familiar: I got lost in the music. The orchestra started in on Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite and even the picnicking groups chatting around me failed to distract from the music. What I began to think about was the way a person can lose themselves in art--in music, a painting, a poem, performance, or even a finely-prepared meal--and what value that holds.

At the end of the concert, people stood on their blankets and while the conductor bowed and then swept his hand back to the orchestra, people clapped. And clapped. And while some concert-goers corked their leftover wine and slipped on shoes, many of us simply stood and clapped. The applause lasted for so long that I was sure there must be an encore around the corner, but the conductor only came back and bowed a last time before leaving the stage. This was the longest-running applause I have ever experienced at a symphony orchestra concert, the length perhaps only rivaled by the applause of a crowd after an especially raucous rock show. These people were appreciative. And moved.

I'm not planning to get into the age-old question of what value is art. I'm not nearly academically minded enough to attempt that. But it's something I like to think about and it's something that has certainly been written about since we started calling art, art. What does it all mean?

It made me think of something Susan Sontag wrote about art in her essay, "Against Interpretation." She says that the best critics of art are those who "reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking it up." And that's exactly what this concert did for me: it let me experience the sensuality of a piccolo running through a string of high notes, french horns' regal sound, the bounce of a violin's string when it's plucked. I need to slow down more, to look at the sensuousness of art, to really experience it. In a world where life is accelerating at a frightening pace, where people work more than they play--this call for slowing down and paying heed to those things we pass is apt. This blog, then, is my attempt to do just that: to take Sontag's advice and "learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more."