Hrm. Went to see a cello band tonight. It wasn’t my scene. They were clever, and my nerdy heart thrilled to hear arrangements of the X Files theme song mashed up with Halloween’s movie theme and Mission Impossible’s them song crossed with the Rebel Suite from Star Wars crossed with Take 5 – but it was kind of brutal sitting through an unpassionate performance of passionate music.
Oh – and whatever pickup was on one of the cellos was just inexcusable. For a show in which every head in the house probably dropped about $40+ dollars I expected it more. The place was pretty well packed and everyone walking out was just thrilled. I feel like it was just me and Kristen who felt their intonation was completely lacking, their performance was mediocre and that the quality of the sound was subpar.
Judgy, judgy, judgy – but it can really ruin my enjoyment of a show when it doesn’t seem like the performers are enjoying themselves. The encore was a “correct” version of the Game of Thrones title theme (which I think all cellists nowadays are REQUIRED to learn, but they are NOT required to PERFORM it!) and what might as well have been a Muzak version of a radio pop tune… not nearly as interesting as the Eliot Smith covers they’d been playing all night – just…. I don’t know, they should’ve been in the background at a wedding reception.
Judgy judgy judgy. My friend Gordon Nash wrote an intense and beautiful essay about his support of the music scene – and that the root of his support was his battle against the world’s Love of mediocrity. And tonight was just all about the celebration of that Love. I’m being harsh – hyper-critical – but damn it the best thing they played the whole night was an original piece by one of the performers on the stage, but they brushed past it and got back to their “hits”… i.e. arrangements of other people’s interpretations of other composer’s music.
Headed home under glowering clouds listening to an Alice in Chains that made me think of low-hanging, slate clouds and suicide back in high school. It fits the mood today. It was the sonic equivalent of the solemn, stark and self-destructive beauty in Anselm Kiefer’s works and I long to just find dying fields broken by flat grey rectangular pools, open graves by the thousand reflecting the poisoned sky.
