Extreme Experiences

[jayne lee wilson]

In November 2003, I attended a performance of Mahler's 6th Symphony in Liverpool with the RLPO conducted by Gerard Schwarz. I travelled to the hall thinking, well, this is very familiar, but I can glory in the sheer power of it...

By the end of the 1st movement I was - unexpectedly - very caught up in the drama, I recall whispering to my companion, "wow!, wow!"

I sensed something amiss during the andante - a movement always very much a part of me... my heart was beating very fast, and each agonised twist in the movement's progressions (you know the ones!) made things even more tense. I began to feel I understood every bar of this music far too well, far too intensely. So to the finale... the sense of foreboding, the dread, the crushing darkness of the introduction was terrible - quite overwhelming. My heart was beating so fast I could scarcely feel the separate beats, I felt sick and dizzy - "don't feel too well..." I muttered to my friend, and - left the hall, to sit gloomily in the bar, where I soon recovered, but didn't go back in. I just made out dimly, the hammer blows, and began to feel awful misgivings...

In Sainsburys car park the next day - "back to life, back to reality" - I burst into tears of bitter regret, and although the performance was repeated the following day I didn't dare to go back. But I came to love the piece even more through listening at home. I eventually had a grand rapprochement with the 6th in 2010, with Petrenko, back in the same position in the same hall. That too - the whole day - was a remarkable experience, but it's also another story!

Others here must have had strange, intense, perhaps similar experiences...
So tell us your stories of the extreme, bizarre, odd or even funny things you've seen or experienced yourself at live concerts...

[gurnemanz]

Not so bizarre but I remember sitting right in the front row (not usually my favourite position) for Bruckner's Sixth with Masur and the Gewandhaus in Leipzig in the early Seventies. I didn't know the symphony at all at the time and felt almost physically overpowered by the experience, forced back into my seat as if by G-force and unable to move.

[MrGongGong]

I sensed something amiss during the andante - a movement always very much a part of me... my heart was beating very fast, and each agonised twist in the movement's progressions (you know the ones!) made things even more tense. I began to feel I understood every bar of this music far too well, far too intensely. So to the finale... the sense of foreboding, the dread, the crushing darkness of the introduction was terrible - quite overwhelming..

Do you think that these linguistic ideas are really in the music ? or something imposed upon it ?

I'm not dismissing your experience or interpretation in any way, just interested in how we ascribe non sonic things to musical experience and how those are far from the universal experiences that we often think. A cursory glance at funeral musics of the world will show how radically different they sound etc

I guess this goes back to the "is music ever about anything ?" question

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Do you think that these linguistic ideas are really in the music ? or something imposed upon it ?

I think such linguistic references are a "transcription" rather than an "imposition", MrGG - the exact effect(s) a performance has on us can only be expressed to others through the parallel medium of words. And, because they're "parallel", exact corelations always stay apart from each other and never "meet": I think David Owen Norris referred to this in this morning's BaL when he mentioned Chopin's dislike of "picturesque" descriptions of his Music, but would occasionally resort to these to help his students get closer to the "affekt" he expected from a piece. It's a useful but ultimately inadequate "hook".

I don't know how to express the effect Ferneyhough's Sixth String Quartet had on me when when I first heard it at Huddersfield; the nosebleed that I had in its final pages probably best communicated the "coiled spring" tension and excitement I enjoyed far more eloquently than the words "coiled-spring tension and excitement"!

[teamsaint]

a couple of rather low level points.

Even a single note played in a particular way can change your view on a piece of music....has certainly happened to me.

Second, if you want an extreme experience......i have seen Metal band Machine Head....not really through choice !!
Startlingly extreme and impressive, if just for sheer intensity.

[Petrushka]

One of my very first live Mahler performances was LSO/Abbado in Mahler 6, March 21 1978, at the RFH and I nearly needed an ambulance to take me home.

However, my extreme experience is one I've mentioned on here before. I was at a 1998 Prom in which Gergiev conducted the Shostakovich 'Leningrad' and I was seated in 'O' stalls in one of those front row seats which is literally on the stage. So intense and overwhelming was the massive climax to the first movement that I was completely caught up in it. Cueing in the cellos and double basses Gergiev seemed to be pointing direct at me. It was the most extraordinary and unique experience I've had in the concert hall, impossible to describe in words. I was caught up in a typhoon, whipped up into the roof and thrown down again, shattered beyond words.

[Richard Tarleton]

Jayne, you sound as if you were unconsciously having an Alma Mahler moment - see p. 59 of her memoir which I've recently mentioned in the What are you reading now thread.

Bizarre, odd, and funny in a macabre sort of way. In the 1990s my wife and I went to a piano recital in Swansea's Brangwyn Hall, where we've been to many great concerts and recitals. It was a Polish pianist of whom I had not heard - it was the programme he was playing that swung it, ranging from my two favourite Scarlatti sonatas, through Chopin Moments Musicaux, some Liszt and finally Brahms, so we took a chance.

When we got there the piano was on the "side stage" - half way along the long side of the hall. The seats were ranged from behind the pianist to level with the piano stool, but none past it. We discovered that out numbered seats were at opposite ends of one row. When I asked an usher what on earth was going on, he replied the pianist insisted on not having audience in his sightline, so they'd had top move all the seats at the last moment, messing up the seat numbering. We just sat on two adjacent seats, and told everyone who came later to move along one.

The programme was divided into three sections, and we were asked not to applaud pieces or groups of pieces, but only at the end of each section. It was obvious from the opening bars of K380 that the pianist was a charlatan. We sat through the first break, hoping it would get better. It didn't. Part way through the second group, the most appalling outbreak of bronchial coughing broke out behind us. I turned to glare, only to see an old lady being bundled out. We left at the next break - I paused for a visit to the loo, where two people were saying how lovely it was. As we left, the old lady was being bundled into an ambulance. Call me callous, but it seemed an entirely appropriate end to a bizarre experience.

When I rang to complain about the recital, an official acknowledged that they had been conned. I have not heard of the pianist, whose name I have long since forgotten, since.

[Serial_Apologist]

Do you think that these linguistic ideas are really in the music ? or something imposed upon it ?

Whew - that's a real corker you've bowled there, GG!

I'm not dismissing your experience or interpretation in any way, just interested in how we ascribe non sonic things to musical experience and how those are far from the universal experiences that we often think. A cursory glance at funeral musics of the world will show how radically different they sound etc

Isn't what some would describe as an inner capacity, (which you might describe as an inner infirmity?), to "identify" with a specific musical idiom to the point of being "overwhelmed", "surrendered", "alienated" etc., indicative of some deep correspondence between the individual aculturated to that idiom by virtue of proximity and familiarisation, and the idiom itself? If so, this would, I venture, suggest that the capacity for such music to elicit such reactions - indeed, any kind of reaction - resides as much within the music as it does in the fortunate recipient. If so it goes some way to explaining why Schoenberg's musical advances uncovered possibilities intrinsic to where music was "at" - indeed, possibilities that Mahler and Strauss shied away from investigating further. It maybe helps explain why, as Elliott Carter has said, it should be easier to identify with contemporary music than with that of the past. Post-feminist sensibility makes it hard to identify with those girls swooning over Mr Darcy!

This is not to place some value judgement on the fact that I, as a product of this particular culture, responded in the manner I did on first hearing Region IV from Hymnen, and Penderecki's Dies Irae, i.e. by rushing terrified from the room, or by breaking down in tears each time I hear the ending of Strauss's Metamorphosen, whereas my responses to eg Tibetan fuineral music may not be of comparable intensity. I would argue that art and responses to it are relative to stage of historical and social context - the latter being "encoded" in the art rather in the way we respond aesthetically and emotionally to landscapes: all landscapes are human-made and, like Wagner, contain all sorts of things that didn't ought maybe to be there, such as giant hogweed, yet we still respond "naturally", with tears, joy or horror, ideas being inextricable from what we feel, yes, but we can't exclude the possibility that our feelings express a loss of connectedness the landscape stands for: the nature we overlook may be red in tooth and claw, but it also evolved the human capacity for reason.

I guess this goes back to the "is music ever about anything ?" question

Yes, it is as "about" things as anything seen, heard, smelt or felt through the "maya" of language(s) cannot help but be "about" "some" "thing". In order not to be about anything would require the mental judo of thinking thinking into not-thinking, decribed to the point of verbal exhaustion by the best writers on mysticism, by Wittgenstein at the end of Tractatus, and perhaps best by Cage in Silence, when he concludes, the only "think" one can do is "suddenly listen".

As to the conundrum as to whether some musics, rather than others, are intrinsically more capable of re-producing a wider range of composerly feelings in the listener than others, this is probably best left to recipients to say, and in my case open myself out to the widest possible range of musics.

[jayne lee wilson]

Do you think that these linguistic ideas are really in the music ? or something imposed upon it ?

I'm not dismissing your experience or interpretation in any way, just interested in how we ascribe non sonic things to musical experience and how those are far from the universal experiences that we often think. A cursory glance at funeral musics of the world will show how radically different they sound etc

I guess this goes back to the "is music ever about anything ?" question

Not so much "linguistic ideas" but, as fhg and SA say, an attempt at (necessarily anecdotal) "transcription" which involves among many things the historically and culturally "encoded" feelings, ideas and associations layered through an artwork - that you respond to (with your own subconscious and conscious history) with inescapable immediacy, there before the phenomenon.

My almost over-familiarity with the 6th beforehand probably led me to lower my guard, making the welling-up of feelings unbearably intense, seeming to come from deeper levels, beyond my conscious reach or control.

Since it's at least five minutes since I last quoted it, here it is again -

"Within this principle of blemished air
We hear a God who isn't there"
(Peter Porter)

So we move, from the sheer pleasure of sound, and the emotional waves it creates, to the structures and meanings we impose upon it or claim to hear in the composer's creations, or intentions (stated or not)...
But isn't it those vivid, immediate, spontaneous and rarest reactions that we value most? Or at least remember most?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

It's wonderful when this happens. I had such an experience last weekend at the Bridgewater Hall, referred to in another thread.

[EdgeleyRob]

Nothing as extreme as your Mahler 6 Jayne, but there have been certain occasions over the years at concerts where I've felt overwhelmed, almost to the point of a sort of panic attack type feeling (not sure how else to describe it).
I remember seeing Alfred Brendel playing the Schubert G Major D894 as part of a recital in Manchester a few years ago.I was so emotionally drained by the experience I had to 'get my head together' for quite a while before attempting to drive home.
There have been other occasions too.
My wife thought I was just having a funny turn (maybe I was!).