[Trombone-l] An Aviary Gone Mad.

[Bill Dinwiddie]

>From the NY Times:

RIVER FOREST, Ill., Oct. 1 - It was like an aviary gone mad.

Scores of cellular phones trilled and twittered, beeped and burbled all at 
once inside a concert auditorium in this community outside Chicago. The 
orchestra onstage was unfazed. The composer was delighted.
On Sunday, in a perverse commentary on the scourge of modern concert halls, 
the Chicago Sinfonietta played the world premiere of the Concertino for 
Cellular Phones and Symphony Orchestra by David N. Baker, a professor of 
music at Indiana University and a prolific composer.

Paul Freeman, the group's music director, told the audience beforehand, 
"This is a great moment in history, when we can say to you, 'Ladies and 
gentlemen, turn on your cellphones.' "

A device similar to a traffic light signaled the audience members to 
activate their rings - red for the balcony, green for the orchestra seats - 
at various points in the piece. An assistant conductor, Terrance Gray, 
followed the score and activated the lights.

Four amplified mobile phones were onstage. One, operated by a teaching 
assistant at Indiana, Aaron Vandermeer, was programmed with Mr. Baker's main 
tune and well-known classical themes like the "William Tell" gallop and a 
motif from the last movement of Brahms's Symphony No. 4. The other three 
cellphonists onstage played random rings, sometimes timed to destroy a 
pastoral melody here or there.

Mr. Freeman held a brief practice session before the downbeat. "You may use 
as much imagination or as little as you like," he said.

"We want to be very disciplined about this," he added. "You are really not 
to perform until you see your light." The rehearsal was sloppy: many rings 
continued past the light.

The creators of the performance worried that people would not know how to 
prompt their ring tones. (Mr. Baker's wife had showed him how.) So the 
orchestra directions to its subscribers by e-mail and put an insert in the 
program. Many in the audience were rehearsing before the concert, staring 
intently at their phones, cocking their heads and punching buttons.

During the performance, some in the audience held up their phones and waved 
them back and forth, as if to make themselves heard. Little squares of light 
from the phone screens studded the hall at Dominican University, one of the 
homes of the Sinfonietta. But the audience cellphonists seemed to lose steam 
toward the end of the piece, and the orchestra occasionally drowned out 
their rings. Organizers hoped that the sound would be better the next night, 
at Orchestra Hall in Chicago.

The score was filled with classical tunes suggested by a ring-tone Web site, 
including fragments from Strauss's "Don Juan," Bartok's "Concerto for 
Orchestra," a Brahms symphony and a snippet of "Scheherazade" by 
Rimsky-Korsakov. At one point, Mr. Baker turned the tables. Oboes and flutes 
imitated a cell ring. The tuba groaned with irritation.

Seriousness lay beneath the frivolity. The Sinfonietta, which will play nine 
concerts this season and has a $2 million budget, is a small, worthy 
orchestra struggling for notice in a city with big-time competition. It says 
its mission is "musical excellence through diversity" and calls itself the 
country's most racially diverse orchestra.

"The key is to differentiate ourselves in the market in general," said Jim 
Hirsch, the orchestra's executive director (and a stage cellphone performer 
on Sunday). So the orchestra, which is starting its 20th season, specializes 
in unusual programs, including concertos incorporating tap dance, steel pans 
and maracas.

The cellphone piece had a certain artistic seriousness of purpose, too.

"What I was really thinking was, chaos versus organization," Mr. Baker said. 
"But more importantly, how do you change somebody's listening apparatus by 
what's going on around them?"

Mr. Freeman put the work in the context of music with random elements, like 
John Cage's "Imaginary Landscape No. 4" for 12 radios, and pieces by Charles 
Ives that have unrelated passages running simultaneously.

Mr. Freeman said he had gotten the idea for the composition while sitting in 
an airport in Prague, where he is chief conductor of the Czech National 
Symphony Orchestra (which is expected to perform the piece in December). 
About 100 people were there, most of them talking on cellphones.

"I thought, 'Darn, if you can't beat them, join them,' " Mr. Freeman said. 
He approached several composers, including Mr. Baker, 74, who is also 
director of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra.

"My first inclination was to ask him what he was smoking," Mr. Baker said. 
But the idea appealed to him. He struggled for five weeks on how to 
reconcile diametrically opposed elements - an orchestra and cellphones - and 
came up with the idea of having onstage cellphones with his own themes, and 
a division of phones in the hall.

But the audience participation was key. "It was a way of giving people 
control at a concert," he said. "I'm hoping people will see the comedic 
element, but more importantly, that maybe you can have fun at a symphony 
concert." The piece was also a recognition that cellphones "are not going to 
go away," he said.

The audience buzzed after the concert. "I made history!" said one boy. A 
woman said, "It's a commentary on our modern life." A man said, "All it 
takes is practice." Mr. Baker called the performance a success and said the 
best thing about it was that people were excited to take part.

But there are limits to such pieces, he had said earlier, recounting that he 
had told Mr. Freeman, "If you call me and ask me to do something with 
flushed toilets, count me out."