He Gets It

The kids’ High School music department gave a performance at Boston Symphony Hall last night.  It was magic.  Talk about a once in a lifetime opportunity.  My step daughter is a soprano in the school chorus, and my step son is a percussionist in the concert band.

The concert opened with the chorus.  Their first piece was mostly just intertwined counter melodies.  Not a lot of harmony.  Not a lot of individual voices blending together.  In other words, it didn’t really take advantage of the space.  The second piece was big blocks of harmony.  Perfect.  All of those voices working together to project across the huge hall.  No mics, no amps, no sound reinforcement at all.  Just the perfect concert hall.  Everyone could hear every nuance as the voices filled the space.  I said to my wife, after the chorus finished, that is what music should sound like.  It was awesome.

It was awesome, but it didn’t quite reach the full potential.  You need a the band for that.  You need a big brass section to blow the doors off the place.  The room was so alive, it just sounded amazing.  Every note from every instrument filled the entire space.  It is the sound that everyone dreams of.

I had a moment during the concert band performance where I reverted back to my audio engineering days.  I thought of all of the racks of gear we had at Northeast Broadcast School, and all of the pieces of gear I bought to help me mix off of my old 8-track, and all of the plug ins in GarageBand.  You are always looking for the perfect reverb sound.  Springs and plates and rooms and halls and in some cases airplane hangers.  Digital representations of the natural echoes in all sorts of environments.  They can sound good, but they never ever sound good enough and even when you spend thousands of dollars, it never really sounds real.  The concert band was playing a piece that had a lot of loud stops and starts.  Every time they stopped with a bang, there was a second or two when the sound reverberated throughout the room.  After one stop I actually laughed out loud.  Jen thought there was something wrong.  There wasn’t.  It was just the perfect sound.  It wasn’t A sound, it was THE sound.  It was the sound everyone is trying to reproduce though no one ever gets it right.  The kids both got it last night.  Acoustic perfection.

After the concert was over we were out in the lobby.  I said to my step son, do you get it?  He said, Yes.  I didn’t have to explain what I was talking about, he just new.  He now gets what it’s like to perform in a real concert hall as opposed to an auditorium.  I am so happy the two of them had this opportunity.  I’m even more happy that they enjoyed it as much as they did.  They both clearly had a blast and they both did a fantastic job.  I hope this is something that sticks with them forever.