Music II

Went to a concert at an art museum last night, with Alpha and the friend we go to interesting concerts with. It was the second concert in a row for us where a guy played a conch shell. He also played a tuba and a cimbasso, which I don’t know about you but I don’t see one every day.

When we got there, there was a guy loitering in front of the museum. He was a barefoot white guy with dreadlocks and old jeans etc, and I jokingly said to Alpha, “there’s the tuba player,” because we had been wondering what to wear to the concert – casual, suit, something in between? We went with jeans, finally, because it was not only tuba, it was also electronic music (it was a tuba/electronic duo experiment) and after all in an art museum and not a concert hall.

We took our seats and the musicians walked in and I had been right about the tuba player. He played something, the electronics guy analyzed the rhythm and added a percussion track and doodled around and this went on for an hour or so.

Blat-blat-blat. Twinky-twinky-doing-doing. Click-click-click. Cool stereo effect with ping-pong-ball sounds clicking from speaker to speaker. Hoo-hoo-hoo (beer bottle). Ornk-ornk-ornk (conch shell).

A few people walked out at various points in the concert. A guy sitting in front of me grooved to the music and frowned a superior frown everytime someone left. Philistine luzer squares.

Coincidentally, in the room were works by an Austrian artist who specialized in painting scribbles over photographs. I once thought, dude, I could do that, and to prove it took a photograph and scribbled over it; turned out I could in fact not do it, at least not the way he did. So, my conclusion, he was a genuine artist; so I am careful not to let myself think things like, you know, “my kid could do that.”

So what I did instead was think, why is it always the nice guys who get assassinated? Like Gandhi, or that Catholic priest recently who had been working on behalf of ecumenical reconciliation? Why not an artistic fraud? I scanned the crowd for signs of a knife but no dice. I suppose it’s too hard to know with certainty, deep down, on the spur of the moment, if maybe you just aren’t getting it.

After the concert, the two musicians hugged each other and grinned as if to say, wasn’t that a great success. The guy with the dreads said CDs were for sale.

Oh, and there was a man with a big video camera taping the show, and a hottish blonde woman in a white outfit and white high-heeled track shoes with him with sort of a TV reporter look to her. They had a little tv monitor with them that they could watch what they filmed on.

The show was organized, I suppose, and introduced by the son of the man who owns the museum, or at least the art in the museum. He may be a respected expert on electronic music. At any rate, he has a sweet gig, putting on electronic music concerts in his dad’s art museum.

His dad came to the show at the end, sat in the front row, impeccable in a grey suit.

2 responses to “Music II

  1. Suzette

    Have you ever heard the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra?

  2. mig

    We tried to once, but they wouldn’t lettuce in.