Lingering Associations

A while back, Sarah was writing about earworms and the havoc they can wreak among musicians, and this week, I'm experiencing what you might call an extracurricular variation on the tune that gets stuck in your head. It's the tune that triggers a memory so sharp that you can't help but think of it every time the tune is played. This happens to orchestra musicians all the time, since we play many pieces of standard repertoire dozens, even hundreds of times over the course of our careers. Sometimes, the memory is highly personal, but in an orchestra, it's more often communal, something specific that happened at a certain moment of a certain performance that everyone will remember for the rest of their lives.

One example from the Minnesota Orchestra's recent history is the end of the Dvorak cello concerto. Back in 2000, when I was new in the orchestra, we played a young people's concert called "Dvorak's Discovery," in which a young boy somehow meets Dvorak and learns about his life. It was a somewhat corny show, though effective, and at one point, as Dvorak (who was played by veteran Twin Cities actor Steve Yoakam) was talking about his own childhood, the orchestra began to play the end of the cello concerto at a murmur underneath the speech. At one particularly peaceful moment in the music, Dvorak mentioned that he worked in his father's sausage factory as a child, then turned to his young friend and asked, "Do you like sausage?" Ever since, we can't make it through a rehearsal of that concerto without at least ten people asking their stand partners if they like sausage.

This week, the memory is visual, and far more recent in vintage, and it comes in the second movement of Scheherezade, which is the featured work on our season finale. Earlier this season (the same week as our second set of Inside the Classics concerts, in fact) we played the entire piece on another young people's program, with dancers from several local companies fleshing out the story behind the music for the kids. The choreography was very kid-friendly and acrobatic, and one move has managed to permanently invade my personal playback of the music. In the middle of the second movement, as the music swirls around in a lilting two-count, the dancers, who had been more or less lining up and moving in unison, suddenly broke free of each other in an instant and began bouncing like rag dolls around the stage, looking for all the world like a bunch of Dr. Seuss characters whose heads had just come unglued from their shoulders. By the last show, a number of us were subtly mimicking the dancers from within the orchestra, and this week, as we approached that same moment in the music, I felt my shoulders involuntarily dip and my head loll, and I heard my friend Jen Strom stifle a giggle behind me. I honestly don't know how I'm going to keep from doing it again in the concerts.

I've got another great story of a musical moment forever sullied and preserved in Minnesota Orchestra history, but it takes a while to tell, so I'll save it for my next post sometime this weekend...