Ask An Expert: Climate Control

Regular commenter Emily Kroeck asked a good question about Sarah's last post, so I thought we might as well make it a tour edition of Ask An Expert. Emily asks:

Q: How is instrument temperature and humidity controlled on tours where flying is involved? I'm particularly curious about the big and numerous instruments like basses and cellos. Do musicians with smaller instruments carry them on in flight, or is every instrument stored in one temperature-controlled parallel universe that the stage crew then taps into at each destination? Also, does [the orchestra] bring along all of its own instruments or do you borrow some from host venues (I'm thinking of percussion instruments?)

Long before we ever leave on tour, our staff distributes to each musician a questionnaire on which we must, among other things, declare whether each of us will be hand-carrying our instrument from city to city, or placing it in the care of our crew, which has dozens of specially designed and built trunks ready to accommodate them. For those who play instruments too large to carry onto planes, the answer is obvious, but for those of us who play smaller instruments, it's a tough call. The downside of "trunking" your instrument is that you usually won't have access to it between concerts, leaving you only an hour or two of warm-up time to get reacquainted each night.

But hand-carrying can be a real problem, too, since many airlines are none too pleased to see dozens of bulky instruments taking up the overheads, and technically, they don't have to let us bring them on board. (On this tour, we're actually doing a fair amount of bussing between cities, so this is less of a concern.) Furthermore, if you're hand-carrying, your instrument is subject to whatever changing weather conditions happen to be around at the moment, whereas the trunks travel in special climate-controlled trucks and cargo planes. For instance, it's about 15 degrees warmer and a lot drier in Stuttgart, where we've just arrived, than it was in Cologne, which we left 5 hours ago. Temperature and humidity can really affect the sound of string instruments in particular, so you have to set your own priorities.

However, despite the logistical difficulties, we do bring all our own instruments from Minneapolis, even the percussion equipment. (The lone exception is pianos, since Steinway grands are standard equipment in every major concert hall in the Western world.) You might think all percussion is the same, but our own Kevin Watkins was just telling me the other night that he'd gotten a look at the Berlin Philharmonic's xylophone, and was shocked to see that it's two "keyboards" lay parallel to each other, whereas American xylophones have one layer elevated above the other, like uneven parallel bars. It would be pretty hard to adjust to something like that on the fly.

Emily's comment also included the following: The artist's bar thing is COOL. Never mind that I'm not in an orchestra nor have aspirations to be in one - I'm jealous anyway.

This is not, technically, a question, but I'm taking it as the perfect excuse to post some more video of my very favorite part of the European concert hall/backstage cafe experience. Specifically, the clip below was shot in Cologne, in the very moments after our concert ended on Thursday night, as I made my way from my seat onstage into the wings, where I partook of a Cologne Philharmonie tradition that really ought to catch on in every concert hall in the world...



That's right. In Cologne, you have a glass of beer in your hand before you put your instrument down. Not only that, it's a local brew - Kölsch - which, while not exactly a highfalutin' beer (I once had a Surdyk's worker sneer at me for asking if they had any,) tastes excellent when you've just spent 35 minutes sweating your way through Nielsen's 5th Symphony...