Ask An Expert: Musical Chairs

It's been two months since we last did an Ask the Expert post, and season ticket holder Judy Kinsey has a question that I'm actually surprised hasn't come up on the blog before now:

Q: I noticed, but didn't really pay attention, a few years ago when the orchestra's seating - the placement of sections on the stage - changed. The cellos moved to the middle and the double basses to the left. And maybe more that we didn't recognize. A friend who hadnt been at a concert for awhile attended a concert recently and was very surprised. She asked me when that happened, and why. I didn't remember when exactly, and I didn't know why.

Well, Judy, first of all, thanks for being a subscriber! People like you make our marketing department very, very happy. As for the seating, you're exactly right that we underwent a major change in how our string section sets up on stage a few years back. Prior to the switch, we sat in the configuration that's most familiar to American audiences - first violins on the outside edge of the stage at stage right, second violins just to the inside of the firsts, violas on the inside stage left, and cellos on the outside edge at stage left, facing the first violins. The basses were arrayed behind the violas and cellos at stage left. It looked like this...

(click the photo for a larger view)

Shortly after Osmo took over as music director, however, he started experimenting with a different seating, which was actually widely in use in the 18th and 19th centuries. Under this system, the two violin sections face each other across the stage (with the seconds where the cellos used to be,) the cellos jump to the inside spot next to the firsts vacated by the second violins, and the basses shift to stage right to stay near the cellos. Violas and first violins stay where they were. So the new seating looks like this...

(I know you can't see the first violins, but trust me, they're just left of the cellos...)

The rationale behind this seating is twofold: first of all, since much of the repertoire we play was written by composers in the 18th and 19th centuries, it makes sense to arrange the strings the way those composers would have expected. Secondly, by separating the violin sections, you create a very cool stereo effect in the concert hall, especially when you're playing music by a composer (Beethoven, say) who liked to play the violins off each other frequently. Some reviewers have even claimed that they can hear the effect of the antiphonal violins on our Beethoven recordings. (A third benefit could be that, by moving the cellos to an inside position, their soundboxes are facing out at the audience, but I don't know whether that actually makes a huge difference in the sound.)

Initially, Osmo had us sit this way just when we were playing Beethoven symphonies, and he then quickly amended that to "Beethoven and anything written during Beethoven's time or earlier." I think it was less than a year later that we switched to using that seating full-time, unless there's a compelling reason not to. (For instance, we almost never use it for pops shows, in which the orchestra tends to be spread further apart on the stage and the violins need to be close enough to hear each other.)

The switch wasn't without controversy: the cellos have a lot less room in their inside position, which has been a source of concern. And of course, it can be very difficult for the violins to hear each other across the stage, so we sometimes have to spend extra rehearsal time tightening up the ensemble. But we did take a poll of the orchestra a couple of years back, and the results were strongly in favor of sticking with the new seating. We're not the only US orchestra using it, and it's fairly common in Europe.

There have been other changes on our stage in the last decade, too. When I joined up in 2000, for instance, we didn't have any risers on stage, so the winds and brass just sat directly behind the strings, with everyone on the same flat level. This tended to result in a lot of complaints from the strings that the brass were trying to kill us with volume, and from the brass that the strings were a bunch of whiny princesses. It was also a problem for the back of the winds, where percussion instruments might be inches from the head of a horn player.

We started using risers immediately when Osmo took over, and these days, the winds and brass are arrayed at three different levels above the strings. We've also experimented with miniature risers for the back desks of violins, who are the furthest string instruments from the podium and therefore benefit from an assist in seeing over the players in front of them.

Basically, there's no right answer to the seating question. I would argue that there is a wrong one, though, and it's a model that a number of orchestras still inexplicably use. This model uses our old seating, with the violins together at stage right and the basses at stage left, but flips the violas and cellos, placing the violas on the outside edge of the stage. (When I played in the Alabama Symphony in the late 1990s, this was the seating we used.)

So basically, you've just done two nonsensical things: 1) placed the violas - the one string section guaranteed to basically never be in charge of things like tempo and harmonic flow, a section whose main job is to listen as carefully as possible to everyone else and bind together the top and bottom of the ensemble by following - in a location on the stage where they will essentially not be able to hear anyone else clearly; and 2) turned the softest instrument group on the stage to have their soundboxes directly facing the back wall rather than the audience. (Insert hilarious viola joke here.) That seating drove me up the wall, and I've never heard any adequate justification for it, but like I say, you still see it. (I'm pretty sure the New York Philharmonic even uses it, but let's face it, there's no accounting for New Yorkers.)

So, Judy, there it is: more than you probably ever wanted to know about where we plunk ourselves down on stage. Next time, maybe we can get into opera pits...