McGill speaks
Jul. 27th, 2009 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacClarinetist Anthony McGill is a regular performer at the local chamber music festival. I reviewed his excellent Messiaen and Mozart here a few years ago.
A good-sized audience came to his noon talk today, although he didn't even bring his clarinet. They all wanted to hear him tell about performing in that John Williams piece at Obama's inauguration a few months ago.
I was more interested in hearing him tell about not performing. For, as the world learned a few days later, it had been judged too cold to play safely or adequately, so the quartet of distinguished performers mimed a performance to their own previously-made recording, without announcing at the time that that's what they were doing. I wanted to know how a legitimate musician justified such an unconscionable practice.
McGill said that he hadn't known, until he arrived in D.C. for rehearsals and blocking, that it is regular custom for all performing instrumentalists at inaugurations, even the Marine Band, to pre-record their selections, and then decide whether to use the recording based on the weather forecast.
He didn't try to defend the practice, but the situation clearly puts a conscientious musician in a dilemma. This was just a few days before showtime. It was far too late to pull out in dudgeon, or to suggest a reasonable alternative, like performing indoors somewhere and being displayed on the big-screen TVs that most of the audience are looking at anyways.
The other honest course of action would be to refuse to go along with the charade and sit there motionless while your distinguished colleagues mime away, pretending to be themselves. But disrupting the expected flow of an inaugural ceremony that way would require a much more iron-minded person than the easy-going McGill.
So he went along. The piano could be unhitched; Yo-Yo and Itzhak could soap their strings. But you can't pretend to play the clarinet without playing the clarinet, so he had the toughest job. And that is how an honorable man gets talked into unethical behavior.
I thought about asking him during the question session, "Didn't you think there was something wrong about this?" But I refrained. What would I be expecting him to say in response, and what would it prove if he did? Sometimes I'd rather go along than make a big principled show, too.
A good-sized audience came to his noon talk today, although he didn't even bring his clarinet. They all wanted to hear him tell about performing in that John Williams piece at Obama's inauguration a few months ago.
I was more interested in hearing him tell about not performing. For, as the world learned a few days later, it had been judged too cold to play safely or adequately, so the quartet of distinguished performers mimed a performance to their own previously-made recording, without announcing at the time that that's what they were doing. I wanted to know how a legitimate musician justified such an unconscionable practice.
McGill said that he hadn't known, until he arrived in D.C. for rehearsals and blocking, that it is regular custom for all performing instrumentalists at inaugurations, even the Marine Band, to pre-record their selections, and then decide whether to use the recording based on the weather forecast.
He didn't try to defend the practice, but the situation clearly puts a conscientious musician in a dilemma. This was just a few days before showtime. It was far too late to pull out in dudgeon, or to suggest a reasonable alternative, like performing indoors somewhere and being displayed on the big-screen TVs that most of the audience are looking at anyways.
The other honest course of action would be to refuse to go along with the charade and sit there motionless while your distinguished colleagues mime away, pretending to be themselves. But disrupting the expected flow of an inaugural ceremony that way would require a much more iron-minded person than the easy-going McGill.
So he went along. The piano could be unhitched; Yo-Yo and Itzhak could soap their strings. But you can't pretend to play the clarinet without playing the clarinet, so he had the toughest job. And that is how an honorable man gets talked into unethical behavior.
I thought about asking him during the question session, "Didn't you think there was something wrong about this?" But I refrained. What would I be expecting him to say in response, and what would it prove if he did? Sometimes I'd rather go along than make a big principled show, too.
