in Burlingame, on Sunday

[calimac]

athenais and I attended a chamber music concert I was reviewing. Then we sat around in a diner and talked about Rome. You won't get a good chiliburger in Rome. The gelato, however ...

Meanwhile, Jon Carroll talks about restaurant background music. He writes:

The idea of music as background is, all by itself, kind of odd. Someone labors on a lovely duet for cello and piano for six months, and then it is played almost exclusively when people are putting fish in their mouths. It's like, the composer could have at least doubled his output if he'd known about the fish.

Actually, he did know about the fish and he did double his output. How do you think Mozart wrote so much? Any work of his to which the word "Serenade" is attached - and that includes the exquisite Eine kleine Nachtmusik - was written in the full knowledge that it would be played to audiences studiously ignoring it while they ate dinner or were otherwise occupied.

Comments

[fr-john.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall that people complained when Wagner had the lights turned down in the concert-hall. They said they couldn't see their friends and hold conversations.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Oh, well, opera - before baseball games were invented, that's how people treated opera performances. You packed a picnic lunch, chatted with your friends, cheered and booed the action. The purpose of the opera overture was as a way for management to spend five minutes saying, "Hey guys, the show's about to start, if anybody cares to pay attention."

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

And (I am told) Haydn got so irritated that he wrote the "Surprise" symphony to wake up snoozing postprandial audients...

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The actual emotion was amusement, not irritation - Haydn was a terminally genial fellow - but the story is attested by contemporary sources.

[divertimento.livejournal.com]

Same thing for works by Mozart and others titled with
my namesake, Divertimento.

A later paragraph in the Jon Carroll column expresses
one value of music that I've long aimed to be able to
deliver in the appropriate setting:

My friend the musician said that playing for diners is a kind of art and that there are people who do it well (which is to say: softly) and yet still manage to insinuate the rhythm into the conversational groove, and pretty soon a kind of unspoken consensus has been reached, a "we shall be cheerful and mellow tonight," and society is thereby improved.