Symphony orchestra

As Jaime-jin plays the viola, the rest of us made a tacit pledge to go see her play in yesterday's orchestra concert. I was torn at every fork where I met a decision. The definition of having fun is this: an engagement enough that I don't notice myself yearning for elsewhere. Of course the auditorium teemed with old white people- a few of them were less terrifying than the others. One woman had her face painted all silver: an operatic mermaid or Medea. I think I managed not to catch death. There was so little elbowroom that the ushers had to shove a few walkers and their walked between the organpipes, or corral them at a corner of the ceiling.

I wonder idly how you go and get involved to become Music Director in the first place. Sinews in this process aren't very clear. She had an aureole of white hair and the benevolence of a harvest king in all her candid shots, to be located in the program. More feverishly I wonder how you go and write music for an orchestra. Well, for starters, you learn enough that you can shoot off the lingo of artistic sound and strain it thin enough that it floats in the vapors of the symphony hall. And then? Before us we have so many crazed little Mozarts and then Beethovens seized up in an august fury. They choose to decline for the greater good of their creations. Haydn looks too stately for the fever, and Bach looks too jowly. But maybe, given that each artist gets a finite volume of charisma, there falls into place a balance and its compensations. The composer is fashioning a fantastic creature who might not even fit in the animal kingdom, and he bleeds himself for it. The creature's made to dance an absurd dance. You first glimpse life in the twitching of the violinists' bows, all together, like a school of fish swimming under a battle of navies. The cellists enact a more sober, horizontal motion. He gives his life to funding this creature; he whinges and stumbles, collapses satisfied, and kicks it in the street.

A small critic objects. How do Bach and his seventeen-odd children allow this model? But surely Philip Glass is skulking around here somewhere, sniffing out gas leaks. We sigh and say, 'and yet it moves.'