October 21, 2009: A new approach to the virtual concert experience

re-rite is a new experiment by the British Philharmonia Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.  It tries to confront the problem that most concert-goers not only are passive but also lack any sense of how they can actively engage through listening.  re-rite tries to solve this problem by turning a recorded performance into an activity space.  Here is how it is described on the Philharmonia's Web site:

re-rite, the Philharmonia Orchestra's Digital Residency, will allow members of the public to conduct, play and step inside the Philharmonia Orchestra with Esa-Pekka Salonen through audio and video projections of musicians performing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

Opening to the public at the Bargehouse on London’s South Bank on Tuesday 3 November, the project will show every section of the Orchestra performing The Rite of Spring simultaneously ‘as live’ throughout a four-storey warehouse building. The public will able to sit amongst the horn players, perform in the percussion section and take up the baton and control sections of the Orchestra as they play.

The ambitious project, made possible through the support of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, is the brainchild of the Philharmonia’s Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who has developed the concept with the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Digital Department.

This "official story" has now been supplemented by a review on the Web site for the London Telegraph by Ivan Hewett.  Hewett's account provides a good sense of how the above "statement of theory" has actually translated into the "practices" of the audience:

Many people, I think, are bored by the sight of an orchestra because they can’t hear it. By hearing, I mean really hear it, in the sense of understanding how this instrument reinforces that one, how this sound over here is in dialogue with that one over there. People are blind to the orchestra, because they’re deaf to it.

Now the Philharmonia Orchestra has come up with a bold idea that actually addresses that issue. They’ve made a filmed performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which will be on constant show at the Bargehouse on London’s SouthBank from Nov 3. Sponsored by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, it was made using 29 cameras placed within and around the orchestra, including some placed on the players’ heads.

The various rooms of the Bargehouse lead to different sections of the orchestra – here a horn room, there a woodwind room. Each one has screens showing conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen along with the players, while the total sound is remixed to highlight the players’ particular contribution. In the percussion room, visitors can even join in. There’s also a “control room”, where all the elements can be seen and heard simultaneously.

It’s a real-time education in seeing and hearing a piece, done in the most thrillingly immediate way.

The above photograph, by the way, is the view from that "control room;"  and, at the very least, it should provide the audience with an appreciation of the problems of attention that confront every conductor.  This may have been what Salonen had in mind when he first conceived of the project.

I find it particularly appropriate that this project has been based on a composition by Igor Stravinsky.  Stravinsky understood the problem as Hewett stated it but expressed it in terms of a distinction between hearing and listening.  Here is the way he put it:

Others let the ears be present and they don't make an effort to understand. To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

It is unlikely that future audiences will be as engaged in that "effort to understand" as any performing musician (including the conductor) must be;  but, if this particular project leads to even an awareness of the path that leads to such understanding, then it may be remembered for defining a paradigm shift in the very nature of the concert experience, whether physical or virtual.