Pit Problems

Even though I really enjoy working in the orchestra pit, it makes me a little bit nervous. The first year I played with the KSO we were rehearsing in the pit when someone ran past and accidentally kicked something into the pit. Now, if you haven't seen the pit at the Civic, understand that our heads are just about at the level of the auditorium floor. The UFO flew into the pit and hit my viola hard enough to crack the belly and the sound post. It happened so fast and was so unexpected that at first I had no idea what had happened. Everyone around me stopped, shocked, while the conductor yelled to keep playing (it was the last 5 minutes or so of a dress rehearsal and he thought I had just broken a string).

I have always been well aware of the hazards of playing in a pit. The next time you go to a musical, ballet, or opera with live music if you look carefully you will see nets that extend part way off the stage to the pit. Those are to catch anything that might fly off the stage and onto the musicians. That is not an altogether uncommon occurrence, either. Being hit from the audience side was something I had never thought about until it happened.

Such is the nature of the pit. The unexpected should be, well, expected. It's a different layout than we're accustomed and we're working in less space with more stuff: cases, wires, lights, risers, etc. Things happen.

And, at Saturday night's Nutcracker performance, something did happen. Earlier in the week, my stand partner Eunsoon and I had noticed the desk of our stand was a bit loose. As long as we didn't tilt it back too far it was fine and we didn't think much about it. Saturday evening we were playing along when suddenly the desk flopped completely upside-down, catapulting our music toward the first violins while blinding them with our stand lights. As is often the case when things go awry, it happened during the quietest part of the entire ballet.

We're not sure what happened. No one touched the stand, and it didn't happen right after a page turn. So we're doing what all musicians do when something bad happens that can't be explained.

We're blaming the conductor.

A Soloist's Worst Nightmare

Sometimes the most exciting concerts are the ones where something goes wrong. A few seasons back we had a soloist whose e-string snapped while she was playing. As is custom, she grabbed the concertmaster's violin and continued playing while her instrument was passed back to the section to be re-strung. The performance (both hers and that of the section violinists who fixed her violin) brought down the house. Last season our former principal second violinist Eric Kline broke his e-string while soloing with the KSO on our annual runout to Greeneville. The audience was still talking about when we returned a few weeks ago. Recently violist Yuri Bashmet experienced one of those heart-stopping moments. It's okay to laugh: it looks like his million-dollar viola exploded, but it's really a pretty easy fix.

The Pit

Some of my fondest memories are from playing in pit orchestras for various musicals. The atmosphere in the pit is a lot different than when we are on the main stage. People relax. It's not that the music is necessarily easier than our usual symphonic fare. Actually, scores for musicals can be quite challenging. The songs are scored for the comfort of the vocalists, not the musicians, so keys like B major (five sharps) or D-flat major (five flats) are quite common. Really, I think the musicians relax in the pit because the focus is not primarily on us. Our job is to make the people on stage look good. If we are noticed it's not always a good thing.

Just about every musical I have played for has had some near-disaster during production. (I don't think I'm the violist equivalent of Typhoid Mary, but who knows....) Most disasters happen without the audience ever knowing, but a few memorable times things have gone horribly wrong for everyone to see or hear. The worst (or best, depending on how you look at it) disaster that I witnessed happened during a run of Oklahoma when I was freelancing in the Chicago area. We were giving a special presentation for a packed house of school children. It was a doomed venture from the overture. A picnic basket was kicked into the pit (if you come see the Knoxville Opera next week, you will notice that there is a net above part of the pit to catch falling objects), a actor forgot an entire verse of a song, and several people missed entrances or forgot lines.

Clearly, it was not going well, but the show didn't reach full fiasco status until near the end. Curly, the leading male, had a fast costume change. Apparently no one was around backstage to help him get dressed and when he came back out on stage it was clear that he hadn't had time to properly put his pants on. For a few minutes he made it work by keeping one hand on his pants and using the other in his fight scene with the evil Jud Fry. Given that handicap, you would think that Jud would have had a better chance, but Curly still got the best of him. When the actors playing the police came out to arrest Curly they didn't notice he was holding his pants up. Or maybe they just didn't care. They turned him around and forced his hands behind his back. His pants fell down around his ankles to the screaming delight of over 700 elementary school children. Cowboys really shouldn't wear polka dot boxer shorts.

This weekend we are not in the pit, but we are staging a Valentine's pops show full of Richard Rodger's greatest hits. It should be an enchanted evening full of great music. And, hopefully, no fiascos.

Give Opera a Chance

The first time I attended an opera was in college. I wasn't particularly keen to go, but there was a boy involved. He really liked opera and I really liked him, so I thought I would give it a shot. We didn't last, but my fondness for opera has.

Before I attended my first opera, two things came to mind whenever I thought about opera: a sturdy women with fat braids and a Viking hat singing notes that could crack glass, and Elmer Fudd singing “Kill the Wabbit” in the Bugs Bunny opera cartoon. I expected to be bored to tears but figured that I could at least close my eyes and enjoy an evening of Strauss. I don't think I'm alone in my misconceptions about opera. It has the ill-deserved reputation of being an excruciatingly boring, snobbish activity that only the upper crust of society pretends to enjoy. I was shocked when I not only enjoyed the production, but laughed so hard that tears streamed down my face.

Since that first experience, I have found attending opera performances to be great fun. Really, opera is just a live soap opera sung in a different language. (The English translation is projected above the stage.) It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the writers for Days of Our Lives and As the World Turns are opera fans because opera plots are just as crazy as anything on daytime TV. Women pretending to be men pretending to be women, characters who are part human / part animal, curses, revenge, love triangles (or octagons in some cases): opera is chock-full of drama and intrigue, not to mention great music.

Knoxville Opera Company will be staging Rigoletto on the 13th and 15th of this month. If you haven't ever attended an opera, you ought to consider going. You will likely recognize many of the tunes even if you are not versed in opera. If you do attend, try to get seats that allow you to see into the orchestra pit. It's interesting to see the inner workings and, more often than not, something exciting happens behind the scenes. Last season a large set of orchestra chimes started to pitch over during a performance of Tosca. A bass player caught them and boosted them back up only to have them pitch the other way. It turns out they were off a caster. Our panicked percussion section was madly trying to right them while still counting rests.

I Saw Mommy Stitching Santa's Pants

Friday evening when Santa came on-stage for the first time during the Clayton Holiday Concert, I noticed that he had a hole in his pants. I figured that since I could see it, the audience probably could too so I told the symphony's director of operations after the concert. Her reaction was, “Oh no, not again!” Turns out this is not the first time Santa has had a problem with his pants. I offered to fix them.

I think most people have a secret, or not-so-secret passion. Mine is all things related to sewing. When we bought our house one of the big selling points with us was the large bonus room. At first the room was primarily dedicated to music with a small corner for my sewing machine. Now the opposite is true. Slowly, the sewing machines, cutting table, and fabric have taken over the room. Even when I am ripping out a pants zipper that I accidentally installed backward (so you would have to reach your hand down your pants to pull it up...) I am always happy when I'm sewing. I love playing the viola and I'm glad to play with the Knoxville Symphony, but if The Metropolitan Opera Company or Cirque du Soleil called needing a costume designer I'd be there in a heartbeat. This is why I offered to fix Santa's pants.

My motto when fixing something is “First do no harm.” This is followed closely by, “Measure twice, cut once.” When I took out the old repairs to see what I had to work with I had visions of Santa wearing a pair of red sweat pants for the rest of the Clayton performances. The pants were in bad shape. Finally I said a little prayer, made a slit in the lining and repaired them as best I could. Luckily my repairs held for the rest of the performances. I did cringe every time Santa high kicked or karate-chopped his way across the stage. I had hideous visions of his pants disintegrating on the spot.

I enjoyed playing costume mistress for the night, but I think the best part of the whole situation was seeing my four-year-old's reaction when she got up in the morning to find Santa's pants hanging up in the studio.