Wonderful Timing
I've always wondered, I guess, what it might feel like to be so overcome by a piece of music that you, well, are overcome by it in front of the entire LA Philharmonic and their audience and all of Twitter and, eventually, the world.
My friends and I have a running joke, because I'm asexual, that I am repulsed by anything that could even suggest that something sexual is going on. We clarify that things are "possible sex thing (asexual)." We spoiler-tag "sex" on Discord. We do not, by any means, "come out on top."
Not to get too in the weeds with my own stuff (asexual), but I am someone who has published zines called "How to Do Sex" (about how sex is bad, actually) and "I Don't Like Kissing," and that's all you need to know about that.
But when I read that someone let out a "wonderfully timed" full-body orgasm during the LA Philharmonic's performance of Tchaikovsky's fifth symphony the other day, I gotta say, something in that spoke to me.
https://twitter.com/silverjocelyn/status/1652385452173975552
(Important clarification: The whole orchestra did not actually stop playing.)
In its write-up of The Event, the LA Times notes that the LA Phil's program says of the second movement of Tchaikovsky's fifth symphony that its "luscious main theme was adapted for a popular love song; Tchaikovsky's skillful orchestration, however, lifts the mood from sentimentality to high Romanticism. The movement's principal melody is presented in a memorable solo by the horn, followed by other appealing woodwind solos."
The top two things I know about Tchaikovsky, outside his music, are: (1) gay, and (2) sad. There is a stunning-but-not-that-stunning amount of RPF about him on Archive of Our Own. He channeled his deep depression and awful life circumstances into art in profound ways. Instead of ending with the exuberant third movement, as symphonies often do, he tacked on a whole fourth movement to his sixth symphony as if to say, "Just to remind you: I am actually sad." And then he died.
"One can't know exactly what happened, but it seemed very clear from the sound that it was an expression of pure physical joy. A sort of classical-music equivalent of that scene in a movie where someone is talking loudly in a party or a nightclub, and then the record suddenly stops and they say something that everyone hears."
– Lukas Burton, who attended the concert
My friends, though I cannot relate to what this person went through during this piece, I can relate to becoming so emotionally invested in a composer that whenever they re-enter the public eye, you simply must let everyone know that, somehow, you get it. And I would just like to make it clear that I get it.
(Photo by Dmitry Smolyanitsky)