Thoughts on the orgasm thing and music school failings
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
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Hey, did anyone else start off their week by accidentally landing in a viral news article about an orgasm?
I had tickets to last Friday’s concert but returned them because I was tired, and the next day a friend texted me a tweet claiming a woman during the performance had “a loud fully-body orgasm,” enough that the orchestra actually stopped playing.
I have seen the LA Phil play through many an unexpected noise or disturbance, including one medical emergency, so I was extremely doubtful about the claim that they stopped playing! Naturally I had to check if it was real, so I messaged someone I know who works at the Phil, and was told the following:
Mostly I just wanted to set the record straight that my adopted home orchestra, which I love with more fervor than anyone should love an orchestra, would never stop playing because of some measly orgasm noise. Some fellow LA Phil watchers chimed in with examples of other things the Phil has played through:
I got so hung up on this aspect that I maybe didn’t foresee that by confirming the basic story I would be fueling the virality of the incident, and on Sunday morning woke up to this email:
My contact at the Phil very much did not want anything to do with it and requested the confidentialest of confidentialities. Despite my polite refusal to participate in the article, it came out, and I was quoted in it.
I’ve seen a couple of theories floating around that the incident was planned by the Phil to get attention, and with all due respect, I really don’t think so! First of all, it’s the LA Phil—according to this NYT article, the pre-pandemic LA Phil made $187 million a year (for comparison, the New York Philharmonic in the same period made $86 million)—and Dudamel’s star power is such that the LA Phil could have drummed up a viral moment any number of not terribly imaginative ways. I also go to the Phil a lot and can attest anecdatally that low attendance is not an issue, even at the less buzzy concerts, so it’s not like the Phil needed some desperate Hail Mary to get butts in seats.
Second of all, the sense I got of how the people at the LA Phil reacted to this indicates that this was very much not a planned thing. (Judging by the fact that none of the coverage really called attention to the new work on the program or any of the performers, I’d say that this did a terrible job highlighting the stuff the LA Phil typically likes people to know.)
Lastly, the article has been updated with further information offering the possibility that the sound (which you can actually listen to) was a medical incident, not an orgasm.
I have to say that I kind of hope it was actually an orgasm, not because that’s the funnier option (I mean, it is) but because if it was indeed the sound of a woman having a health-related spasm, I cannot imagine how embarrassing it must be to 1) have an uncontrollable moment splashed all over news and social media, and 2) to be known to the general public—even anonymously—as the Woman Who Orgasmed at the LA Phil. If it were me, I would be too mortified to return to the concert hall.
Anyway. That’s all I have to say on the matter—that and the fact that I’ve seen the word “orgasm” so many times this week that it has ceased to have any meaning.
I’m not that far off from “no brown M&Ms”
We are somehow at the stage where I am negotiating the terms of my artist contract for the concerto premiere (!) and I am starting to think that maybe in my younger and more vulnerable years I was too harsh to judge artists for having demanding terms in their contracts.
I have, without complaint, shown up to many a performance and had to work with a crappy piano in a room with terrible acoustics. I have performed whispery Impressionist works on pianos that did not go a hair below fortissimo. I have played the clear, organized works of Bach and Mozart on pianos where the hammers didn’t go all the way down and thus bled all the notes together in echoey rooms that swirled everything around even more.
Given that pianos can be oh so terrible and this is a performance with orchestra where things can get really thrown off by the smallest thing, I thought it was prudent to request a clause put into my contract that the piano for the performance be reasonably in tune with everything working.
I realized after typing out my request that “reasonably in tune” is an extremely vague phrase that can be interpreted so loosely that it’s basically meaningless. After some thought, I wrote out several legally sound definitions of what constitutes a “working, in tune” piano, including that the piano must be tuned such that Key A4 (which the orchestra tunes to) falls within several cents of 440 Hz.
I have no idea if this is a normal thing to put in a contract. It made me feel like Van Halen asking for no brown M&Ms. I just want to make sure the piano isn’t one of those beat-up nightmares, and to do so I guess I have to stipulate the exact frequency of an individual key? I don’t know what else to do in this situation because—and yes I have complained about this before—my degree in music performance from an accredited music school did not once require anyone to tell me what is normal to ask for in a contract to perform music.
Speaking of music schools preparing students for careers
I’ve been quietly watching the San Francisco Conservatory of Music of the past several years announce splashy innovative initiatives to set their students up for success. This week Jeffrey Arlo Brown (my editor at VAN!) published an article about the logic driving SFCM’s recent purchases.
Years ago I auditioned at SFCM and was given time after my audition to interview and be interviewed by a panel of faculty. After they asked some questions about me (I vaguely remember speaking at length about my recent research obsession with Clara Schumann!) they asked if I had anything I wanted to ask them.
Given that I was, you know, trying to figure out if getting (and paying for) another music degree was going to do anything to get me closer to having a career that paid more than zero dollars, I asked what seemed like a reasonable question: “How does SFCM prepare its students to have successful careers in music?”
The response was…not what I was expecting. The professors frowned, then one (who, no, I will not name) spoke for all of them.
“We are not…” [dramatic pause] “a VOCATIONAL school,” they said with disdain. “You should be here because you want to focus on becoming a better artist and making great music, not because you want to make money.”
I don’t know if I’ll ever forget that response—implying that there was something wrong with me for being preoccupied with such tawdry earthly concerns like “career.”
Part of me wishes I could have applied to the SFCM of now (apparently)—the one that owns a prestigious management company, agency, and record label, that brings the artists under these vaunted umbrellas in direct contact with its students, that offers practical opportunities with people who can make careers. Part of me also wonders when SFCM turned into such a “vocational school”—has anyone told its faculty?
Performance exercises no school teaches its students (probably)
One of the few things I actually miss about being in conservatory is the constant opportunity to practice performing for others. There are many things music school is not good at doing (see above), but man is it the perfect environment for test-driving your rep on a weekly (if not daily) basis.
No matter how much I practice, there are always—always—cracks that form in the heat of performing for an audience, and the only way to find and shore up those cracks is to practice performing. When you’re not in music school and the act of meeting up with friends requires multi-week advanced planning, though, it’s a lot harder to see how your program fares under performance conditions.
Over the years I’ve come up with some kooky ways to simulate performance stress and trigger flubs, and maybe the most chaotic method is the one where I pop an iPad at max volume on the piano, put on some TV, and play through the noise.
My little iPhone microphone can’t convey just how chaotic this actually is in real life; from where I was, the sound of The Good Place was so loud I couldn’t quite hear myself sometimes, which is why there are a bunch of flubs in the video that I just had to push through. This is not what performing is actually like, of course, (if anything the silence of a respectful audience is maybe more terrifying) but blasting a TV show while you’re trying to play music does wonders for forcing a lot of atypical mistakes to the fore and requiring you to get through them without being in full control of the situation.
(Funnily enough, Youtube flagged this video for copyright because it correctly clocked the music, but didn’t seem to pick up on the full episode of scripted TV just running the entire time.)
I have already picked my Eurovision fighter
Eurovision is next week (hooray for a distraction from my own performance obligations!!!) and while I normally wait to pick favorites until I see all the performances, I…already have a favorite.
First of all, my favorite would be Madame of Italy with “Il bene nel male” which totally should have won Sanremo, but alas, I don’t know what Italian voters were thinking, and that song is not in the Eurovision running.
After running through the playlist of Eurovision contestants (upsettingly, the U.K.’s entrant is actually good this year), I found myself completely unable to maintain any semblance of neutrality and have decided that La Zarra, France’s contestant, has the best song, “Évidemment”:
It’s 1000% because of that kicky bassline that shows up at 0:59, which absolutely makes the song. I love a kicky bassline. I normally don’t back the Big 5 countries in Eurovision because I love an underdog, but I’m all in on France here.
(For the first time ever this year, I as an American will be able to vote in the contest, so theoretically I could totally vote for France—thank you for helping us in our revolution!—but I’m pretty sure this would require me to be awake during the final, and while I love the song, I love sleep more. Look, I vote in real elections, I think Eurovision will be okay without me.)