Apologies to my friend who hates when people listen to music as background music, but after a lovely meal on a Friday evening, I had a pile of dishes in the sink that needed attending to, and I wanted something pleasant to accompany my chore.
Thus I put on my Michelangeli Brahms CD. (And truth be told, it's more like the dish-washing is the "background" activity.)
These are live recordings of concerts he gave in 1973. There are 10 such CDs in this collection-- all are live concert recordings. Each CD ranges from 49 minutes to a little over 70. The beautiful playing goes without saying, but the other thing I've noticed in these recordings is that there is very little coughing. Maybe 3 or 4 times in the entire roughly-one-hour span, and one person at a time.
By contrast, at last Thursday night's SF Symphony concert, at one point, when I got distracted by the coughs, I noticed one cough every 7 or so downbeats.
Now I shouldn't be throwing stones in this case, because I had to cough a few times, too. But I gagged myself with a handkerchief and coughed 3 times during the entire Eroica--once during a very loud section and the other two times between movements.
I think it's unrealistic to expect an entirely cough-free concert, and often being the one who needs to cough (though I control it as much as I can help it), I'm usually pretty tolerant of a few coughs here and there, but the Thursday concert was the most coughing I've ever experienced--where people didn't even bother holding it in.
It also seemed like they put about 56 of the coughers in my section, with 5 of the loudest, most frequent coughers within a 5-seat radius.
Then there were the lovely group of 3 uber-dressed up mature ladies who kept opening their itty bitty purses, glasses cases to switch back and forth between their reading glasses and their opera glasses to look at the program and then at the orchestra, and swapping opera glasses among each other for a looksee and rustling something every few minutes.
But back to the coughing. . ..
Has there been an evolution (or de-evolution) in the coughing etiquette between the concert days of Michelangeli and now? Or perhaps this was just a bad evening as far as coughing and rustling older ladies are concerned?
Since today is pi day, a celebration of all things 3.141592635389793238 and by association, all frivolous statistics, please allow me to indulge and present you with some coughing statistics from last week's concert.
1853: the total number of measures in Beethoven's Eroica (According to the Breitkopf and Hartels version of the score.)
7: the rough number of downbeats that MTT gave between each cough (during the 2 minutes that I was distracted enough to actually count.)
So so far, we have 1 cough every 7 measures. 1853 divided by 7 is a total of 264.7 coughs, but there is no such thing as 7/10 of a cough, so we round up.
265: assuming the coughing-every-7-minutes went on all night (no, I didn't keep track. After those 1 or 2 minutes, I tuned out the coughing and focused back on the music.), that is the total number of coughs that transpired during the Eroica performance.
2743: total number of seats at Davies Symphony Hall.
265 coughs divided among 2743 potential active coughers (the concert was sold out and I did not see one empty seat in the balcony section.) amounts to roughly 1 in 10 people coughing.
5: 265 total coughs spread out over 50 minutes is 5.3 coughs per minute. Since coughs are discrete items, I've rounded down to 5.
That is (if anyone cares enough to read this far) one cough every 11.3 seconds (seconds are indiscrete, so it's ok to leave it as a decimal).
Happy pi day to all.
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3 comments:
Coughers are the bane of my existence. I read a study somewhere that said people only fail to suppress their coughs when they're bored. I once went to a concert by Hesperion XX that was so spellbinding that not one person coughed during the playing. Not one!! I was in ecstasies. Whereas when the performance is mediocre, or the audience member is a twerp, there's coughing galore. I always get so infuriated during our concerts when we get to a particularly hushed bit and make what we consider a magical decrescendo to an ominous pause, and right in the middle of the fermata, some moron starts hacking up phlegm. I think they could suppress it if they really tried. I mean, when I'm at a concert and I feel a cough coming on, I will practically stuff my mittens in my mouth and gag and choke and turn bright purple in an attempt not to make a noise. Why can't other people do that? Plonkers.
That, in essence, is the main problem with live recordings, quite aside from the mistakes issue. That's why most recordings are heavily edited. There are mistakes that would irritate listeners after repeated listenings, and all sorts of other nasty noises you wouldn't want to hear, such as the musicians cussing at each other.
Ok, I'm not musically attuned enough to notice most mistakes. The only repertoire that has any possible chance of me detecting any mistakes is violin music or string quartets. If someone misses the rhythm in a piano concerto, I am not going to notice. Ignorance is bliss.
I've noticed the exact high frequency of coughs in the SF Symphony Hall. At first i thought perhaps it was due to poor ventilation, but that doesn't really make sense. Also, i've noticed that the coughs don't seem to be randomly distributed, but tend to come in clumps.
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