The Williamson was successful. It wasn’t that successful. Other orchestras did nearly as well, and some seasons better. (The Williamson seven years before, I heard from Marietta, had decided to unearth a lost composer, and scheduled an entire Mahler cycle. The season did not lose money. Not quite.)
All right, I said grimly: Who else hates season subscribers?
The answer to that was going to be the answer I needed. I think I knew that even then—when I had no damned idea in the world what the answer was going to be.
So I thought, and I constructed insane theories that didn’t work. Poisoned rosin from violin (viola, cello, bass) bows floating out into the audience, and season subscribers the only ones there often enough to absorb enough poison; I do remember that one. Only one real objection, but a beaut: why was the Williamson string section itself still alive? And I ate and drank very well, thank you—the Apelles Hotel defies tradition by actually serving the sort of food one always expects good hotels to serve, though they very seldom do. And when the Moross concert rolled around, I decided to go to one Williamson concert anyhow, and went and heard it. Fascinating stuff.
Frankie and Johnny was the centerpiece of an evening that included Beethoven’s Coriolan overture, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, a group of songs by a living composer, Peter Bardolph, and, after Frankie and Johnny, the overture to The Threepenny Opera to play the audience out with. A short program, but the Williamson under Marietta has always been more interested in quality than quantity.
Bardolph, whose stuff I hadn’t heard, turned out to be a Beat. There seem to have been some Beats before the Clean Slate War, but mostly poets, or thought to be so. Some very odd, and one or two very interesting. Now the Beats are musicians, working with beatnotes.
A beat-note is easy to describe, and comparatively hard to hear. Let’s say somebody plays a concert A, 440 cycles per second. At the same time, some other rude body plays another note, this one at 445 cycles a second. What many people will hear is a single note, probably the 440 because that’s what they’re used to hearing.
What many others, and musicians and music-lovers certainly, will hear is a) two notes very close together, an uncomfortable sound, and b) a third note at 5 cycles per second (No, they won’t hear an actual note; people do not hear at 5 cps. They don’t hear at much below 20, at best. But what will be heard is an increase and decrease in sound, 5 such increases and 5 decreases a second, a 5-a-second beat. They are hearing the difference between the two notes being played, as well as the notes. This difference is called a beat-note.)
A Beat composer—who works a great deal with such beat-notes—presents a Hell of a challenge to singers. Most singers can’t dependably produce three- or five- or eight-cycle shadings in notes. Some can, and Fredi Tallman was one of them. Bardolph had written the cycle for her, and it was a pleasure, in its way, to hear her negotiate the damned thing.
In a way. I am not much on tiny differences. I can hear them, thanks, and they make me uncomfortable. If God had meant man to concertize in tiny differences He would not have invented the piano.
The Moross was pure Moross, brash and very early-20th and never quite altogether serious. As called for in the score, the three sopranos did deliver the final chorus with beer mugs in hands, one foot each up on a coffin (brought out and just left there front-stage for the second half), as if it were a bar-rail.
This story—ain’t got no moral—
This story—ain’t got no end—
This story—just goes to show you—Never put your trust in any man.
And then the whizz-thump of Moross’ chords, and a little closing, and one long final chord like a chorale squeezed all the way down to that one.
Silence, and applause.
The Threepenny overture was almost an anticlimax, which is something that tiny piece almost never is.
On the way out, I ran into Josh.
The teenage pest was drifting for the doors, being pushed by whichever group he happened to land in front of from second to second. He was being pushed along like a scrap of paper in front of a broom, nodding his head, his eyes shut and whistling under his breath, which is a sound you might go your entire lifetime without hearing. I hope you have, too; it’s rather a grating little noise.
A small active group shoved him to one side, and he landed in front of me, still whistling. He was carrying a small suitcase, like a lot of young musicians, and I assumed it was full, as they mostly are, of scores and sandwiches. I said: “Hello, Josh,” and was audible over the crowd-mutters.
Of course he had never seen me before. I’d been a blank during his talk with Marietta. He hesitated, then nodded, and stared a little.
“I met you last week,” I said. “I was with Miss Jink when you met her at the AHD.”
“Oh, sure,” he said distantly. “I remember seeing her there.”
Charming young fellow. It occurred to me to ask: “By the way, Josh, are you a season subscriber?”
“Me?” He gave me a hollow laugh. I don’t hear those much, either. “Think I’ve got that kind of money yet? No, I’m a second-balcony angel. Up by the dead spot—but usually I go down to the balcony rail to listen. People complain they can’t see through me down by the rail, but who goes to a concert to see?”
Charming. I did know about the dead spot: Petrarch Hall was built about as well as most concert halls, and up in that second balcony was an acoustic dead spot, hard to hear much of anything from. Hard for the orchestra to hear applause from, too, but then, there usually wouldn’t be much.
“Well, some day you’ll work your way down,” I said.
“Sure I will,” he said. “And soon, too—you wait and see. And a hundred old corpses with season tickets will still be holding every one. The waiting list is three years, last I heard.”
I marked it down in my head. Another reason to hate season subscribers.
And Josh allowed himself to be pushed forward and off to my left, and I was out the center door. It was a full twenty minutes later, with most of a gimlet inside me at a fairly noisy bar a block away from the hall, that the back of my head kicked in.
Idiot, it said to me. It does that a lot, and I have learned to live with it. I waited patiently for it to tell me why, this time.
It did. It told me I had found someone with a real reason, however odd and personal, to hate season subscribers, and only season subscribers.
The reason didn’t make a great deal of sense. But, as I vaguely remembered thinking before, it didn’t have to—why was always at least fairly likely to be crazy. And this was less crazy than many such reasons: a waiting list, in the first place, that simply had to be cut down fast, and a group of people who clearly needed killing, in the second place.
And, given the reasoner, the reason did look as if it led straight to the actions. If you were Josh, why shouldn’t you shorten that list by any means handy? Why shouldn’t you erase these ugly people who were just taking up space at concerts, and probably not even appreciating the music very much? Not as well as you appreciated it, not anywhere near as well.