janzen@pipa.DEC (11/13/84)
If people like live performance experiences, here's a doozy. On or about March 13, 1983, I performed my compositions for 49 minutes in the "quad" at Orange Coast College (in Orange County, California, just south of Los Angeles County). I played a simple synthesizer (60 simultaneous voices, one color, variable envelope), and used the college music department's giant amplifier system. The people responsible, from Associated Students, also set up a stage. The person running the mixer was about 60, and a music professor, that, as it turned out, left the school last spring. The concert was at noon, and I began at noon exactly with a Bach prelude, to settle in. The rest of the music was mine. Now, no one expects best behaviour from juniour college students in the quad at noon. In fact, I expected the worst from them. I did not expect the worst from a 60-year-old professor. The students were pretty raunchy, and I was prepared for that. An unscheduled guitarist played acoustic guitar at the back of audience of about 200 on the grass. I guess he was on grass, too. Anyway, he walked back and forth back there (I couldn't hear him, but my friends from DEC could because they stood back there) and after 45 minutes began to walk up to the stage and behind it, still picking out chords one at a time. When I stopped playing at 12:49, as scheduled, he reached out and shook my hand. I didn't have the presence of mind to deck him. The audience occasionally shouted things at me, usually not very obscene, usually just fun. Note that they stayed there to listen; the was a large quad for people to escape to, but they didn't. Once they were helpful. When, despite precautions, my music blew off the music stand, someone picked it up for me, while I couldn't stop. At one point, between pieces, three guys did an iguana imitation, slithering across in front of the stage. It turns out that the professor running the mixer had organized it. My dance professor friend didn't come; she was in her office waiting to hear if she still had a job; this was the last day state (California) law permits a college to lay off for the following year, and the lay-offs that day were devastating, for financial reasons. About 15 or 20 minutes into the concert and my own music, I noticed changes in the sound of my instrument. Because I didn't hear it on my monitor \ speaker, and the large speakers were facing away from me, I attributed it to the wind, but sometimes it was quite severe. The sound of this delicate instrument went from mud to chimes in a second. I did nothing, but at the end of the concert I told the professor about it, and he just said, "I was imposing my own feelings on the music. I believe music should have a beginning, a middle, and an end." (My music then was iterative euphony.) This, of course, was very unprofessional, and taught his students, standing there with him at the mixer making jokes about me through the concert (according to my friends) that they should not have respect for other musicians and for other music. I answered him didactically, "No, it doesn't, that's all over and done with." It's the best I could do when faced with the kind of malicious infantilism this retiree represented. After the performance, the professor's group began striking the stage out from under me, so I had to break the synthesizer right away (it's collapsable) and put it in my car (by myself) with my recorder, stand etc. People tried to talk to me; one guy wanted me to improvise with his group; another asked me if I was looking for talent - I just told him to get his act together and take advantage of being a student there to get performance fora; people always ask where they can get my records (I havn't any). So I learned. Although I felt prepared for fun-loving students, I should have been ready for a disrespectful senial self-hating old codger ruining the sound of my instrument, putting his stranglehold on the lifeline from me to the audience, and wringing the life out of my labors. Tom Wed 7-Nov-1984 08:59 EST