Results tagged “Olympics” from Life's a Pitch

When I was watching the summer Olympics this past August, I got it into my head that a funny segment during the TV coverage would be to show an average person swimming alongside the Olympic swimmers (running against the runners, etc.). Me, for example, in all my former New Canaan High School swim team not-glory, diving into the pool next to these women who were breaking world records. My thought was that after watching the Olympics for days on end we lose track of how incredible these people are; there are no points of comparison, so when the Olympic athletes swim fifty meters of a pool in 22 seconds (it took me longer than that to write this sentence), we don't comprehend what it really means.

Last Saturday night, I made my concert debut in a world premiere performance piece by a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer in New York City. Go big or go home, I always say. In the interest in full disclosure, composer David Lang, who I work for, and visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra created a piece for 50 "violinists" who had never played the violin before. I was one of them, and I was terrible. I must have asked our teacher Todd Reynolds to show me how to hold the bow four times, in addition to glancing conspicuously at the girl to my left who seemed to know what she was doing. I was the only person in the whole group who Todd Reynolds had to physically correct, and when I asked David how I did later on he said, "You had the best posture of anyone when you weren't playing."

I'm certainly guilty of leaving concerts and complaining about the quality of musicianship. It's obvious to state, but this is hard work - physical work - that takes decades of commitment to perfect. We know this in our heads when we sit at concerts, just as we know it in our heads while watching the Olympic swimmers on TV, but can we really grasp it without experiencing the physicality ourselves? 

How can orchestras give donors, audience members, and perhaps even critics a taste of what it's like to play an instrument? Would that help ticket sales? Change reviews? Increase donations?

Many industry people and classical music lovers have or still do played/play an instrument, but we don't usually play just before the concerts we now go and see. If every person in the audience was required to take a half-hour music lesson from member of the orchestra before that evening's performance, how would that connectedness alter the concert experience? Would the audience appreciate the music more because they understood the instruments better? Some might even appreciate the music more simply because they met an orchestra member personally before the concert. Similarly, when was the last time your orchestra's administration played instruments? Perhaps the orchestra members could give them lessons as well. Make it a team-building day, and see if your local paper would cover it.

I won't be quitting my day job any time soon, even though Hilary Hahn saw the photos and swore I looked like a natural (that's because she didn't see my post-concert Erlkönig impression). That said, after a one-hour group lesson, I feel like I understand what I'm pitching a bit more intimately, and will smile fondly and knowingly at my (big air quotes) fellow violinists during the next concert I go to.


Updated 3/23: Click here for a slideshow of the event.

Nope, I'm not going to write about it, but I sure wish the press would!

The Olympics have renewed my fascination with all things surrounding child prodigies and, especially with the games being in China, I wonder why we haven't seen child prodigy athlete vs. child prodigy classical musician press.

Surely there are huge, glaringly obvious similarities: extreme focus on a singular pursuit from a very young age, supportive beyond-supportive-parents (or parental figures), intense training, legendary coaches/teachers, presence of natural gifts, all-consuming travel schedules, physical demands, careers potentially cut short by injury, existence just below the mainstream celebrity line for most....lots of interesting compare/contrast material there.  You can't swing a dead Chinese cat without hitting a human "interest" story in NBC's Olympic coverage, so I'm frustrated that there hasn't been a Chinese classical musician/Chinese athlete development piece. Commitment from a national level to developing young talent of all genre? Come on, that's gold! [pun...intended.] Every time the cameras cut to Mama Phelps, I think how intriguing a piece examining successful young athletes'/musicians' parents would be; similarities would certainly cross national boundaries, there. And what better platform than The Olympics to explore where and how prodigies in all areas materialize, since multiple studies have shown that neither geography nor ethnicity appears to matter in sports or classical music.

Wikipedia's List of Child Prodigies is comedy to behold. No Hilary, no Joshua Bell, no Michael Phelps! Gotta love Ruth Ann Kepple, though, "prodigy of facts". Hilary never liked being called a prodigy; in interviews, she often half-jokes that the word originally meant "monster".  Young, exceptional athletes aren't called "prodigies", though: the term seems limited to the arts, chess and academics. Why is that? There's also the question of which athlete/musician child prodigies become tops of their fields when they reach adulthood; athletes almost can't, for physical reasons, whereas classical musician prodigies can have forty-plus year careers.

I enjoyed the six minutes of my life that was spent watching a former tennis pro eat "weird Chinese food" in between beach volleyball and synchronized diving, but I do think that exploring the prodigy topic during the Beijing Olympics could potentially shed some really interesting light on both sports and classical music. As usual, in my absolutely performing arts-biased opinion.