#178 - When the Music Ends, the Music Begins
"One duty of the composer is to expose the unexpected, overlooked and hidden skeins of music woven in the world around us." - Chris DeLaurenti
Chris DeLaurenti's Favorite Intermissions captures the tinkling, mumbling, tittering, tuning sound of intermissions at classical music concerts. Sneaking a minidisc recorder under his jacket, DeLaurenti secretly recorded these soundscapes: the music of people getting ready to make and listen to music.
The CD is currently out of print, but you can read more about the project, and hear MP3s through Daniel J. Wakin's article, "The Concerts Found Onstage While Everyone Else Takes a Break."
What is so wonderful about this music is its mixture of the innocent and the illicit. As suggested by the mock Deutsche Grammophon cover, with its espionage-like photograph of DeLaurenti standing before the stage recording at intermission, this is a CD that discovers aesthetic value and beauty in the abandoned, in what most consider junk and noise.
In this sense, Favorite Intermissions is like much "Outsider Art": its pleasures come from its recovery of a lost innocence. But simultaneously, we get our naughty thrills with DeLaurenti, who, in capturing these intermissions, violated the copyright rules of most classical performances, where unapproved photography and recording is strictly banned.
Listening to Favorite Intermissions, we steal cookies from the cookie jar with DeLaurenti, hiding under the table with him in our newly shared secret world, while the adults gather around above us, swallowing down their high-art vegetables, dropping crumbs of their fancy desserts to the ground below.
25 September 2007