City Walks at SFO “You Are Hear” Festival
- June 25, 2010
- By Michael Kaulkin
- Past Work, Performances
- 0 comments
Some composer friends and I have been kicking around the idea of getting our music played in unconventional venues. The idea is that if music is only played in concert halls, then the audience is limited to people who take time out of their busy schedules to seek it out, to say nothing of willingness to spend money on tickets. Surely we can find new ways of bringing new music to audiences that don’t require them to be so proactive.
The annual You Are Hear festival at San Francisco International Airport presented us with an opportunity to play this out. Today members of San Francisco’s Magik*Magik Orchestra performed beautiful quartets by Alexis Alrich, Dan Becker, Belinda Reynolds and Clark Suprynowicz and myself in a little enclave overlooking the security line in Terminal One. Right between some busy escalators and a busy elevator.
You would think that as a composer I would find this setting intolerable for a performance of my music, but I loved it. I loved the informality of it, and I loved the look on the face of the harried-looking woman clutching her People Magazine while she figured out what was going on after getting off the elevator. I even loved the security announcements that repeatedly upstaged my very nuanced and contemplative piece.
The ambient noise and the bell on the elevator and the calls for Kim Anderson to pick up the white courtesy phone all became part of the music. And, there was the added element of theater as I watched passers-by react in different ways to the incongruity of a string quartet playing next to the escalator leading to TGI Friday’s. Most people were in a hurry and didn’t react at all. Many paused and smiled briefly, and some stopped, transfixed, and sat on the floor.
I wonder how many of these folks would ever take time out of their life and buy tickets for a chamber music concert.
Here is part of my string quartet City Walks as performed by members of the Magik*Magik Orchestra today at San Francisco International Airport’s You Are Hear festival.
