The last few weeks have been a bit dry and academic, so today we’re going to talk about something completely different, namely, a concert! That’s right, this blog about music is going to talk about an actual concert! If you’re curious about what it was like listening to a Bruckner Symphony in Taiwan after more than two years away from concert halls, read on!
Arrival
Running a few minutes late, I rushed out of the MRT station and into the compound that houses the National Concert Hall, along with the National Theater and the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall 國立中正紀念堂. The monumental effect of the whole compound was spoiled a little bit by the vast section of the central square that was fenced off for maintenance—under the looming solidity of the two performance halls, the temporary barriers gave off a flimsy, kids’-meal vibe—but if anything, the detour I made around the barriers just reinforced the vastness of the whole complex.
The exterior of the buildings is designed in the traditional-Chinese-meets-concrete style particularly favored by the KMT (similar edifices can be found at the Grand Hotel Taipei, or the National Palace Museum). Upon entering the building, though, it’s a different story. Red carpets everywhere. Marble galore. Grandiose lighting fixtures that somehow manage to be both exactly what you’d expect of any classic concert hall around the world, and deeply evocative of the 1980s era in which the hall was built.1 (I forgot to take photos of the inside, so here we’ll all just have to rely on my memory.)
I made my way to my seat the upper balcony. Inside the hall, plush modern seating and excellent sightlines make concertgoing here a real pleasure. Waiting for the concert to begin, I was left to gaze upon and speculate wildly about the gargantuan organ that occupies the entire back wall of the stage. (Given the opportunity, I’ll make a point of coming back to hear it.)
The program was Bruckner’s fifth symphony, and I will confess, I was ambivalent about going. My impressions of Bruckner generally focus on adjectives like, “loud” and “long” (often flirting with “interminable”). I also have an unfortunate mental association between Bruckner and the Nazis … but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Performance
It turns out that some of my vague memories of Bruckner were correct. Bruckner is loud! Bruckner symphonies are long (and yes, this one sometimes bordered on interminable!) But I had forgotten how quirky, eclectic, and even humorous they are. The fifth symphony manages to combine everything from the brassy bravado of Wagner at his most “kill da wabbit,” the restless moodiness of Mendelssohn’s Die Hebriden, some of the humorous wind interjections of Mahler at his most ironic, and a strangely insistent motif in the final movement that reminded me inescapably of Mozart’s famous “Don Giovanni” motif.
I was also reminded of many of the challenges and glories of live performance.
In the pro column: The sound in the concert hall, boosted by the stage’s megaphone shape and the hard surfaces throughout the hall, was crystal clear. In the con column: the bright and clear sound favored high, bright partials in the extreme. In a piece like Bruckner 5, where the brass are always ready to strut their stuff, this spelled doom for balance in a few places—the slightly bemusing spectacle of strings sections frantically sawing away and yet being completely inaudible under the over-enthused brass section produced a mis-synched AV effect.2 Aided and abetted by the hall’s marble and hardwood surfaces (and perhaps by the fact that only about half of the seats were absorbed by those squishy, absorptive objects known as “human bodies”), the sound on several occasions became uncomfortably loud, even in the upper balcony. I can only imagine the post-concert condition of poor bassoonists’ eardrums, situated as they were directly in front of the brass.
In the pro column: In more strings-centric sections, the playing was lush and beautiful—the kind of performance that creates the full-body vibrational envelope that no home sound system can reproduce. This was coupled with the sensitivity, warmth, and humor of several of the woodwind soloists, particularly the principal clarinet.
In the con column: Throughout much of the middle two movements, I thought that, if anything, the performance was a bit too beautiful. Maybe it’s the fact that Bruckner stands towards the top of the Germanic symphonic food chain (albeit below some of the other B’s like Beethoven and Brahms), but we forget that these composers could be humorous! Particularly the third movement, which felt like it should have had the rustically thigh-thumping feel of a Ländler (also beloved of Mahler),3 but instead came off as just safely and generically triple-meter, felt like a missed opportunity to bring some levity into a symphony that often delivers Romantic Teutonic earnestness at its finest.
Reflection
This was my first time back in a symphony hall since the start of COVID. Indeed, this concert was a strange inversion of my last symphony hall concert experience before COVID. On that occasion, I took my students on a trip to hear the Shanghai Chinese Orchestra 上海民族乐团, one of China’s great “traditional music” performing ensembles,4 play a Chinese New Year program in one of America’s great halls, Chicago’s Symphony Hall. This latest concert flipped much of that geography on its head: a trip to hear one of the great German symphonists played by one of Asia’s flagship orchestras, in one of Asia’s great halls.
It was also an experience of listening to the legacies of the German Romantic fetish for monumentality, embraced and amplified by a Nazi regime for whom monumentality for its own sake was a persistent aesthetic paradigm.5 This collided in this performance with the monumentality of a construction project that was built to augment latter-day KMT visions of monumentality. The National Concert Hall lies literally in the shadow of the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, a monument to the erstwhile hero of the Northern Expedition, and later the architect and overseer of Taiwan’s 228 Incident, the White Terror, and decades of martial law. It is a reminder (pace Kant) that music is deeply embedded in and indebted to its social context. No matter how beautiful the music, listening to Brucknerian musical monuments within the walls of a monumental nationalist edifice that stands at the foot of a monumental memorial to the violently authoritarian legacies of Taiwan’s most powerful post-War political figure reminds us of the crucial role played by particular kinds of music in the generation of prestige, cultural capital, and social legitimacy.
Being back in a concert hall was a complicated experience. And yet, as the symphony approached its conclusion, I found myself crying. Although this is mainly a blog documenting my current work as a music researcher, my background is in performance—I have (too) many degrees in performance, I have taught performers at universities and summer festivals for years, and I have pursued the performance projects and collaborations that have sparked joy in me, with performers who are busy sparking joy in audiences around the world as we speak. I have watched and mourned as COVID decimated the livelihood of my performer friends and colleagues, even as I broadly support science-based safety restrictions. As a graduate student at an elite American university, I am very conscious of my paltry-but-stable salary, which means that even as venues have started to reopen, I have avoided seeking out performance opportunities. This is not because I don’t want to be performing—I miss it desperately. But I am acutely aware that I don’t need to perform right now, I just want to. But to be confronted with live performance again, in all its visceral monumentality, was a moving experience that ultimately left me feeling overwhelmed.
If this seems like a complicated set of reflections on a simple trip to the symphony … well, maybe it explains why I’m a researcher as well as a performer. But the next time you go to the symphony, or the opera, or a jazz club, or a musical, take a look around you. Along with the talent, the sweat, the effort, and the technical nuances of the performance, along with the architectural finesse of the venue, along with the simple pleasure of feeling live music vibrating against your skin and unfolding before your eyes, try to spare a moment to think about the social milieu in which concert-going exists as a phenomenon. Who knows? It might even change what you hear.
Here I confess, I guessed 1980s for the lighting fixtures before knowing that the hall was built in that decade. At the same time, I will not be doing the research to see if the lighting has had a significant makeover since the hall’s opening. Regardless of whether or not they’re the originals, these lights still look very 80s to me.
This was probably exacerbated by the fact that the first couple of desks in each row of the strings sections sit past the edge of the proscenium arch, meaning they don’t get much acoustic help from the stage shape. This impression of acoustic disadvantage was heightened by a slight but noticeable lag between the strings and the brass who, despite being further back on the stage, consistently reached the audience first.
I’m not a Bruckner scholar, and I won’t be. I haven’t opened the score, nor will I. If it’s not an actual Ländler please don’t @ me. I’m just saying that many sections of the third movement evoked the fun of a Ländler, fun that was lost in the quest for stringy lushness that shaped the aesthetic of this particular performance.
In reality, the Shanghai Chinese Orchestra isn’t all that traditional. If you’re curious how the mashup of traditional Chinese instruments and Western symphonic orchestral aesthetics came to be, Fred Lau’s Music in China: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007), has a great introduction on the subject. The book is a bit pricey, but it’s always worth checking to see if your local public library has it, or if you can find it used!
See, for example, Alexander Rehding, Music and Monumentality (Oxford University Press, 2009), or Karen Painter’s Symphonic Aspirations (Harvard University Press, 2007).