OUTRAGEOUS!
The Symphony Orchestra
as Aural Dildo

by Harriet Lobdell

A species that just loves to fight. A species that just loves to subjugate and enslave. A species that loves to  pillage and plunder, and then hoard the results. A species that loves mirrors and air conditioning, cigarettes and meat. That's us all right.

But.

Take 100 people who have spent years training their fingers and mouths in the most exquisitely delicate forms of fine-motor skills, years teaching their ears to discriminate between tiny, micro-tonal differences in pitch, years subverting their own rampant individualism. Put those 100 people on a stage in a large room. Put printed music in front of them. Give them a person to lead them in unison performance.

The result, against the vicious and bloody background of human history, is nothing less than completely outrageous. Not just little, 12-point pixelated "outrageous," but

OUTRAGEOUS!

Yes, we're talking about your standard old-fashioned, garden-variety symphony orchestra. One of the great human creations. 100 grumpy, selfish, greedy, horny individual human beings acting in near-perfect accord to produce aural textures simple and sublime, raucous and whimsical.

Yetch, you say? She listens to classical music!? Jeez! The boring stuff I tune past at the low end of the FM band? The old-hat crap that shows up on PBS?

Yes, that stuff. What I'm saying is: If you haven't heard a symphony orchestra LIVE doing, say, the William Tell Overture, then you, my friend, really don't know what you're missing.

Oh, you say, I went to see Fantasia 2000. Nice graphics, but the music left me cold.

Me too. A terrible film, terribly recorded.

The problem was not IMAX or Disney. Well, only partly IMAX and Disney.

The problem is: The difference between a RECORDING of a symphony orchestra in full blossom and the REAL THING is the difference between watching a porn movie and having sex yourself.

Even if you have the highest-end high-end audio system, the difference is still there, and still the same. Fake, versus real.

So, yes, she IS talking about yucky old classical music, but she's saying that you have to hear the REAL thing to know what she's talking about. Which is: ear orgasm.

Truly outrageous. It is indeed truly outrageous that while leaving our bloody tracks across history we should have also developed this fantastically complicated system of aural notation AND a ridiculously expensive and difficult system of performance of that notation.

But we have done that. And somewhere near you tonight, or if not tonight then soon, a full symphony orchestra will be playing. If you've never heard one going full bore, do your ears a favor. Escape genital tyrrany. Buy a ticket*** and give yourself a new kind of physical fulfillment.

END

  ***For a list of American orchestras with links to their sites,
click here or here

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