As a lifetime lover of the performing arts, I’ve sat through long orchestral performances and let my attention drift.
Wearing a blue blazer and my first necktie, I was taken to performances by the National Symphony Orchestra that became the resident orchestra of the newly-opened Kennedy Center. Later I would see Boston Symphony Orchestra performances, though my $4 student price tickets often allowed only partial visibility of the performers. I remember the lights being dimmed and my being carried away by the music, and even sometimes carried towards slumber.
Determined not to repeat my childhood lapses, I took a strategic nap before this Sunday’s festival. This time, the stakes were higher: I wasn’t in the back of the hall. I was sitting on stage at The Mondavi Center.
The Wennberg Orchestra Festival gathers every level of student orchestra in Davis into a single afternoon, and this year, as the Master of Ceremonies, I got to welcome the audience of 400 or more and introduce each group. That meant sitting at a lectern just a few feet from the musicians, right behind the second violins.
As I tried to communicate with my enthusiastic introductions, every entrance mattered. The tuning of all those instruments, led by the concertmaster, seemed to go on too long. One performer was recognized by the conductor taking the stage after the tuning had concluded; he made it to the performance just in time, despite a flat tire on his car. One could imagine him sprinting across town and then across campus, carrying his violin case like a misshapen football. I watched from the lectern as he slipped into his seat, breathless but almost ready,
Sitting so close to the action, I realized that I, too, was part of the set dressing. I remained visible, modeling an attentive silence for the audience without ever pulling their focus away from the sharply-dressed performers. I watched the student musicians tracking the conductor, bows rising together, eyes lifting and settling.
I enjoy speaking into a microphone before 400 people, but I didn’t always know how to negotiate the silence after each piece ended. I could sense the audience looking at me, waiting for permission to clap. Meanwhile, I was looking at the conductor, waiting for a nod. For three or four seconds that felt much longer, nobody moved. As the MC, I felt like the bridge between the sacred silence of the stage and the eruptive energy of the audience.
From the perspective of the audience, an orchestra is a unified wall of sound. From eight feet behind the second violins, the sound is engulfing. From my seat, the orchestral balance vanished; I heard the gritty, intimate details of the violins rather than the polished “wall of sound.” Perhaps only the performers and I could hear the audible breath of the woodwinds before a musical phrase. Under the stage lights, I could see the rosin dust rising from the bows.
The confidence, increasing complexity, and sustained excellence of the performances belied the youth of the performers. A familiar movement from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony appeared late in the program, and I reminisced about the well-worn cassettes that provided the orchestral soundtrack of my last two years of college. When that close to the performers, one actually feels the timbre of the orchestral pieces. The stringed instruments immersed me in sound. The kettledrums resonated in my chest cavity.
By the end of the afternoon, the stage belonged to the students and the conductors (especially Angelo Moreno) who had mentored them. The students carried the sound, held the tempo, and stayed with one another through the harder passages. Introducing the performers, and congratulating them after each rousing finale, I was filled with admiration and gratitude for their performances.
Neither teacher nor parent of these musicians, I left the stage proud of a community that still finds value in the slow, disciplined alchemy of turning rosin and wood into art. After each performance, and especially during the encores, the musicians could hear applause before and behind them on the Mondavi stage.
It’ll be breezy tonight, so bring your paperweights and your friends with weighty knowledge. Expect 31 questions on a variety of topics you should know something about, this week with questions on British heroes who died elsewhere. Today’s pub quiz comes in at a svelte 858 words, my slimmest quiz all year.
In addition to topics raised above and below, expect questions tonight on the following: albums, anthems, anxieties, apartments, arenas, Asian nations, athletes, astronomical bodies, bands, banks, bars, borders, capitals, capsules, characters, clothes, comedians, controllers, credits, dad jokes, decades, detectives, directors, disquietudes, dogs, dukes, economies, elements, epics, eras, forms, franchises, gambling halls, glass enclosures, Greeks, hearings, households, idols, journeys, kings, Koreans, long jokes, machines, magicians, merchants, metals, minerals, movies, novels, poems, presidents, quarterbacks, refusals, remotes, satirists, satellites, sidekicks, sitcoms, songs, sports, stones, taxes, tickets, tournaments, trousers, verbs, U.S. states, geography, current events, and Shakespeare.
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Best,
Dr. Andy
Three questions from last week:
- Film and Film Critics. About what 2026 Pixar film was film critic William Bibbiani speaking when he wrote that the film “isn’t just James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) if it had feelings, it’s also James Cameron’s Avatar if it was good”?
- Youth Culture. Why has Bebe the parrot gone viral: Alerting Ukrainian soldiers to drones, exploring the Bahamas in a submarine, or accompanying Justin Bieber on stage at Coachella 2026?
- Countries of the World. How many European countries have a larger population than that of Iran: One, three, or five?