Cultural expressions
This weekend, I went to two very different cultural events in San Francisco.
On Saturday, courtesy of the Craigs, I went to the San Francisco Symphony to hear a performance of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, which was one of my favorite things to listen to in high school. I've only heard it performed live once before, at UC Berkeley in 2000.
The San Francisco Symphony's version was fantastic, and it was especially amusing due to the informality and joking around of the conductor and soloists. During the lead-in performance of La Noche de Los Mayas, several audience members mistakenly applauded after the second movement. (At classical concerts the social convention is that you applaud only at the end of a composition, not at the end of a section of a composition. This means much less frequent applause than at other kinds of concerts. Often, a few people in the audience don't know this or are confused about when a composition has ended; usually the social pressure of the other audience members' silence gets them to stop right away.)
The San Francisco Symphony tells first-time concert-goers that
[i]t is considered proper concert etiquette to clap only after a piece is complete. This means, for example, if you're listening to Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, which has four movements, it is appropriate to clap after the last movement. You can look at your program book to find out how many movements a piece has. Usually, there is a 15- to 30-second pause in between movements. So, in the case of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, you know you're hearing the Finale after three pauses. If all else fails, you can always wait for the rest of the audience to clap before applauding.
At the concert on Saturday, some people started clapping in between movements, and the conductor turned right around and exclaimed -- to the majority of the audience which had remained silent -- something like
Listen, we all know there's not a musician in the world who doesn't like applause and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
This was hilarious and was greeted with much laughter and applause.
Later, the soloist singing "Olim lacus colueram" actually acted out (with great enthusiasm) the whole story of being a swan about to be eaten, and all the soloists really got involved in their parts and played them up humorously. And I think that's interesting because I've heard discussion of the phenomenon that, since Carmina Burana is in Latin, some people will approach it very solemnly, like an ancient religious text. This is funny because Carl Orff's own title for his piece is Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis, which starts out by telling us that they are "secular songs" or even "profane songs". And certainly their content is that -- so these particular soloists really seemed to appreciate that point thoroughly.
One interesting thing was the number of different ways of pronouncing Latin. The several choruses all pronounced intervocalic c as ts, whereas I think two of the soloists pronounced it as ch and the other as ts. (I pronounce it as k.) One of the soloists, on the other hand, pronounced at least one intervocalic t as ts. (I should compare this with modern spoken German; I have a theory that that's where it came from, because some classical singers may be extremely familiar with German phonetic rules.) It's funny to hear people pronounce Latin differently from the way I do, but it's even funnier to hear different musicians in the same performance pronounce it differently. I guess it's hard for the conductor to get them all to override their years of training and practice...
On Sunday, at Zooko's recommendation, I went to the ComBots robot battle tournament at Fort Mason Center. Here I saw various robots smashing, tossing, and grinding each other up.
The most exciting thing was when a "spinning" robot, which was either spinning as a unit or else carried a rapidly spinning cutting blade, clashed with another robot of whatever kind. This invariably produced sparks and sometimes produced flying shrapnel. The robots fought each other inside an enclosure of bulletproof glass. Not only was this repeatedly proven necessary as robots and robot parts slammed into it at high speed, but we ever sometimes wondered whether some of the spinning robots would break through it if they were thrown up against it at the right angle. After all, the walls of the arena inside the bulletproof glass enclosure were made of steel I-beams (the kind used in construction), and the spinning robot Megabite had repeatedly torn enormous gashes straight through the I-beams on contact. If a fighting robot can cut through a steel I-beam, perhaps it can cut through bulletproof glass, too.
The robot builders followed various strategies: essentially, these were the spinner, the wedge, and the hammer. (A spinner either spins its body or a separate cutting blade at extremely high speed; if it has a separate blade, it could be mounted either horizontally or vertically, which makes a big difference in combat. A wedge tries to flip its opponents over, or pick them up and dash them into the walls, or sometimes pick them up and flip them out of the arena, which may involve a moving arm. A hammer tries to smash the other robot from above with a heavy moving part.) There is a great deal of variation within these categories, including with regard to weight distribution, whether there is a robot arm present, whether the wheels are shielded, what kind of wheels and motors are used, etc. The spinners definitely produce the most drama, with sparks constantly flying everywhere, but some people described a rock-paper-scissors situation where each strategy had strengths and corresponding vulnerabilities.
I had a great time at both Carmina Burana and ComBots and am happy to live in a city that offers them on a regular basis.
