Musicon / Notes / The thrill of being present at a great concert
-The thrill of being present at a great concert
There’s something magically immediate about witnessing a musical event, as compared with letting your iPod shuffle through your stored playlists. Part of the thrill of being present at a great concert is knowing that it’s happening in this place and time, among these people, and can never be experienced the same way again. It’s both a celebration of singularity and a reminder that life is finite and lived in one direction only.
Every concert is to some degree a speculation, because musicians have off nights, and things go wrong in even the most tightly scripted shows. Glenn Gould hated concerts because of what he called the gladiatorial side of the experience: the need to conquer the music and the audience; the potential for failure; and the public’s fascination with failure. But I think most people go to concerts not to keep score, but to enter a realm in which everything is vital and meaningful. We go to reach that point at which we feel: Yes, this is how it really is.
From The Globe and Mail; excerpts, edited by Musicon