October 4, 2006
Cellphone Concertino Video thanks to the NY Times
The New York Times offers a video of the Concertino for Cellular Phones and Symphony Orchestra by David N. Baker, held October lst in Chicago and explains just how the audience was asked to participate.
"A device similar to a traffic light signaled the audience members to activate their rings — red for the balcony, green for the orchestra seats — at various points in the piece. An assistant conductor, Terrance Gray, followed the score and activated the lights.
Four amplified mobile phones were onstage. One, operated by a teaching assistant at Indiana, Aaron Vandermeer, was programmed with Mr. Baker’s main tune and well-known classical themes like the “William Tell” gallop and a motif from the last movement of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4. The other three cellphonists onstage played random rings, sometimes timed to destroy a pastoral melody here or there.
Mr. Freeman held a brief practice session before the downbeat. “You may use as much imagination or as little as you like,” he said.
... During the performance, some in the audience held up their phones and waved them back and forth, as if to make themselves heard. Little squares of light from the phone screens studded the hall at Dominican University, one of the homes of the Sinfonietta. But the audience cellphonists seemed to lose steam toward the end of the piece, and the orchestra occasionally drowned out their rings. Organizers hoped that the sound would be better the next night, at Orchestra Hall in Chicago."
Just for the record, as this is loudly being touted as the first such performance of its kind, with the audience buzzing "we made history", it was not a first.
Dialtones Symphony was the first very ringtone concert. It was conducted by Golan Levin and performed in September 2001 at the Brucknerhaus Auditorium in Linz, Austria. The 28-minute concert was produced through the ringing of 200 visitors' phones. And there have been others since:
-- Links in Ringtonia to ringtone concerts and symphonies
-- An Informal Catalogue of Mobile Phone Performances, Installations and Artworks - through 2002
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/ringtonia/archives/2006/10/013714.htm