2023. 5. 28 Sun
Hans Zimmer’s arena concert turned out to be a complete bummer, but not (solely) because the composer himself dropped out an hour before the start due apparently to an acute viral infection and the show had to begin with the manager coming up on the stage with the ‘we have a bad news’ speech and a 15 min of grace time to let people leave - a great way to work the crowd and quite a few from the premium area do actually leave to get their tickets revoked, which is perfectly understandable considering the amount they must have paid for the ‘Hans Zimmer Live’ without Hans Zimmer... we decide to stay like the majority, the decision which would very quickly be regretted.
I guess what I was expecting was something a bit more humourous and unexpectedly majestic like The Pirates, meticulous and furiously exhilarating like Inception, ethereal and mesmerisingly architectural like Interstellar, mastered and movingly grand like The Dark Knight or hypnotizing and hauntingly otherworldly like Dune. These brilliant songs are mashed up into so-called ‘Orchestra Suites’ rearranged for these tours. And in effect, original themes inevitably lose their force and magic through deadeningly prolonged strings and drums to fill up time or worst bland and cheesy electric guitar solos. Endless repetitions and constant build-ups that practically every time explode in the exact same crescendo of undiscernible sounds are almost unbearable. The smudgy sound technic is another thing: this mash-up and then prolonging again to compensate for the length of the show doesn’t make any sense to me. Why not play like a nice and simple fifteen-course meal instead of a crowded buffet? Then it would have covered everything I ever wanted to hear. Musically, a commercial medley just does not do them justice.
But something about the sound (and I specifically write sound not music) in general keeps me very much distanced the whole time. And this has nothing to do with the physical distance between the stage and the first row of the balcony where we are sitting. K’s verdict is as simple as “the playing wasn’t engaging.” But how DO we become engaged? What makes us immerse into music at a concert? Certainly not the volume because Hans had it plenty. The most immediate comparison I can draw is with Thielemann’s Mahler 3 at Semperoper five days ago. I was enthralled then. Thoroughly overcome by the sheer truth of Music. What is different now? I look at countless speakers hanging down everywhere. SPEAKERS. They are what’s keeping me from engaging. And I realise what is coming out of there, this digitised sound, a sonic impression, is not music. I’m recollecting an old interview given by Celibidache which had a seminal impact on me as a music dilettante. I transcribe a part of it here.
First of all, one must understand or we must agree upon what music actually is. There are aspects of it that are totally unknown. To start at the end: What is tempo? To me it is a physical reality that defines the conditions of how sonic vectors are to be united. Time is a condition by which the multitude of information contained in sound can be reduced to unity. After all, our mind can only process one thing at a time. It skips from one monad to the next and we reduce this multitude. One transcends the first, liberates oneself from it, and appropriates it in order to be free to perceive the next one. Therefore I ask, “Can you perceive the same multitude of information with a microphone as with your ear?” On the contrary: the microphone ignores a third of it and creates totally new elements from the other two-thirds. If you have a vast amount of elements, you’d require much more time in order to reduce them than if their total was limited. The more complex it all is the slower the piece should be. ... A CD cannot offer this wealth of impressions because the microphone is not able to record them. Digital technology splits a sound into 1,600,000 parts then recombines them. But according to which criteria? That of the machine. How can one tell what was there before?
Having been to the Philharmonie for quite a number of times now, I feel I have gotten to understand this a little better. Musical effect of course starts with sonic impressions which move our emotions, but then it is much more and quite inexplicably. And even at the Philharmonie, it is only very rarely experienced, this moment of complete unity and truth. This remarkable and profound statement of a great conductor is exactly what Hockney said about photos. That a camera only sees the world geometrically. Digitisation is always a reduction. As in the case of Hans Zimmer, if the original music was already digitally conceived unlike Mahler’s, the problem is even simpler: why in God’s name would anyone go to a concert to hear it? It has no merit whatsoever musically, to experience it live. It exists only in an already appropriated form - almost like a piece of chewed-up meat for the toothless, which ironically makes it simultaneously the best possible version there is - even playable via all kinds of personal means. Just as I’m listening to the music of Dune on my laptop now writing this. And I bitterly confirm it is better than the amped-up excerpt I heard live yesterday night with congested, crackling reverbs.
It really comes down to the question, what is music - or in this case what one should anticipate—hope for—at a concert. As Celibidache so ruthlessly puts it, a poor critic who only hears the direct sound might be content to pay 130 euro for such an event with so many speakers that he fails to count them. For the same amount of money, I would like to think I’ve put myself to the test. And I passed.
