Johannes Brahms, Meet Sidney Crosby
Last week my sweetheart and I went to a performance by London Symphonia. We hadn’t attended a symphonic concert in years, and it was absolutely wonderful. Beethoven’s violin concerto in D major and Sibelius’s 2nd symphony. Magnificent playing of great music. It got me thinking how I got to be a classical music buff. (Not an expert, I love it but claim no serious knowledge of it.)
I was raised on mid-20th century popular music. My dad would play his vinyl records for me when I was quite young. I remember Dave Brubeck, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Gerry Mulligan and the soundtrack from the Peter Gunn TV show, music by Henry Mancini. Oh, and Spike Jones on 78s. I loved listening with him, what kid doesn’t enjoy that kind of attention from his Dad?
It kindof stuck with me, although like most of my generation I became a big Beatles fan when they hit the charts, then it was The Doors, Cream, The Who, etc etc as the Rock Era washed over us all. But I owned some recorded jazz as I got older, too. Brubeck and Oscar Peterson and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and such. There was some R&B and blues mixed in there, too, but I had no experience of classical music. The only youthful exposure I remember was the local orchestra coming to our grade school for a performance, as such organizations do, and the principal of my high school complaining bitterly that no one wanted to play the violin any more since the electric guitar had come along.
Anyway, into my 40s, that was my music listening, mid-century popular music, as I said. At some time during my period as department chair in the early 2000s, the University’s Faculty Relations department – which used to do useful things from time to time – sponsored a Night at the Symphony. Discounted tickets to go hear a performance by Orchestra London (as it was then known), and I decided, trying to be a good team player, to buy a ticket and go.
They played in Centennial Hall in those days, a horrible old barn with miserable acoustics. I remember that I had trouble even hearing the cello soloist. I have no recollection of what pieces were played, but I was quite taken by it. Watching and hearing a symphony orchestra, even a mediocre one in a hall with bad acoustics, is an all-encompassing experience. There is almost too much sound to take in, as well as a hundred things to watch. I enjoyed it very much, and from that time on I was hooked. I bought tickets to more concerts and started making trips on the train to Toronto to catch the much-better Toronto Symphony playing in acoustically-wonderful Roy Thomson Hall.
And, I started buying classical CDs, mostly symphonic, but small-group recordings, also.
That is what makes symphonic music like hockey: nothing compares to seeing/hearing it live, right in front of you. I played my cd of Sibelius’s 2nd the morning after the concert, and enjoyed it, but it reminded me there is no substitute for sitting in a hall and listening to an orchestra.
Similarly, watching hockey on TV is nothing like being in an arena and having it happen in front of you. Hockey is a game of sounds, the snicking of the skates on the ice, the bang of a hard-shot puck hitting the boards or ringing off the iron goal posts, and the sounds of the players yelling to one another. And, no sport moves as fast as hockey, and you only realize that sitting in an arena watching talented players do their thing.
A TV broadcast of a hockey game is a sterile thing, in comparison. It may well be possible with current technology to send those sounds through your TV or laptop during a game, but then the hockey chatterers hired by the broadcasters would have to shut the hell up, and they won’t do that. TV broadcasting of all sports is predicated on the belief that if you are not distracted by all sorts of things having nothing to do with the sport, you will get bored and go do something else. Talk-talk-talk, often about shit having nothing to do with the game being broadcast.
You may remember when Fox first started broadcasting NHL games in the US, they did some techie thing to make the puck light up in red on TV screens, so Americans who had never seen a game live could follow the play. It was much mocked, but I understand Fox’s instinct.
My own intro to hockey was much like my intro to classical music. I grew up within spitting distance of the Canada/US border, so my dad’s big-ass antenna picked up the CBC station in Windsor, Ontario, on which we could – and occasionally did – watch Hockey Night in Canada, and some Detroit station carried Red Wings games. That was all well and good, but I was in no sense a fan until my son started playing around age 9, and I spent hours in cold rinks watching games for years. Even kids (this was not a NHL-prep league, believe me) skating around in a game gives you a feel for hockey, and the sounds are the same. Then we started going to London Knights games. That’s Ontario Major Junior A level hockey, which is NHL-prep, and you could get good seats in the big old barn they used to play in. It was great, and I was by then a real fan.
I don’t actually watch much hockey on TV any more. North American football, and – strangely enough – baseball, are the only sports worth watching on TV, in my view. Football is too many people over too large an area to enable anyone (or at least me) to take it in while sitting in a stadium. And baseball is mostly about the mano-a-mano contest between pitcher and hitter, which TV delivers well. Still, the commentators on those broadcasts would also make me very happy if they would just shut the hell up….
Anyway, my point, if not obvious, is that one cannot really come to appreciate and love symphonic music from cds, however good your audio equipment is, and one cannot really love and appreciate hockey from watching games on TV, no matter how big-screen and HD is your equipment. You gotta get yourself to the concert hall or arena.
And….I’m just as likely to sit down and have a chat with Sidney Crosby as I am with Johannes Brahms.