“The cruelest thing you can do to a note is to play it outdoors,” where it “just floats away like a helium balloon, never to be heard again,” writes Justin Davidson on Thursday (6/19) at the website Wondering Sound. “And yet, wall-less, roofless, stageless spaces surely have shaped more musical traditions and provoked more ecstasies than any room or hall…. It’s a paradox of symphonic music that the greatest evocations of the outdoors need a big hall to achieve their full effect…. Performances en plein air, like picnics and sidewalk restaurants, make up in atmosphere what they lack in concentration, and that is a powerful instrument of pleasure. … The most reliable date for outdoor music in New York City rolls around every June 21, when Make Music New York floods the five boroughs with solstice sounds…. It’s a way of rediscovering the city through the ears.” In 2011 when “roving percussionists … [performing] John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit … the composition merged with the landscape.… The day was a triumph of music without walls.” In Monday’s (6/23) New York Times, James Oestreich gives a more detailed description of events in last Saturday’s 2014 Make Music New York festival.
Posted June 24, 2014
Pictured: More than 200 woodwind and brass players, led by Jeff W. Ball, perform Berlioz’s “Symphonie Funebre et triomphale” in Manhattan’s Bryant Park on June 21, 2014, as part of the annual Make Music New York festival. Photo by Karsten Moran / New York Times
