Musical Entertainment

It's been a good weekend. The garden is looking neater. I have completed the text of my CV, a job that's been hanging over me for a year now (although it still needs polishing and setting in a pretty form). The beautiful watercolour that I brought back from Peru is framed and hanging on my wall. And it still feels like it's been a relaxing couple of days.

But most interesting was Friday night.

At my local arts centre, a one-off show was advertised. It was a musical performance based on the music of various popular songwriters known for performing using the piano, and as I play the piano it seemed to fit the bill as an evening's entertainment.

I found the whole experience rather disconcerting. I have never been to a gig, as such, nor to a rock concert or anything similar. I have been to one or two performances of classical music, now. Otherwise, my history of listening to music has been limited to the performances of family and friends in a social setting. What was so weird about this was that in some ways it was extremely similar, and yet the differences were also quite extreme.

The list of songs could have been lifted directly from an evening in a brethren household - in fact there were very few I hadn't played myself in the past - and as the guy playing them wasn't the original performer any more than I was, it was very much a deja vu situation. The pianist and singer was accompanied by a guitarist, bassist, drummer, keyboard-player and saxophonist. Of those, only the last would have been unusual in my past life, and even that wasn't unknown. The general sound and the way the songs were performed were also an eerie match. I could have closed my eyes and been back sitting in armchair on a Saturday evening, listening to my brothers and their friends cutting loose, although my old acquaintances were keener on harmony singing.

I think the most unsettling difference, though, was that this was relentlessly presented as "entertainment". The main performer felt obliged to involve the audience, boost them, get feedback and interaction and, I suppose, give value for money. The musicians were on stage, we in the audience were on tiered seating in lowered lighting, watching as the lighting changed and smoke from dry ice drifted in the coloured beams.

Somewhere in my head, this felt like a jarring mismatch. I have been used to people playing ninety percent for their own pleasure, with my enjoyment as a useful side-effect, and it felt like pressure to be obliged to enjoy and be seen to enjoy the same kind of thing done explicitly for my benefit at my cost. Perhaps the sheer familiarity of the repertoire was responsible for that discomfort.

Still, it was well done, and made for a good night out. Nobody else is to blame for the still-sometimes-odd goings-on inside my head.