Afuera del Comfort Zone

In the midst of an unfamiliar park in an unfamiliar city, speaking an unfamiliar language with a woman that I have known for maybe an hour, hay un lugar que será siempre familiar—the concert hall.

On the first step of the foreboding staircase, I can already perceive the scent of the orquestra—the characteristic oily, metallic smell of the brass, and the resinous, woody odor of the strings. And the rough sounds of a rehearsing ensemble are all too close to my heart: the jolting start and stop of each few measures at a time, the music overlaid with the conductor’s impassioned commands—Tenuto! Attención aqui! Crescendo…

I am fascinated to watch each rehearsal, Maestro Jorge apparently unaware of the baton that exists in his hands only incidentally, but which is siempre natural and very graceful, with bastante control. Sometimes, as though it were too cumbersome or somehow inhibited la libertad y movimento de su expresión, he seamlessly transfers the baton from his right to his left, which wields it equally naturally and dexterously.

Y estoy demasiado acostumbrada también a las tendencías de los músicos, who well know that the conductor can see their cell phones on the stands behind which they are only half-heartedly concealed, who deliberately stare into their scores at the most exciting places of the music in order to play through the conductors cut-off, and whose vocal and instrumental chatter unfailingly emerges from each break in the music. Just as well I understand the feeling as the conductor (a guest director from Honduras, porque Maestro David está en Mexico para unos días) succumbs to the perilous and futile temptation to use the baton as a percussive device in an inevitably ineffective attempt to bend the orchestra more forcefully to his will.

There are other parts of the rehearsal to which I am less accustomed, like the possibilities that are all of the sudden available to the conductor when the musicians know their parts cold, y toman en cuenta their dynamic markings as though they were as important as the notes themselves. Además, when each musician recognizes his identity not as that of an individual, but as belonging to part of a group, ‘balance’ pertenece not only to la relación entre los miembros de la orquestra, but more profoundly to the equilibrium that each individual musician strives to achieve, giving his sound as much presence as possible just short of the point at which it would take precedence over the sound of the orquestra as a whole, to which it is always secondary and of which it is always above all a part. And when every instrumentalist toque así, the result is magic.

Llena each measure de sonidos, movimientos, y eventos musicales. There are not many things to which I can be attentive for a three-hour period, but to these rehearsals I am. The music makes you smile, makes you dance, makes you part of something when you would otherwise be alone: con la orquestra pertenesco—this is why I’m here.