Essay: After the Silence, Music

ESSAY

After the silence, music

For the players of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, consigned to silence, the global pandemic was a time of melancholy separateness. Author Chloe Hooper reflects on the slow return to the stage.

Illustration HOLLY WARBURTON

The first step was switching off the ghost light. For months, a bulb glowed from centre stage of Hamer Hall, as ghost lights did in unoccupied concert halls all over the world. It felt good to pack the light stand away. Through the endless nights of lockdown, the spirits of the stage had been appeased, but there was now much to do.

The stage manager discovered that the longer a venue had been asleep, the longer it took to wake up. The place smelt musty. Security staff had been checking the sea of empty seats, but in the day-after-day of haunting quiet, the air had become dank.

One moment, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra was a single organism on stage, a multitude of voices, lost together in the same music. Then, suddenly, each musician was wrenched into a melancholy separateness. They had the anxiety of catching and unwittingly spreading the virus, layered with other fears about survival. So many musician friends were finding themselves falling over the precipice, unable to make a living.

In this brutal landscape, would the Orchestra make it through? If it did, would an audience be waiting? And in the meantime, there was only so much practising a person could stand every day in, say, a one-bedroom apartment.

There was Zoom, but that’s too much like talking to yourself to call a real conversation. Performing alone in your room, it’s hard to muster the necessary attention and vigour. Something precious is always missing. The computer takes away essential elements of music — the close communion of people and instruments, the visceral feedback — often accentuating the worst parts of playing, the self-conscious and internal critic. Also, no-one wanted issues with the neighbours.

A trumpeter received a series of abusive anonymous letters under her door, complaining of noise. Shaken, she took to practising in a local park, and was moved by the number of strangers who came up to thank her for sharing her music with them, for the reminder of life before.

How to fill the slow-going hours? When not rehearsing, some members of the Orchestra added rollerblading, or knitting, or baking to their repertoire (they were relearning what it was to be home at night around dinner time). Some started new degrees. Some found that teaching helped them through; they were transmitting something of purpose and meaning, even if that thing wasn’t perfect notes in a concert hall.

Through night after night of carefully planned then cancelled repertoire, all of them waited.

Just when it felt this would never end, the exorcism began. With the ghost light turned off, the stage manager and technicians raised the house lights, replaced the bulbs that had blown, made sure there were no gremlins on the switchboard, that the panelling on the roof was at the right height and position for the acoustics.

The players picked up their instruments again with an added sense of purpose. At first, it could be horrible. The disconnect of what a viola player heard in his head and what his fingers could do didn’t align. And somehow he’d lost a pair of black trousers, and wasn’t sure he’d find the MSO’s standard-issue silver tie. But he could play, and he found trousers and tie, even as across the road from his apartment a mob had taken over the Shrine, protesting at the vaccines that would make it safe to hear live music again…

Savour that sound of the orchestra tuning to an “A”. The instruments following the oboe in a wave, the pitch building. Even in the cacophony, there are the stories beyond words, the music telling us about the mourning of the past two years, the hardships faced by so many musicians, the loneliness of waiting, the wondering if they would ever step onto the stage, but also the relief, the sheer joy of now being home.

Between the notes, for the musicians there’s an even sweeter sound.

The bag checkers whispering, “Is the phone off?”; the seat shifters finding their ideal positions; the throat clearers preparing themselves for quiet. Here is the grand potential for hundreds of people to be enthralled together. All this time, the orchestra has been waiting for this moment — the silence after the tuning. All this time, they’ve been waiting for an audience, for you. ■

Chloe Hooper is one of Australia’s most versatile writers. She lives in Melbourne.