Members of IOC often rally late in a season by quoting the group wisdom that things always "come together" in performance. This is not the most vivid phrase -- for me it evokes something casual, unanticipated, like a fifteen-minute meal of pasta and sauce, so basic that it seems to constitute itself without the intervention of any outside agent. This phrase does not really describe what happens in concert.
What happens in concert is that, for several hours each semester, all 30 or so of us active, over-scheduled, slightly frantic individuals set aside our usual concerns and simultaneously turn our minds to the music in our hands. These are not minds easily turned away from their usual concerns, of which we all have many. When it happens, it is quite a thing to watch. Phrases clipped clean as if with scissors; consonants arriving in lockstep at the back of the hall; chords stacked neatly beneath a tower of overtones. It makes my eyes water, like those movie scenes where the whole crowd cheers the underdog or jeers the oppressor -- something about many people moving all at once, together, that just gets me.
Because in those brief moments we get perhaps the best glimpse of what it is like to be in someone else's mind. If I am thinking about the awkward page-turn at page 30 and it goes off without a hitch, I know that everyone else was thinking about it, too, and not only do I know what they were thinking but I think I have an inkling of what it was like to be thinking it, right at that moment. All the time we spend in our own heads, our own bodies. It's nice to get out once in a while.
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