Point of View

Yesterday afternoon I was invited to the orchestra by one of my friends. It was a lovely afternoon--beautiful music (an all French program with the subtle tone nuances of a Monet painting), great company and a special bonus: seats in the conductor's circle.

For those of you unfamiliar with Philadaelphia's Verizon Hall, these are the seats that face the conductor and look over the shoulders of the orchestra. In other words, you sit facing the audience. The sound is most definitely different from the stage looking out (the brass is fairly overpowering for one), but the visual feast is exceptional.

From that vantage point, you see the actual scores on the musicians' stands, watch the percussionists frantically changing mallets for different sounds and even see things that you would fail to see watching from the front. In the first piece, for example, a contemporary piece by a local composer, Jennifer Higdon entitled Blue Cathedral, the horn section did double duty by playing both the rims of crystal glasses filled with water and gentle Chinese bells that they rolled in their palms. Truly, you would be hard pressed to see the musicians both "warming" up their glass rubbing fingers (one even adjusted the level of water in his glass by adding some from a squirt bottle in his pocket) and fingering the delicate bells, all of which came packed in beautiful padded boxes that rested on their music stands. The result was a glorious mix of sounds that were all the more astounding when you saw their origins.

My point is that perspective is critical in perception, a skill most writers know innately but often struggle with when it comes to putting words on papers. Where you sit does matter, not only in how you tell the story but in what you see.

And changing seats is good for all of us to shake up our senses and to get a new handle on the big picture.