It had to happen - a concert for cellphones and symphony orchestra

Horns Up. Bows Ready. Cellphones On – by DANIEL J. WAKIN (from the NY Times)

RIVER FOREST, Ill. -- It was like an aviary gone mad. Scores of cellular phones trilled and twittered, beeped and burbled all at once inside a concert auditorium in this community outside Chicago. The orchestra onstage was unfazed. The composer was delighted.

On Sunday, in a perverse commentary on the scourge of modern concert halls, the Chicago Sinfonietta played the world premiere of the Concertino for Cellular Phones and Symphony Orchestra by David N. Baker, a professor of music at Indiana University and a prolific composer.

Paul Freeman, the group’s music director, told the audience beforehand, “This is a great moment in history, when we can say to you, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, turn on your cellphones.’ ”

A device similar to a traffic light signaled the audience members to activate their rings — red for the balcony, green for the orchestra seats — at various points in the piece. An assistant conductor, Terrance Gray, followed the score and activated the lights.

Four amplified mobile phones were onstage. One, operated by a teaching assistant at Indiana, Aaron Vandermeer, was programmed with Mr. Baker’s main tune and well-known classical themes like the “William Tell” gallop and a motif from the last movement of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4. The other three cellphonists onstage played random rings, sometimes timed to destroy a pastoral melody here or there.

Mr. Freeman held a brief practice session before the downbeat. “You may use as much imagination or as little as you like,” he said.

“We want to be very disciplined about this,” he added. “You are really not to perform until you see your light.” The rehearsal was sloppy: many rings continued past the light.

The creators of the performance worried that people would not know how to prompt their ring tones. (Mr. Baker’s wife had showed him how.) So the orchestra directions to its subscribers by e-mail and put an insert in the program. Many in the audience were rehearsing before the concert, staring intently at their phones, cocking their heads and punching buttons.

During the performance, some in the audience held up their phones and waved them back and forth, as if to make themselves heard. Little squares of light from the phone screens studded the hall at Dominican University, one of the homes of the Sinfonietta. But the audience cellphonists seemed to lose steam toward the end of the piece, and the orchestra occasionally drowned out their rings. Organizers hoped that the sound would be better the next night, at Orchestra Hall in Chicago.

The score was filled with classical tunes suggested by a ring-tone Web site, including fragments from Strauss’s “Don Juan,” Bartok’s “Concerto for Orchestra,” a Brahms symphony and a snippet of “Scheherazade” by Rimsky-Korsakov. At one point, Mr. Baker turned the tables. Oboes and flutes imitated a cell ring. The tuba groaned with irritation.

Seriousness lay beneath the frivolity. The Sinfonietta, which will play nine concerts this season and has a $2 million budget, is a small, worthy orchestra struggling for notice in a city with big-time competition. It says its mission is “musical excellence through diversity” and calls itself the country’s most racially diverse orchestra.

“The key is to differentiate ourselves in the market in general,” said Jim Hirsch, the orchestra’s executive director (and a stage cellphone performer on Sunday). So the orchestra, which is starting its 20th season, specializes in unusual programs, including concertos incorporating tap dance, steel pans and maracas.

The cellphone piece had a certain artistic seriousness of purpose, too.

“What I was really thinking was, chaos versus organization,” Mr. Baker said. “But more importantly, how do you change somebody’s listening apparatus by what’s going on around them?”

Mr. Freeman put the work in the context of music with random elements, like John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 4” for 12 radios, and pieces by Charles Ives that have unrelated passages running simultaneously.

Mr. Freeman said he had gotten the idea for the composition while sitting in an airport in Prague, where he is chief conductor of the Czech National Symphony Orchestra (which is expected to perform the piece in December). About 100 people were there, most of them talking on cellphones.

“I thought, ‘Darn, if you can’t beat them, join them,’ ” Mr. Freeman said. He approached several composers, including Mr. Baker, 74, who is also director of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra.

“My first inclination was to ask him what he was smoking,” Mr. Baker said. But the idea appealed to him. He struggled for five weeks on how to reconcile diametrically opposed elements — an orchestra and cellphones — and came up with the idea of having onstage cellphones with his own themes, and a division of phones in the hall.

But the audience participation was key. “It was a way of giving people control at a concert,” he said. “I’m hoping people will see the comedic element, but more importantly, that maybe you can have fun at a symphony concert.” The piece was also a recognition that cellphones “are not going to go away,” he said.

The audience buzzed after the concert. “I made history!” said one boy. A woman said, “It’s a commentary on our modern life.” A man said, “All it takes is practice.” Mr. Baker called the performance a success and said the best thing about it was that people were excited to take part.

But there are limits to such pieces, he had said earlier, recounting that he had told Mr. Freeman, “If you call me and ask me to do something with flushed toilets, count me out.”