Friday night, I saw Trans-Siberian Orchestra live.
GUUUUHH.
Trans-Siberian Orchestra shows are easily some of the most fulfilling theatrical experiences I've ever attended. As I mentioned in my post about getting my electric violin, I've been attending them off-and-on since middle school, and I am always thrilled. They follow the same format every year: the first "act" is their debut album, Christmas Eve and Other Stories, with the poetry-narration of the story read out loud. The second "act" changes a bit every year, and is more traditional rock show with hits from all of their albums. Thus, there is the traditional narrative experience of a theater piece, and the traditional hardcore sensuality of a rock show. Whenever I go to one of their shows now, I consider completely changing my career. Then I calm myself down by reminding myself that theater and rock shows aren't that different and that if I want to learn the technical side of sound well I should work with some bands anyway.
When I first saw TSO live, I was at a particularly rough point in my life and the concert had a great healing effect on me. Now, I'm not at a rough point, but am definitely at a place where I need to refuel myself and find experiences that will help me do that. By now, these shows are familiar but still surprising. By now, I not only know the songs intimately, but have a good grasp of the narration which I've only heard at the concerts. By now, that environment is so comfortable, and filled with positive past experiences that I could sit down in my really, really crappy "last row of the nosebleeds completely to the side" seat and feel my breath release.
And I'm sure it's a combination of all that that meant that in the first act, I was a blubbering mess.
There was the opening song, "Night Enchanted" from their new album, "Night Castle". Then they started the opening narration, and I think it was these lines:
In the moments of our lives
Both the joyous and the tragic
If the truth is to be told
We are all pursuing magic.
And instantly, I was gone. Lost. Eyes welling up and spilling over, nose turning red, brain thinking something about, "YESWEAREALLPURSUINGMAGICTHAT'SEVERYTHINGWESEARCHFORTHATGOODINTHEWORLDTHIS IS SO BEAUTIFUL", only far less coherent. By the first song from that album, "An Angel Came Down", I was sobbing while perched atop my chair (last row has some benefits), thinking, "What am I doing in theater? They've figured it all out here! Why don't I work to give the audience something this beautiful?! Everything should be this!"
And I kept crying for most of the album. The idea that wherever music plays there is hope? Cried. "Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24"? Cried. Man who's had a fight with his daughter just wanting her home for Christmas? Cried. Said daughter wishing on the only star she could see, the light of an old bar in NYC, for help and money getting home? Cried. Angel-child coming into the bar and telling the bartender about the girl and the bartender paying for her plane ticket? Cried. Joy of father knowing his daughter would be home? Cried. Angel returning to God having seen the kindness that can exist between people on the earth? Wept. I was the corner of the "sold" seats, but since it was in a coliseum, there were seats wrapping all around the space so there were plenty of unsold seats next to me. I actually moved a seat away so as not to disturb the man sitting next to me.
Yes, I am the loser that cries through a rock concert.
To be fair, I'm not a generally weepy person. I don't cry at the drop of a hat unless it's Sweeney Todd, or, apparently, TSO. But by halfway through the concert, I'd gone through a complete emotional catharsis and was stepping newborn from the proverbial ashes. So there I am, emotionally vulnerable, sensually vulnerable and synaesthetic. And THEN, they take me into full-on rock show mode. Lights. Pyrotechnics. Fireworks. (I kid you not. FIREWORKS. INSIDE THE COLISEUM.) Not resolving one song so they could go directly into the next song without letting us breathe. LED screen-type projections (that I admittedly couldn't really see because I was so far to the side). Crazy stage antics. Playing in the sky. Lasers. Carmina Burana.
Not that they weren't doing these things during the first act, but during the second act, they bumped them up to eleven and the focus moved from character/story to entirely the performers and the show. Also, the second act was louder. Literally louder. Simple, genius. In my brain/body experience of sensory input, I overload easily... and there's the good kind of overload that is thrilling, and there's the bad kind of overload where I'm afraid to move. This was the good kind. COLOR COLOR COLOR COLOR COLOR. Only once did the synaesthesia vs. stage lights thing become an issue (I'm sorry, but "O Fortuna" just ISN'T RED. It's GREEN). Instead, the show became a rollercoaster... and like a rollercoaster, where I scream not from fear, but from needing to release physical pressure that has built itself within me, I was clearly screaming and headbanging because all the input I was getting was so much good that I couldn't physically hold it still. It needed release. (This is not unusual with me. I physically spaz a great deal because of the physicality and sensuality of emotion. It's a good thing I tend not to go to concerts where moshing is popular.)
The second act in particular became a huge party of "LOOK WHAT WE CAN DO!" which I really appreciated. TSO is comprised of many accomplished musicians and performers. Getting to see them strut their stuff was satisfying, because I can't do that and don't know many people who can do that. This year they gave the electric violin a LOT of stage time. Yessss. Mark isn't playing with TSO this year as he's focusing more on his "Electrify Your Strings!" program with public schools, but I remember talking with him about how he was trying to get TSO to let the violin be more of a presence in the show as opposed to primarily leading the local string section. Well, they've finally got there, which is smart because electric violins are still relatively new instruments. There's a huge "wow" factor with an electric violin. (I used mine in my final project for Experimental Music Theater. It wasn't a great project, but a lot of people thought it was because I used an electric violin.) And Anna Phoebe, the electric violinist this year... phenomenal. Incredible. I want to play electric violin like that. (In this clip she appears at around 1:40. Chris hits his head on a glowing panel at 1:00.)
A show as huge as Trans-Siberian Orchestra shows could seem technically ridiculous. Their setup is insane, and I don't want to know how much it costs. Everything moves, everything shifts, things rise into the sky. And the beauty of it is that none of it is necessary. It's not life changing. It's not going to make me a better person. It's actually just awesome. It's incredible to watch. I'm not thinking about how this affects the world, I'm not moving to some higher plane, it's actually working to fulfill sensory desires, and celebrate the possibilities of the unnecessary things we can do. For an extreme example:
Yes, that's Chris Caffery and Anna Phoebe rising into the sky during the encore of "Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24". It's over the top. It's ridiculous. It's unnecessary. It's AWESOME.
On a less extreme example, there's one effect that they've been doing for years, since I think the 3rd time I saw them... which is making it snow during the song "First Snow". They shoot out something over the floor section that I believe is a kind of soap, so soap-bubble clusters come down. They tend to dissolve right before they hit the audience. The first effect this has which is so genius, is it makes people in the audience look up in wonder, and reach over their heads to see what it is... which is a child's reaction to their first snow. Genius. Then, add in the lasers to the mix... and the bright specks that appear in the sky when the lasers hit the snow is glittering and gorgeous, and is simply, "Look what we can do with light!"
Something this particular TSO show helped me articulate is why I am drawn to heavy music. I mean, yes, it clearly goes back to my childhood and having a brother five years older than me who would blast In Flames and Meshuggah. But I started blazing my own metalhead trails away from his tastes with my discovery of Elvenking in 8th grade, and now while we do like similar music, we lean towards different facets of metal. I tend towards epic. Power metal, symphonic metal, folk metal, melodic death metal. Similarly, I am drawn to epic classical music. Stravinsky, Shostakovitch, Berlioz, Beethoven. Organ music. GIANT CHOIRS. The thing that scared me and excited me the most when I first saw Sweeney Todd was the giant choir standing up and singing the Dies Irae theme... and "City on Fire". (I showed people the 1982 version of Sweeney and they had no idea why that song gave me nightmares. Then I showed them the 2001 version with the massive choir and they understood.) I like epic. I like extreme, largely because I have very extreme emotions that I actively work to neutralize in daily life because showing that much emotion is not socially acceptable. Where are they to come out? Music.
Metal is about extremes. It's about extreme distortion, extreme volume, extreme emotion. This was enormously clear to me this time around hearing the introduction to "Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24".
"Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24" is very easily Trans-Siberian Orchestra's most famous song, which you've probably heard. It's "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" and "Carol of the Bells", starting with a single cello and moving into heavy, screaming guitars. TSO actually came to be because of this song. This was originally released on Savatage's album, Dead Winter Dead, a concept album about the Bosnian War. In this story, an old man returns to his hometown of Sarajevo to find it wracked by bombs every night. His protest is to play classical music on his cello in the ruins of the middle of the town, right in the middle of the warfare. (The song "Mozart and Madness" from that album exemplifies this - and this track was recently edited and rerecorded and released on TSO's latest album.) "Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24" is the song representing the old cellist playing through the bombs on Christmas Eve. In the story of the album, a woman and a man from different sides of the conflict are listening, then hear the cello abruptly stop. They rush to see what happened, and find the old man dead, finally hit, with his smashed cello beside him. (This story was inspired by the playing of cellist Vedran Smajlović.)
"Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24" became such a huge hit, that some of the main people involved with Savatage decided to create Trans-Siberian Orchestra off of that concept. Many, many people, songs and lyrical phrases are shared between TSO and Savatage. TSO is bigger, more of an orchestra. Savatage is much rougher around the edges, more of a band.
How Trans-Siberian Orchestra contextualizes "Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24" for their album is: the angel that is flying over the earth on Christmas Eve sees scars upon the people and the land. As he listens to hear what has happened, he hears people say they're killing for God. This shocks the angel, who, being an angel and all, has heard God speak often and knew that God never mentioned killing your neighbor. Drawing close to a recent battleground, he hears this song, and somehow the song still brought hope even in the most desperate circumstance.
Thus, this piece became an angered cry. And it NEEDED to be loud, and it needed to scream and Anna needed to play so hard that bow hairs started to break off because this was a protest. This was everyone with their own voice, be it guitar or violin or drums or keyboards or cello, crying out against the voices of conflict and hate. It was screaming for hope where everyone else had given up. Because the thing about hope is that no one can take it away from you if you insist on holding onto it. You can create it. This was creating the most extreme hope in the midst of devestation, and the NEED of that could only be expressed through the extremes of metal.
And every emotion throughout the show was that extreme. If it was happiness, it was unbounded joy. If it was sadness, it was complete devastation. If it was celebration, it was WILD. They actually did "Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24" TWICE... once in narrative context, and once as encore, as the "this is our top hit song that you know and love" bit (which is when Anna and Chris levitated on that platform).
It was extremely emotional. It was extremely sensual. It was extremely moving. And Trans-Siberian Orchestra concerts always focus around hope and goodwill, and we all know how much of a sucker I am for that. I came out of Nassau Coliseum absolutely alive and buzzing, caught with the Advent spirit which has stayed. Last night I walked home, singing the whole way, largely Christmas Carols and TSO songs. "Promises to Keep" has some lyrics that ring very true to me:
And the dream is still alive
From that first December morning
And it always will survive
As long as we can see
That the dreams that we find in life
Are the dreams we tend to seek
And Christmas has its promises to keep
Christmas time and the moment's just beginning
From last night when we wished upon a star
And if this kindness this day is just pretending
If we pretend long enough
Never giving up
It just might be who we are.
It's a choice. A choice to treat people with love, and that doesn't have to be confined just to "the holiday season". Any magic we find at this time is magic we ourselves create. It's not like God comes out in December and bestows things on us. He's always there, if we'll just reach our hands up, like children wondering at snow.
Now I'm off to hear Britten's Ceremony of Carols at Grace Church. Yay Advent!
"O Fortuna" is blue. BLUE.
ReplyDelete-Lauryn