The Symphony Hall and the Grasshopper

A symphony hall is a wonderful place. Entering through the portals, being admitted by an usher, and seeing the expanse of seats and the grand brightly lit stage are an important part of the musical experience – sort of getting into the mood for some serious music. Then the orchestra enters in their tuxes and long dresses with rich wooden instruments, bright brasses, and shiny drums. The concert master signals for tuning and the oboe plays an A and the tumult begins as all of the instruments play several notes to make sure they are perfectly in tune. Then the conductor enters and the audience explodes into applause, even though he hasn’t done anything yet. It happens this way in countless concert halls all over the world several times a week as it has for centuries. That’s what makes it classical!
The first half of the program continues to the intermission and everyone gets up for a break, including the orchestra. Then after the bells and the lights signal the second half of the program is about to begin, everyone, including the orchestra, parades back into the auditorium and the music begins again.
That’s the way it is and that’s the way it is supposed to be. What isn’t supposed to happen is for a grasshopper to join the orchestra. No, this grasshopper doesn’t take a seat with the woodwinds or the strings or even the percussion. This grasshopper enters after the first few notes have been played and it rises up from the basses, the very large stringed instruments. It first flies up to about 15 feet, hovers and finally settles on the curtain in back of the orchestra. Then, it flies again into the middle of the stage area over the heads of the violas and flutes and it hovers for awhile, you know how grasshoppers fly, not too steadily and they make a lot of thrashing noise – they are better at hopping than flying, but they can fly when they need to, and this grasshopper really needed to fly, but not too far. And then he was back on the curtain. Did he know the music? Did he adjust his flight to keep the rhythm or the tempo? Did he like Beethoven? I don’t think so, but it seemed like it watching from the audience. I know I should have been so mesmerized by the wonderful music that I didn’t pay any attention to the grasshopper, but I couldn’t take my gaze away. After all, he could have flown into a bassoon, or dropped into the bell of a horn, or alighted on the slide of a trombone, the targets were limitless, and any one of them would have stopped the entire orchestra at once. He flew back to the curtain, higher this time and he seemed to be much more fatigued than before. After all, grasshoppers are certainly not long range flyers, and they don’t have enough energy to hover for a long time.
The grasshopper could have flown into the audience, we were downhill from his perch and he could have reached us easily, but he didn’t. The last I saw of the musical grasshopper was his ultimate flight up and over the curtains in back of the orchestra and into the dark at the end of the stage. Back he went to he outside of the auditorium – to a place much more hospitable for grasshoppers than an orchestra. But he did have some great tales to tell his friends as they sat on a limb and chewed the leaves and spat their tobacco juice and chatted like old friends do.