{"id":1645,"date":"2009-09-10T19:31:03","date_gmt":"2009-09-10T23:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/?p=1645"},"modified":"2009-09-10T19:31:03","modified_gmt":"2009-09-10T23:31:03","slug":"now-they-know-how-many-holes-it-takes-to-fill-the-albert-hall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/2009\/09\/now-they-know-how-many-holes-it-takes-to-fill-the-albert-hall\/","title":{"rendered":"Now They Know How Many Holes it Takes to Fill the Albert Hall"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to classical music, nor do I have a musically creative bone in my body. I can pick out the right-hand parts to a few Beatles and Coldplay tunes on the piano and I can play a pretty mean kazoo, but my incompetence with the finer, mechanical parts of music has never kept me from deeply appreciating it. I’ll actually make sacrifices and bad life-choices I usually wouldn’t make to go see a live show, and I was very much looking forward to seeing Prom 70 <\/a>at the Royal Albert Hall despite my almost complete ignorance of classical music.<\/p>\n

I’ll admit that I was more excited to see anything<\/em> in the Royal Albert Hall itself than I was about the actual program: so many greats have played on that stage, it’s an amazingly beautiful and historic venue, and I own a few concerts on DVD that take place in that very hall.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure I even have the vocabulary to describe the concert we saw, so I’m not sure why I’m blogging about it if I can’t write about it, but I want to enthuse about how much I enjoyed the night’s performance (as well as the venue it was in). Besides purely enjoying the music and wishing the performance had been longer, I found myself wondering about the musicians, about their lives\u00a0and motives, and what would possess a person to be so passionate about one random instrument that they would pursue it to the highest level of achievement and proficiency. I lack the dedication, talent, and all around aspiration to do anything<\/em> like that, so I’ve always been attracted to people who know where they’re going and how they want to get there.<\/p>\n

Additionally, I also found myself wondering about the whole “BBC Proms” program itself: the fact that the BBC can sponsor, fill, and finance nine weeks<\/em> of almost continual classical music concerts for 115 years, as well as broadcast them nightly on television and radio,\u00a0says a lot about the importance of the fine arts\u00a0to London and Britain as a whole. The Proms program doesn’t strike me as one that would exist or even be attended by nearly as many people in New York, for example, which I now realize is a terrible shame, since it prohibits people previously ignorant of classical music, like me, to enjoy a night of the most talented musicians around for a good price in a historic venue and perhaps develop and interest in the finer arts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to classical music, nor do I have a musically creative bone in my body. I can pick out the right-hand parts to a few Beatles and Coldplay tunes on the piano and I can play a pretty mean kazoo, but my incompetence with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[740],"tags":[1309,1297,1307,1308,36,1243],"class_list":["post-1645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chelsea","tag-arts","tag-bbc-proms","tag-classical-music","tag-concert","tag-music","tag-royal-albert-hall"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}