Attending a concert and awards’ ceremony staged in Malaysia
by one of the international music examination bodies, I was kindly seated in a
place of honour right in the front row.
All the same, I had difficulty seeing what was happening on stage and
heard only intermittent fragments of the music being performed. This was particularly galling since the
performers, all of whom had achieved high marks in their music examinations
over the previous year, seemed exceptionally talented; not least an extremely
capable young harpist who played a piece of Grandjany with immaculate poise and
grace.
Music examinations often get criticised for the
artificiality of the situation (who ever performs to an audience of just one person
who is sitting writing at a desk?) and for allowing students to earn high marks
when, throughout their musical education, they might only ever have played 24
pieces (three at each grade). The great
thing about these High Achievers’ concerts is that the students perform in
front of real audiences and, certainly in the case of this particular event,
are encouraged to play music other than that they have learnt for the
examination. What was notable here,
apart from the quality of the performances, was its slick and well-organised presentation
and the professionalism of everybody involved both in performing and in back-stage
management.
So why was my vantage point so disadvantaged?
My view was continually obstructed by hordes of
photographers clambering around in front of the stage, occasionally climbing on
to it, and frequently placing themselves directly in front of the performer. This obsession with recording everything on
film has long been a south east Asian thing; it is rare indeed for any Chinese,
Japanese or Korean person to attend any event or visit any landmark without
seeing it largely, if not wholly, though the viewfinder of a camera. This practice has, thanks to the growth of Smartphone
cameras, now become truly global. Only the
other day, forced to watch the piteous CNN (I stay in a lowly hotel which pipes
no other English-language news channel into the guest rooms) I felt a sudden
pang of sympathy for the near-imbecilic Richard Quest as he asked a loquacious
Asian now resident in California about the importance of Facebook. She threw her head back and launched into a
rapid-fire monologue which enthusiastically related how, after work, she could
grab a snack, photograph it and share it with her friends. Poor Quest, possibly for the first time ever,
was lost for words and could only utter a bleating “Why?” before being silence
by a look which eloquently reduced him in his interviewee’s eyes to a
sub-species of rodent. I still fail to
understand why reality can only be legitimised through the lens of a camera;
but there it is, and we have to accept the fact.
Even more disturbing at the Malaysia event was the masking
of the sound the performers were making not by the extremely irritating
clicking of camera shutters (or more particularly the electronically created
imitation clicking of false shutters on Smartphones), but by the intrusive presence
of microphones. The country boasts few
venues suitable for a large-scale musical performance, and these events
invariably take place in hotel ballrooms where low ceilings, thick carpets,
heavy upholstery and wide, ill-shaped floor spaces conspire to prevent any live
sound from carrying. The amplification
of any performance is just about essential if, as was the case on this
occasion, the audience numbers into the hundreds. However, amplification is one thing; here we
had no amplification, rather an electronic screen which largely obscured the
sound. We have come to expect the
screeching and sudden, ear-splitting feedback when someone waves a live
microphone in front of a speaker, but here the destructive force of a poorly
managed and misunderstood sound system went one stage further.
Even as one player was performing, a man would march on to
the stage, grab a microphone, stick it to a stand, tap it to see if it was
working (even utter the invocation, “testing, one, two three” down it) in preparation
for the next performance; which was similarly obstructed by the physical moving
of microphones and all their paraphernalia.
Microphones were stuck in front of piano keyboards (a pointless place to
stick a microphone if ever there was one – but Elton John does it, so it must
be right!), placed precariously in front of guitars and suspended before a pair
of violins. Only the harpist had the
courage and strength of personality to wave hers away, much to the obvious disgruntlement
of Microphone Man (who at one stage had literally grabbed the microphone from
the MC to announce that there was a problem with the clip on microphones some
later performers in the show were going to use). With wires strewn around the stage and
microphone stands placed in the most physically obstructive positions (I even
had to move one myself so that those receiving awards could actually get up on
to the stage) the whole stage looked like some giant plate of colourful
spaghetti thrown against a wall during a Mafia shoot-out.
The troubling thing is that microphones now serve not as an
adjunct to a performance but, rather like cameras, to legitimise it. You cannot, it seems, be a proper performer
unless there is a microphone very visible to all around. How often do we see modern day pop divas gyrating
around almost wholly naked apart from a headset microphone, when we know they
are merely miming to a backing track?
How often does a singer clasp a hand held microphone to a heart, only to
drop it to one side at moments of high emotion and, lo, the sound stays exactly
the same? Microphones are not used for
amplification, they are used as indicators of professional expertise; and it is
a practice I yearn to see ended. What’s the point of an aujdience attending a live performance when its whole object is to be recorded? Young musicians need to learn that a microphone is a piece of funtioning euipment, not a religious icon to be held up and revered above all else. 
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