Here we have street musicians playing popular music.
Now, these aren’t the ragged “street musicians” you find slumped on the streets of Portland. No, these are classically trained musicians from the Orquestra Simfònica Del Vallès (Symphony Orchestra of the Valley), and they are playing on the streets of Sabadell, Spain, a town about 15 miles northwest of Barcelona. So they are street musicians. Sort of…
And the music has been enduringly popular since it was first performed 193 years ago. YouTube videos of this performance have had around one hundred ten million views since this original was posted five years ago.
So yes, street musicians playing popular music.
Okay, it’s true, it’s classical music. It’s from the fourth and last movement of Beethoven’s last symphony, the Ninth, first performed in 1824. But who could not like this? A hundred million YouTube viewers can’t be wrong, right?
Since you survived listening to classical music, I have to say “But wait! There’s more! Today I’m throwing in a free bonus!” Here are five interesting take-aways from this video:
1) Kids are pretty much the same anyplace you go, climbing on things they shouldn’t, generally lacking any sense of rhythm, and latching onto great melodies.
2) We can finally hear the different members of the violin family and the different sounds they make.
This piece starts with the giant stand-up violin, the double bass, which — no surprise — plays bass notes.
Then the lady sits down and starts playing the cello, which plays low notes as well, but in a somewhat higher range (that is, a higher “register”) than the double bass.
After the double bass and the cello, the violas come in. To the uninitiated, violas are easily mistaken for violins. Though they are held and played the same way as the violin, violas are actually quite a bit larger. With that larger size comes the ability to play lower notes than the violin can. The viola fills in with notes too low for the violin and too high for the cello.
Finally, the familiar violin comes in, playing the highest notes in the family.
3) Most people only hear orchestral music at the movies (Star Wars theme, anybody?) so they have no real idea how an orchestra is arranged. The result is that if they ever see a real orchestra they have no idea what’s going on. Here, we get to see the musicians assemble themselves into an orchestra.
The arrangement of an orchestra can vary, sometimes a lot, but as they are in this video, the first violins (I’ll explain that another time) are always to the left and to the front.
The rest of the orchestra is pretty much as you see it assemble here — viola toward the center front, cello and double bass at the right, timpani (“kettle drums”) in back to the right, horns in the center back.
4) Some instruments are louder than others. For the audience to hear the quieter instruments, the orchestra needs more of them.
For example, the cello is much louder than a violin, so they need a bunch of violins to keep the cello from drowning out the violins.
The timpani is really loud (trust me, you don’t want your kid or your neighbor’s kid taking up the timpani), so they need several cellos to keep the timpani from drowning out the cellos. Then they need to add more violins to keep up with the cellos and the timpani. While it might seem like a vicious cycle, it’s not. It’s just a modular system.
5) These musicians were playing in an open public square without any electrical amplification, evidence that these instruments can play very loudly indeed.
Today when we want to hear something better we can turn up the volume by, well, turning up the volume. Back when Beethoven wrote this, there was no electronic amplification, so instrument makers worked hard to make their instruments beautiful as well as loud.
A friend of mine told me about hosting a cellist at his home in Hawaii. The cellist brought out a borrowed Stradivari cello (which was worth far more than the house in Hawaii) and proceeded to shake the entire house with it. My friend was shocked at how loud this 320-year-old instrument was.
Having never heard them close-up and without accompaniment, most people have no idea how loudly these instruments can play. And remember, that volume comes from simply drawing a horse hair bow across a single string on a single cello. Take several dozen such instruments and they are able to fill the town square of Sabadell with music. The accomplishments of instrument makers of two or three or four centuries ago are really quite remarkable.
One thing that isn’t apparent from this video is that there is a piece of the song missing. It comes at about the four minute mark, where there is a short interplay between the French Horns and the strings.
My guess is that the missing section could be found in a Bugs Bunny cartoon someplace. Warner Brothers often used bits and pieces of classical music in their Looney Tunes cartoons.
In any case, if you really can’t stand classical music, I will leave you with this video of composer John Williams conducting in that hotbed of classical music, Tokyo (no, I’m not kidding), as the Boston Pops Orchestra plays Mr. William’s very popular main theme from Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
Copyright 2017 — 2021 by Toni Pfau. All rights reserved.
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