Playing ITM in extremely noisy settings

[MusicalADD]

Thanks all, lots of great stuff here! Very informative and entertaining anecdotes. Also pretty frightening, esp. the ones about drunk folks wanting to play air guitar. Hmm. I hadn't thought about needing to develop crowd-control skills....

[lesl]

One thing hasn't been mentioned, is if you can play with your backs against a corner in the room, the walls sometimes can help reflect the sound around you and you can hear yourself a bit in one of those settings. I have found having mics and monitor to be counterproductive - unless you have fancy mics, the mics pick up the roar of the crowd and amplify that right in your monitor.

My anecdote is the time we played in a sort of banquet room with carpeting and drapes and luncheon tables with tablecloths. We started at the appointed time, (couldn't hear ourselves so watched each other's feet) and about 1/2 hour into the gig, the person in charge came over to us smiling, and said we could start playing whenever we were ready.

[talasiga]

- they've come out for a few convivial pints with their mates and they don't want to be hassled into silence just because you're playing.
.........

This maybe true in a pub - well more than "maybe". But I can't understand one thing. Last night I went to a paid concert of celtic dance (Irish and Scottish).
They had a harp player during the breaks and when he did his solos, about 130 of the 150 people in the audience starting talking, some very loudly.
I am talking about the adults here.

Can anyone explain?

[Nanohedron]

- they've come out for a few convivial pints with their mates and they don't want to be hassled into silence just because you're playing.
.........

This maybe true in a pub - well more than "maybe". But I can't understand one thing. Last night I went to a paid concert of celtic dance (Irish and Scottish).
They had a harp player during the breaks and when he did his solos, about 130 of the 150 people in the audience starting talking, some very loudly.
I am talking about the adults here.

Can anyone explain?

I've seen this before. They weren't there for the music, but to gawk at the spectacle of the dancing, the eye-candy of it. The music is incidental to them. Take away the dancing, and it's fine to display bad manners; after all, these days music has become for many people little more than a commodity relegated to mere atmosphere, rather than a thing to be actively appreciated in its own right, never mind that there's a flesh-and-blood person up there playing his heart out, live. Sad and brutish IMO, really.

If it had been a music-only concert, I daresay you'd have witnessed a different crowd.

[talasiga]

......bad manners
.....

thanks for your overall response Nano.

just one thing, do you really think manners are an ingredient in this issue?
I mean I, myself, am a bad mannered person, as you well know.

Exactly what has manners got to do with listening to someone playing a harp?
Can someone explain this to me?

[chris_coreline]

Exactly what has manners got to do with listening to someone playing a harp?
Can someone explain this to me?

as a general, and pritty much universal rule, if somone is playing an instrument, solo, on a stage, it is expected that those gathered shut up and listen.

In this case however it appears the harp was providing incidental music, which is culturally vestigial; perfactly valid in a stately home with a crowd of 20 people talking quietly about matters of court, but quickley drowned out by 150 people talking about just about anything.

As the modern tradition is so focused on the culture of the session, which as has been stated elsewhere was historically incidental, social music and *practice* for the more serious concerts there has been a lot of bleed-through of the incidental/social/casual attitude (which is fine, as its unique, fun, and lets me play music in a pub).

I suppose one could argue that its pritty bad manners for the organisers to deploy a hopelessly quiet but singularly beautiful instrument as incidental atmosphere to a large crowd.

[talasiga]

well it had a mike at it and it was loud enough to be heard.

The harpist was part of the program. when I said "breaks" i meant breaks from the dancing.

We all paid money to see the dancers AND the harpist. Is that too incidental?

[Nanohedron]

In this case however it appears the harp was providing incidental music, which is culturally vestigial; perfactly valid in a stately home with a crowd of 20 people talking quietly about matters of court, but quickley drowned out by 150 people talking about just about anything.

Ah, yes, there's that.

I do tend by habit to think of an onstage performance as being by its staged nature non-incidental, thus my issue with manners. Whether the production truly intended the harping to be mainly incidental, in this case it was certainly relegated to the incidental by its audience treatment. Talasiga tells us that the harp was well-miked and a billed part of the program, so while armed with that I still lean to the suggestion that it wasn't intended to be incidental music, pairing stately, dreamy harping alongside the more blood-stirring spectacle of the dancing indeed throws the harp into an ambiguous position. You don't get eye-candy from a harp performance. I wasn't there, I didn't read the billing layout and its implications, I didn't witness the program strategy or lack of it. If the harp indeed was placed merely as if "between" dance sets and only for so long as it took to change shoes, then its incidental status would be pretty much assured, whatever the intention.

They had a harp player during the breaks and when he did his solos, about 130 of the 150 people in the audience starting talking, some very loudly.
I am talking about the adults here.

If this statement wasn't an issue with manners on your part - and you point out the adults - then what was it?

[talasiga]

In mannerless forests
curious creatures silently savour
the pure drop

[ceadach]

Nice Haiku Talasiga!

I've seen this before. They weren't there for the music, but to gawk at the spectacle of the dancing, the eye-candy of it. The music is incidental to them. Take away the dancing, and it's fine to display bad manners; after all, these days music has become for many people little more than a commodity relegated to mere atmosphere, rather than a thing to be actively appreciated in its own right, never mind that there's a flesh-and-blood person up there playing his heart out, live. Sad and brutish IMO, really.

If it had been a music-only concert, I daresay you'd have witnessed a different crowd.

Testify! And I was the harper 32 inches to your left hand, my brother. Let's not even start on the issue of tuning in front of crowd...

chris_coreline wrote:
In this case however it appears the harp was providing incidental music, which is culturally vestigial; perfactly valid in a stately home with a crowd of 20 people talking quietly about matters of court, but quickley drowned out by 150 people talking about just about anything.

Which brings up an event I played at recently. Even the amped harper run into this problem; as recently at a memorial for a deceased friend of mine earlier this month. I had written a tune in her honor, it was announced as such by the M.C., and yet, even in this solemn setting there was a good chunk of people yapping away through it. Yapping despite several people trying to hush the oblivious yappers in question. A sign of the barbarous times in which we live.