Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

The hall is too big. The audience is out for blood. Lions waiting for Christians. The silence tonight exists to be filled, not to surround the sounds. The air is lush with fear. The walls are hard, the seats blood red. I'd rather be in Venice.

    The piano is a tinny piece of trash. It's just an act, magic with a saw, and playing plays no more part in it than poetry on a trapeze.

    They don't react to the anticipatory pause just before the climactic note, so I drop the corresponding silence later on in the piece. No one stirs at the top of a run, so I hit it just a little bit harder the second time around. No slips allowed between the jumps and the dips.

    In fact, big halls usually result in a little sound for most people, who are sitting two hundred feet away under a hundred foot ceiling, the sound soaked up by three thousand bodies. The stillness of summer in small tents is lost in the shared panic: is he fast, is he loud, will he forget it? The music arrives with only a third of its baggage, as if you turned the volume down.