Music Evening at the Art Museum

This evening I volunteered at the art museum, keeping an eye on one part of an interactive musical performance.

A little complicated: there were three galleries, interconnected with speakers, each with a couple of musicians and two sets of hand-made scales. Visitors could add plectrum-shaped pieces of cardboard, punched out from vintage album covers, to the scales. The scales could point to different musical qualities (one of mine said "soft" or "loud", the other "static" or "lively").

The idea was that visitors could influence the piece - with the performers responding to wherever the scales tipped.

What was actually most interesting to me was how kids would just jump right in, throw a plectrum on a scale, realise it wouldn't do much (not much of a weight, really...) and go back for another handful or three. Or just load bundles of them from one side of the scales to another. Or they would wander in carrying instruments they had made in the workshop downstairs - guitars made from cardboard boxes and rubber bands, or kazoos made from toilet roll tubes and tissue paper - and just actually join in with the music-making.

The adults, on the other hand, were generally much more well-behaved. And had much less fun. Some carefully placed their single cardboard token, got no response and left. Others tried another two or three, but pretty quickly gave up on making any changes.

Metaphors for democracy. Guidelines for Just Play Along, And To Hell With The Rules You Only Have In Your Head Anyway. Hmmm.

Anyway. My musical group happened to be in the gallery with the shoe exhibit we'd visited the week before with P & J. And, although I was trying to take surreptitious pictures of the most interesting kids, or of the woman who showed me her art piece - a vinyl LP with red paper streamers dangling, jellyfish-like. The album was the soundtrack of Hair. Ha ha - the best option is actually me, dreaming fondly of the yellow satin heels.

And of the ability to wear them for any length of time.
And of having somewhere to wear them to.

There's a small Carrie Bradshaw in all of us.