Events of Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Caution: Pahts of this blog are written in Bahstonian. If you ahn’t fluent in this foreign language, try using context clues or looking up strange words on Google Translate.

          This mahning, we woke up at the most ungodly time of 6:30 to ensure that we would make our tour of MIT at 10. As it turned out, we allotted ourselves the perfect amount of time. We hustled through breakfast, sped to the T station, and then purchased tickets while Abby and Dad pahked Hahvey, our RV at the shopping center and then walked over. Hopping on the T with a quite a bit more knowledge than we had on Monday, we headed on the Orange Line to Downtown Crossing, where we transferred to the Red Line to go to MIT. Since we had taken two college admissions tours already, I (Ben) wanted to see what MIT would be like, since it is one of the universities I am considering. I liked most of what I saw.

          After the information session, we joined our tour guide, Elijah. He talked about the student life, the high quality education, and the layout of campus, which intrigued me the most. All MIT buildings are known by a number. Some also have a name, like building 54, which is the Green building. This could get fairly confusing. All the rooms are labeled, too. We started out in room 10-100—Building 10, Room 100. Also superbly organized were the courses. All the majors are numbered Courses, and all required classes in the course start with the course number. The organization is spectacular! Most of MIT’s buildings are connected either above or below ground, which makes it nice during cold weather. Even if you live in a dorm a ways away from the center of campus, you can still make it to class without having to venture through the Boston cold. One of these connecting halls is the “Infinite Corridor”. Although not quite infinite, it is quite long (0.6 miles), and includes parts of buildings 7, 3, 10, 4, and 8. I found myself liking MIT more and more as the tour went along.

          We next walked toward Hahvahd, where we had a food recommendation and wanted to see the campus. We found the spot we were looking for in a mall called “The Garage”. It sounds a lot more dingy than it is. Here, we found “world-class” Crazy Dough’s Pizza. When some restaurants advertise “world-famous”, they usually don’t mean it. Why do I say that? There are probably 2.p bajillion signs we’ve seen advertising the “World’s Best Burger!” or “World Famous Fries”. A few are really good, but most aren’t world class. But in Crazy Dough’s, they had signs saying that in some international pizza contest, their specialty pizzas had come in first in 2004 and 2006. We got a whole pepperoni pizza, a baby spinach salad, and Dad got a Reuben sandwich. The dough made the pizza. Crunchy and still soft, this was some of the best pizza dough I’ve ever tasted. With full stomachs, we headed on for a brief look through the Curious George Bookstore and then a quick look at Hahvahd University. While doing our self-guided tour of the oldest univehsity in the Western Hemisphere, we heard snippets of campus tours as they passed. Through this, we found out that all freshmen stay in the dorms on Hahvahd Yahd, and that all the upper-classmen dorms have a view of the river. We walked through one building, admired the inside, and then moved on to the third college of the day: Bahston University.

          Part of the way to BU was a nice stroll along the Charles River. Here, in what is obviously the athletic center of the area, we saw lots of people running, walking, biking, and rowing. We made our way across the river to the University and got a different kind of campus tour: the alum tour. Bahston University is where Mom got her physical therapy masters degree. Mom gave us a brief dialogue about her memories of the area before hustling off to the symphony hall. Our goal was to reach the hall by 4:00 so that we could tour the hall before the night’s performance.

          We were greeted in the hall lobby by our tour guide, Dick. He gave a fun and informative history of both the Boston Symphony and its hall, creatively named the Bahston Symphony Hall. When the symphony was formed in 1881, it was housed in the Bahston Music Hall. But when the first music hall was scheduled to be torn down, a new one was constructed. Plans were to call the new building the Bahston Music Hall, but, since plans fell through and the old hall was never demolished, two buildings couldn’t have the same name. Even though some elements of the hall were already adorned with the initials BMH, the new structure was named the Bahston Symphony Hall. A unique fact about its design: the practice of the day was to model new symphony halls after other symphony halls that “worked”. But McKim Mead White, the designer of the hall, had heard of a Hahvahd engineering professor who had been messing around in acoustics. He had determined some principles that helped Bahston Symphony Hall to become one of the world’s best halls, including the use of spaces to trap reverberating sound so that, although the sound was reflected, it didn’t get too mucky. When someone asked what the best seat in the house was, he replied, “They are all the best seats. It just depends on your preferences.” It was so well designed that all seats were created equal. (Then why do certain seats cost more? I have no idea.) Our tour moved on to the rest of the hall, where we saw the backstage, the conductor and soloists’ green rooms, and the stage. Lindsey was proud to say that she rubbed the stool of one of the bass players of the Boston Orchestra.

          After a quick picnic dinner (complete with Bahston Cream Pie) in a nearby pahk, we headed back to the symphony hall for a pre-concert talk and then a night of Barber, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky. During the talk, we were introduced to the story and style behind the pieces. Marc Mandel, the director who gave the talk, helped me notice little details in the music that I otherwise would not have noticed. He talked about each composer’s style, the contrasts in the music, and the dramatic elements that greatly enhanced the evening. After a fantastic 45 minute lecture, we moved from our second row seats on the floor to our great seats in the second balcony. During the tour, we figured out that we wanted to sit on the corner of the first balcony overlooking the stage; during the concert however, they were already taken.

          Tonight, we were introduced to the idea of an Open Rehearsal, where the symphony is practicing for the next night’s performance. For us, it was almost as good as a performance but with open seating. The hall still looked grand with the 16 plaster replicas of Greek sculptures aglow, the five chandeliers with 375 lights each brilliant. The pieces were, for the most part, played all the way through, but occasionally they would go back so some improvements could be made. The orchestra and audience were not in formal dress, but it did not affect the quality of the music.

          The first piece was Samuel Barber’s Overture to The School for Scandal, which was a comedy of manners written by Richard Sheridan in 1777. Although it was never intended to be performed in conjunction with the performance, it was written to summarize the plot, drama, and attitude of the comedy. Think of summarizing a French essay in Japanese; this was the way Barber took the essence of the play from the language of acting, interpreted it in English, and then wrote his interpretation in the language of music. The power and skill in this composition is summed up in one fact: although it was Barber’s first orchestral composition, its first performance was by the Philadelphia Orchestra in front of an audience of 8,000. It is quite a work.

          Next, we heard the Beethoven Violin Concerto in D. Written for the incredibly skillful Franz Clement (of Beethoven’s orchestra), we heard it performed by Pinchas Zukerman. Since I am not current on my world-class violinists, initially, the name meant nothing to me. Unbeknownst to me, I had the rare pleasure of hearing one of the world’s top 10 violinists. Even more spectacular than his skill (which was quite spectacular) was the way he played. He got extremely involved in the music—and he had the entire 44 minute piece down by memory!

          After a brief intermission, we heard Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. I can do no better of a job than the program, which read: “[The theme] will recur as a catastrophic interruption of the second movement’s love song, as an enervated ghost that approaches the languid dancers of the waltz, and—in a metamorphosis that is perhaps the symphony’s least convincing musical and expressive gesture—in majestic blazing E major triumph.”

This description perplexed me until I listened to the violent transition described between the calm and peaceful and the power of the music. For the unusually small orchestra that Tchaikovsky desired, they do put out a huge sound. The principle tuba, Mike Roylance, was fabulous. We could hear him clearly over the rest of the orchestra, but it was a sweet power that was so musical, it was indescribably awesome.

          With the sweet music still flowing in our heads, we walked over to the T stop for the long ride back to the hotel. As soon as we reached room 403, our tired bodies dramatically collapsed.