Why was a scientist thrown out of a classical concert

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maybe he’s only theoretically a chemist.

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he was definitely at the wrong performance:

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Being invited to participate in something is not a license to be an ass ruining the performance for everyone else. You know, the “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins” thing.

Maybe he’s a secret classical music hater who has archived his goal. You sneaky bastard!

The crowdsurfing attempt may have been ill-advised, but it sounds like the rest of it was exactly what the director was hoping for.

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Woah - that’s a fantastic rendition of Thundertruck. It also pretty much proves to me that classical compositions can’t compare in anything like the emotional intensity of contemporary music, even when the latter is played on the instruments of the former. I have never been able to appreciate (or even understand) the appeal of classical music - and this is probably why.

I once crowd surfed during a violin solo.

Admittedly, it was kind of a bad-assed one.

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Well I think this is hilarious, and throwing him out just makes it more hilarious. It sounds like everybody played their role perfectly!

I respectfully disagree, perhaps not with your whole thesis but definitely your implication. Rock, punk, and metal can ramp up the anger and aggression like nothing else. However, I think most classical music is much better at representing things like beauty or joy. Of course “classical music” is a massive over-generalization, since one is compressing hundreds of years of music history into a genre. Personally, I love things like Bach fugues for their multi-voiced intricacy. Nothing I’ve found in modern music really scratches that same itch in me. I love other classical composers and pieces of music for different reasons. At the same time, I listen to stuff like Streetlight Manifesto or Machinae Supremacy or Mumford and Sons or the Les Miserables soundtrack (picking at random from what’s currently on my phone) because of the emotions they create in me and the different sounds.

I think modern music is on the whole more heavy-handed with emotion than classical music. It tends to hammer your “anger” button or your “sexy” button or your “victory” button, etc. much harder and it pays for that with a lack of nuance in most cases. Take “Thunderstruck” for example. It is a pretty damn repetitive piece of music when you get down to it (solos aside). It basically just sits at “11”, volume-wise and it has all of four chords. That isn’t saying it isn’t a good song or saying that it isn’t successful at conveying the emotions it wants, just that power chords and sixteenth note arpeggios aren’t everything.

Of course, we’re comparing the best of nigh on 500 years of music with whatever we remember from the last 60-70, so classical music is naturally going to have a lot more positive examples. I personally think that they complement each other. The modern potential for intensity combined with classical technical expertise (there is a lot of classical piano that is at least as technically challenging as anything that any power metal band has whipped up) and the ability to back off and play pianissimo for part of a song makes for better music.

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Can’t thank you enough for posting this. Never having heard of these guys before, my first thought on watching the vid was that they couldn’t actually be beginning to start playing that fast; they’ve just sped the video up quite a bit. But, er, no. Upon paying close attention it became obvious that these guys actually could play that fast, the biggest give-away was watching the horse hair unravel on the bows. So. You’ve managed now to keep me awake most of the night.

Also, there is just nothing quite like going to see Beethoven’s 9th played live, especially when the get the full choir (chorus; hum is that a theme or a motif, Bob?) and you realize that there are something like effing 300 voices singing, not even counting the soloists. Pretty powerful stuff. Austin do have a good symphony :slight_smile:

I saw this mentioned in Harper’s Weekly Review, and googling David Glowacki, found that 1) the incident happened in 2013, and 2) the protagonist denies that he was crowd surfing. http://glow-wacky.com/.../06/24/handeled-during-the-messiah/

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