A regular Carnival Cinema column of showbiz life musings by Captain Frodo –
On the way of the Showman: ‘Again, With Feeling’
By Captain Frodo
For me, these are days of much emotion. The following is an emotional piece, filled with emotional truth, backed up by emotional numbers, and emotional confabulations.
The only brand of violins people know is Stradivarius. Violins and violas created by the Italian Stradivari family are arguably the most exclusive and celebrated musical instruments ever created.
Why is this? Since they are musical instruments one would think it is their sound that superceeds any other violin ever created. Something in their tone touches the human soul in an incomparable way.
A few years ago some researchers decided to look into this. To know for sure they used a double-blind study. They got together a collection of new, high end, expensive, world-class instruments and also nine old Italians including six Stradivarius violins. They got a bunch of proper accomplished soloist violinists together. So they would not know which violin they played the researchers put modified welding goggles on the violinists. They were literally kept in the dark about the violins true identities. Each musician played each of the violins and rated which ones they liked best. Marking sound and experience of playing. Turns out the virtuosos prefer the new violins, not the old Italians.
Then, sometime later, the researchers did the test again, only this time it was the AUDIENCE who didn’t know which ones of the violins were the Stradivarius and, weirdly, they too prefer the sound of the new violins.
The world was shocked. OR was it?
These results might be good news for the premium violin makers living today, as the most anyone has ever gotten paid for a new violin is US$136.000 whilst the highest auction price for a Stradivarius viola is 45 million dollars.
In an article about the study, one of the blindfolded musicians said: “We must cut through the BS and superstition of this… There is nothing magical about old Italian violins.”
I both agree and disagree with this comment. Because there isn’t anything supernatural about these old Italian violins, yet they are magical. They’re enshrouded in the kind of magic my dad does. (Ropes, silks and feather flowers.) The real kind of magic. (I’ll get deeper into that in a future post.)
The kind of magic humankind have been experiencing since we lived in caves. The kind of magic a caveman Pappa and his tired little girl would have experienced by the dancing fire in the late Paleolithic. Shamans pulling small white rocks out of thin air, making skulls of totem animals talk like ventriloquist dolls, disappearances, and levitations as well as cryptic ejaculations of predictions about the future. And healing. Always a bit of healing. For individuals and for the whole tribe.
Real magic happening right in front of you, be it in your living room on the west coast of Norway in the late ’80s or in the Altamira Cave 36,000 years ago, real magic, feels real awesome.
The Stradivarius have become part of the human popular imagination. Even those that could not tell the difference between a Bach and a Glass piece knows a Stradivarius is special. They might not know why they know but they do. For all they know it’s magic. And they would be right.
Because the Stradivarius comes with magic. It comes with story, with reputation. They come with names. The Stradivari family name but also they have given names. Alard, Molitor, Baron Knoop and, possibly the most famous, the MacDonald Viola. This viola also comes with a magical price and money is a powerful symbolic magic. $45 million (Last auction price,) is a modern hocus pocus magic formula. This kind of magic wakes us up, makes us pay attention. Money is a kind of magic people really believe in. It’s really a great magic trick in its own right. Paper or small metal coins, or even 0’s and 1’s in a computer, that’s what it is, but since we, the people, believe in it, money is so much more. People are in awe of 45 million, its an emotional number. The magic of that much money for the MacDonald viola tells us there is a pretty big story there. A magic story.
In the year 1839 in Pect Hungary, at the inauguration of the city’s first stonework theater, viola virtuoso Szandor Petrovis stepped onto the new stage with the Molitor, 1697, Stradivarius violin. It was much publicised. The concert was a gift from the Emperor Ferdinand I to the town who had recently suffered the worst plague of cholera in Hungary’s history. Even though the concert happened after the outbreak finished, a legend grew that the plague had ended immediately after the concert. The people of Pect called it the Stradivari Csoda or the Stradivarius Miracle.
Not many people know that it was actually the MacDonald viola which was used for the world premiere of Old MacDonald, one of the most loved songs since the dawn of culture.
So there is magic in the old Italian instruments. The magic is not there to be measured in objective reality though. Perhaps in the world of cold hard facts, there is no magic in the Stradivarius. The magic is instead to be found in the human heart. Not a sensory organ in the regular sense, yet the symbolic way we talk of the heart conveys the message. The heart hears what the mind can not know. It hears the magic of story, it reads the expectations of perfection in the concert program, it flutters with anticipation as the woman with the magical instrument enters the stage, and it sends emotions, real emotions of sublime satisfaction through us as the vibrations of horse hair pushed against tightly wound gut strings tears the silence asunder. By the time the first tone of pure sound resonates through the concert hall, it feels like God moaned with pleasure.
The magic is the feeling. The feeling of real magic.
This is what the audience feels and you can’t tell an audience after the show that their experience wasn’t true. That what they felt was based on a misunderstanding. Well, you can, and many performers do when they are approached by spectators after their show. But we shouldn’t. A feeling is real if the feeler feels its real.
The feeling of wonder when experiencing a magic trick is real even if the experience of magic came from an illusion. A $20 note torn and restored. That’s real magic, if you feel it is. The worlds strongest man, the worlds most tattooed woman, the original boneless wonder, real or not is beside the point. A woman’s beard might not be real but, at the circus and the carnival, we love to believe the lie.
If all you are going for is sound maybe a brand new, machine-made, plastic violin sounds better than a four-hundred-year-old artistic masterpiece, but a Showman armed with a Stradivarius and a good impressario just might produce a powerful enough magic feeling in his audience to transform them into the famed butterflies of chaos. So that when they leave the concert halls and step out into the world, as they flap their metaphorical wings anything might happen.
Feeling is the Showman’s secret weapon, more powerful than truth. Study your Craft, how to create emotion and how to convey it. Great art is about more than technical skill and objective reality, it is about emotional telegraphing. Wield the weapon of mass seduction wisely, my fellow Showfolk, with great power comes great responsibility.
See you all along the Way.
Captain Frodo
Pic by John W McCormick
Carnival Cinema
Master Showman, dad, husband.
Currently performing in Opium at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas.
(And Carnival Cinema Co-Founder)
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