a letter from the orchestra pit

dear future musician,

I do not know whether you still have orchestra pits.

There is a theatre on the other side of town where men have been fitting new equipment all week. They came from the city with crates and cables, and the manager has been walking about as though the building belongs to someone else now. He says the pictures will carry their own voices. The actors will speak when their mouths move, and an orchestra will play from inside the machine.

I have not seen one yet.

Most of my life has been spent making music for people who are looking somewhere else. This is a strange way to earn a living, but it is a real one. You learn the picture, certainly: where the heroine lowers her eyes before she decides; how long the villain leaves his hand on the door before entering. But the picture is only part of it.

You learn the room as well. You learn how long an audience will sit quietly before it begins to move in its seats, and which jokes need a little air around them. The projector has its habits. Some evenings the reel races; some evenings it seems to pull the whole film reluctantly behind it. A child begins crying in the back and suddenly the scene has changed, though nothing on the screen has.

On Thursday, during the chase in the second picture, the pianist came in late. It was not much, but the scene had begun to flatten. I held a note longer than I ought to have and looked across at him. He found his place. The chase continued. Nobody in the house turned around.

That is the work. It is a hundred small things done before they become things.

The new pictures may be good for music. I do not doubt it. There are towns that cannot keep an orchestra, and people there will hear singers who would never have come within a hundred miles of them. A composer might make something for this new apparatus that could not be made in a theatre, or in any room where musicians have to breathe together. A player could perform once and be heard for years afterwards, by people who had never learned his name.

I can see the wonder of it.

Still, I keep returning to the thought of the picture with its music already inside it. At present, a film reaches us with its faces and its shadows and its gestures, but without much of a pulse. We supply that part. It changes from night to night. Some pictures have to be pushed along; others become foolish if you hurry them. Sometimes I hold one low note until I am nearly ashamed of it, and then a woman turns towards a window on the screen and the whole room seems to lean with her.

The new picture will not ask for any of this. Its music will have been decided somewhere else, by people who will never know our theatre or the boy who always coughs in the front row or the pianist who is late because his tram broke down. It will arrive complete. That may be what makes it great.

I expect there will come a time when people find our work difficult to imagine. They will wonder why anyone sat in the dark beneath a screen, watching a story that had already been told, and trying to follow it closely enough to give it another life. Perhaps they will think us lucky. Perhaps they will wonder why we put up with the uncertainty of it.

I have tried to imagine their music.

There will be sounds that cannot be made in a theatre. Someone will put an orchestra into a small room and make it sound larger than a city. A singer will sing with herself. A man working alone will make a record full of people. The old devices will fall out of use, not because they were useless, but because the new music will have learned other ways to move.

Perhaps the final chorus will no longer have to change key. It may rise by another route: a drum entering late, a voice made wider than a voice can be, a gap where the listener expects sound. The difficulty will still be there. It will simply be hidden in different places.

I have begun to practice more carefully. Scales in the morning, then the passages I usually skip when there is work to do. My fingers still know the instrument, but I notice them now. I watch them settle on the keys as though they belonged to somebody I am trying to remember.

That is not because I think the machine will make bad music. It may make music I could not begin to make. But there is a particular knowledge in playing night after night, in learning the weight of a room and the pace of a scene, and I do not know where that knowledge goes when nobody needs it.

I am writing to you because I think you may know the feeling, even if you do not play an instrument.

You may work with some other material. You may have a machine beside you that can make much of it faster than you can. You may still recognise the bad joint, the wrong turn, the false note. You may be the person everyone asks when something has gone oddly quiet.

Then, one day, you may find yourself looking at a finished thing and realise that you have not touched the difficult part of it in a long time.

There is no disgrace in that. But there is a difference between understanding a thing and being inside its making. I do not know whether the difference matters to anyone except the person who has lost it.

Perhaps people will still learn the old instruments in your time. They may do it without any thought of wages. They may do it because a sound made in a room is not quite the same sound once it has been carried away and kept. They may want to make something that belongs only to that evening, among those people, with all its small mistakes intact.

There is still a show tomorrow. I will be there before the lights go down. I will wet the reed, check the keys, and wait for the first frame.

For now, the picture still needs us.