Flash Mob Performance Art

Mass performance art is a fascinating product of the Internet age. For the uninitiated a bit of background may be helpful. “Performance art” itself is defined as art created by the performance of one or more individuals. It began in the modern sense in the 1960s, Yoko Ono among the practitioners. For many it was a response to the question, What is art? Pop Art could make art using everyday objects and images, from Andy Warhol’s soup cans to Claes Oldenberg’s giant Typewriter Eraser, which stands in the National Gallery of Art sculpture garden in Washington, D.C.

Why, then, should not an artist mingle visual art and theater, often impromptu street theater, and produce performance art? A popular term from the time was a happening. Performance art often seems simply to happen spontaneously. At least that is the viewer’s perception. Often, however, the artist has given considerable thought and preparation to the creation of the performance moment, how it should look, and what it should mean. Performance art can incorporate all of the senses, using color, movement, music, and so on — or their opposites: stillness and silence. The “living statues” or silent robotic-type individuals one occasionally sees on the streets, usually with a basket for monetary contributions at their feet, are engaging in a form of performance art.

Flash mobs are a 21st century innovation on the performance art theme. They began about 2003, with Manhattan being credited as the first site. Indeed, flash mobs tend to be big city phenomena. Individuals communicate with one another over the Internet and often anonymously about what, where, and when a performance will take place. Some flash mobs engage in a short rehearsal before the actual event, but the unrehearsed form is as common if not more so. Also, as a performance unfolds observers sometimes join in and become performers themselves.

A number of examples can be found on YouTube. For example, a flash mob of about two hundred danced to “Do Re Mi” from The Sound of Music in the central railway station in Antwerp, Belgium. London boasts what organizers hope to be an annual winter “No Pants Subway Ride,” coordinated by Improv Everywhere. Their tagline is “We cause scenes.”

Performance art comes in all sorts of forms, and flash mobs demonstrate the mass creative power that can be unlocked through electronic communication.

Nesser to Grieg to Rubenstein

The other day I was reading Swedish mystery writer Håkan Nesser’s book, Borkman’s Point. His detective, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, who drives a small, elderly Opel with an up-to-date, high-end stereo, comments on a northerly drive that he needs to hear “something Nordic”: “Cold, clear and serene. Sibelius and Grieg.”

The power of suggestion later that day led me to rummage in the CD cabinet for something to listen to as I fixed dinner. What came to hand was a Chicago Symphony recording of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, orchestrated by Alfred Wallenstein. What I had forgotten about this CD was the pianist: Arthur Rubinstein.

The music was suitably stirring — cold, clear, serene, and Nordic — but listening to it also stirred memories of hearing Rubinstein in concert more than forty years ago.

Rubenstein (1887-1982) would have been seventy-nine in the spring of 1966, when I was a high school senior and somehow acquired tickets to a concert he gave in San Antonio, Texas. I recall going to the performance with my girlfriend (later wife) and another of our classmates. The program has long since escaped my memory, but I recall vividly the thrill of seeing this piano virtuoso at work.

Rubenstein, a Polish Jew, was born the eighth and youngest child of a businessman in Łódź. He evidenced interest in the piano during an elder sister’s lessons and by age four was studying and playing in Warsaw with Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim, who became his mentor. By age ten in 1897 he had moved to Berlin to continue his studies and in 1900 made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic. In 1904 he launched his career in earnest in Paris. (The photograph shows him in 1906.)

Rubenstein led an amazing career that ended in 1976, when he was eighty-nine, and then only because his eyesight had begun to fail during the Seventies. I count myself fortunate to have seen and heard him a decade before his retirement. He died in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1982, about a month shy of his 96th birthday.

January 28 will mark the 123rd anniversary of Rubenstein’s birth. I have several recordings of him that should be suitable to play for that occasion.

Blue Moon: Blue, Blue, Blue

When two full moons occur within the same month, the second is called a “blue moon.” The infrequency of the occurrence has made it a subject of folklore as well as scientific investigation. A common expression is “once in a blue moon,” that is, rarely.

Most years twelve full moons occur, approximately once monthly, over the course of the year. But the common calendar (called the Gregorian calendar) is not precisely aligned to the lunar cycle. Thus every two or three years there is an “extra” full moon.

Various explanations are given for this full moon’s designation as “blue.” One is that in Old English belewe can mean either “blue” or “betrayer.” Because early clergy were responsible for calculating the date of Easter based on the full moon, some years they may have needed to explain whether a particular full moon was actually the “Lent moon” or a false one, a “betrayer moon.”

Are blue moons actually blue? Rarely. But certain moons, not necessarily full moons, in past ages did seem to be bluish in color. The perceived color change probably was the result of other substances in the atmosphere, such as dust or ash from volcanic eruptions. One story is that in December 1883 geologist W. Jerome Harrison reported viewing an “electric-blue” crescent moon against a copper-colored sky from his home in Birmingham, England. He attributed it to lingering atmospheric debris from the explosion of Krakatoa, a volcano in Indonesia. Krakatoa’s spectacular eruptions began in May 1883, culminating in the destruction of the volcano island in August that year. In addition to the volcanic explosions, subsequent tsunamis devastated the region.

Blue moons also have been the subject of popular songs, often with blue given the connation of sadness, sometimes mixed with the sense of rarity. The most popular example is Rogers and Hart’s “Blue Moon,” which begins: “Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone, / Without a dream in my heart, / Without a love of my own.” But then a new love comes along, and the song includes the line, “And when I looked the Moon had turned to gold.” When the tune was first composed by Richard Rogers, it was given different lyrics and originally intended to be sung by Jean Harlow in the 1933 MGM film, Hollywood Party, which featured a number of the movie stars of the era. The song went through other versions — for example, repurposed for the film, Manhattan Melodrama in 1934 — until Lorenz Hart finally gave it the familiar lyrics after that film was released. Since 1934 “Blue Moon” has become a standard ballad, recorded by popular singers including Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley.

There also is the bluegrass song, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” written by Bill Monroe in 1947, in which the blue moon is told to “Shine on the one that’s gone and left me blue.” Monroe, often called the “Father of Bluegrass,” is credited with popularizing the genre, which takes its name from his band, the Blue Grass Boys. Monroe’s home state of Kentucky has the nickname, the “Bluegrass State,” based on the prevalence of bluegrass, a smooth meadow grass of the Poa genus. Bluegrass seedpods turn from green to a purple-blue hue, which gives this grass its name.

A blue moon rising on New Year’s Eve welcomed in 2010. The next blue moon should occur in 2011 — plenty of time for any aspiring folklorists or songwriters to get a new composition ready.