A radio comedian was wondering why, when you go to a classical concert, the audience gets to hear the musicians warming up. He contrasts this with other jobs - courtroom lawyer, physician, construction worker which seem to lack a public warmup.
Sure, athletes warm up a little, taking shots at the goalie or throwing the baseball around. But what jobs actually feature this? Is it always needed? Does the comic have a point?
Athletes warm up to get their muscles ready; some of that you see on the field, some of that occurs out of sight in the locker room or trainer’s room.
Sometimes your equipment needs to be warmed up - drag racers doing burnouts to warm up the tires / get extra grip; preheating your oven because different ovens take different times to get up to temp.
Sometimes there are pre-use checks - a band doing a sound check to make sure everything that was just setup works properly, a pilot walking around the plane to make sure the pitot tube covers are removed.
Sometimes it helps to go over your material one last time before you use it; whether that’s a student taking a test or a speaker reading their speech one last time backstage.
I suspect that what the members of the orchestra are doing are some combination of multiple reasons above. I bet there are some lawyers who do it too, just they go over their opening/closing argument/witness questions either before they walk into the courtroom or silently in their head before the judge comes in; you’re just not either seeing it or seeing it but not noticing it.
AIUI the musicians are not warming up themselves. You’re not going to hear them practicing scales or playing several bars of the tricky spot in the upcoming sonata to make sure they get it right. What they’re doing is adjusting their equipment, i.e., tuning the instruments that need last-minute tuning adjustments.
If they don’t have that kind of instrument—e.g., if they’re pianists, singers, and so on—then you don’t hear them tuning. As Spiderman says, it’s like band members doing a sound check just before performance to make sure everything is correctly set and plugged in.
Sure. They could do this before the public walks in? I guess it is an efficiency matter.
AFAICT it’s a question of time and space. As in, you want to tune right before you start playing, to optimize your in-tuneness, and you want to tune in the performance space you’ll be playing in, so you can hear what it sounds like in that space and take into account ambient temperature and humidity and so forth.
Lots of people working in public adjust their equipment immediately before using it. Airline pilots, as Spiderman mentioned, do visual checks and tests of the safety systems.
Construction workers adjust the pressure regulator on the air compressor for the tool they’re about to use.
Nurses zero out a pressure line before taking a reading on a patient.
Speakers tap their microphones to check clarity and volume, and adjust the placement of the mic.
And so on and so on. Pretty much anybody you ever see using an adjustable piece of equipment in their workplace is making some regulation or adjustment of the equipment just before using it. The reason that this comedian thought (or pretended to think) that orchestra tuning is such a weird outlier is because he confused warming up the person with adjusting the equipment.
Orchestras do often warm up themselves on stage. That can last anywhere from 5-10 minutes in my experience. Then they’ll tune off the oboe right before the conductor walks out. Tuning on stage is important. The 5 minutes of chaotic warm-up is just convention, and I’m not sure why they do it. I don’t believe it’s convention everywhere in the world.
Again, though, is that really “warming up” the players, or just “settling in” the instruments to get them vibrating in the temperature and humidity conditions where they’re going to be played?
The former.
eta: Here’s an older article (bad formatting warning) about the tradition, and whether or not it should continue.
Still, practicing onstage right before a concert is a bit of an odd tradition. Because vanity lurks somewhere in the hearts of all of us, most folks, I would imagine, would prefer to do their brushing up behind closed doors, not before the crowd that has assembled expressly with the expectation of being dazzled by their brilliance.
Yeah, you’re right, although I have heard musicians say that it’s more about bringing the instruments to playing temperature in the ambient conditions than the performers “performing” or “practicing” for their own sake.
I was in band in high school. Except when we were playing outside or something, I wouldn’t really say we need to warm up the instruments, per se. But I also wouldn’t say we were warming up ourselves, either. Warming up implies to me that something is out of shape and needs to be eased into.
What we were doing is tuning, and we do in fact tune both the instrument and ourselves. Woodwinds in particular don’t tend to keep their tuning because we have to take the whole instrument apart, including the parts we use to tune. And even brass tuning slides can get disturbed. So we do have to adjust our instrument. But we also need to adjust our embouchure (mouth shape and placement), and how we hold the instrument, adjusting to how our muscles in our bodies are never 100% the same. As a clarinettist, I had to know how much pressure to put on the thumb rest to stay in tune.
If we were actually warming up ourselves, you’d hear us playing though the range of the instrument, getting used to what changes we need before playing. And if we were warming up our instruments, we’d need a longer time to actually play. If we did that stuff, that was usually at rehearsal before the audience was allowed in, usually referring to it as a “dress rehearsal.”
Here’s an audio recording of what you’ll typically hear before a concert, at least in the US. They’re certainly not tuning, and the guy banging on the timpani isn’t bringing the drum up to operating temp. It really is just a short ad-hoc practice session to get lips, fingers and hands limber, inexplicably in front of a live audience.
Actually, you hear this all the time in orchestral concerts.
Yeah, I guess maybe I just can’t sort out the specific bits in all the individual cacophony. Ignorance fought.
The key word is visible. I think lots of job require a warm up or system check, but people don’t see it. At Amazon you do calisthenics at the start of shift and after lunch. When I started at Dominos Pizza they hadn’t switched to conveyor ovens, and old Baker’s Pride slate ovens were checked at the start of day by cooking a small cheese pizza to make sure the slate was heating evenly and it was up to temp.
I don’t see what is inexplicable about it. They’re about to perform and want to do their best at it. Settling in with their role in the actual position they’re going to be performing in seems natural, and having them first do that and then let the audience in seems inefficient. And what is the issue? That some small fraction in the audience who have never seen music performed think they’ve started playing and are bad?
Don’t race car drivers rev their engines before the race?
Another article on the subject.
Before the concertmaster emerges, many American orchestra musicians are likely to straggle out, tune up and even practice that evening’s parts. European orchestras tend to tune backstage and come out all together, as the London Symphony Orchestra did recently at Carnegie Hall. For some, the difference is striking. “We in Europe think the American habit of sitting onstage for half an hour is abominable,” said Harold Clarkson, a former cellist who represents orchestras on tour. “In Europe it always causes comment.”
Bolding mine. I don’t have a dog in the fight, as my symphony days ended at the youth level, but there doesn’t seem to be a good explanation for why American symphonies do this. We can make post-hoc justifications all we want, but European symphonies evidently don’t, and they get along just fine. It’s just a convention. Maybe the Europeans are right in that it ruins a bit of the magic, watching a cacophony of sound prior to the show. Maybe the Americans are right, in that limbering up before a performance makes the performance better. But it seems either method seems to work just fine.
In the top series, practice sessions are actually televised, and are of great interest to hardcore fans. But it’s also hard to practice driving a racecar in private.
The trainers at SeaWorld do a pre-show warm-up with the dolphins, orcas, etc. in full view of the arriving audience.