Fable
The invisible prelude before the band begins
The city's band was strong—hand them a score and they could play it. But every banquet needed a different character: the chamber of commerce wanted steadiness, the academy wanted clarity, the docks wanted something short and forceful.
The conductor first wrote long instructions on the first page of the score. The musicians would read them, but during the performance they were easily diluted by the notes that followed, and complex scenes still went off track. Someone suggested retraining the entire orchestra. The conductor refused; the orchestra itself was very expensive, and it could not stop rehearsing for every banquet.
A composer wrote an opening prelude not made public to the audience. It entered the orchestra's memory before the main piece began, so that the later performance automatically carried a certain direction.
This intro is not for the audience to hear; it is made up of a specially arranged set of positions and notes. It is very short, yet it can influence how every melody that follows unfolds. At first the composer wrote the intro too long, and the band ended up squeezed out of space for the main piece. Later he kept only the most useful passages, so the influence stayed steady without going too far.
Different banquets have different prompts. The band does not need retraining, and the score does not need to be covered with explanations; it only needs to load the corresponding prompt before the opening. The conductor still required every prompt to go through rehearsal, because a wrong prompt would make the whole performance sound unified yet off task.
The band tried rewriting the entire score for each banquet. The effect was good, but it was too slow and too expensive, and the old musicians complained that the foundations they knew were being scrambled. The next event moved to a school, and it had to be rewritten again, almost equivalent to rebuilding the band each time.
A conductor switched to short opening gestures. For the merchants' guild, three slow beats first; for the academy, a white flag raised first; for the docks, urgent drumbeats first. The main body of the score did not move, yet the musicians were led into the right tone by the signals at the start. What was adjusted was no longer the whole orchestra, but the short bit of guidance before the performance began. This method also had limits. If a banquet required a completely unfamiliar genre, a few gestures were not enough; but most occasions only needed a change of tone, emphasis, or etiquette, and that string of small signals before the opening could save the effort of rewriting the entire score.
He finally understood: sometimes changing the direction of an entire performance does not require retraining the whole orchestra—just inserting a rehearsed intro before the opening.