Outdoor concert

Every year for Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day, the National Symphony Orchestra, in conjunction with the National Park Service, performs an outdoor concert on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol. It's a fun evening of socializing and picnicking on the lawn while listening to orchestral pops music.

Neighbor Joel and I decided sort of at the last minute to go last night (the Memorial and Labor Day concerts are always on Sunday night of the weekend), so we quickly dressed and headed down to the Capitol. Once there, we waded through the throngs of picnickers spread out on the lawn and found us a little patch of grass down towards the bottom of the seating area, giving us prime seats as close to the orchestra as we might have been in the concert hall at the Kennedy Center. Since we hadn't planned this trip, we were without food, so we were tortured by all of the sights and smells of the foods around us. There was a full array of food choices, too, from people who had simply picked up a few bags of chips to those who brought complex and elaborate gourmet suppers.

It was a beautiful evening, with lovely weather and clear blue skies. As the sun went down, we could see first orange and then deep red skies on the horizon through the back of the stage backdrop. And, actually, by the time the concert was over about 10 p.m., it was actually cold! I should have brought a summer sweater.

After the national anthem, the orchestra, under the baton of principal pops conductor Emil de Cou, opened with a suite of pieces in honor of the 100th birthday of composer Leroy Anderson, including his most famous work, the Christmas song, "Sleigh Ride." De Cou explained to the audience that it was included since Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, is the official start of the Christmas shopping season!

Next they played a series of works used as the sound track for lots of the old Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons, including "Merrie Melodies" and "Powerhouse" ("Powerhouse" is the jazzy work excerpts of which were often used for chase scenes and for mass production/manufacturing scenes), then doing Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy," which was used in Fantasia, and the concluding the first half of the concert with "Kill the Wabbit" from What's Opera, Doc?, a/k/a "The Ride of the Valkyries" from Wagner's Die Walküre.

After intermission, they opened with an arrangement of "Seventy-Six Trombones" from The Music Man that was interspersed with themes from Sousa marches. In honor of the start of the fall school semester, they next played Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance Military March No. 1 in D" (the "graduation" march) and then Robert Planquette’s "Le régiment de Sambre et Meuse," also known as the "Script Ohio March" that is traditionally played before Ohio State football games. That was followed by Tchaikovsky's Marche Slave, which includes the hymn tune Russia, a melody that always reminds me of Boy Scout summer camp and the Order of the Arrow official song, "Firm bound in brotherhood."

Next we went to Hollywood and the sea and heard Korngold's "Overture to The Seahawk," an old pirate movie (I've never seen the movie, but this piece gets played a lot at various pops concerts), and then, in honor of all the Washingtonians who are at Rehoboth Beach this weekend, they played John Williams's "Main Theme from Jaws." The Hollywood section continued with more John Williams music, a suite from Harry Potter and the "March from Raiders of the Lost Ark."

They concluded the concert with "America the Beautiful," asking everyone to stand and sing along in solidarity with the Gulf Coast residents preparing for the hurricane. It amused me; the arrangement they played had essentially two "verses" of the song, so when the melody first came up, people started to sing, yet when we heard the melody the second time, the conductor turned around to lead the audience in singing. Some people didn't know what to do and stood silent. Some sang the first verse again, but I went ahead and (though I can't guarantee the accuracy of the words) sang the second verse.

As the audience left the lawn (or stood and listened, as was the case with many of us), they played Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever."

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Something I noticed at the concert bothered me a bit. There was a decided lack of diversity. Now, this was a free concert, completely open to the public as it has been for years. One of the park rangers we talked to as we were leaving said there were probably between six and eight thousand people there at the concert. Since some 600,000 people live in the District, that meant over 1% of the population came to the concert. Yet, if you don't count the police and security people, I didn't see a single black person sitting in the audience. There were lots of white people, of course; we were sitting near Spanish-speaking Hispanics, east Indians, and Asians; Joel and I represented the American Indian element; yet, there weren't any black people. The audience was young and old, with elderly, middle aged, young, and little children, and it looked to have the full socio-economic spectrum. The concert was all pops, with familiar tunes from cartoons, musicals and major movies that all Americans should recognize.

So, why didn't the black people come?