Girls, Guitars, The Crimson Grail-Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center

Now I know what 219 guitars and basses look like. It is a sight that is much more extensive than one might have imagined. I saw it before the house was opened, so the vastness of the musical enterprise that is The Crimson Grail, the largeness of the space in which the music was to be heard, was forcefully absorbed. This was an orchestral work, not a rock band work, yet, still, this was larger than a symphonic orchestra. All the sonic timbres and levels that the variety of instruments in an orchestra provide were brought to musical life by guitars and basses in The Crimson Grail.

Two rows of musicians, their instruments and amps, stretched forever around Damrosch Park on three sides. There were four conductor stands (Vaquero was one of the conductors; his was the first section, far from the bandshell stage, at the back). Above them on the bandshell stage, the composer - primary conductor, Rhys Chatham. The lighting was crimson, that beautiful shade and tone of red I hardly ever see anywhere except as the finest clear red lipstick coloring a lovely, youthful Chinese actress's mouth in a Chinese film.

I don't know how many chairs were inside the venue -- more than a thousand, but fewer than two thousand. An even larger crowd stood at the back; there were many more than that crowd who never were able to get into the fenced off venue at all. This was An Art Event.

The musical cues were signaled by Rhys, which cues had to be seen by the sub-conductors and conveyed to the musicians of their sections. Thus the cues had to be as large, and as plain, as possible. The technical and musical logistics of performing The Crimson Grail are mind-boggling. This wasn't something simple, a 'beautiful mess of noise' put out by non-musicians, as Rhys's music used to be characterized. As Vaquero put it in rehearsal, "If you cannot count forwards and backwards throughout, you can't do this." I got caught up at times by the musicians' counting; they were encouraged to verbalize their count, to express the count physically, and many of them did. I could see on their faces the joy they were feeling, having this life-time memory musician experience of making a piece as an orchestra (an experience that guitarists don't get much). It was an orchestra that was playing a very particular piece with specific objectives, which were reached, by everyone working very hard at doing it right. It was very beautiful.

It was also transcendant, judging by the audience which could not remain seated by the last movement. It had a touch of the trance inducement that I'm so aware of from African and African heritage music, but it didn't -- couldn't -- quite go there.

The composition of musicians wasn't 50 percent women, but there were at least 15% women, including Rhys's 17 year old daughter, who doesn't speak English very well, and has wild, long blonde dreads. They didn't do as well with musicians of color: perhaps three black people and a few more Asians.

Vaquero and I discussed the why there were so few musicians of color who applied for the experience. It surely wasn't because the guitar isn't an instrument of interest in these communities. Africans were playing prototypes of guitars long before they brought what became the guitar to Spain. Listen to any African or Afro Latin group and there are guitars all right. So it had to be outreach.

One of the women in Vaquero's section, is Valerie Opielski. She's one of the volunteers at the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls that takes girls from 8 to 18. The camp is named after Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton, a blues and rock performer/songwriter who was one of the first women to play the music that came to be known as "rock n' roll. One of Opielski's groups is playing at Lincoln Center outdoors free later this month.

Girls do love to play guitar.

Edited to add a review of the show just went up on The New York Times.