The Final Giant's Footstep
Coming back to Vienna for a second time, feels like a new city, but once I rode the train system (U4) I remember all of the places we visited at the beginning of the month. I tried to visit new places that I did not see during my first time in this city. I was pretty successful in my search to find new locations. I tried to go ice skating, but the cost was too high and instead I spent my time walking around the Botanical gardens. Since it is the winter season, the garden does not have water in the fountains or flowers in the soil. I know that the location will look completely different in the spring when the plants are blooming, but I also found beauty in the lack of foliage, because it takes the landscape and strips it down to the essentials and reveals the main highlights of the park.
After walking around the park, I attended the House of Music. I very much enjoyed this museum. It holds something for the first time classical music consumer to the Phd music teacher. They had a lot of artifacts from major classical composers. The first floor, it an exhibit to the Vienna philharmonic. It contained programs from their first performances and major world tours. It also discusses previous conductors of the phil and what happened to the musicians during WW2. An interactive element is present in the middle of the room. This takes random instrumentations and gives you a dice to roll for melodies and create a luck of the draw Waltz. I played with this programing twice because I wanted to also write a Waltz for the flute. I think that it was very interesting to have that element in the center of the exhibit and I feel it provides something for every age of tourist. The second floor is dedicated to the physics of sound and explains the four classifications of instruments. There was also a bass drum in the back center wall that was the diameter of the floor. I thought the second floor was interesting because it engages the scientific mind behind each instrument and explains sound with proximity and wave frequencies for tuning. The third floor contains a walk through exhibit of Major composers. This floor also used to hold the Vienna Philharmonic interactive conductor, but it was moved to the fourth floor to be next to the gift shop. Before you walk into the section of the composer their signature is present on the wall. Each room holds artifacts about their conducting and musical composition. Each room also contains a time line for each composer and the decorations match either a composition of their work or the time frame where they composed. The weirdest thing on the third phone is a snapchat filter of Mozart’s face. You sit down in a chair and the motion capture, mimics the movements of your mouth, eyes, head, and eyebrow to match the Mozart present on the big screen. The final floor was one of my favorites because you are able to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in real time.
The motion sensor on the baton catches most of the movements and finds the down beat very easy. The only exception to this motion caption was that it only was programmed to work in the meter, so when you tried to turn a fast cut time into a single beat measure, the orchestra does not follow along correctly. Before I stepped up to the podium, I watched other people give the conductor spot a try. I found out that if you do not have a pulse of time, or your rhythm is off, the players will stop and someone from the orchestra will respectfully tell you that you need more practice and are not fit to conduct the Philharmonic with those rhythms. I did not see their faces, but I do not know how I look with conducting the Vienna Phil and using my left hand for independent movements and ques for certain section in the score. I know that the sensor did not pick up these movements, but great practice makes great results.
We saw the Vienna Symphony in the Mozart opera house. This program was very well thought out and I gained a new favorite symphony from it. Dvorak’s 7th Symphony is very well crafted and each movement can stand alone as an individual piece, but each one interconnects with each other and the soloist were amazing in their parts and their interactions with each other. I was in the first row, so I was able to hear the individual resonance from the viola in front of me and was able to watch the cellos interacting with themselves during harder sections or light sections where they smiled at each other. Both flute players had gold flutes, and it added a resonance to the instrument to match the oboe and violin for when the melody was passed off. Their lower octave were also very rich and supported. There was also a piano concerto placed before the intermission. Being in the front row, I was able to hear the creek of the foot pedals and feel the vibrations coming from the grand piano. The downside, was that the orchestra was very covered by the direct sound waves of the piano. I really enjoyed every piece in this concert and would listen to them again on my own time.
Coming back to Vienna for a second time, feels like a new city, but once I rode the train system (U4) I remember all of the places we visited at the beginning of the month. I tried to visit new places that I did not see during my first time in this city. I was pretty successful in my search to find new locations. I tried to go ice skating, but the cost was too high and instead I spent my time walking around the Botanical gardens. Since it is the winter season, the garden does not have water in the fountains or flowers in the soil. I know that the location will look completely different in the spring when the plants are blooming, but I also found beauty in the lack of foliage, because it takes the landscape and strips it down to the essentials and reveals the main highlights of the park.
After walking around the park, I attended the House of Music. I very much enjoyed this museum. It holds something for the first time classical music consumer to the Phd music teacher. They had a lot of artifacts from major classical composers. The first floor, it an exhibit to the Vienna philharmonic. It contained programs from their first performances and major world tours. It also discusses previous conductors of the phil and what happened to the musicians during WW2. An interactive element is present in the middle of the room. This takes random instrumentations and gives you a dice to roll for melodies and create a luck of the draw Waltz. I played with this programing twice because I wanted to also write a Waltz for the flute. I think that it was very interesting to have that element in the center of the exhibit and I feel it provides something for every age of tourist. The second floor is dedicated to the physics of sound and explains the four classifications of instruments. There was also a bass drum in the back center wall that was the diameter of the floor. I thought the second floor was interesting because it engages the scientific mind behind each instrument and explains sound with proximity and wave frequencies for tuning. The third floor contains a walk through exhibit of Major composers. This floor also used to hold the Vienna Philharmonic interactive conductor, but it was moved to the fourth floor to be next to the gift shop. Before you walk into the section of the composer their signature is present on the wall. Each room holds artifacts about their conducting and musical composition. Each room also contains a time line for each composer and the decorations match either a composition of their work or the time frame where they composed. The weirdest thing on the third phone is a snapchat filter of Mozart’s face. You sit down in a chair and the motion capture, mimics the movements of your mouth, eyes, head, and eyebrow to match the Mozart present on the big screen. The final floor was one of my favorites because you are able to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in real time. 
We saw the Vienna Symphony in the Mozart opera house. This program was very well thought out and I gained a new favorite symphony from it. Dvorak’s 7th Symphony is very well crafted and each movement can stand alone as an individual piece, but each one interconnects with each other and the soloist were amazing in their parts and their interactions with each other. I was in the first row, so I was able to hear the individual resonance from the viola in front of me and was able to watch the cellos interacting with themselves during harder sections or light sections where they smiled at each other. Both flute players had gold flutes, and it added a resonance to the instrument to match the oboe and violin for when the melody was passed off. Their lower octave were also very rich and supported. There was also a piano concerto placed before the intermission. Being in the front row, I was able to hear the creek of the foot pedals and feel the vibrations coming from the grand piano. The downside, was that the orchestra was very covered by the direct sound waves of the piano. I really enjoyed every piece in this concert and would listen to them again on my own time. 
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