Symphony No. 8

Which is big, but not huge.

But by the time you get to the late 19th century, composers like Gustav Mahler are writing pieces literally called the Symphony of a Thousand.

Wow.

To get louder, to get bigger, you had to crowd hundreds of human bodies onto a stage.

Your brain sees that small visual footprint and thinks, OK, this will be a small, intimate show.

And then they hit play.

And you are slammed with a wall of sound that rivals Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand.

The visual cue is totally lying to you.

Now that's not to say I am unable to enjoy the sublimity of pieces of music.

Because frankly, when I sang Mahler 2, when I sang Mahler 4, when I sang Mahler 8, when I sang Mozart Requiem, when I sang a lot of Bach, a lot of Bach, when I sang Messiah, what we started this conversation talking about, I was able to experience The spirituality of the text and the music and the way they worked together.

And that was a wonderful...

It was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

It shouldn't sound like one choir singing this.

But if you go to sing, um, we're singing Mahler Eight, uh, uh, with Toronto Children's Chorus, uh, this, uh, season four times through the season with two different orchestras.

And, uh, yes, this is certain sound, like to sing with orchestra and really like fortissimo marcato, uh, and actually like quite a certain sound and enunciation to sing with orchestra.

Like a trumpet kind of sound we need to create that, and I have to figure it out how to teach children to transform from some, uh, world music sound, uh, of Tracy Wong piece, uh, to this kind of sound.

It's-- That's, uh, yeah, that's quite something because, I mean, Mahler is, is, you know, a very different kind of sound to native music, for example, world music, to pop music, to contemporary music.

It's, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's like chalk and cheese.

They're two completely different worlds.

I've s- I've sung a Mahler Eight myself, and it's, it's huge.

Staffing alone costs a lot of money.

Not every piece of music needs as many players as Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand, which needs more than 150 instrumentalists and a huge choir.

But even a much more economical Mozart symphony calls for at least 30 or 40, each of which is a highly trained professional who needs to be paid.

Plus the cost of the scores.