Text 1: The first note, by Imogen Vale

An original contemporary memoir extract.

The hall smelled of floor polish and wet coats. I had practised the cello piece so many times that I could play it while thinking about something else, but backstage I could not remember how to hold the bow. My fingers seemed to belong to someone who had never seen an instrument.

Through the curtain I heard chairs scraping, then a cough, then the soft thud of the piano lid being closed. My teacher whispered, “Take your time.” I nodded as if I had received a useful instruction. In fact, I was trying to stop my knees from knocking against the music stand.

The first few bars were careful and small. I watched the page rather than the people, following each note as if it were a stepping stone across a stream. Then I reached the passage I had always disliked. One note came out thin and sharp. I felt my face grow hot. For a second I wanted to stop, but the next note arrived anyway, and then the next.

By the end, my hands were steady. The applause sounded enormous, though there were perhaps forty people in the room. I bowed too quickly and nearly knocked the bow against the cello. My teacher smiled from the side of the stage. I did not become fearless. I simply learnt that being frightened did not have to be the same as being unable to continue.

Text 2: Music above the market, by A Special Correspondent

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

This report appeared in a provincial newspaper in 1885, after an orchestra gave an open-air concert in the square of a market town.

The square was filled long before the orchestra took its places. Some had come for the music; others appeared to have been caught by the promise of an afternoon without rain. The platform had been raised between the market stalls and the old clock, and a row of children sat upon the cobbles before it.

The conductor raised his hand and the talk of the crowd died away. The first movement began with a low, measured phrase from the strings. It travelled across the square, past the fruit sellers and the open doors of the inns, and for a moment the rattle of carts beyond the houses seemed to recede.

Then the weather intervened. A gust scattered the music from the conductor’s stand, and two players reached for their pages at once. A few persons laughed. The conductor waited, smiling, while a violinist pinned down the loose sheets with the heel of his hand. The orchestra began again, this time with the brass carrying the tune above the wind.

The performance lasted an hour, though the youngest listeners seemed persuaded that it had lasted three. They fidgeted, whispered and pointed at the drummer whenever he raised his sticks. Yet when the final chord sounded, the square answered with a long burst of applause, and even those who had wandered in by accident remained to the end.

It was not a flawless concert. The wind took a page, and one entrance came late. But the music held its place among the clatter of an ordinary afternoon, and that, we venture to think, may be a truer test of a performance than silence in a concert hall.

Both of these texts are about performing music in front of an audience.