Salastina

Maia here: ok, perhaps I will get blacklisted forever from publicly telling this story, but it’s true, so... here goes!

In February of 2017, I was super pregnant with my first child, our son Galen. Kevin and I were at a Star Wars recording session. It was John Williams’ 85th birthday that day, and let’s just say his mood wasn’t exactly celebratory. The vibe at that session was much more tense than usual. Of course, everyone’s always on their best behavior for John Williams; this was different.

At one point, Kevin lightly tapped my knee with his bow. He had noticed a colleague and friend, who’d been out sick for a while, was finally back that day. I leaned forward to smile at her and give a little encouraging wave. The maestro immediately called us out in front of the whole orchestra for disrupting the session, pointing at us with his baton while sternly saying, “now’ s not the time for visiting!!”

He later had the contractor reprimand us, telling us it was a privilege to be breathing the same air as him. While that is, of course, true — and while that moment was certainly mortifying, in a way — I can’t say either of us truly felt ashamed of our actions. It was clear the reaction was more about the birthday blues than anything inappropriate we’d done. If anything, we felt a little like, “he knows us!”

r/ChristopherTin

What is this thing you speak of, rehearsal?

Very, very few composers actually send out their music ahead of time. And even if they do, very few musicians have time to look at it. So we show up, there's music on the stand, we read it, they record it!

You get used to it quickly!

It was a disaster.

We were playing an incredibly beautiful piece of music (Schubert's Cello Quintet), and during the most delicate, whisper-like passage, this crazy sound came from the audience. Our best guess was that it was a sneeze-fart, but it really was such a weird, out of context, almost animal noise. We looked at each other and started giggling (I can't control it on-stage). 30 secs later, in the 2nd most quiet passage, it happened again. By this time, we were shaking and crying, barely holding on to our instruments. The audience started laughing, too.

We really should have left, but we weathered the 10 minutes hysteria. Afterwards, we looked for the audience member so we could apologize, but they (or it) left.

Another superstar! I talk about you in a different reply, Chris!

If you don't know Grammy winning composer Christopher Tin, you should. Right now.

Hugs

Kevin: We got ourselves in trouble with John Williams.

John Williams sessions are a different animal. Each take is almost like a concert performance, so everyone feels a greater sense of responsibility, no matter how big the orchestra is. So even when we're not actually playing, people are on good behavior.

We rubbed him the wrong way with a small, friendly interaction, and he let us know lol. Like Maia said, we kind of cherish the personal interaction with him haha!