Tan Dun contributed a noisy, empty overture called "Internet Symphony No. 1" (the title felt like a threat).
The charge of baggy monsterism has (in so many words) been laid at White's door before -- most particularly in connection with his expansive autobiographical trilogy of novels ("A Boy's Own Story," "The Beautiful Room Is Empty" and "The Farewell Symphony").
White himself cannot have known, when he wrote A Boy's Own Story, that he would write the sequels that were to join it in a kind of first-person trilogy, The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1998) – books telling a young man's story, since youth, in the gay world of the 60s and 70s, which seemed magically extended until it was brutally curtailed.
In 1996, he appeared in front of a half-empty Carnegie Hall with the Iceland Symphony.
At one point, she imagines "all the things from the past … like a huge national orchestra biding its time … all the objects holding still and silent till the shops empty of people … Then, when darkness falls, the symphony … The symphony of the sold and the discarded.
The orchestra sounds terrific, but Carnegie Hall, usually packed for Chicago Symphony concerts, had a noticeable number of empty seats.
"Without the symphony, PAC was going to be an empty building," said Dr. Victor J. Bauer, the board's vice chairman and treasurer.
Whereas the choreographic effects of Mr. Forsythe or Wayne McGregor tend to look coldly empty in their reaccentuation of body parts, almost all those in "Classical Symphony" are organically linked.
It was not entirely surprising that there were many empty seats at Avery Fisher Hall for the two remarkable concerts by the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jonathan Nott, on Wednesday and Thursday nights.
The H-D-H team wrote and produced lovelorn pop songs with a gospel kick: "Where Did Our Love Go," "I Hear a Symphony," "Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart," "My World Is Empty Without You," "Come See About Me".
