Being able to bring the intoxicant of your choice to a concert is not exactly a new phenomenon. Folks have been doing it at rock events for decades and even the St. Louis Symphony allows drinks in the concert hall for their non-season events. The Colorado Symphony, though, is taking it to a new level.
As I found out while listening to The Most Trusted Source in News—NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me"—the Denver-based orchestra just announced "Classically Cannabis: the High Note Series", described as "a new partnership between the Colorado Symphony and the industry that supports legal cannabis in Colorado, which is expected to contribute more than $67 million in tax revenue to the State of Colorado in 2014."
Far out, right?
Initially intended as public events to which concertgoers could bring their own weed, the "Classically Cannabis" series was changed to invitation-only when the party poopers in the Denver city government informed CS that they might be violating state law. "If you go forward, warned Stacie Loucks, director of the department of excise and licenses, in a letter to symphony board president Jerome Kern (no, not THAT Jerome Kern), "we will exercise any and all options available to the city of Denver to halt the event and hold the business owners, event organizers responsible for any violations of law." That's because, as the Los Angeles Times noted in a May 11th article, the constitutional amendment that made pot legal in Colorado "also banned its open and public use."
Yeah, that's logical. I wonder if they were stoned when they wrote that?
But what about the music? "The CSO brass quintet," writes Mr. Wenzel, "dressed in all-black suits with pale green ties, began its 45-minute performance with Richard Strauss' ominous Also Sprach Zarathustra Fanfare, followed by short speeches from the CSO and sponsors. The acoustics in the unadorned space were sharp and bright as the quintet continued with recognizable classical favorites from Debussy, Bach, Wagner, and Puccini.
"Co-organizer Jane West of cannabis company Edible Events [!] said $30,000 had already been secured in sponsorship for the night, and CSO officials confirmed another $20,000 was garnered from attendees. The CSO is hoping to raise $200,000 from the three Space gallery shows and another, non-pot-sanctioned Classically Cannabis event at Red Rocks this summer."
There's no mention of whether or not anybody held up any cigarette lighters. In any case, this made me wonder what kind of music would be appropriate for an audience floating on Cloud 9. A few pieces that came to mind were:
* Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," which describes a series of hallucinations experienced by an artist who takes an opium overdose in a fit of unrequited love.
* Scriabin's "Poem of Ecstasy," which rises to truly delirious heights. Granted, Scriabin apparently had in mind the kind of ecstasy that doesn't necessarily require being stoned—although it can certainly help. So I'm told!
* Christopher Theofanidis’s "Rainbow Body," just because simply listening to it comes close to inducing a sort of indefinable celestial serenity.
Got any suggestions of your own? Leave a comment. I've gotta go; got a sudden attack of the munchies.
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