University of Utah Christmas Party Interruption

On Friday night, my quartet had a performance at the Rice Eccles Stadium on the higher floors.  It was for a Christmas Party for Doctors at the University of Utah.  We were chosen to play because one of the doctors had daughter that is also part of the gifted music school.  They wanted the quartet to do some background music for the start of the party.  

Rice Eccles Stadium

When we first started our program, there were only staff members preparing the dinner to listen to us.  After a few pieces, more people started to show up for the party.  Most of the people showed up fashionably late.  Or more like and hour later than the party started.

I was supposed to play a solo piece, but we ended up running out of time, so I didn't have to.  Our quartet played two pieces and there were are couple of solos.  One of the quartet pieces was a Mozart quartet.  That one went okay, as well as most of the solos.  It was right before the Brahms when things got a little more interesting.

Right as we sat down to play our final piece, we were rudely interrupted by the fire alarm.  It went off really loud and we were all startled.  We just stayed sitting there with our instruments.  Nobody else moved.  We all thought it was accidentally set off and there wasn't really a fire.

After about five minutes, I started to wonder if there maybe was a real fire.  We decided to pack up and leave, just in case.  Right as we started walking out, a lady came and said that it was a false alarm and we could all stay and finish our piece.  We unpacked again and were all ready to play our piece, but the alarm was still going off.  We decided to wait until the alarm stopped going.

As we sat there waiting, the security people came to us and told us that everyone had to evacuate the building.  They said it was probably a false alarm, but everyone was required to exit the building so that they could check.  We had to pack up all of our stuff again and go out a side exit and down 5 flights of stairs to ground level.  Thank goodness I play the piano so I didn't have to carry an instrument around.

After we got out, we started thinking that maybe it was Brahms (the classical composer) who set off the alarm so we wouldn't play that last piece.  He didn't want us to play it because we didn't sound very good at rehearsal.  He is probably wondering why we even bother trying to play his music because we didn't sound very good.

Overall, it was a really interesting night.  We decided to just leave without finishing that last piece.  We were all really tired after, but we had a lot of fun.