“My phone eats first” is a lighthearted expression often used at restaurants, but it points to a broader cultural habit: the tendency to document before we experience. From meals and concerts to vacations and everyday moments, the impulse to capture has become increasingly embedded in how we move through the world.
There is a strange irony in trying so hard to hold on to something that we end up standing slightly outside it. I thought of this earlier this month at Maison symphonique, where l’Orchestre de la francophonie (OF) closed its 2026 season with Brahms, Mendelssohn et nouvelles créations. Pleasantly, not a phone was in sight—at least from where I was seated.
Presented in partnership with the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec, rising composers Charles-Vincent Lemelin and Louis-Michel Tougas were featured alongside some of the classical repertoire’s most familiar names: Johann Strauss II’s overture to Die Fledermaus, conducted by Marie-Claire Cardinal; Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor with pianist Élisabeth Pion; and Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 in E minor, led by Julien Proulx.
I enjoyed every work on the program, but in keeping with l’OF’s commitment to education and artistic outreach, I would like to give particular attention to one of the afternoon’s new creations. Lemelin’s composition was hauntingly beautiful, the kind of piece that seemed to create its own atmosphere around the orchestra. It was music I could imagine hearing in the middle of a dark winter, when the crisp, chilly air outside gives way to the amber warmth of the glowing concert hall, where violin bows sweep through the air, and trumpets gleam gold beneath the soft light.
It is moments like this that remind me why I love the orchestra. There is a particular comfort in stepping away from the constant noise of daily life. Part of its appeal, too, is how naturally it seems to suit everyone. You can come in good company, make a solo date of it, seek it out when your social battery has run low, or arrive for no reason other than the music. More than anything, though, the orchestra offers a kind of authenticity that feels increasingly rare: letting a moment be lived instead of turned into material for later. Isn’t there also something refreshing, even liberating, in letting the room, not the phone, have the moment?
None of this is to dismiss the beauty of documenting our lives. There is value in wanting to remember, to revisit, and to share. But there is a difference between preserving a memory and interrupting an experience in order to manufacture one. Importantly, recording everything can pull us—and sometimes those around us—out of the very moment we hope to preserve. After all, can we really be fully present in something we are already trying to archive?
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