Ask An Expert: Composer Craziness

From time to time here on the ItC blog, we'll be posting questions that we receive from readers about some aspect of the orchestra world or other, along with answers from either the two of us or from whomever we can find who is best equipped to provide an answer. If you'd like to submit a question, just click the Ask An Expert button on the top menu. Here's our first installment:

Q: In your experience, whats the strangest thing a modern composer has ever asked the musicians or conductor to do in a score?

Sarah's Answer: I've done my share of new music readings for young composers, which can be both enlightening and entertaining, and I've seen some interesting stuff. The one that sticks out in my mind was a lengthy composition for soprano and orchestra by a doctoral student from 5-6 years ago. The music was pretty complicated, but what got me was the vocal line - the soprano was singing in pre-Coptic Egyptian (which was strange enough), but the kicker was that it was written out in hieroglyphs in the score. To the composer's defense, a hieroglyphic translation and pronunciation key was provided, but that wasn't really practical for rehearsing - it ended up being something like, "Could we go back to that raven/sun/eye/jackal-headed god line??"

Sam's Answer: Back in college, I once played a piece by the eminent Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel. It was called "Finale," even though it was a one-movement piece, and the reason it had that title was because, midway through the performance, the score instructed the conductor to have a heart attack and die. Our conductor, who was only 30 and in remarkably athletic shape, had to put on quite a show to sell his death to the audience - I believe he actually pulled the conductor's stand over on top of himself as he fell. Following the collapse, the entire chamber orchestra was instructed to leap from our chairs, surround the conductor, and try to help him. Eventually, it was determined, silently, that he was dead, and the first violinist led us back to our chairs, where we played the Dies Irae (a Latin death hymn), and then carried our still-deceased conductor from the stage. The hardest part, of course, was accomplishing all this without laughing...

I've actually got an even more interesting answer to this question, but sadly, it's not the kind of thing you want to be writing about on a general audience blog. (Let's just say that it would garner us an easy NC-17 rating.) I'd be happy to spill it to anyone who wants to buy me a beer after a concert sometime...