2007 Highlight Reel, Part Two

Continuing with the top ten list of my favorite concerts of the year, we've made it to summer...

6. All-Nordic Program, Macy's Day of Music - July 13, Orchestra Hall
If you've never been to the Day of Music, you're missing out. Officially, it was created several years ago as the kickoff to our four-week Sommerfest concert series. Unofficially, the orchestra concert that's at the event's heart has become just a small piece of the greatest single showcase of the local music scene the Cities has going: 24 straight hours of live music, all genres (almost - we're sadly lacking in the hip-hop department), on five or six different stages, inside and out of our downtown concert hall. Best of all, the whole thing is completely free of charge, which has assured us of huge crowds every year, despite the fact that we're nearly always competing directly with either the Basilica Block Party or that corporate monstrosity of a concert the Aquatennial puts on in a parking lot on Washington Ave.

There are years where I've actually stuck around for all 24 hours of the Day of Music, just drinking in the atmosphere, and loving the sight of such a diverse crowd at our hall. Our concert, which comes mid-evening on the main indoor stage, always has a distinctly raucous atmosphere (comparatively speaking,) and the crowd, which waits in line for an hour or more to get a spot in the audience, is far more vocal and upbeat than at any other concert we play. It's basically a huge party, and I hope we never quit doing it.

7. Brahms - Clarinet Quintet - July 20, Orchestra Hall
Chamber music is something musicians love to play, because it challenges us in ways that orchestral and solo work doesn't, and because, musically speaking, it's the ultimate team sport. And over the last few years, the chamber music series we present at Sommerfest has suddenly become wildly popular. I don't know what combination of marketing strategy and musical quality has prompted the huge increase in attendance, but one thing that I know doesn't hurt is when Osmo is performing. Our music director is also a talented clarinetist, who played for several years as principal of the Helsinki Philharmonic before becoming a conductor, and after some prodding, he took up performing regularly with members of the orchestra on these concerts. This concert was my first chance to play with him, and the fact that it was on the Brahms quintet (widely considered by musicians to be the greatest piece of small-ensemble music ever written,) made the experience even more memorable.

As it turns out, Osmo is very easy to work with when he doesn't have a stick in his hand, and the other members of the group (violinists Jorja Fleezanis and Helen Chang, and cellist Jim Jacobson) were some of my favorite colleagues to play with as well. Together we pulled off what I thought was a rich, dark interpretation of the piece, and Osmo's work on the gypsy-tinged cadenzas of the difficult slow movement was deeply impressive.

8. Mendelssohn - Octet for Strings - August 26, Greenwood Music Camp; Cummington, Massachusetts
Okay, this is a slight cheat, because I didn't actually perform on this concert, but I don't care. Greenwood is a small chamber music camp squirreled away in the Berkshire hilltowns of Western Massachusetts, and I've been coming here since I was ten years old. It's the kind of place where kids discover everything they love about life and music, and tear up throughout the year whenever they think of it. The idea at this camp isn't to grow prodigies - it's to show a bunch of incredible kids a great time, with music as a key part of the action. No one spends six hours slaving away in a practice room at Greenwood. No one has to listen to a teacher lecture about what a disappointment they are, and how much harder they need to work to become a Great Musician. Kids there spend as much time playing soccer and dodgeball as they do playing Mozart. The result of the low-pressure environment is not just a well-balanced camp, but a higher level of music-making than you can possibly imagine.

The kids at Greenwood stun me every year with their dedication and their ability to rise to the level of expectation. But this year, I was assigned to coach a group of the camp's top young players on a piece that we normally never even attempt with kids under age of 13 - the rollicking, pounding finale of Mendelssohn's Octet for Strings. It's a perfect piece for teenagers - Mendelssohn was only 15 when he wrote it, and it's chock full of teen angst and wild emotion. It's also wickedly difficult to play, with eight players arrayed across the stage, trying desperately to stay together and in rhythm when they can barely hear each other. As I say, it's not something one generally attempts with young kids, but we had the feeling that this group might be able to pull it off.

The truth is, it was close. We rehearsed twice as much as the average Greenwood group does, and my coaching style (which I normally think of as friendly and collaborative) took a decided turn for the authoritarian as the week went on. I found myself stomping the floor to keep the beat, and begging individual players not to rush when they reached an easy section. One of the violinists, who had been placed in the group even though we feared that the part might be way over his head, was struggling mightily to remember where to begin his crucial solo 2/3 of the way through the piece. For the first time in my two decades at Greenwood, I was actually afraid that one of my groups might not be able to pull off what had been given to them.

The day of the concert, my first violinist came running up to me outside the concert barn, and whined that she was nervous. I told her she'd be great, that she had her part down cold, and hoped that I was telling the truth. When their turn came up on the program, dead last on a 3-hour concert (nothing, but nothing, can follow the Octet, so it's always last,) I slipped out of my seat and walked to the back of the barn, where none of the players would be able to see me. I knew how tense I was likely to be, and didn't want any of my fear transferring to the kids.

I shouldn't have worried. From the first snarling entrance of the cellos, the piece jumped off the page like it always does. The violas and then the violins joined the fray one by one, in perfect time, and the rushing drive to the first big cadence was packed with the kind of frenetic energy only kids ever seem to truly have. From there, it was an 8-minute roller coaster ride to the end, and my first violinist had clearly overcome her nerves, because when she led the final chord, she did it with such vigor that her arm left the string in an arc, yanking her bow into the air in an action pose that could have made the pages of Sports Illustrated. The kids and parents in the audience went berserk as they always do for this piece, as anyone would really have to do for this piece. Standing in the very back of the room, I had to turn away so that no one would see the tears in my eyes. Just as they do every summer, a collection of kids playing barefoot in a barn in the middle of nowhere had reminded me of why I love what I do for a living.

I'll finish out my top ten list on Wednesday, with my favorite two shows of this past fall, one of which may be a surprise. Happy New Year, all...

Addendum to Band Aids and Tourniquets

A majority of the musicians I know are involved with music education in one form or another. From a musician’s point of view, it’s only logical, as part of being an artist is ensuring the continuation of that art by passing on the knowledge and skill required to produce it. As Sam wrote in a recent post, arts organizations play a significant (if incomplete) role in providing at least a modicum of arts exposure and education through outreach programs - it doesn't make up for the lack of music and art in many school curricula, but it's something.

I can't agree more that the lack of arts curricula is a serious deficit in our educational system - there's no shortage of anecdotal and statistical evidence showing how arts education can influence discipline, organizational skills, self-expression, self-esteem, ability to work with others, etc. Further, it lays the groundwork for a lifelong appreciation of music and art, which indisputably enriches one’s life. Hard to argue with all of that.

So, the message so far is "Music education good!". Here's where I'll stir the pot; more arts education in the elementary level is absolutely necessary, but I wonder about the necessity of so many music schools at the college and graduate level.

Over several bottles of wine the other night, a group of friends, all professional musicians, all teachers at the college/graduate level, discussed the disproportionate number of students in performance degree programs. Conservatories and music schools are pumping out graduates at record levels at a time when expansion in the music field, particularly with orchestras, is slowing. It is difficult to make it as a performer - 200 potential candidates will apply for the average orchestral job opening, not great odds by any means. From a purely practical perspective, we don't need increasing numbers of performing musicians; it’s progressively difficult to find employment and it’s a ridiculously competitive and saturated field. From an institutional standpoint, what we need are well-educated music enthusiasts who have the knowledge, and therefore the ability, to enjoy (and support) all kinds of music – that should be provided to them via that disappearing arts curricula that both Sam and I are bemoaning.

Any thoughts out there in the ether as 2007 comes to a close?

2007 Highlight Reel, Part One

Somewhere, deep in the second appendix of the Great Global Rule Book, it is written that everyone must make lists at the end of the calendar year. Best of... lists, worst of... lists, top ten lists, lists of resolutions, lists of last year's resolutions that were broken inside of a week, etc. Journalists and critics especially love such lists, and newspapers this time of year are chock full of year-end wrap-up articles that invariably feature lists.

I'm not much for resolutions, myself, but I do love lists, so I thought I'd throw together my own Top Ten of 2007. The twist is that these will not be the ten best shows/concerts/events I attended, but the ten I had the most fun performing in. I'm disqualifying Inside the Classics concerts, simply because they would obviously make the list, given how much I have invested in the series. Other than that, everything I played in 2007 is fair game. And just to make it simpler, I'm putting these in chronological order The first five are below, and I'll cover the second half of the year on Monday...

1. Mozart - Sinfonia Concertante for Violin & Viola - January 19, Orchestra Hall
This was a special performance in many ways, but the reason it sticks in my mind is that the soloists were the orchestra's Associate Principal Second Violin, William Polk, and his wife, our Assistant Principal Viola, Kerri Ryan. Kerri and William are two of my closest friends (Kerri and I came to Minnesota at the same time in February 2000,) and they are also two of the most dazzling musicians I know. They worked wonders with the Mozart, weaving their lines effortlessly around each other and the orchestra, and I heard several older members of the orchestra declare that it might have been the best performance of that piece that they'd ever heard. Unfortunately, Kerri and William have since left us for jobs in the Philadelphia Orchestra, leaving a serious void in our inner strings. But when I think of them, I'll always think first of that Friday night last January.

2. Beethoven - Symphony No. 4 & Sibelius - Symphony No. 5 - February 13, Carnegie Hall, New York
Playing in another city is always an event, and even for those of us who despise the way New York dominates our entire national culture, you can't deny that Carnegie is one of the great concert halls of the world. This was also our first time playing Sibelius and Beethoven, Osmo's specialties, in New York, and expectations were quite high. As it happens, the fourth is my favorite Beethoven symphony, and Sibelius's fifth is my favorite orchestra work by any composer, so I had been looking forward to this show for months. I wasn't disappointed - we were at our absolute level best that night in New York (our first time playing Carnegie Hall without a big name soloist to sell tickets for us,) and the finale of the Sibelius was fairly rippling with tension, as it should be. For an encore, we played Sibelius's haunting Valse Triste, and I literally got goosebumps as it finished. An incredible night in an incredible concert hall.

3. Beethoven - Symphonies 8 & 3 - April 28, Hibbing High School; Hibbing, Minnesota
Nearly every year, the Minnesota Orchestra spends a week on the road, playing concerts in towns and small cities across the North Star State. I'll be honest - much as I love the chance to play for audiences that normally don't get to hear us, these outstate tours can be a bit of a grind, as we struggle to squeeze onto tiny stages in high school auditoriums with unfamiliar acoustics and chairs seemingly designed to cause back pain.

But Hibbing, a down-on-its-luck town that used to be the center of industry up on Minnesota's Iron Range, is always worth the trip. Its high school, built in the early 20th century, is a palace, and its auditorium is simply stunning. More than that, the residents of Hibbing turn out by the thousands whenever we play there, and you've never met a nicer group of people. Before the concert, I took a drive up to the old pit mine on the edge of town, where two other violists and I seized the opportunity to squeeze off a few shots of an Osmo Vänskä bobble-arm doll dominating the impressive landscape...

4. Sibelius - Symphony No. 2 - May 25, Orchestra Hall
If you've never heard the 2nd live, you must. It's one of those pieces that simply can't come close to conveying all its power and emotion on a recording. I grew up on this piece, and from the warm string murmuring that opens the first movement to the thunderous fanfare of the finale, I love it from top to bottom. I've been waiting for years to play it under Osmo, and this spring, I finally got the chance.

Sibelius and Osmo are inextricably linked in Finland and beyond, and many critics believe our music director to be the preeminent interpreter of his countryman's music. This was a galloping performance - Osmo doesn't truck with the leisurely style imposed on the symphony by many 20th century conductors - and while I wasn't sure I liked the breathless pace when we started rehearsals, I was a convert by the time we performed it.

5. Bartok - String Quartet No. 4 - July 3, Apple Hill Center For Chamber Music; East Sullivan, New Hampshire
When my old friend Elise Kuder called me in February to invite me to spend a couple of weeks playing and teaching at Apple Hill's summer festival in rural New England, I jumped at the chance. I have a long history with that part of the country, and a lot of friends who have raved about the Apple Hill experience for years. (These friends conveniently left out the part about the living conditions, which are, shall we say, spartan in the extreme, but roughing it is unquestionably part of the experience.)

Still, when Elise told me I'd be playing the Bartok, I gulped. The Apple Hill schedule has us show up on a Wednesday, rehearse for six days, and then perform a Tuesday night chamber music concert which is attended not only by the festival participants, but by paying members of the public from across the region. Bartok 4 is not a piece that can reasonably be learned in six days, even by experienced musicians. I asked Elise if she was sure we could handle it - after all, the quartet would be made up of four musicians who had never played together before. She was sure.

That week at Apple Hill turned out to be one of the highlights of my year. The other three members of my quartet were all spectacular musicians, and the cellist turned out to be an old friend whom I hadn't seen in almost 20 years. We were all well aware of the challenge in front of us, and threw ourselves into our preparation, rehearsing seven or eight hours a day, breaking up only to practice our individual parts and coach the student groups we'd been assigned to. I was dealing with a serious family crisis at the time, and rather than feeling like a burden, the music was a welcome release, providing me with challenges I knew I could solve at a time when it felt like there was so much I couldn't.

At the concert, we attacked the quartet with a fierce energy that carried us through even the most difficult passages with ease. I'm sure it wasn't the greatest performance of Bartok's 4th ever heard in New England (six days really isn't enough time for a piece usually put together over a period of weeks or months,) but no one's ever had more fun playing it than we did. Of that I'm certain.

Band-Aids Where We Need A Tourniquet

There are endless theories on what music education should be, and how the task of introducing kids to high culture should be divided between schools, parents, and arts organizations. In recent years, as school budgets in the US have gotten ever tighter, music has often been the first thing to be cut. At the same time, teachers burdened with ever more stringent national and state curricula have a hard time making time in the school day for anything but the subjects that their students will be tested on at year's end.

As a result, orchestras and other professional music groups have stepped into the void, offering huge numbers of children's concerts, musician visits to classrooms, and other assorted educational activities. These projects, which are expensive to develop and sustain, frequently receive a hefty amount of funding from both public and private sources, and the dirty little secret of cultural grantmaking these days is that if there isn't an education component to your proposal, you might as well not bother submitting it to most philanthropic organizations and state legislatures.

Most in our business would say that despite the challenges they present, these educational outreach programs are unquestionably good things, and that orchestras are fulfilling their duty to their community by stepping in where schools increasingly choose not to tread. But Allan Kozinn at The New York Times has a different, more nuanced view of the way such programs work in his city:

Often halls are rented, musicians are hired and transported, and everything from ushers to piano tuners (and movers) are paid for, all using cash that the city’s Department of Education should be spending on full-time music teachers and instruments. Seen that way, these programs actually deprive students of a musical education rather than help to provide one.

Kozinn goes on to suggest that we need only look to the past to see what we should be giving kids instead...

Back then it was simple: Music was part of the curriculum, like math, science and social studies. Kindergartners and first graders began with singing, note-reading and rhythm-beating, and as the course continued through high school, it touched on the history of music and how it works... Even more crucial, if you wanted to play an instrument, lessons were free, and the school would lend you an instrument until you felt sufficiently committed to buy your own. As interesting as the class work could be (depending on the teacher), the real business of getting to know how music works took place in instrument lessons.

Now, I wasn't around in the 1960s (the era Kozinn is talking about,) so I don't know whether his memory of such quality music ed is accurate or not. But his thesis makes a lot of sense. Most musicians in our business believe fervently in the educational aspect of our jobs, and many of us do additional education work outside of our primary jobs. But when it's entirely possible, even probable, that a kid in our community could go all the way through school without ever being offered an instrument, or a chance to learn how to sing, it does start to feel as if we're banging our heads against a wall.

I don't have a solution to propose here. I know better than to expect that legislators in my state or any other will be eager to raise taxes to support something that political opponents could quickly label an unnecessary frill. It's certainly not my place to tell the voters of Stillwater or Shoreview that they ought to be voting for the local levies that would give their schools the money to fund real music programs. My own local school district (Minneapolis) is in such a deep and perpetual crisis that a lack of arts funding has to wait in line behind such immediate problems as plummeting enrollment, unequal distribution of resources, and a crippling shortage of good teachers. And I have no interest in getting into a pointless debate with the wingnuts who believe that our schools would have plenty of money if only the fatcat teachers and their union would stop hoarding it all.

But I do know that I was the very definition of a problem student when I was a kid. Unquestionably bright, said all my teachers, but unfocused, inconsistent, and profoundly undisciplined in my approach to learning. It was only through music that I learned not only how to play an instrument, but to commit to really learning something, even if it was boring, or complicated, or hard. Music taught me how to think, how to analyze, how to persevere, and how to become truly good at something that, at first, it seemed I had no aptitude for.

I'm no expert. But to me, these seem like valuable educational skills. And I hate the fact that the majority of American kids today aren't getting anything close to the opportunity I had to acquire them.

Technicalities

Sitting here in my post-holiday overindulgence coma, I thought back on the many happy Christmas Days I had as a child. They were not, in my mind, notable for the warm family memories or the gift-giving or the caroling or the turkey dinner, but for the fact that it was one of 2 days in the year when I did not practice the piano.

These two "no piano" days were the only ones sanctioned by my childhood piano teacher, a Juilliard graduate and a stickler for discipline (the other day off, for the record, was one's birthday, and as my birthday is in January, my precious days off came very close together!) Although most professional musicians' practice schedules may not be quite so stringent, the general attitude is very much the same. It was instilled in me early that you had to practice to simply maintain your level of playing - time off meant an equal amount of time just to get back to the shape you were in previously.

Everyone occasionally needs a day off (particularly after a long period of heavy playing), and one day will usually have minimal impact. Most musicians will tell you, however, that after a couple of days off, playing feels a little "off". Wind and brass players have it even worse because their technical demands include the use of the very small muscles in the embouchure which are agonizingly quick to get out of shape. Most years, I can count on one hand the number of days my French horn player husband has taken off - his horn travels everywhere with us, vacations included.

Conducting is a different matter entirely, as muscles used are less fine-tuned and specific - taking a couple of weeks off certainly doesn't make too much of a difference (and I don't really "practice" gesturing anyway). But as with any physical activity, one must be conscious about maintaining strength and mobility - conductors regularly stand for a couple of hours at a time with their arms in the air, which is a rather unnatural position! When I am conducting a lot, I do a good amount of abdominal exercise to keep my core muscles strong (long periods of standing can be tough on the back), and when I have a few weeks off, I usually increase repetitions in my weight lifting routine to keep my arm and shoulder muscles in working order. And that's just the physical part, which is relatively easy - as for studying music, it's rare that more than a day or two goes by where I don't at least crack open a score for a half hour - and then there is the music that is constantly playing in my head that I'm listening to and analyzing, but that's a topic for another post.

Keeping up one's technique during theoretical "time off" essentially means that we don't get much "time off" at all, but that's the way it is - as Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski famously remarked, "If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it."

Christmas On The Benches

I grew up in the Quaker church (not nearly as exotic in my home state of Pennsylvania as it is in the Midwest,) so the kind of extravagant Christmas celebrations that so many religious traditions observe were foreign to me. My religion emphasized simplicity over ceremony, to the extent that normal Sunday services were conducted in silence, the whole congregation gathered together on hard wooden benches in a building that resembled a renovated barn, with no officiant or minister leading us. The closest thing we had to a religious authority figure (other than God, who, our tradition held, was to be found not in the sky above, but on the Earth, within each of us,) was the elected clerk of the meeting, who would indicate that the service had concluded by shaking hands with the person next to him/her, at which point we would all do the same, and then go have coffee.

My first Christmas at Gwynedd Meeting came when I was eleven, shortly after we'd moved to the area and begun attending services. I'd attended Catholic Christmas masses before, with members of my extended family who observed that tradition, and being a child with little exposure to such things, found them to be hugely intimidating, if gloriously extravagant. But I had no idea what to expect of a Quaker Christmas service. In my world, Christmas was about two things - presents and music, in that order. My brothers and I all played string instruments, so we were in heavy demand around the holiday season for cheesy little mini-performances in front of relatives, friends, and even real audiences. Moreover, we had a stately old Baldwin upright in the living room, and my mother, an accomplished amateur musician herself, was only too happy to spend an hour or two teaching us carol after carol from the worn green Christmas songbook that resided in the piano bench.

But in a church known for silence, how could Christmas be Christmas? I remember being seriously worried about this. Our services were never exactly austere and forbidding, but they were certainly solemn, and to a kid, solemnity just doesn't go with Christmas. So I was surprised when one of the elders of the meeting approached my parents to ask whether my brother, Drew, and I would be available to participate in a musical portion of the Sunday service on the weekend before Christmas that year. It would be a simple matter of performing a few understated carols in between hymns and testimonies, and we were both agreeable. We had a stockpile of such arrangements at home, and knew it wouldn't take more than an hour or two to whip them into acceptable shape.

I don't know who selected the repertoire, but I do remember thinking that some of it seemed to have little to do with Christmas. The operative theme seemed to be quiet murmuring music, rather than anything particularly festive. Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring was an obvious choice, as was a movement of the Corelli Christmas Concerto that we'd been playing together for years. But somehow, Simple Gifts (a hugely important hymn in the Quaker church, albeit one without a single connection to Christ or the holidays) got into the mix, and then came the selection that made my brother's face fall the minute he heard it - Pachelbel's Canon in D.

See, my brother was a cellist, and I know from experience that the very mention of Pachelbel's name inspires that same grimacing reaction from all cellists, regardless of age or ability. The ubiquitous canon is actually a lovely (if severely overused) piece of music, and the instruments playing the melody line really have little to complain about. But for whichever instrument plays the bass line, Pachelbel is ten minutes of quiet hell. A canon is really nothing but endless variations on the same set of chords (that's why the various lines can enter one after the other and not sound dissonant,) which means that, while the melody might be changing and evolving, the chord structure stays absolutely static. Since chords are built from their lowest note, the upshot of all this is that the cellist plays a sequence of eight notes a total of 54 times in Pachelbel's Canon.

I don't know how many times my brother had to bang out the Pachelbel bass line over the years, but I do know that he was never happy about it. That Sunday at Gwynedd, I distinctly remember the change in his face when we transitioned from Corelli to Pachelbel. He went from a studious young performer hoping not to screw up, to an automaton in a trancelike state, calmly repeating his two bar bass line like a machine, his mind somewhere far, far away as he waited for me to finish noodling around on the melody line. In the years since, I've seen this look from countless other cellists at weddings, funerals, and religious ceremonies of all kinds, at which the celebrants never seem able to resist the siren song of Pachelbel.

Afterwards, I must have made some vaguely mocking comment about his demeanor during the canon, because I distinctly remember him turning to me, eyes flashing with anger, and hissing, "It doesn't even have anything to do with Christmas!"

He was absolutely right, of course, and yet, I'll bet the Canon in D is being played even as I type this on Christmas-themed radio stations across the country. So Drew, this one's for you: may you never again have to play those eight cursed notes...

Happy Holidays!

OK, if you're tired of Handel's Messiah this holiday season and are up for a giggle (and don't mind some NC-17 humor), check out this video, Bill O'Reilly's sexual harassment suit sung "like Handel's Messiah". Yes, composer Igor Keller actually created a concert-length quasi-baroque oratorio, premiered this past January. Who says modern music is dry and humorless?

Charlie Wilson's Soundtrack

Having been excused from Friday night's holiday pops show because (get this) there wasn't enough room on the stage for five stands of violas, I took advantage of the evening off to go to a movie I've been waiting to see for some time: Charlie Wilson's War, based on the true story of a hard-drinking Texas congressman who more or less single-handedly dragged the US into intervening in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1980s. (I know, I choose such delightful holiday fare, don't I?)

What makes the story remarkable is not just that Wilson was a little-known, skirt-chasing alcoholic of the highest order; and not even that he was concocting this scheme while facing possible indictment in a sex-'n-drugs scandal stemming from an ill-advised weekend in Las Vegas; but that he managed to engineer a half-billion dollars of covert government funding for an insurgent Afghan resistance without anyone in the press or public taking the slightest notice until years later.

So there I was, happily enjoying the diversion, thinking nothing of my day job, when the movie reached its climactic scene, in which the Afghani fighters finally have the anti-helicopter and anti-tank weaponry they need to fight back against the Russians, and they use it to great effect, and there is much rejoicing... and while all this is going on, what do I hear playing on the soundtrack? Handel's Messiah. I kid you not. To be more specific, it was the choral movement which comes roughly halfway through the First Part of the piece, titled "And He Shall Purify."

Only it wasn't, really. It was what I can only describe as the extended dance remix of "And He Shall Purify," with the lilting choral lines dancing over a decidedly electronic bass drum and other assorted accoutrements. It was an odd choice, and after listening to it for three or four minutes, which is how long the scene lasts, I came to the conclusion that someone involved with the film (my money's on Aaron Sorkin) must have really wanted to use that particular movement of the Messiah, and someone else must have been insistent in pointing out that baroque music was really not going to carry so well over the sounds of automatic weapons and shoulder-fired Stinger missiles. Thus is compromise born in Hollywood, or so I like to believe.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the way Hollywood always loves to break out the classical chestnuts when they're making a war movie. And not for the little character development scenes, either. You're not going to hear Beethoven's Ninth while a couple of grunts pass a doobie around in a foxhole and try to forget where they are and what they're doing. No, when the full orchestra kicks in in a picture about human combat, you know you've reached a scene that will either be glorious or staggeringly awful. Oliver Stone is famous for this, of course, and Wagner would never be the same after Francis Ford Coppola got done with him. In The Sum of All Fears (which, while not strictly a war movie, is a movie about acts of war and their consequences,) the movie's denouement features a full rendition of Nessun Dorma, as all the bad guys are summarily and secretly executed by various secret agents around the world. There's even a whole CD available of classical music that's been used to bolster war movies.

Now, Charlie Wilson's War isn't really a war movie, I suppose. Whereas war movies are epic adventures, concerned with big ideas and the men and women called upon to lay their lives on the line for them, this is a film about politics and personalities, about backroom deals brokered in the service of what everyone involved hopes might turn out to be a greater good. Other than a couple of token scenes meant to remind us of just how brutal the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was (thereby justifying Wilson's somewhat shady dealings,) there isn't much in the way of a battlefield to be seen.

Still, there it was: Handel and the mujahideen, together at last. I suspect I'm never going to hear that movement quite the same way again...

Not your grandmother's "Nutcracker"

Well, 'tis the season, and musicians all over the world are buried in ballet pits for the billionth production of the "Nutcracker". But trust me, you've never seen a production of the holiday favorite like this one, a production of the Bejart Ballet Lausanne choreographed by Maurice Bejart. Wow. I particularly like the accordionist (a leitmotif throughout this production.)

The ballet world mourned Bejart's passing last month. I first saw his work as a kid in Hawaii when Rudolph Nureyev came for a one-night engagement and performed Bejart's "Songs of a Wayfarer", which left a deep impression on me, and I've been an admirer since. Bejart managed to be both artistically adventurous and widely popular, not an easy feat in any field. And by all accounts, he was a hugely successful man who lived modestly, was generous with his dancers and was never above praising the work of his fellow choreographers.

One more link for you of Bejart's Nutcracker - a beautiful "Arabian Dance with an extraordinary dancer.

Sit down and shut up.

Seattle Weekly has an article in its latest issue which dares to suggest that there actually might not be anything wrong with the way classical music is presented in concert halls. Author Gavin Borchert acknowledges that there seems to be near-constant griping these days that the staid formality of our genre is a relic of a past era, and fails to take into account current social customs and concertgoing trends. But, he objects...

A couple of things puzzle me. First, the classical concert experience is, in all essentials, identical to that of dance, theater, literary events, or for that matter—barring the munching of popcorn and cheering the fireball deaths of villains—movies. Go to the performance space, buy a ticket, sit down in rows, watch and listen, try not to disturb your fellow audience members. Yet it's only in conjunction with concerts that you hear complaints about what a crushing burden this all is. Second, why is sitting quietly considered such an unendurable ordeal?

I think Borchart is on to something here, and I say that as someone who regularly decries what I see as a silly and mindless orchestral devotion to certain 19th-century traditions. (Exhibit A) It's long bothered me that many of the withering criticisms aimed at classical music (in particular, the idea that playing music from the past somehow makes us irrelevant to the present) are not considered valid when applied to, say, theater. (Imagine how silly it would sound if critics in the UK were to start lambasting the Royal Shakespeare Company for not doing enough plays by Tony Kushner!) And while I am all for shaking orchestras out of our sometimes sleepy patterns when it serves a larger purpose, I'm baffled by those who argue that the concert experience would be improved by people milling about and talking while we play.

Setting aside for a moment the inescapable fact that we perform, without amplification, in concert halls that are designed to bounce the maximum amount of sound around a huge room, I just don't get what walking and talking would add to the audience's experience. I sincerely doubt that anyone is really itching to socialize during a performance, in any case (that's why we have dinner and drinks with our friends before and/or after a show, isn't it?) and honestly, the only reason people talk instead of whispering at First Ave or the Fine Line is because the music is so damn loud! Besides, if you think back to the last time you saw a band you really like at some local bar, I'll bet you can remember being annoyed by that couple in front of you who spent the whole time shouting into each other's ears and ignoring the music. Because you're there for the music, and if you aren't, you should be somewhere else.

After citing a few recent examples of "alternative" classical performances he's attended, Borchert concludes:

Maybe people behave the way they do at concerts not because it's an artificial standard imposed by ironclad tradition but because the music sounds better that way. Maybe listeners feel classical music most deeply when they pay quiet attention to it. Maybe sometimes not clapping is OK, and we don't need to rush in and obliterate every silence.

I know it's heresy these days to suggest that America's symphony orchestras are doing anything at all correctly, but I couldn't agree more.

How old is our audience? (And do we care?)

Sarah and I have both written before about the seemingly intractable debate over the health of classical music in our pop culture-obsessed society. While I doubt the two of us agree on every facet of the issue, and both of us would like to see some changes in the way orchestras, in particular, present themselves, I think it's safe to say that neither of us buys into the idea that classical music is dying. There's just too much data that shows otherwise to be ignored, regardless of the anecdotal evidence to the contrary pumped out continuously by the likes of Norman Lebrecht.

Still, much of the argument has to be anecdotal, simply because we don't have enough historical data to measure modern realities against past eras, and those who believe fervently that classical music is in serious danger are always on the lookout for old numbers that support their thesis. One of the most dogged pursuers of historical orchestra data is journalist/composer/blogger Greg Sandow, who has been sounding the alarm about what he sees as an unmistakable decline in public interest for years now. Now, I consider Greg a friend of mine, and I have a lot of respect for the work that he and his wife (New York Times-turned-Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette) have done in the field of music criticism. I happen to disagree with much of what Greg writes on the subject of the overall health of the field (much of my opposition stems from my belief that he is one of those New Yorkers who see the New York scene as either a microcosm of the national and international scene, or as the only scene that really matters, and that he therefore writes from a perspective informed almost exclusively by what he sees from his front stoop,) but I can't deny that he frequently brings up fascinating side discussions, and supports his theses far better than many others on his side of the debate.

Greg's latest salvo is a continuation of a topic he's taken up in the past - his belief that American orchestra audiences were not always as, ahem, mature (read: old) as they are today. This runs counter to the conventional wisdom within the industry, which says that Americans have always gravitated to classical music as they age, and that the abundant presence of gray hair in many concert halls shouldn't be a concern. In the past, Greg has come up with some extremely limited data suggesting that audiences in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s may have sported a younger median age, but has been stymied by a lack of much available hard data from the era.

Now, with the help of the Minnesota Orchestra's own PR and archive staff, Greg has accessed a decades-old study showing that 55% of our orchestra's audience in 1955 was 35 or younger. The study also has some fascinating breakdowns of where concertgoers of various ages and income levels sat at the shows they attended, and even offers up some advice for the orchestra's PR staff of the era on how to attract even more young ticketbuyers.

This is fascinating reading to anyone who cares about the business, and my belief that our future is not, on the whole, in danger doesn't mean that I dismiss out of hand the idea that our audience may be aging or that we should be concerned about this. But I do see one significant piece of data missing from Greg's analysis (and here again, I think we may be seeing the New York-as-microcosm worldview coming into play.) Nowhere does Greg tell us what the median age of our audience in Minneapolis is now! Now, I'm not sure we even have that information available (I'm guessing we don't,) but Greg doesn't even suggest that he asked for it. If he didn't, I'll bet I know why. Go to a New York Philharmonic concert these days, or a Philadelphia Orchestra concert, or a Boston Symphony concert, or just about anything classical at New York's Carnegie Hall, and you will see a virtual sea of elderly faces in the seats. So it's natural that Greg would assume, from his home in Manhattan, that things are the same everywhere. And from my perch in Minneapolis, I confess that I don't get to many concerts elsewhere in the US, so I'm even prepared to suppose that Greg has seen this phenomenon in other American cities as well.

But here's the thing: what's true in New York just isn't true in Minneapolis. I don't know what the median age of our crowd is in 2007. But I know that I look out every week from the stage at Orchestra Hall and see a wildly diverse crowd, age-wise. We have some elderly fans, yes, but we also have a ton of under-35s, a large college crowd, and even (and this is perhaps the biggest shock) a lot of baby boomers, the very demographic we had supposedly lost for good to the classic rock genre decades ago. With the exception of our morning matinees, which are aimed directly at older listeners who prefer daytime concerts, I'm prepared to stipulate that our average crowd has as many under-40s as it does over-65s.

Assuming I'm right (and you don't have to grant that - even if I'm wrong about the specific numbers, there's still no disputing that our crowd is far younger than the ones I see at orchestra concerts in the Northeast every year,) there are two possible conclusions to be drawn. One is that Minneapolis is a completely unique orchestral oasis with no relation to the larger national scene, and therefore, a study of our audiences from any era is in no way useful in assessing the national health of the industry. I find this scenario unlikely.

The second possibility is that orchestras and their audiences vary widely from city to city (this is a big country, after all, and cultural interests in, say, Miami, couldn't be more different from those in Detroit or L.A.,) and that any snapshot of an audience in one city, during one specific year, is simply not instructive on a national level. Are the Minneapolis numbers instructive as to the demographics of our orchestra? Absolutely. Do they have anything at all to do with orchestral demographics in Washington, San Francisco, or Phoenix? I suspect not.

Dissonance

An orchestra, like any large organization, is prone to periods of disharmony, but sometimes the conflicts reflect a much larger issue than the usual ebb and flow of the complex interrelationships, as discussed in this New York Times article.

There are a multitude of directions from which to approach a response to this, and I couldn't in good conscience start without saying that I have a great deal of sympathy for both sides in this situation. Being married to an orchestral musician (my husband is acting principal horn of the Richmond Symphony) and hearing, on a daily basis, about the difficulties of symphonic life from an insider's perspective, I probably have a better understanding of and deeper sympathy for musicians than the average conductor. On the flip side, being a conductor and having many friends in the conducting field, I have a definite perspective about life on the podium.

The level of discord (and apparent disfunction) in Seattle seems dangerously high. At the root of the matter is the way in which music director Gerard Schwarz appears to have asserted (and maintained) his authority. Schwarz is known as a savvy businessman; a hands-on music director heavily involved in the fundraising aspect of his position and a man with many key allies on the Seattle Symphony Board. From the Board's perspective, Schwarz has done much to build the orchestra, maintain an active recording schedule for the ensemble and establish a loyal audience (and donor base.) From the musicians' perspective, a 2006 survey shows, the orchestra wants new artistic leadership.

Being a music director is so much more than being a conductor; the expectation placed on an individual in this position is basically super-human. Not only must one be a musician of the highest level; one must also have a certain amount of political savvy, financial understanding and managerial overview of the organization, as well as well-honed mediation skills. Understandably, no-one can be all things to all people, and a conductor, like any other person, may have better skills in some areas than in others. The main issue, then, is aligning the skill sets of a particular conductor to a particular organization. And even if the alignment is made, as with any relationship, things can change - people (and orchestras) often need to move on.

All these things being understood, what troubles me most about the Seattle situation is the apparent hostility and the reported physical malice of the situation, from scratched cars and scalding coffee purposefully situated in a mailbox to threatening phone calls. When this level of enmity is present, all sense of civility and decorum is lost, which is an odd notion for an orchestra, an organization whose very core mission is the product of decorum, order and tradition. How can one possibly make music with such rancor in the ranks? And if there is such dissension, how can one establish and maintain an organizational mission?

I don't really have a conclusion or a pat answer to any of this. What I can assert is that in my experience, it is dangerous to view these affairs in absolutes of black and white. Acrimonious court cases are becoming more commonplace in our litigious society, which makes me wonder if we are simply standing up for our rights or crying wolf at every perceived wrong that befalls us. (And it would seem to me a near-impossible task to be a working musician, regardless of extenuating circumstances, with a severe anxiety disorder; we work in a constant high-pressure situation unkind to this type of condition.) But perhaps a regime change is in order - and then the question becomes, how could this now gracefully be accomplished??

Geburtstag

This is how I want to spend my 99th birthday: in a recent NY Times article Daniel J. Wakin writes, “Now here’s a way to celebrate your birthday: Gather hundreds of affectionate fans in a theater, sit as they watch a rare performance of your only opera, and bathe in their applause. So it was for the composer Elliott Carter, who turned 99 on Tuesday. He was attending the final showing in a run of his opera, ‘What Next?,’ at the Miller Theater. The work was being staged for the first time in New York. The first half of the concert consisted of chamber music by Mr. Carter, followed by the opera after the intermission. During the break a stream of people came up to him. Many wished him a happy birthday. He signed a CD of his music. He accepted an organic chocolate bar from a female admirer, and took a bite. After the opera performance and bows by the cast members, they joined with the audience in round of ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”

Occupational hazards

An interesting article on the hidden perils of our job.

Hearing is the the bedrock of musicianship - without the ability to discern the slightest varieties of intonation, to hear the smallest nuances of tone, any other skill is practically useless. As a conductor, all I really have are my ears; my job is to pick out the tiniest details in the orchestra that need to be adjusted and perfected, and if I have any auditory issues my career is shot. Musicians tend to be very careful about their aural faculty - we're the ones covering out ears when fire trucks go by, and the ones wearing ear plugs when we go clubbing (OK, I actually don't know anyone else who does this, but when I'm out dancing somewhere there's a booming bass, I have my earplugs in!). It's a bit ironic, then, that one of the most dangerous places for our ears is our workplace.

To wit: a normal conversation is between 60-70 dB. OSHA monitoring requirements begin at 90 dB. Pain can begin around 125 dB. A symphony orchestra, at it's peak (and depending on the size and constitution of the ensemble) can reach 137 dB. Now, that's assuming a certain amount of distance from the group in question - but can you imagine being in the middle of it?

And it's not only when we're onstage - practicing has its own hazards. Check out the bottom of this handy list to get an idea of the decibel level of several instruments played in their higher dynamic range. My husband, a horn player, regularly works with a sound level meter and has discovered that he can pump up his own volume to 108 dB. As with any horn player, his bell (where the sound comes out) is under his right ear, and he acknowledges that his hearing is different in that ear than in his left. Given that 90-95 dB is the level of sustained exposure that may cause permanent damage, this is a pretty frightening prospect.

Standing on the podium today during a Holiday Pops show, I was inundated by the sound from a big band plus orchestra and from a trumpet solo in a very high range only a few feet away, and I have to say, sometimes it hurts, and that worries me. I'm very careful with my aural health - any time I use headphones I keep it on a setting below 5/10, the car radio is low enough that people ask me if it's actually on - but this is an area where it is difficult to control what's going into my ears. During louder pops shows you'll see half the orchestra put in bright pink ear plugs from the big boxes backstage. But the thing is, they can do it subtly. How strange would it look if I put in my plugs in the middle of a big band chart??

I'm on ear rest tonight - no iPod, no going anywhere there might be loud traffic (not too much of a problem during the winter in Minneapolis!), and no phonecalls ...well, maybe just a few, but speak softly if you call...

Who Needs Caroling? We've Got Handel.

Sorry for the light blogging this week. In addition to the usual rehearsal schedule, I'm actually moving across town this week, so today will likely be the last you hear from me in this space until the weekend.

I actually haven't seen much of most of my colleagues in the orchestra this week, either (Sarah included,) because this is the week that we split the orchestra for holiday programming purposes: 20 string players and a smattering of winds play Handel's Messiah off site (specifically, at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, and the St. Paul Cathedral,) while the rest of the group plays an assortment of family concerts and holiday pops shows at Orchestra Hall. A few hardy souls volunteer to play in both groups to pick up some extra present-shopping cash, which always seems like a great idea until you get to the day when you finish a double rehearsal at the hall at 7:05pm, and have 25 minutes to sprint the eight blocks to the Basilica and throw on a tux for the Messiah concert. The year I doubled up, I don't think I caught my breath until intermission.

Whenever I can, I try to get myself assigned to the Messiah split, because it's one of the few great big holiday blockbusters that I love every bit as much as the audiences who pack the concerts every December. I've got nothing against the Nutcracker, really, and Silent Night is lovely, but they do wear on you after the 127th time you play them.

The Messiah is different. I've loved it since I was a kid, and every time I play it, there are a couple of moments that bring tears to my eyes. I couldn't be less religious, but that's what makes Handel's oratorio so remarkable. Despite the use of sacred texts (mainly Old Testament stuff about the coming of the Messiah) to form the backbone of the libretto, he hasn't written a mass meant to be slogged through at a Sunday morning church service; he's taken the biography of the central figure in Christianity and set it to music of such passion and personal feeling that you can't help but be moved. It's really less of a sacred work than it is a secular work on sacred themes - more Chronicles Of Narnia than the Book of John.

The soloists sing as if they were personal friends of Jesus, and are reacting to events as they occur, rather than reciting some dry bit of religious history. The first words you hear are not some declaration of God's power or our unworthiness as people, but a calming, understated, "comfort ye; speak ye peace" from the tenor, while the orchestra murmurs soothingly in the background. When the soprano tells you to "rejoice greatly," the music carries her to a place where she can't help but sound overcome with childlike glee; when the bass bellows, "Why do the nations so furiously rage together?", there is a raging storm going on underneath him in the strings to drive home the point. And towards the end, after the crucifixion and the famous Hallelujah chorus, Handel takes everything way down as the soprano sweetly (naively, perhaps?) asserts her certainty that Jesus still lives, and the chorus responds with a hushed, chilling declaration that "since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead."

It's bone-deep, this music, and though I've never studied the piece from a music theory perspective, I suspect that Handel was way ahead of his time in the way he approached its composition. Playing it doesn't feel like playing baroque music on modern instruments usually does; there's a muscularity and a defiant stride to the sound, and Handel makes use of effects that I know for a fact weren't in common use in church music, circa 1741. It's an opera without sets, really, and that might be why it's so popular among audiences. (In fact, I hear you're pretty much out of luck if you don't already have a ticket to our performances this week.) Stories you've already heard a thousand times need some serious immediacy if they're going to touch you in anything like a meaningful way, and Handel knew just what buttons to push.

Messiah-nic

Because this was too funny (in that horrifying, it-could-happen-to-anyone way - in fact listen to our first podcast for the retelling of a similar incident that happened with the Minnesota Orchestra) not to repost (thank you Alex Ross), a "Messiah" gone very, very wrong.

Fear and trasfiguration

A glance at next week’s schedule at the Minnesota Orchestra indicates a rather diverse week; three performances of Handel’s “Messiah”, a duo of Holiday Pops shows and two Family concerts. It’s typical fare for the holiday season, which is most musicians’ busiest time of year. What I find interesting about this particular week is the scope of our offerings: the Handel (despite being one of those ubiquitous “holiday” pieces) is a serious piece, musically satisfying for the orchestra to play; the Pops show is a typical big band/children’s chorus/orchestra holiday extravaganza, with a Santa, to boot; and the Family Concert is a wonderful collaborative show with Magic Circle Mime, a great pair of mimes who put on a top-notch production.

I really think that the artistic profile of this coming week is the optimal profile for any orchestra.

(I’ll let the purists gasp in horror for a moment.)

Don’t get me wrong. I love Beethoven as much as any musician or classical music fan, and I think that subscription concerts are an important core mission for an orchestra. But every performing arts organization has the responsibility to 1) serve its community, and 2) present programs that offer different ways to experience music. To deny the significance of this is tantamount to the proverbial burying of one’s head in the sand.

Last month, after our inaugural “Inside the Classics” concerts, Sam and I received the first piece of what I jokingly called “hate mail” that I’ve ever received. The author of the letter bemoaned the fact that we played such short excerpts of everything in the first half of the concert, and how Orchestra Hall was one of the few places that provided a place to listen to piece of music in its entirety (which made me wonder, did they stay for the whole performance?). The purpose of an orchestra, according to the writer, was to provide the kind of extended musical experience that was lacking everywhere else in life, and that trying to entertain the audience while imparting information was akin to pandering to the abbreviated attention span of the 21st century.

I happily live in the 21st century (and frankly, we really have no choice in that matter, unless we can time travel). And as a musician and conductor living in the times that we do, I feel a deep responsibility to make the experience of hearing symphonic music as vital, vibrant and relevant as it can be (and truly, it is – the emotions that the best orchestral pieces can evoke are as immediate, moving and transformative as they ever were.) If this means that we present concerts in different kinds of formats, or that we perform more collaborative/crossover/”pops”-type concerts (and I really hate the connotations of the word “pops” – more on that in a later entry) and that we enlarge the scope of our educational and family offerings, I’m happy to oblige.

Orchestras, like any large organizations, move with the grace and speed of a glacier. It does not help that we support an art form that is deemed by much of the population to be outdated and elitist (I totally disagree with this, but, again, I think the fault lies in the way that we present what we do.) But this being the case, the responsibility lies with us – orchestras, conductors, management - to actually find ways to present this music in a way that is current and relatable. And that will, by necessity, always be shifting. To consider this reality with fear and loathing is both self-defeating and dangerous. To assume that we can “educate” audiences to believe that a standard overture-concerto-intermission-symphony format is the only way to truly enjoy classical music is both disingenuous and narrow-minded.

I find the prospect of appraising the constantly changing way that people consume culture to be a fascinating challenge, and I look forward to the evolution of the art form that I love and am utterly committed to. And I am delighted that many of my colleagues here are willing to embrace this perspective.

And it makes me think of my favorite quote (from, of all people, a former U.S. Army Chief of Staff):

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

Noble Accents

There was another pleasant surprise in last week's Grammy nomination announcement - six old friends of mine who make up a ridiculously innovative chamber ensemble called eighth blackbird got a nod for their latest CD, strange imaginary animals. (One of the pieces on the album, Zaka, by composer Jennifer Higdon, is also up for Best Contemporary Composition.)

It's hard to describe exactly what the blackbirds do on stage, because it's almost completely unlike what anyone else in the business is doing. But I've been watching them do it since we were all in college together, and every time I see them perform, I wonder how it's possible that anyone could make the most complex pieces of new music as accessible and immediately engaging as they do.



It's also difficult to express just how mind-blowingly hard it is to play music the way the blackbirds play it: memorizing impossibly difficult scores, adding subtle (or not-so-subtle) bits of choreography to emphasize the barest nuances within the music, and in effect, giving the audience a complete sensory experience rather than just an aural one. It's an approach that requires almost superhuman patience and dedication, and a commitment to teamwork far beyond that needed for an average chamber ensemble. It's the kind of grind that usually leads idealistic young musicians to burn out and disband within a few years. But the blackbirds have been together for over a decade now, and five of the original six members are still with the group. I know from conversations I've had with them that it hasn't always been easy, but this is a group that really believes passionately in what they're doing, and that enthusiasm is infectious. If you get the chance to see them live, (especially if you've never yet heard a piece of new music you liked,) seize it. I promise you won't be sorry...

We Accept!

Well, as of a few hours ago, we are officially your Grammy-nominated Minnesota Orchestra! The list of noms came out this afternoon (not that we were sitting around waiting for it, you understand... ehrm... well, maybe we were just a little bit...) and our recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony made the list for Best Orchestral Performance. We're hardly the frontrunners - that dubious honor would probably go to the Nashville Symphony, whose recording of a new Joan Tower piece co-commissioned by a gigantic consortium of orchestras from all 50 states has been getting the full-on salivatory treatment from the arts press in recent months. But hey, it's our first nomination in one of the "major" categories in quite some time, and it's for a recording that I genuinely loved making, and that's enough to get me excited.

Jovian Comets

I love procrastinating. So that others can join me in my time-wasting today, via Soho the Dog, a wonderful little meme/questionnaire.

The Rules:

1. Put your iTunes/ music player on Shuffle
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER WHAT


1. If someone says ‘Is this OK?’ you say?
Distilled (Blonde Redhead)
Like vodka, baby.

2. What would best describe your personality?
Honky-Tonk Interlude from Rodeo (Copland – Morton Gould and his Orchestra)
And may it be a long a fruitful interlude.

3. What do you like in a guy?
Just a Thought (Gnarls Barkley)
But not too many more – leave the thinking to us girls.

4. How do you feel today?
X & Y (Coldplay)
Maybe tomorrow will be an A& B day

5. What is your life’s purpose?
What You Waiting For? (Gwen Stefani)
I think the point is not to wait at all

6. What is your motto?
Artist’s Life (Strauss - Welser-Most/LSO)
More praxis than motto, but sure

7. What do your friends think of you?
Une Annee Sans Lumiere (The Arcade Fire)
God, I hope not…

8. What do you think of your parents?
I am the highway (Audioslave)
But you are the Autobahn

9. What do you think about very often?
Hedwig’s Theme from "Harry Potter" (Williams)
I don’t know how to explain this one. Except to say I do a fair amount of Pops conducting. Which inevitably involves something by John Willliams.

10. What does 2+2=?
Bogoroditse Devo from All-Night Vigil Op. 37 (Rachmaninov – St. Petersburg Chamber Choir)
I miss those simpler days when my biggest concern was math homework, which used to keep me up all night.

11. What do you think of your best friend?
Bedshaped (Keane)
But not pillow-topped

12. What do you think of the person you like?
Show me forgiveness (Bjork)
And he does, on a daily basis

13. What is your life story?
“Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’” from Dichterliebe, op. 48 (Schumann - Wunderlich/Giesen)
“Doch wenn du sprichst: Ich liebe dich!/ So muss ich weinen bitterlich.”

14. What do you want to be when you grow up?
Cold Water (Tom Waits)
Am I not pushing myself hard enough? Should I be aiming for ice??

15. What do you think when you see the person you like?
Red Cape Tango from Metropolis Symphony (Daugherty – Zinman/BSO)
And nothing is sexier than a tango

16. What do your parents think of you?
Why me, Lord? (Johnny Cash)
Because you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family

17. What will you dance to at your wedding?
Milkshake (Kelis)
It’ll bring all the boys to the yard; I can teach you, but I’d have to charge

18. What will they play at your funeral?
Pomp and Circumstance No. 1 (Elgar – Boult/LPO)
Fitting for a “graduation” from worldly matters

19. What is your hobby/interest?
I’m the drunk and you’re the star (New Buffalo)
See question #1.

20. What is your biggest secret?
Pieces of Me (Ashlee Simpson)
Uh…that I have Ashlee Simpson on my iPod?

21. What do you think of your friends?
Love unlimited (Fun Lovin’ Criminals)
And how they deserve it!

22. What should you post this as?
Jovian Comets (Buselli Wallarab Jazz Orchestra)

Mozart would have loved this...

In my last post, I mentioned that I sometimes find the classical music business to be somewhat long on somber reverence and awfully short on fun. These can be fightin' words in an industry that has pretty much hung its hat on the trumpeting of its own monumental importance and seriousness. But while there remains no shortage of classical musicians (and audience members) who disdain any approach to the music that could be deemed irreverent, the last couple of decades have produced a startling number of musicians who devote their careers to pushing the envelope. From Nigel Kennedy to the Kronos Quartet to Yo-Yo Ma (who put out an album and accompanying film of music "inspired" by the Bach cello suites a few years back, and has been touring the world with his innovative Silk Road Project) musicians are discovering that there is an audience for a new, less tradition-bound approach to serious concert music. This isn't the mind-numbing pap that record labels market as "crossover," understand - it's serious music, played by serious musicians, only without all the damned seriousness, if that makes any sense.

My personal favorite example of what I call the New Irreverence is the video clip below. The violinist is Gilles Apap, a remarkably talented player who could certainly have thrived as a traditional soloist, playing the same concertos the same way night after night with orchestras around the world. But instead, Apap has cultivated his own distinct style and sound, informed not only by classical traditions, but by jazz, blues, gypsy music, bluegrass, and countless other genres. And as you'll see here, he doesn't see anything wrong with mashing all his influences up together in the name of entertaining the crowd, even if it might offend some Mozart purists...



My favorite part of the video comes at the 4:23 mark, when the camera cuts to a mustachioed member of the orchestra who is quite clearly not down with Apap's take on what is usually an understated 30-second cadenza. I've played this clip for a lot of people since I discovered it a couple of years back, and while most musicians I know love it, I've found that some diehard classical fans are put off to the point of being offended by what they perceive as Apap's lack of respect.

Leaving aside my personal feelings on the matter, I love the fact that something as simple as a genre-busting cadenza at the end of a violin concerto can cause such a strong reaction in people. After all, isn't provocation supposed to be part of what art and culture are about? Somehow, in our corner of the music business, it's become our primary mission to be certain that whatever we do doesn't offend anyone, ever. It seems to me that that approach leads us down a path to never particularly inspiring or challenging anyone, either, which is why I'm awfully glad there are guys like Gilles Apap out there in the world.

A Woman's Touch II

I’m still ridiculously jetlagged (and thus very out of it) from my trip to Korea (in fact, I think I asked Sam “Where am I?” as I wandered onto stage for rehearsal this morning).

It was a fascinating trip. I hadn’t worked in Asia since a stint at the New National Theatre Tokyo in 2002, so I’d forgotten how tough the initial day or two could be. It’s hard enough, as a conductor, to stand there as the general manager introduces you to an ensemble you’ve never worked with, listen to the polite applause from the orchestra as you step up to the podium for the first time, and try to figure out (over the course of that first rehearsal) how this particular group works. What makes things even more challenging are the sometimes dubious, occasionally bemused and decidedly confused expressions of an ensemble who has never seen (or perhaps never even entertained the notion of) a female conductor.

I discussed in a previous blog some thoughts on being a woman on the podium. I still maintain that most musicians (in the end) don’t give a hoot about gender, as long as you know what you’re doing. But I really mean, “in the end”. Here in the US there is a fairly high likelihood that one will have encountered a female conductor at some point. And even if one hasn’t, the notion of equal rights is enough of an established element of our education and culture that most people would not doubt my knowledge or skills based on my gender (although, let’s face it, we really do still have a ways to go in the area of gender equality).

And this is where cultural differences really step in. Korea has been called a “patriarchal democracy” and is a country in which the traditional Confucian ideology of male superiority still holds sway. Understandably, this made my job quite difficult. When I raise my baton for the first time in front of any orchestra, I know that just as much as I will be assessing the ensemble, every single musician will be assessing me right back. A conductor, by necessity, has something to prove during that first rehearsal, and sometimes (as in my first rehearsal in Seoul), as a female conductor, I have much more to prove that I would if I were male.

It took a full rehearsal and some carefully considered levity (I like to try to get the orchestra to have a good time – I find that if I can get people to relax, smile and be in a good mindframe the music-making is better) to get the orchestra comfortable and more open to me. We spent the entire 2 1/2 hours on Mendelssohn’s 5th Symphony, and I worked a great deal on blending the sound and striving for a sense of line. Musicians respect musicianship, efficient rehearsal technique and a consistent viewpoint. And evidence of these factors can usually overrule any lingering doubts about the ability of a woman to wield a baton.

The concert went well, and by the end of the week we were exchanging greetings and joking during breaks as if we all went way back. It took a lot of work. But I knew we’d get there.

Dancing In Our Chairs

Following up Sarah's post on the taboo against audience members at an orchestra concert reacting physically in any way to what goes on in the music, I am pleased to report that 20 or so members of the Minnesota Orchestra took a firm (if inadvertent) stand in favor of in-concert dance moves this past weekend.

We've mentioned in past entries that the various (and many would say absurdly pretentious) rules of orchestral decorum are drilled into the heads of countless American conservatory students every year, with the result that most of us enter the professional world convinced that if we sway, tap a foot, smile, or in any other physical way demonstrate that we are enjoying ourselves and the music during a concert, we will be immediately dragged out and shot by the Committee For The Showing Of Proper Respect To The Greatest Music Ever Written. We've also noted that we in Minneapolis (and, most particularly, those of us in the viola section) seem to have largely gotten over this silliness.

So, anyway, last week we were playing a pretty fun concert with one of our favorite guest conductors, Gilbert Varga. Varga works us in rehearsal nearly as hard as does Osmo, but he has a decidedly easygoing feel about him, and always seems to be having a great time on the podium. There were a whopping six pieces on this particular program, ranging from introspective Debussy to understated Dvorak to virtuosic Vivaldi, and the finisher was Respighi's over-the-top and seldom-performed Roman Festivals, which conjures up all the madness and drunken revelry of the best European street fests.

In the last movement of the Respighi, which consists of a series of short jumps from one type of musical whirlwind to another, there's a fun little oasis where all the noise stops dead and is replaced by what sounds like a town band playing a waltz on a merry-go-round. A few bars into this diversion, the melody sort of swoops upward to the second beat of a measure, then falls away, the way waltzes in Tchaikovsky ballets often do. It's kind of a silly moment, and in rehearsal, the first desk of violas sensed it coming, and did this move they're known to do on occasion where they lift their butts completely out of their chairs, as if propelled upward by the music, then settle back down on the next beat. Since this is one of the less disruptive things the viola section is wont to do in rehearsals, no one really paid any attention.

But later in the week, after we'd played our first of three concerts, Varga joined the violas at an ice skating party at violist Ken Freed's house, and commented that he was surprised that our first desk hadn't repeated their move at the concert that morning. Whether he knew what he'd set in motion with that innocent joke, I have no idea. What I do know is that, the next night, when we came to the merry-go-round section, the entire viola section rose at least six inches out of our seats in unison, then fell back and kept playing, as the second violins and wind players shot us strange looks and Varga giggled on the podium.

Now, I'm sure some members of the audience saw us do this. (Although the violas sit in the inner circle of the string section, we're clearly visible to anyone in any of our three balconies, and to a good chunk of the main floor as well.) But aside from one or two grins from the first tier, I saw no physical evidence that we'd been widely observed. But then came Saturday night, our last concert of the week. As we approached the now famous spot, Varga physically turned his head away from the violas, grinning wildly, and even threw up one of his hands to shield us from his peripheral view. On the swooping beat, not only did the violas repeat our full-section rise, but we were surprised to be joined by nearly the entire second violin section, sitting to our left in full view of the whole audience! (The seconds have always been jealous of our shenanigans.)

This time, no one in the audience who had his/her eyes open could have missed it, and a wave of laughter rolled through the hall, even as we continued to play. Varga winked at us, and turned his already flamboyant conducting up yet another notch for the big finish. I suppose it's possible that someone, somewhere in the hall (perhaps even onstage) was offended by our impudent display. But to me, it just enhanced the pleasure of what is already a piece of music meant to show the orchestra at its most unhinged, and I suspect that vast majority of the audience that night would agree. This was the kind of extra-musical spontaneity that fans of other genres of music are always complaining classical lacks, and it was worlds away from the sort of forced swaying and painted smiles that pseudo-classical acts like Andre Rieu are always putting on. And besides, it was fun, and I'm a firm believer that fun is contagious, and we need more of it in this business.

Postscript: After the concert, I remembered that on this particular Saturday night, we had a special guest in the audience: the newly appointed President & CEO of the Minnesota Orchestra, Michael Henson, who is winding up his tenure at the Bournemouth Symphony in England, and will be moving to Minneapolis in February. I have no idea whether he saw our little dance move, or what he thought of it if he did, but it's probably good that he now has a clear idea of just exactly what he's getting himself into. Welcome to Minnesota, boss...

Two can play this game...

It would seem that Sarah's iPod and mine contain at least a few of the same indie rock faves, although I must confess that I don't keep much in the way of classical music on mine. In any case, I love comparing music collections, so I'm shuffling my iPod, and I'll throw out the first five tracks that come up...

Restless - Alison Krauss & Union Station. I don't think music gets any better than AKUS, especially in the years since dobro master Jerry Douglas joined the band. All country music should sound like this.

Number Six Driver - Eddie From Ohio. A wistful road song from an occasionally silly but endearing band I've loved since college. They're actually from Virginia, not Ohio, but they do at least have a drummer named Eddie. They show up in Minneapolis about once a year, usually at the Cedar, and put on one of the best live shows out there.

The Laws Have Changed - The New Pornographers. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I love this band like no other, and I've always thought that the album this song comes from is their most underrated. On the other hand, I've been trying to see them live for about three years, and every time they show up at First Ave, I buy the tickets, find friends to go with, and then am forced to cancel at the last minute because of some family emergency. Honestly. It's happened three times. I'm actually scared even to plan to see them now.

Two Lights - Five For Fighting. Yes, I have Five For Fighting on my iPod. A lot of it, actually. Does this somehow destroy any indie cred I've built up with EFO and the Pornographers? Don't care. John Ondrasik's voice is one of the most soothing things I know, and any band named after a hockey penalty is fine by me.

Wings - Josh Ritter. I actually went to college with Josh, back when he was starting to realize he might have some serious songwriting skills, and I was the entertainment manager of the local coffeehouse. Any time I had an open night on our schedule, he'd show up and sing, even if it was for only four or five people. I lost track of him after graduation, until the day my old friend Ellen Stanley (now of KFAI radio) handed me his second album, "Hello Starling," and said, "Remember Josh? You've gotta hear this." If there are still such things as the voice of a generation, Josh Ritter should be one. (They already know this in Ireland and the UK, where he's a bona fide star.)

Well, that was an enjoyable way to kill ten minutes on a snowy Sunday morning. Maybe we should make a regular thing of this iPod sharing business. In fact, I believe I'll create a tag for it, just in case. And if anyone wants to share their own list in the comments, fire away...

On the iPod

I travel. A LOT. One of the few things that make transit days like today tolerable is having my music library travel with me via my trusty iPod (Slingbox also makes traveling much more pleasant, particularly when I'm stuck on an interminable layover or delay in Atlanta or O'Hare).

What I’m listening to now:

Blonde Readhead - 23
Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach – Painted from Memory
Sigur Ros - Takk
Janacek – In the mist/Rudolph Firkusny
Serj Tankian – “The Unthinking Majority” from Elect the Dead
Takemitsu - How slow the wind, Knussen/London Sinfonietta

I’m having a moral debate with myself about downloading the new Radiohead album and how much I should pay for it.

Ask An Expert: Leadership Qualities

Here's an excellent question from Emily Kroeck, who asks:

Q: What are the titled players roles and responsibilities? Does each titled player have a unique leadership role? Once a musician accepts a titled position, what must they do to maintain it?

So, let's define our terms first. A titled player in an orchestra is any musician who holds a title like principal, associate principal, co-principal, etc. These are the leaders of the orchestra, and though their roles do differ from instrument to instrument, I went to one of our most prominent titled players, Principal Cellist Tony Ross, for a deeper explanation...

Tony's answer: Well, the principal, of course, is the leader of the section, and the associate or assistant principals are there to take over when the principal isn't there. The main role of the principal starts long before the first rehearsal, with putting bowings and other markings in the parts, and making decisions with other principals about how certain things should be played. We also make decisions in rehearsals, and try to know what the conductor will want before he asks for it.

Occasionally, principals also deal with what you might call artistic enforcement, making sure that everyone in the section is on the same page as far as quality of sound and style. If an individual in the section isn't playing something the way I think it should be played, I take it as part of my job to address that. Aside from all that, we're basically the figureheads for the orchestra.

Sam's addendum: As far as maintaining their positions as titled players, this is a bit tricky, and varies widely from orchestra to orchestra. Here in Minneapolis, all members of the orchestra spend our first two years of employment on probation, during which time we get feedback from our colleagues as to how we're doing, and what could use improvement. At the end of that probation, musicians are granted tenure (or not, in which case the musician must leave the orchestra,) which provides a heavy measure of job security.

However, while a titled musician may have tenure, the tenure does not extend to his/her title, which can be revoked at any time by the music director. In other words, while the music director cannot dismiss a principal from the orchestra for artistic reasons without following a long and deliberately difficult process, he can strip the principal of his/her title, thus demoting him to a less prominent position within the section.

Generally, it is expected that titled players will maintain a good relationship with their sections, keep their skills sharp at all times, and be responsive to other principals in the orchestra, as well as to the music director. The stripping of a player's title has occurred only very rarely in Minnesota Orchestra history, and it has never happened under our current music director. It should also be noted that some titled players choose to give up their titles late in their careers and step back into the section, if they are concerned that their skills might be diminishing.