This American Orchestra?

Continuing the sordid tale of just how an Inside the Classics show comes together...

It probably bears explaining why I keep referring to the "script" for our upcoming show. This is a concert, after all, not a play, and it's not as if every word we say on stage during these concerts is hammered into stone well in advance and the whole production could fall apart if one of us flubs a line. More than anything, live music sinks or swims on its ability to sound spontaneous and new, even when it isn't, so we don't ever want the explanatory first halves of our concerts, diligently planned as they are, to come off seeming as if we're reading lines.

Still, when Sarah and I took over the production and hosting duties for this concert series, one thing we both agreed on was that the usual way that this type of series is presented didn't really fit what we had in mind. Orchestras have been holding pre-concert lectures for decades, solemn and dry rituals that Anna Russell once referred to as "talks given by great experts for the edification of other great experts."

In an effort to make such in-house education more accessible to a wider audience, a lot of orchestras have experimented with shows in which someone (nearly always the conductor) speaks from the podium during the concert about the music, and provides examples to illustrate his/her points. The Minnesota Orchestra was one of the first to create a whole series out of this type of concert, first with staff conductor Bill Eddins (now music director of Canada's Edmonton Symphony) serving as host, and later with the always engaging David Alan Miller, who helmed the series up through this past spring.

What Sarah and I are trying to do with the series now is to take the next logical evolutionary step in this line, taking our series from a hybrid of concert and music history lecture to something more integrated, where music, information, and pure entertainment blend seamlessly into a complete production. If we're doing our job, every one of our shows should make you laugh, think, and experience music in a new way without either of us ever telling you how we want you to do any of those things. In other words, we'd like to do for classical music what Ira Glass did for public radio. It's a tall order, and this is why I spend weeks sweating over a carefully worded script for every show.

Having established what we'll be playing and in what order, Sarah and I now turn to exactly how we'll be using the excerpts we've chosen. Obviously, we have some preexisting reason for choosing the excerpts we do, but that doesn't mean that we always know exactly how they'll be presented in the concert. Sometimes, this is the kind of thing that develops over the course of several conversations and meetings. This time, because of the intervention of the holidays and Sarah's out-of-town schedule, it all came together in a single telephone call a little over a week ago.

I should stress at this point that coming up with the sequence of non-musical events on the first half of the concert is essentially my job, and there's nothing in Sarah's job description that requires her to help with this. But being the very model of a modern multitasking conductor, she willingly pitches in when I get stuck, which is a very good thing, because as of the day of that phone call in mid-January, I had been essentially staring at the excerpt list for a week and entirely failing to turn it into anything resembling a script.

It took about an hour for the two of us to bust through my writers' block, mainly by throwing out any crazy idea we could think of ("What if we had Peter make a grand entrance on a zip line attached to the third balcony?") and then whittling it down until it became something we could actually use. By the end of the night, I had a complete outline of how the first half will hopefully unfold, and six days later, that outline had become the first complete draft of our script.

That was yesterday. What remains of the preparation will likely include several rewrites of the script as it now stands, careful editing of my own lines (mainly to condense and remove material - my first drafts are always way too wordy,) prop acquisition (those tiaras and battle axes in the first show weren't just sitting around backstage) preparation of separate briefing materials for the stage crew, the orchestra, Sarah, and Peter, and a couple of complete recitations of the script in front of a microphone, to check for overall length and proper flow. For this, I have exactly seven days left. Plenty of time...

Next time: Meeting Our Mr. McGuire