This Is Why You Never Want To Watch Anyone Make Sausage
We're now a little more than a week away from our next set of Inside the Classics concerts at Orchestra Hall, and that means that it's crunch time for me. Sarah and I start planning these shows months in advance, but the last couple of weeks before we take the stage are always a flurry of preparation and last-minute revision. I don't know that it's actually a very good idea for me to let the audience in on this in advance, since a) it might bore you to tears, and b) it might detract from the (hopefully) seamless flow of the concerts, but since it's more or less all that's occupying my thoughts at this point, I'm going to do it anyway. For the next week or so, I'll be offering what amounts to a running diary of how a concert like this comes together.
The process starts when Sarah and I, along with a host of Minnesota Orchestra staffers, choose the repertoire for the coming season. And actually, in the case of the 2007-08 season, Sarah was brought on board as the official conductor of the series after we had already chosen the rep, so she didn't have much of a voice in the process. (Now that she's part of the team that plans the series, of course, her voice is arguably the most important when it comes to repertoire choices.) This should give you some idea of just how far in advance our seasons are planned - in fact, we're already completely done choosing the pieces we'll be featuring n 2008-09 (and have since before our first show in November,) and we've got some pretty good ideas about what we'll be doing in the two years after that as well.
Once we know what we'll be playing, things settle into a lull until a couple of months before the next concert is scheduled. At some point, usually about 8-10 weeks before the next show, we sit down together with our primary administrative contact, Kari Marshall, and start to talk about what we know we want to focus on, what musical ideas we want to be sure to get across, and what creative techniques we might use to accomplish this. Usually, Sarah and I each come into this meeting with a few concrete ideas, but a lot of our best material comes when one of us says, "I don't know how we're going to fit in Idea X," and the other one says, "Well, I guess we could..." That's more or less how the Firebird pantomime that you all seemed to like so much in the November show came into being. Kari's role at these meetings is to be completely unflappable and encouraging, no matter what ridiculous ideas are coming out of my mouth, and to take copious notes, which become extremely important in the weeks ahead, when Sarah and I frequently lose our own notes and have no specific memory of what we were planning.
That first meeting is also when we discuss what actual chunks of music from the featured piece we'll want to excerpt on the first half, and what other pieces we may want to drag into the mix as well. This is probably the most important part of the process to get done without delay, because as anyone who's ever played in an orchestra knows, sheet music does not just appear on the stands. It has to be meticulously researched, purchased (if we don't already own it,) rented (if it can't be purchased,) prepared, bowed by the string section leaders, and placed into folders at least two weeks before the concert, so the musicians have time to check it out and practice it before the one rehearsal we get for this series. Handling this job for us is our staff of three full-time librarians and several part-time assistants, each of whom knows more about the music we play than anyone in the orchestra ever will.
Making the librarians' job harder is the fact that the Inside the Classics concerts are designed to move along quickly. Traditionally, if there's an orchestra on stage, the music starts once everyone holding an instrument is ready, and anything else that might be going on has to be secondary to that. In our shows, though, everything is highly scripted and a lot of things are dependent on quick timing and fast changeovers between excerpts, so there's just no time for the musicians to be scrambling around looking for the next thing they're supposed to play. So the library has to prepare a special excerpt book for every musician on stage to use during the first half, with all the excerpts they'll be expected to play clearly labeled and in the proper order. If a certain instrument doesn't play in a certain excerpt, there needs to be something to alert the musician that s/he'll be sitting one out. It's extremely time-consuming work, and in order to get it done in time, the library needs us to have our ducks in a row as far in advance as possible.
In the case of our upcoming Tchaikovsky show, the library also served another important purpose. Shortly after Sarah and I had submitted our last and final excerpt list, our principal librarian, Paul Gunther, pulled me aside at a rehearsal to point out that we'd included a single 4-bar excerpt from a certain Tchaikovsky symphony, and that this particular excerpt would require a whole herd of wind, brass and percussion players who otherwise would not be needed in the concert to show up in order to perform for about 7 seconds. This seemed downright silly, although the musicians in question would certainly have showed up without complaint had we asked them to, so after much discussion, we scrapped the excerpt. (We had another one already in the mix that was going to be used to make much the same point, in any case.)
At this point, it was already the first week of January, and while we had an excerpt list, and a series of components that we knew would be included in the concert, we did not yet have a specific outline or anything that looked like a script for the first half. Oh, and we'd yet to talk to our soloist, who was battling the flu, about any of this, and Sarah was conducting out of town and wouldn't be back in Minneapolis until four days before the first show. Good times...
Next time: Writer's Block
The process starts when Sarah and I, along with a host of Minnesota Orchestra staffers, choose the repertoire for the coming season. And actually, in the case of the 2007-08 season, Sarah was brought on board as the official conductor of the series after we had already chosen the rep, so she didn't have much of a voice in the process. (Now that she's part of the team that plans the series, of course, her voice is arguably the most important when it comes to repertoire choices.) This should give you some idea of just how far in advance our seasons are planned - in fact, we're already completely done choosing the pieces we'll be featuring n 2008-09 (and have since before our first show in November,) and we've got some pretty good ideas about what we'll be doing in the two years after that as well.
Once we know what we'll be playing, things settle into a lull until a couple of months before the next concert is scheduled. At some point, usually about 8-10 weeks before the next show, we sit down together with our primary administrative contact, Kari Marshall, and start to talk about what we know we want to focus on, what musical ideas we want to be sure to get across, and what creative techniques we might use to accomplish this. Usually, Sarah and I each come into this meeting with a few concrete ideas, but a lot of our best material comes when one of us says, "I don't know how we're going to fit in Idea X," and the other one says, "Well, I guess we could..." That's more or less how the Firebird pantomime that you all seemed to like so much in the November show came into being. Kari's role at these meetings is to be completely unflappable and encouraging, no matter what ridiculous ideas are coming out of my mouth, and to take copious notes, which become extremely important in the weeks ahead, when Sarah and I frequently lose our own notes and have no specific memory of what we were planning.
That first meeting is also when we discuss what actual chunks of music from the featured piece we'll want to excerpt on the first half, and what other pieces we may want to drag into the mix as well. This is probably the most important part of the process to get done without delay, because as anyone who's ever played in an orchestra knows, sheet music does not just appear on the stands. It has to be meticulously researched, purchased (if we don't already own it,) rented (if it can't be purchased,) prepared, bowed by the string section leaders, and placed into folders at least two weeks before the concert, so the musicians have time to check it out and practice it before the one rehearsal we get for this series. Handling this job for us is our staff of three full-time librarians and several part-time assistants, each of whom knows more about the music we play than anyone in the orchestra ever will.
Making the librarians' job harder is the fact that the Inside the Classics concerts are designed to move along quickly. Traditionally, if there's an orchestra on stage, the music starts once everyone holding an instrument is ready, and anything else that might be going on has to be secondary to that. In our shows, though, everything is highly scripted and a lot of things are dependent on quick timing and fast changeovers between excerpts, so there's just no time for the musicians to be scrambling around looking for the next thing they're supposed to play. So the library has to prepare a special excerpt book for every musician on stage to use during the first half, with all the excerpts they'll be expected to play clearly labeled and in the proper order. If a certain instrument doesn't play in a certain excerpt, there needs to be something to alert the musician that s/he'll be sitting one out. It's extremely time-consuming work, and in order to get it done in time, the library needs us to have our ducks in a row as far in advance as possible.
In the case of our upcoming Tchaikovsky show, the library also served another important purpose. Shortly after Sarah and I had submitted our last and final excerpt list, our principal librarian, Paul Gunther, pulled me aside at a rehearsal to point out that we'd included a single 4-bar excerpt from a certain Tchaikovsky symphony, and that this particular excerpt would require a whole herd of wind, brass and percussion players who otherwise would not be needed in the concert to show up in order to perform for about 7 seconds. This seemed downright silly, although the musicians in question would certainly have showed up without complaint had we asked them to, so after much discussion, we scrapped the excerpt. (We had another one already in the mix that was going to be used to make much the same point, in any case.)
At this point, it was already the first week of January, and while we had an excerpt list, and a series of components that we knew would be included in the concert, we did not yet have a specific outline or anything that looked like a script for the first half. Oh, and we'd yet to talk to our soloist, who was battling the flu, about any of this, and Sarah was conducting out of town and wouldn't be back in Minneapolis until four days before the first show. Good times...
Next time: Writer's Block
Labels: inside the orchestra
posted by Sam at
8:17 PM
2 Comments:
Not that you need to be told this because you're seasoned performers, but it's true: Every creative process goes through a phase where it doesn't look like it's going to work out, but as we know, it always does. I'm one of those people who needs the pressure of a tight deadline to pull my creative notions in line with logistical processes - indeed, I've tried pulling everything together well ahead of schedule, and it doesn't work. I need the stress of the deadline to catapult the creative process to fruition.
That's just my soap-boxy way of sayin': You'll be FINE.
Very true, Emily, and at this point, I'm not worried about whether we'll be ready in time, since we always are, and the alternative is stepping out on stage, stammering something nonsensical, and running away to the North Woods forever.
What you say about deadlines is also decidedly true in my case. I think Douglas Adams said it best: "I love deadlines! I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by..."
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