"Fight of the century"

Courtesy of Alex Ross's blog post of the day, check out this inadvertently funny event listing. I knew artists could have adversarial relationships, but come on...

The Toughest Job Interview On Earth

Beginning this Thursday, the stage at Orchestra Hall will be playing host to more than just our weekly concerts. It's one of those weekends that come along several times nearly every season, in which we hold auditions to fill one or more open spots in the orchestra. In this case, we'll be hoping to hire two new first violinists, and you can bet that there will be dozens of applicants, perhaps more than 100. (There were 122 violists at my audition here, also with two openings available.)

Auditions are a strange and terrifying business. Musicians worldwide complain mightily about them, and it often seems that not a single major orchestra audition can go by without someone, somewhere, claiming that it was either rigged or unfair or that the person hired didn't deserve the job. (Most of the conspiracy theorizing was confined to conservatory lounges when I was in school, but these days, the Internet makes it possible for all kinds of nasty things to be said right out in public, and anonymously, too. It's not my favorite online innovation, I must say.)

The way that auditions work at most American orchestras is this. An orchestra with an open spot places an ad in the national trade paper of the American Federation of Musicians, as well as on a few select web sites. The ad states the position that's available, the dates of the audition to be held, and the date that the position will be available to the audition winner. Applicants who believe they have a shot at the job then send resumes to the orchestra. At this point, several things can happen, depending on the orchestra:

1) The orchestra might send out complete audition information to all applicants, and assign them an official audition time if they wish. (This is the procedure the Minnesota Orchestra follows in all but a few extraordinary circumstances.)

2) The orchestra might decide to restrict its audition to a few select candidates, either specially invited by the music director, or culled from the stack of resumes received. Very few orchestras go this route anymore, except in cases where a "cattle call" audition (or multiple such auditions) has yielded no winner.

3) The orchestra might invite some candidates to audition based on their resumes, and ask others to submit CDs of themselves playing an assortment of solo and orchestral repertoire, so that it can be determined whether they will be invited to the live audition.

Eventually, the orchestra's personnel office will send out a repertoire list for the audition, which will usually consist of at least one major concerto, at least one other solo work, and a collection of 10-15 excerpts from orchestral works. The excerpts will always be examples of the most difficult playing an orchestral player of that instrument would be expected to do, and will cover a ridiculously wide range of styles and technical challenges. It is considered more or less standard to allow candidates at least a couple of months to prepare the list for the audition, so these packets are usually shipped out far in advance.

Taking an audition, it should be said, is not cheap. Candidates pay their own way, and there is no expense reimbursement for anyone, win or lose. If you're not close enough to drive, you fly. Woe betide you if you are a cellist: that's two plane tickets, one for you and one for your instrument. (If you play bass, you're probably not taking any auditions that you can't drive to.) Once you're in town, you'll often have to spend the better part of a week in a hotel, and if you want to stay close to the concert hall you're going to audition in, there probably won't be many cheap options. You could stay farther out in a discount motel, of course - if you want to pay for a rental car or God knows how many cab rides. All told, you can easily blow $1000 or more only to get knocked out of the running in ten minutes or less.

That's right, I said ten minutes or less. Because when it's your turn to audition, you don't get much time to prove yourself. You show up at the hall at your assigned time, and if you're lucky, you'll be shown to a private practice room to warm up. (If you're unlucky, and the orchestra you're auditioning for doesn't have great facilities, you'll warm up with everyone else in a big noisy room.) Roughly fifteen minutes before you'll be brought to the stage, a proctor will knock on your door, and show you the list of works the audition committee wants to hear in this first round. (These will all be taken from the larger list you got in the mail.)

A quarter of an hour later, you'll be escorted to the stage, where you will be greeted, in most cases, by a giant curtain separating you from the audition committee. (The committee, by the way, is made up of orchestra members, mainly from your instrument group, plus the music director, who usually won't show up until the final round.) The proctor will announce your entrance to the committee, and identify you with a number. You won't speak at all, lest the anonymity guaranteed by the screen be compromised. The screen, by the way, was originally put in place to force all-male orchestras to abandon the ridiculous argument that women just couldn't cut it in the music world, even in a fair audition. As a glance at any American orchestra today will tell you, it worked quite nicely.

You might get a "good morning" from a disembodied voice behind the screen, but probably not. You'll begin with your concerto, and you'll play until the voice tells you to stop, usually no more than three minutes after you started. Then it's on to the excerpts, and the voice might return to ask you to repeat one or more of them, often with specific instructions as to how the committee wants to hear them played. If you screw up, and want another crack at an excerpt, you can signal the proctor, who will ask the committee if you can try again. They may allow you a second shot, but they may not, depending on whether they've already made up their mind about you. Less than ten minutes after you walked on stage, the disembodied voice will call out a brusque, "Thank you! Thanks very much," and you're done. Now it's back to your dressing room to await word on whether you have qualified for the privilege of doing this same thing again two or three more times over the next several days.

I've taken a grand total of six auditions in my professional life, which is way under the average. I won my first job in the second audition I ever took, and won my position in Minneapolis two auditions later. That means I'm a pretty decent musician, yes, but what it really means is that I've been damned lucky. I have friends who I consider to be outstanding musicians who have taken literally dozens of orchestral auditions with little to nothing to show for it. Some of them have given up, and either turned to playing weddings and pick-up gigs to scrape by, taken up teaching full time, or carved out other niches for themselves in the increasingly diverse and varied music world. Others continue to plug away, which can either result in long-delayed elation (one close friend of mine auditioned four times unsuccessfully for the Minnesota Orchestra before finally being handed a prestigious titled chair on the fifth try,) or a long, painful slide into the realization that it's just never going to happen.

It's a brutal, awful way to have to win a great job, and picking yourself up off the mat after a hard-fought loss and knowing that you have to limp home and start working immediately on the next excerpt list can be soul-crushing. That's why I call myself lucky: I know my own nature, and I just know that I wouldn't have been able to sustain the level of dedication it takes to keep auditioning through more than a few consecutive losses. The difference between a career in the Alabama Symphony and a career in the Minnesota Orchestra (and the $70,000 difference in salary between those two ensembles) was, for me, a total of thirty minutes of stage time over one long November weekend in 1999. Now, did I work my tail off for that audition? Yes, I did. Did I come home from five-hour rehearsal days in Birmingham and put in another three hours on my Minnesota excerpt list until I thought my shoulder was going to separate? Sure. Did I win the job here fair and square, and beat out a lot of lesser players? I believe I did.

But the fact is that, no matter how prepared I was, I could have just had a bad day on that long weekend. My hand could have slipped in the first excerpt I played, and freaked me out badly enough that I couldn't recover. I could have been cold, or tired, or hungry, or gotten the shakes, or been unable to get my spiccato bowstroke to work. It happens to everyone. It's happened to me.

That weekend, it didn't happen. And so here I am. And this weekend, a desperate flock of violinists will try their best to make the same glorious thing happen to them. Two of them, at most, will succeed.

"Sing song diplomacy"

Driving in from the airport this afternoon I heard an NPR segment about Hillary Clinton’s latest slam on Barack Obama’s foreign policy position. Discussing Obama’s professed desire to “pencil in” meetings with leaders of Iran and North Korea without first establishing substantial diplomatic contact, she stated: "We simply cannot legitimize rogue regimes or weaken American prestige by impulsively agreeing to presidential talks that have no preconditions. It may sound good, but it doesn't meet the real world test of foreign policy."

This of course immediately reminded me of another bit of newsworthy détente, namely the New York Philharmonic and their current landmark journey to North Korea (the Philharmonic arrived in Pyongyang yesterday).

The title of my post is a moniker that has recently been attached to the Philharmonic’s North Korean effort – it references another bit of historical international relations, when US ping-pong players were the first officially invited Americans to set foot in Communist China for two decades when they toured the country in 1971 – “ping pong diplomacy”.

But here I find the comparison distorted; when the American athletes entered China they were doing so as participants in a common interest, a sport played in both countries. North Korea has little history of Western art music and no serious classical music culture – and certainly what little classical music there is would be unattainable to ordinary citizens. Its official symphony, the North Korea State Symphony Orchestra, is know mostly to perform music of the patriotic ilk - like Bumper Harvest Comes to Cheongsam Plain, as well as works by (officially, at least) the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il. Music in North Korea, it seems, is not so much art as State propaganda. How does this color the view of the average North Korean citizen towards the Philharmonic’s musical presentation?

Experts on North Korea worry that Pyongyang will seize on the concert as a double public relations victory; on one hand presenting to the world at large that it is a hugely misunderstood country hoping to connect with the rest of the world, and on the other hand leading the domestic audience to believe that the US is allowing such a concert because it supports the Kim regime.

And speaking of the average North Korean citizen, how will they at all benefit from this musical outreach? Certainly none of them will be in attendance at the concert – only the political and military elite will most likely be at the performance. And as for the broadcast on North Korean TV, one must note that there are very few households with a television. Those few who do see the telecast might well think that the Philharmonic (and therefore the US) was expressing approval of the tyrannical regime that rules them. And, anyway, radios and TV sets in North Korea are pre-tuned to government stations that pump out a steady stream of propaganda, leading the country to be labeled the world's worst violator of press freedom by the media rights body Reporters Without Frontiers.

Now, I know there is the “music as borderless ambassador” and “life-changing power of art” gambit; I’m not so cynical as to discount those ideals. Stanley Drucker, the Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist, told reporters yesterday that “…it's important to reach people through something other than politics. What we do is universal. Music is pure in itself; it's what you make out of what you hear." And really, in my heart of hearts, I do believe the truth in the statement. But just as an individual can make of music what they hear, a totalitarian State can frame the same music in a way to serve their own propagandistic purposes. And there is no purity in that. By agreeing to perform under the terms provided by the Kim regime, the Philharmonic seems simply to be playing into the hands of their North Korean hosts.

Today’s coverage from the 80-some-odd reporters following the musicians paints a rather bleak portrait of life in Pyongyang; grey skies, battered housing, few cars, bare walls where anti-American propaganda has been recently torn down. Various international watchdog groups put the percentage of (literally) starving North Koreans at around 7%, and the chronically malnourished at around 37% - and yet, the Philharmonic and its entourage were treated to a multiple-course feast which included a full meal of traditional Korean food followed by another meal of Western delicacies, including sliced pheasant and pepper-crusted salmon. Am I the only one who feels queasy at this, that finds that it reeks of the kind of elitism that undermines the diplomatic underpinnings of artistic ideals?

Philharmonic Music Director Lorin Maazel tells reporters, "I am a musician and not a politician. Music has always traditionally been an arena, an area where people make contact. It's neutral, it's entertainment, it's person-to-person.” Music…neutral? Art…apolitical? Rostropovich is turning in his grave. I’m reminded of Leonard Bernstein’s historic 1959 concert at the Tchaikovksy Conservatory in Moscow with – you guessed it – the New York Philharmonic, and the inclusion in that performance of Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony. And Shostakovich himself, whose career suffered greatly under Stalin’s regime, was in the audience...

And finally, the Philharmonic’s North Korean stint got under way after Maazel offered this doozy: "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw bricks, should they? Is [America's] standing as a country . . . is our reputation all that clean when it comes to the way [prisoners] are treated? Have we set an example that should be emulated all over the world? If we can answer that question honestly, I think we can then stop being judgmental about the errors made by others." Let's think about this; granted, no country is utterly innocent – I’m not trying to downplay the terrible "errors" of Gitmo or Abu Graib or waterboarding. But in comparison to below…?

“There is no organized political opposition in North Korea. The norm for actual or perceived “political crimes” is collective punishment of entire families, including young children. Offenses related to the personality cults of Kim Jung Il and his late father and predecessor Kim Il Sung are subject to particularly cruel punishment. There are no independent nongovernmental organizations of any kind…All media are either run or controlled by the state, and all publications are subject to official censorship…During the food crisis in the 1990s, North Korea began executing people accused of crimes related to economic difficulties, such as stealing grain from agricultural cooperatives. Numerous eyewitness accounts by North Korean escapees have detailed how executions are carried out publicly, often at crowded marketplaces, and in the presence of children.”

From the Human Rights Watch website.

And this does not even begin to touch on the issue of continued refusal to meet deadlines for the disclosure of nuclear programs…

As a musician I truly believe in the universality of music, in its power to touch others, its ability to foster connection and communication and greater understanding, and all the idealism that is an integral part of being an artist. But one cannot discount the possibility of artists becoming unwitting pawns in a larger political game because of those very same ideals. Good intentions are just that; responsibility is intrinsic to art. Without taking a stand on artistic (and thus personal) freedom, the New York Philharmonic's concert becomes nothing but melodious propaganda trotted out by a totalitarian regime.


ADDENDUM

By all accounts the concert was a success, starting with the national anthems of both countries and ending with a rendition of "Arirang", a traditional Korean song, that left much of the audience and some of the orchestra in tears. It would be nice to think that this wonderful moment of connection between individuals will bring about a larger change, and I certainly would not discount the possibility. And I have to say, there's something wonderful about seeing news about an orchestra plastered across the front page of national media. But again, who's to say that the North Korean government isn't using international focus on this human interest story to distract from their continued nuclear non-compliance, for instance? I would be very happy to have my suspicious be proved wrong, but in the meantime I maintain my cynicism.

Dog day afternoon

Those are my lovely girls, Bamse (the hairy German Shepherd in the back) and Sieglinde (my deaf mutt), doing what they do best on a chilly Virginia afternoon (chilly being a relative term – it’s a balmy-for-Minnesota 40 degrees.)

While Sam’s been exploring the glorious northern hinterlands on the Orchestra’s State Tour, I’ve been home in Richmond, VA all week on some planned downtime. My schedule with the Minnesota Orchestra allows me these occasional breaks; although I’m frequently acting as cover conductor when I’m not conducting, I share those covering duties with our Associate Conductor, Mischa Santora, so when the stars align – Mischa’s covering and I’m not required to be somewhere else on a guest conducting stint – I get a glorious week at home with the husband and dogs (and, man, does absence makes the heart grow fonder…)

Downtime, of course, is a completely relative term, as I’m pretty much working every day when I’m home in Richmond, as evidenced by the state of my kitchen table, below:



(And yes, I do love a glass a wine when I’m working on Shostakovich.)

Weeks like this are a luxury because I can actually get up in the morning, have a leisurely cup of coffee and start going through scores without any time constraints whatsoever. During conducting weeks, it’s hard to find time to be studying other scores – and my brain’s filled with the stuff I’m performing that week. Covering weeks aren’t so bad – outside of rehearsals, I’ll have some free time to work on upcoming music, although my schedule is often crammed with the non-musical parts of the job – meetings, presentations – that need to happen while I’m in town. Guest conducting weeks can be impossible, particularly if I’m being trotted around for media interviews and board events. So when I can carve out a week at home, I’ll spend the time working on upcoming repertoire without distraction, which feels like an extravagance.

Most musicians I know always feel pressed for time to learn music, and conductors only more so. When you consider the schedule of a typical full-time orchestra, it’s easy to see why; the progression of concerts over the season is relentless (at least a full concert’s worth of music every week), frequently with only one day off every seven. It requires some pretty highly-developed time management to figure out how to be prepared in time for new repertoire or difficult pieces that are coming up.

Whenever I can I try to prepare pieces many weeks out, if not months. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, preparing a score is labor- and time-intensive venture. I always calculate, for a new piece, that for every hour of music, I really need about 20 hours to feel comfortable with it on the podium (and of course, every conductor is different, as is every situation – I’ve certainly had to do pieces on nothing more on a couple of hours notice, and then you just cross your fingers and hope the orchestra is aware of the situation…). And the vagaries of the human mind make it so that those 20 hours are better spent over a longer period of time than crammed into a couple of days, which is where all that time management comes in handy.

So take a look at that pic of my messy kitchen table again – I snapped this shot because I found it so indicative of the learning process that I had to capture it for posterity. Shostakovich Symphony #5 is for tomorrow, when I’ll be reading it with the orchestra at the University of Minnesota; Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra is for next season (October, to be exact); the Copland Ballet Music compilation includes “Appalachian Spring” is for our next Inside the Classics at the end of April; and the Debussy compilation on the bottom includes L’apres midi d’une faune, which I’m doing in a Young People’s Concert in a few weeks. And in the foreground, open, is Schoenberg’s Ode a Napoleon, because it’s cool, and this is one of those few weeks where I can crack open a score just because I like it…

…or just lie about with my dogs, the ultimate activity for a quiet Sunday afternoon.

Winding Down

I don't actually have a lot to say tonight, and there appears to be a massive orchestra hang going on at our hotel bar that I want to get in on, so I hope you'll settle for a few bullet points from our Willmar tour stop...

- The concert hall here is a very cool old stage in a big, imposing brick building in the center of town, which makes for a nice contrast with a lot of the other modern rooms we're playing on this trip. We've been here before, three seasons ago, and my memory of the crowd as enthusiastic and warm was quite correct. Real good people they got out here.

- The awesome chocolatier that we all remembered from our last trip here has moved out of its beautiful old location downtown (same old story, ask any small town in America) and into a strip mall on the edge of the highway south of town. Even more disappointing, it closes at 1pm on Saturdays, as many orchestra members discovered when we rolled in at 3. Megan, Jen, and I alleviated the pain by paying a visit to the Scandihoovian outpost I mentioned earlier, and more or less cleaning it out of Nordic chocolate bars and books of old Finnish wisdom to use against Osmo as the occasion arises.

- The unsung heroes of these tours are really our tireless stagehands, who have to work just as hard on a tour of outstate Minnesota as they would on a tour of Europe. They have to arrive at every new stop hours ahead of us, and insure that every bit of cargo (and we have thousands of pounds of it - instruments, wardrobes, podiums, stands, you name it) is unloaded, placed correctly, unlocked, unpacked, and readied for the orchestra's arrival. Simultaneously, they have to work in perfect tandem with the in-house crew of whatever hall we're visiting and make sure that our stage, sound, and lighting needs are perfectly understood. During the concert, they have to make any required stage changes quietly and efficiently, even if the amount of room on the stage is less than ideal. Finally, once the musicians are done for the night, and head off to party, sleep, or otherwise entertain ourselves, the crew packs everything up again, loads it into our specially climate-controlled semi trailer, and heads for the next town. It can be an awfully thankless job, and our crew is one of the very best in the business.

- We've got one more stop on this trip, tomorrow afternoon in the Finn-intensive town of Cokato. The concert's at 2pm, and we'll make the 1-hour drive for home right after we're done. Since I plan on collapsing onto my couch with two cats and a beer the minute I arrive, I doubt I'll be blogging. So let's consider this the last entry in this mini-travelogue. It's about time I let Sarah get a couple of words in edgewise anyway, and I'll be back later in the week to talk about the freakish and terrifying world of orchestra auditions...

We've Been Noticed

Ordinarily, these outstate tours of ours pass quietly by without much attention from the Twin Cities press. But this time, we've actually had something of a press boomlet: the Star Tribune's Graydon Royce and Jeff Thompson accompanied us to Jackson and Worthington, as did Mike Anthony, the former Strib music critic who is currently working on a book about Osmo.

Graydon turned in a nice front-page piece about the first day of the tour in this morning's Strib, and there's a very cool audio slide show on the paper's web site as well. Our pal Naomi made the front page as well, shaking hands with Bill Schrickel and Richard Marshall. (Thanks for the heads-up on that last one, Nicki...)

As if that weren't enough, the Marshall Independent carried a morning-after story about our concerts, and it seems likely that Willmar's West Central Tribune will run a story in the next day or two. So if you just can't get enough of reading about us on the road, there's your linkfest for the day.

I'll be back on late tonight with the post-game wrap from here in Willmar. But first, I'm off to check out my favorite Scandihoovian souvenir and bookstore downtown...

Lost & Found

We turned back north this morning, heading up US-59 to the college town of Marshall, Minnesota, out near the South Dakota border. And as is so often the case on these trips, getting there was the bulk of the adventure.

It should be no more than a one-hour drive from Worthington, where we stayed after our concert in Jackson last night, to Marshall, and yet, I always seem to find ways to extend these things. To begin with, I noticed months ago that this particular leg of the tour would take us within 15 miles of the little prairie town of Walnut Grove, which those of you good with childhood memories will have immediately placed as the home of Laura Ingalls Wilder during the years when her family was living in a sod house on the banks of Plum Creek. In my world, this is a big, big deal, and my traveling companions, violists Megan Tam and Jen Strom, agreed just enough to allow me to turn the car east on highway 14 and spend an hour or so exploring the place.

Walnut Grove is well aware of its important place in the history of children's literature, and from the moment you hit the otherwise modest city limits, you're bombarded with Ingalls references. The museum itself is closed in winter, but the folks who run it (and the attached gift shop, which stays open year-round) are more than happy to let visitors wander around the grounds. The main attraction is a recreation of the sod house the Ingalls family lived in while waiting for their real house to be completed. (The original sod house, which washed away more than a century ago, as sod houses were always meant to do, is located on a family farm a mile north of town.)

What gets soft-peddled is the obvious fact that Walnut Grove was hardly the town where the Ingalls had their best years: Mary went blind here from scarlet fever, a son was born and then died within a year, and Pa's dream of becoming a successful wheat farmer was dashed. Eventually, the family hightailed it over to South Dakota, and never looked back. You couldn't really blame them.

Rolling into Marshall a half-hour or so after leaving Plum Creek behind, our trio of violists opted for an afternoon of decompression in our hotel rooms before tonight's concert at the local high school. Around 5pm, we met up again to find some food, which is often one of the trickiest parts of an outstate tour, made trickier by the fact that Jen is a vegetarian. Fortunately, we discovered a more than passable bagel-and-coffee joint a few blocks from the hotel, and made quick work of some sandwiches and caffeine. It was 6pm when we left the cafe.

I mention the time because I want to establish right off the bat that it was not my fault that we somehow managed to show up for our 6:30 rehearsal at the high school, which was less than a mile from the bagel shop, at 6:32. See, what happened was that I had plotted our trip using the addresses provided to us by the orchestra and whatever online maps were available to me, and Marshall was actually a bit tricky. The address I had for Marshall Senior High was on Tiger Drive, and every mapping site I consulted insisted that there was no such place. Being a resourceful sort, I used Google Earth to locate the high school, and then confirmed the information on a few other sites. Every source I had said that the school would be easily found just south of downtown, on South Saratoga Street. Since I could clearly see the roof of a school-like building at that address on Google Earth, that was good enough for me. Tiger Drive, I assumed was some unofficial name that only the locals knew.

It isn't. We drove up and down Saratoga Street for 20 minutes, and all we found was a middle school, and a couple of teenagers practicing for their drivers' tests. Eventually, as I started to get desperate, I spotted a lone teen practicing his penalty shots on an outdoor rink (how Minnesota can you get, right?) and hopped out of the car to ask if he had any idea where we might find the high school. He shook the iPod buds out of his ears, cocked his head to the side, and said, "Oh, sure. Do ya know where the Applebee's and the Best Western are, out by the highway? It's just kitty corner to them."

The Best Western was our hotel. We had driven all over town, and the damn school was literally within sight of our rooms. Jen and Megan clearly found this hilarious, but recognizing that I was not in the mood to be poked, stifled their amusement. I stepped on the gas, and managed to make it to the parking lot of the Fine Arts building just as Megan's phone rang to tell us that the rehearsal had started, and our personnel manager was wondering whether we were planning to join the party this evening.

In the end, the concert went well, the hall was warm and inviting, and the crowd was wonderful. But the memorable part of the evening came after the Beethoven had ended, and the audience assumed we were done for the night. We weren't. As everyone in Minnesota knows by now, something horrible happened in this part of the state earlier in the week, and it would have felt utterly wrong for us to blow into town, play a show, and leave without acknowledging it.

So as Osmo was called back to the stage for his third bow after the Beethoven, he stepped up onto the podium, and raised his hands for silence.

"We have all heard," he said slowly, "about the terrible thing that has happened here this week. And of course, we all have still so many questions. Perhaps there are no answers. But we would like to play for you now music for those who have lost their children. We would like to play music for those who are grieving the loss of friends. We would like to play music for the hearts of everyone in your town who has felt this pain. We would like to play the Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber."

I won't lie - the Barber Adagio is not an easy piece to play under the best of circumstances, and to attempt its whisper-soft textures and long, spun tones while your muscles are still twitching from the finale of Beethoven's 7th is something that string players ordinarily would balk at. But we've all been watching the news this week, and there are times when you just have to draw your musical strength from the far greater strength around you. I had to look away from a woman in the front row who had tears rolling down her cheeks even before we began (lest I choke up myself,) but I felt her gaze throughout, and when 60 bows lifted silently off their strings at the end of the impossibly soft chord that ends the Adagio, the room was quieter than any I've ever heard. Osmo waited a full ten seconds in the silence, then stepped off the podium and walked quietly offstage.

The applause didn't begin until he was almost off the stage, and in the silence, this whole trip became worth it for me. The idea that the music we play can silence hundreds in common mourning, can call up who knows how many personal and communal emotions, is why I will never get tired of this job. Critical accolades and CD sales are nice. Knowing that you've given a specific person an experience they'll carry with them is far better.

Now, it's an hour after the concert, and I'm sitting in the karaoke bar at our hotel, listening to an almost shockingly talented woman belt out Martina McBride's power ballad, "Independence Day," and it all feels right, somehow. This town couldn't be less like Minneapolis, and I know that a lot of my friends back home would probably take one look at the Friday night crowd in this bar and sneer. But I wouldn't trade the people who were with us in that high school auditorium tonight for anything, and I'm hoping they wouldn't trade us, either. There's common ground everywhere, y'know?

Thought for the day

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

~ John Cage

Post-Game Wrap: Jackson

There are a few things that are the same on every one of our tours, regardless of whether we're in Cologne, Germany, or Cloquet, Minnesota. One is that at some point, in whatever room has been designated as the men's dressing room, our principal flutist, Adam Kuenzel, will haul out a device known as The Insultinator, which crafts loud, obnoxious pejoratives at the push of a few buttons, and start broadcasting electronic phrases like "You're a totally gross, boring nerd!" to the entire room. He rarely does this in our locker room at Orchestra Hall, but there's something about being on the road that causes "You're a completely bonehead!" (sometimes he forgets to push the middle button that supplies adjectives) to make us feel comfortable.

Another thing that never changes about touring is the routine of getting used to an unfamiliar concert hall in an uncomfortably short length of time. On these outstate tours, we play mainly in civic halls and high school auditoriums, so we're very fortunate that we live in a state which clearly believes in building deeply impressive school facilities. (In fact, I'm beginning to think that many of the newer high school auditoriums we play in were designed by the same architect.) Still, you just never know what the sound in a given room is going to be like until the first time our bows hit the string in the touch-up rehearsals we have before each show. Once we hear ourselves in the room, we've got only a few minutes to adjust before concert time.

The hall at Jackson Senior High School is, I can confidently report, absolutely bone dry. This means a couple of things to musicians. First, it means that we're going to be able to hear every tiny little bit of sound that gets made on the stage, and hear it cleanly and clearly all across the stage. That's the good news. The bad news is that the audience can hear every scrap of sound as well, and the acoustic insures that they'll be hearing it without even a bit of the reverberation that we count on to smooth out our collective sound in a larger, warmer room. So you've got to be extremely careful to keep the blend even, and to not let the energy of the group dip for even a moment, lest the sound die six inches in front of the stage and leave the audience wondering how so many musicians can make so little noise.

The first half of tonight's concert, which included a Sibelius tone poem and a double bassoon concerto (I know! Who knew such things existed?) by something called Dietter, came off well, although it was a bit difficult to assess whether the audience was enjoying it. Sometimes our outstate audiences are as effusive as those in Minneapolis, but sometimes, they're so exceedingly polite in their applause that you have to actually talk to a few of them to find out whether they're enjoying themselves. (Tonight, the uncertainty was heightened by the fact that only a miniscule number of audience members left their seats at intermission, while most remained sitting patiently, as if waiting for us to finish our break. It was sweet, in a somewhat disconcerting way.)

Backstage at intermission, while I was getting myself mentally ready to play Beethoven's 7th for the first time in a month and a half, a nervously smiling girl in a polka dot party dress appeared next to me on the arm of our board president, who had apparently met her in the audience. "She's a violist," he said, "from Worthington. She wants to get a few autographs from the viola section, if that's okay." It was definitely okay, and the girl, whose name was Naomi, quickly collected a page full of signatures in her copy of our program book, and spent a few minutes talking shop with our co-principal viola, Richard Marshall.

Back onstage, the Beethoven was vintage Osmo: crisp and energetic, as we used pure adrenaline to make up for the lack of reverb in the hall. When we finished, the applause was still polite, but I saw broad smiles on a lot of faces throughout the audience. As we retreated backstage and stowed our instruments for the trip to Marshall, I saw at least a dozen audience members collaring musicians to thank us for coming to their town, which still never fails to make me feel as if things are backwards: we really ought to be the ones thanking them.

As I changed back into my street clothes, I suddenly realized that I'd forgotten completely to snap a picture of the polka-dot girl for the blog - so typical of me, to miss the real highlight of the night while wondering what I should write about after it was over. But as I headed back out from the dressing room (actually the school library) to the lobby, who should be standing there, proudly holding the door for every male musician in the orchestra as we stampeded toward the bus, but Naomi, smiling far less nervously now. I quickly collared fellow violist Ben Ullery as he headed out the door, and snapped a shot of the two of them. Naomi tells me that she doesn't have internet at home, so I don't know if she'll see this or not, but just in case: thanks for coming, kid. You made my night.

Let's Get This Show On The Road

The orchestra rolls out of Minneapolis today for one of our regular tours playing away from home. Even if you live in the Twin Cities and pay pretty close attention to our schedule, though, you may not have heard about this particular tour. We won't be going to London or Berlin or Vienna, or even to New York, Boston, or San Francisco. No, this tour will see us play a series of packed concert halls and auditoriums in Jackson, Marshall, Willmar, and Cokato.

Oh, come on. You've never heard of any of them? And you call yourself a Minnesotan? These, of course, are all towns in southwest Minnesota, real prairie towns (in fact, Marshall is not far at all from Walnut Grove, where Laura Ingalls and her family lived on the banks of Plum Creek,) and our orchestra has been making a point of playing in such places for years. (Why we do it in February, I've no idea. For the extra challenge, perhaps.) Last season's outstate tour took us Up North (yes, that's supposed to be capitalized,) to Brainerd, Bemidji, and Hibbing, and the year before that, I think we were in Pipestone, Northfield, Sauk Centre, and Willmar again.

Now, there are lots of good reasons for hauling our considerable mass around the state on a regular basis, beginning with the fact that Minnesota has always been a state that values its rural roots, and where folks living in areas that might be considered backwaters in other states are surrounded by as much culture and art as denizens of far larger cities in other parts of the country. No matter where we go in the state, it seems that the locals pack whatever venue they have available to see us, and you've never met nicer folks. There are a lot of myths and half-truths floating around about our state (thanks, Garrison, thanks a heap,) but the one about Minnesota Nice couldn't be truer. In fact, I'm willing to predict right now that at least one of our tour stops will see us get off the bus and walk smack into a backstage buffet table loaded down with cookies, cakes, and bars baked up specially for us. You don't get that kind of hospitality at the Musikverein in Vienna, let me tell you!

From a purely personal perspective, I love these tours. Road trips through the rural Midwest are one of my favorite leisure activities, and I always skip the official orchestra bus and drive myself, preferably accompanied by a few friends who will spend the entire trip begging me to stop driving 20 miles out of our way to photograph things like this:

That's in Frazee, by the way, up in the west central part of the state, on the road to Fargo. It's made of fiberglass and 30 feet tall. It's the coolest thing ever, and back in 2002 or so when former MN Orch violist Kerri Ryan and I visited it, we spent about an hour basking in its presence. We also checked out the world's largest otter in Fergus Falls, the world's largest loon in Vergas, and a truly bizarre statue of St. Urho with a grasshopper impaled on his pitchfork in Menagha. Last season's tour of the Northland gave me a chance to snap pics of more Paul Bunyan statues than you can shake a blue ox at, and a few years back, I even drove through a dense morning fog for more than an hour to visit this one-of-a-kind attraction in Kelliher...

Yep, that's big Paul's grave. (Yes, they know he was fictional. Quit ruining it for the rest of the kids, wouldja please?) It sits in a little park just a few yards from the tiny town's main (only?) intersection, hidden away under some pine trees. The headstone reads simply, "Here lies Paul, and that's all."

Sadly, my guidebook to such things tells me that there won't be a lot of strange animal statuary and Bunyan memorabilia on this year's trip, and even the Ingalls Museum in Walnut Grove appears to be closed in winter. Still, though, I never seem to have trouble finding things to admire in these small towns, and I'll do my best to bring you along for the ride as we travel. We leave this afternoon for Jackson, and we'll be back in Minneapolis Sunday night. Between now and then, I'll try to bang out a post-concert blog post each night, and keep you informed as to any vitally important roadside attractions we encounter along the way...

Another Revolution In Philadelphia?

Sorry for going AWOL these past several days. The last couple of months have been insanely busy for me, and I felt the need for a couple of days of decompression once I made it through the worst of my winter schedule. Having now achieved three consecutive good nights' sleep in a row (possibly a personal record,) I'm fully rejuvenated, and I'll be making up for lost time over the next week or so...

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This is the time of year that a lot of orchestras unveil their plans for the next season, and it's always interesting to see what other bands around the country are doing. (The Minnesota Orchestra actually trotted out the bulk of our '08-'09 schedule in late November, and we already have renewal materials and brochures in our subcribers' mailboxes, which tells me that our marketing staff is drinking way too much coffee. For those wondering when you'll be hearing something about next season's Inside the Classics concerts, you'll have to be patient a while longer. Look for an announcement in this space sometime in the first week of April. It'll be worth the wait, I promise.)

Ordinarily, these announcements don't contain a lot of surprises. One of the things people rely on orchestras for is consistency, and when you're trying to sell 2,500 tickets to every concert you play, you want to be fairly sure that at least a good chunk of your programming has mass appeal. (Remember that, since we play a new concert every week, we don't have time to wait for word of mouth to build the way long-running theatrical shows and even touring chamber music ensembles do.) So, while orchestras are always quite good at trumpeting any little innovative programming decision they may have made in the course of charting their season, the reality is that, most of the time, you can count on plenty of Beethoven and Brahms, plus a healthy smattering of whatever local specialty audiences in a given city have come to expect and enjoy (around here, that would be Dvorak.)

But in Philadelphia, where the orchestra is notoriously cautious and its audience maddeningly conservative in its musical tastes, something big seems to be afoot in '08-'09. Philadelphia Inquirer critic Peter Dobrin thinks so, anyway:

The orchestra has researched its audience as part of a larger study by nonprofit consultants WolfBrown, and has responded by crafting "collections" - series of concerts aimed at constituencies with distinct tastes and levels of expertise. The "masterworks" collection, for instance, focuses on warhorses - a curiously under-deployed ambassador for introducing novices to classical music.

If you're an expert, you can assemble a package of concerts that are exactly like the ones you've been hearing since Aunt Bippy took you backstage to meet Stokowski. But other concerts will use projection screens to show close-ups of playing musicians. Some will be followed by parties, or feature talking on stage.

To give you some idea of the scale of change, consider the fact that only half the orchestra's presentations next season will follow the traditional concert format. That's practically a revolution.

Well, I don't know if I'd go quite that far (and also: Aunt Bippy? really?), but it is a major step, and if you'd read me those three paragraphs and then asked me to name the orchestra that was being written about, it would have been a very long time before I got around to guessing Philly. I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, attended dozens of Philadelphia Orchestra concerts, and studied violin and viola with three of that band's most prominent musicians, so it's an ensemble I know about as well as an outsider can. And believe me when I tell you that this is not a city, or an orchestra, that has a reputation for embracing change. Philly is all about history, and pedigree, and intense pride in its own hyper-aggressive individuality, and the best way to get a Philadelphian riled up (other than, y'know, wearing a Mets jersey while ordering your cheesesteak at Pat's) is to suggest that something about the city could maybe, possibly, be better than it already is.

The audiences at Philadelphia Orchestra concerts are usually a reflection of that same civic attitude (or atty-tood, as they would say south of Spring Garden Street.) They tend to be considerably older and less musically adventurous than the crowds we see at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, and while they do turn out in reliable numbers for the orchestra's concerts (especially since the beautiful and lavish Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts opened on South Broad Street several years ago,) this probably has much to do with the fact that Philadelphia is the fifth-largest city in the US, with a population of 1.5 million just within the city limits, and millions more in the surrounding suburbs. (In other words, while the Philadelphians only need 0.04% of their metro population to buy a ticket on a given night in order to fill their hall, we in Minneapolis need 0.08% of our metro population to show up to fill ours, which seats roughly the same number of people.)

Attending a Philadelphia Orchestra concert has always felt to me like a very formal experience, as well. A far higher percentage of Philly audiences dress up for concerts than we see here in Minnesota, and there is definitely a distinct whiff of old money in the room. (We have old money here, too, of course, but it tends to be - how can I put this? - less ostentatious.) And while the audience at the Kimmel Center can be quite effusive at times, I've never heard the kind of roaring, cheering applause that we regularly get on Saturday nights in Minneapolis, especially if the repertoire on the program is anything composed later than 1935. (One friend of mine from Philly loves to tell the story of overhearing an elderly patron complaining at intermission about "all this new music they're playing nowadays... this Mahler, I don't know...")

So why, given all this, would the venerable Philadelphia Orchestra be making such (comparatively) radical changes to its programming? Obviously, I don't know for sure, but my guess would be that the orchestra feels that, despite the nearly full houses it plays to, it could be reaching a much broader swath of the public if only it were a bit more welcoming to those who didn't necessarily grow up attending concerts. It's hardly blowing the doors off the industry with any of its new innovations (although I'm guessing that the video screens are going to come in for some seriously withering glances from some of the old guard,) but some of their ideas will likely serve as models for orchestras across the country. We're all constantly looking for ways to reinvigorate our programming and bring new audience members into the fold, even as we try desperately to hang onto the hardcore fans we already have.

It's a delicate balancing act, and more so in Philadelphia than it would be in a lot of other cities. But every fan of orchestral music ought to be rooting for success in Philly next season, partly because if we know new ideas work there, we can be reasonably sure that they'll work anywhere; but mainly because the cost of failure could be another decade of cowardly turtling and status quo strategizing across the entire industry.

Self-soundtrack Part Deux

I asked, via email a couple of days ago: "I'm working on a blog post about "self-soundtracks", the music we hear running through our head all the time. What's your mental DJ playing for you this Sunday??"

Colleagues from across the country responded:

Marty (Milwaukee Symphony): "The past few days I keep singing the first few parts of Salome to myself, as we are playing it this week at work. What an amazing piece ! I sing it in falsetto, if that helps."

Paul (Richmond Symphony): "Beck F@*%ing With My Head"

Sam (Minnesota Orchestra): "At the moment, it's the klezmer movement from "The Dreams & Prayers of Isaac the Blind" by Golijov. But that's mainly because I'm performing it tonight, and can't play that movement to my satisfaction yet. I did wake up hearing "Southtown Girls" by The Hold Steady in my head, for some reason. Great song, tons of Mpls references..."

Vito (Fort Worth Symphony): "I try to have my head clear of any music as much as possible, because otherwise it's overload. If I run through something in my head it is something I'm working on so I can practice mentally."

David (conductor): "Well, the stuff running around in my head usually is the most recent thing I've been rehearsing or performing...today, it's bits and pieces of Jennifer Higdon's Concerto for Orchestra which I just did last night and which is running through my brain today like some weird aural shadow...of course, I just enjoyed hearing a choral evensong at St. Thomas Church in NYC and now a lovely bit of plainchant I heard is competing with the Higdon!"

Steve (Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra): "Stravinsky Danses Concertantes and the theme from Sanford & Son (Quincy Jones' 'The Streetbeater')"

Kirsten (Philadelphia Orchestra): "Dvorak Romantic Pieces."

Katherine (Baltimore Symphony): "La ci darem la mano from Don Giovanni. My husband keeps whistling it..."

Amir (conductor): "Lots of Brahms."

Bob (Minnesota Orchestra): "For some reason the music from Fellini's La Strada seems to be going through my head. I guess I should head to Italy and find out why."

Benjy (pianist): "Good question! Last I checked:
Beethoven 4th Piano Concerto and Op. 132 SQ
Radiohead Kid A
Beatles Sexy Sadie and Taxman
Random, isn't it?"

David (composer): "I've been having my own "Kaddish" in my head all weekend since it was performed Friday. Funny how that happens!"

What about you??

Self-soundtrack

A couple of posts ago I wrote about the music presidential hopefuls have been using as the sound palette for their speeches and rallies. While I find the whole idea of choosing the soundtrack of your life's work quite fascinating, there is a whole other side to the idea of the self-sountrack; the music that is actually there, already running through your head.

If you stop to think (and, more importantly, listen), you are more likely than not to be hearing some snippet of repetitive sound. For some, it is verbal - a key phrase or even simply a word that may be hovering in the background of your consciousness like a screensaver on a computer. For others (and, from anecdotal evidence, more commonly), it is a musical tune or phrase that is on endless loop in one's mind. In the 80's the term "earworm" (from the German Ohrwurm) was coined as the name for this phenomenon, and it is really an apt description; the music wiggles its way into your ear and around your mind like it has a life of its own.

In some instances, this is not at all coincidental. If the music in question is from a commercial or a movie soundtrack or the latest Top 40 hit, it is most likely the result of carefully crafted "hook" that is designed to stick in your head. A "hook" is the music industry's way of "catching your ear"; it is a melodic or rhythmic pattern, usually highly repetitive, that is immediately attractive. (What makes it attractive is difficult to pin down or create a formula for - which I find encouraging! - you don't want to take all the magic out of it...) For example, when you think of the song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", you are most likely to first recall the background chorus that is singing "a-weem-o-weh, a-weem-o-weh" - the "hook".

Hooks can be rather insidious because of their very nature; they're meant to winnow their way into your consciousness and stay there on an endless repeat. One "hook-y" song that often finds its way into my mind (and, please, don't laugh...) is a Jennifer Lopez/Ja Rule collaboration from 2001, "I'm Real". I'm not really a fan of Ms. Lopez's breathy vocals, and I find faux-thug Ja Rule to be a DMX wannabe (and I'd much rather listen to, say, Chuck D or Talib Kweli). But there's something about that "hook", the flute-like synth lick that repeats for the whole song, that's just ridiculously catchy, and if it happens to be playing on MTV2 late one night while I'm redoing "Messiah" bowings (yeah, welcome to my glamorous life), the song will be stuck in my head for days.

Hooks are not exclusive to the popular music world; examples abound in classical music as well. One only need listen to the first few seconds of Ravel's Bolero to understand the mesmerizing quality of the snare drum ostinato and the way it burrows itself into your mind (speaking of Bolero, you really must see this version to believe it). One piece that I can't expunge from my head when I start thinking about it is the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 6; there is something about the undulating rhythm and cadential motive that settles into my psyche.

And it is not all just a matter of hooks, as "sticky" as they can be in our subconscious. Many musicians I know tell me that they have a pretty much constant soundtrack in their minds - it can run the gamut from a piece they're working on to a random composition not even for their instrument that they can't recall hearing recently but is nevertheless lodged in their inner ear. Oliver Sacks in his wonderful new book "Musicophilia" describes how he often enjoys mental "replays" of Beethoven's Third and Fourth Piano Concertos - and these are specific performances, recordings of Leon Fleisher from the 60's. I remember a very odd period in college when I had the slow movement of Mahler's Fourth Symphony (BSO/Ozawa) in my head for over 2 weeks; right now, because I just wrote about Beethoven's Pastorale, it's all of a sudden having a party in my cranial sound system.

I've put out an APB to a bunch of colleagues about what's playing in their heads this gloomy Sunday afternoon; what's in yours??

What makes a leader?

A recent article in the Sacramento Bee caught my attention not just because it was profiling a woman conductor, Laura Jackson (whom I've met - she's a lovely person and fine musician), but for a quote towards the end from Jesse Rosen, president of the League of American Orchestras. Jesse is quoted as saying: "There has been a movement away from top-down, authoritarian leadership... to a more collaborative and more participatory kind of structure, a structure where the leader is now more of a facilitator and nurturer."

It's an interesting assertion. When one imagines a conductor, it's hard not to conjure up images of the authoritarian white-haired maestro wielding his baton like a dictator on the podium. It's an image that's been instilled into the popular psyche, an image that was largely accurate until not so many generations ago.

Women have been on the conducting scene for awhile, and it's not longer so unusual to see us on the podium, although I have certainly stood in front of several orchestra who have told me I was their first female conductor. I think, at this point in history, we can safely assert that from a musical standpoint, you will find no difference because of gender - women and men can both attain the highest level of musicianship. Although perhaps the most subjective concept in the world, I really find musicianship to be, in an odd way, empirical. Most musicians will tell you they know a good musician instinctively, and will respect their viewpoint even if they disagree with it, because they understand the knowledge and skill behind it.

So if it's not musicianship that separates the genders, then what? Clearly, the answer is leadership style, which is what I think Jesse Rosen was alluding to in that quote above.

I'm often asked to make presentations to various groups and organizations such as the AAUW, and part of my speech focuses on the widely divergent leadership styles of men and women. (And before I dive into this, let me say that these are certainly generalization!) Men tend to make more authoritarian leaders and are more likely to engage in strictly top-down management. Apply this to the conducting field, and it makes a great deal of sense, at least by the old model - whatever the conductor says goes, no questions asked, no room for leeway. The conductor has a vision, the orchestra is simply there to put that vision into sound.

Women tend to have a more consensus-based leadership style. This is not to say that we go around trying to get people to agree with our viewpoint - it is more the sense that we welcome discussion and participation. I call the process the "buy-in"; in my view, my job as a leader is to make everyone understand where I'm coming from musically, to accept it as a group goal, and to find ways to reach this goal together. I have a very strong sense that the players in front of me are not just there to support my musical vision; they are active participants in a group effort in which we all strive to reach a common, agreed-upon musical goal.

I was recently guest conducting an orchestra, and late in the rehearsal process, after we had gone over a piece several times, I asked, "Any questions in this? Any concerns?". The ensemble looked a little baffled at first - clearly, they had not been asked this before. All I wanted to know was, I'm comfortable with where this piece is, is there any spot that one of you may be uncomfortable with? After a few moments of silence, a clarinetist asked to rehearse a tricky entrance again and the basses asked for a cue in a particular spot, which I was happy to do. After rehearsal a brass player came up to tell me that they had rarely if ever had the opportunity to speak up in rehearsal to address any issues that were left unrehearsed. And, not coincidentally, I was the first woman to have conducted them.

I think women, as a whole, take a more holistic view of the world, and I certainly think this colors our view of leadership. There are certainly those out there who don't believe women can exercise leadership or authority, but I dwell on that as little as possible. I think it's important to acknowledge that men and women make different leaders (an interesting idea, particularly given what's happening in politics these days!), but as I like to say, different is not better or worse, just different. And to think how much less strife there would be in the world if we could all understand that...

Music To Go With The Words

For anyone who was intrigued by my last post about Stephen Paulus's oratorio, but didn't get a chance to see it live this week at Orchestra Hall, there's one more chance to hear it before the CD we're currently making comes out late this year. Minnesota Public Radio taped Tuesday's performance, and will be airing it tonight in our normal Friday night slot on all MPR Classical stations across Minnesota and the Upper Midwest. (The flagship is KSJN 99.5fm in the Twin Cities, and if you're outstate, or in many parts of Wisconsin, Iowa, either Dakota, the Michigan UP, or Idaho, you can find your local affiliate here. MPR also streams live 24/7, so you can hear the broadcast online as well.)

The concert starts at 8pm Central, and includes a stirring first half featuring clarinetist Burt Hara performing a movement from Olivier Messaien's Quartet For The End Of Time, cellist Janet Horvath soloing in Bruch's Kol Nidrei, and the string section of the Minnesota Orchestra playing Steve Heitzeg's tribute to the victims of war and genocide, Wounded Field.

A few blogs have written about the performance as well, which also happened the last time we played this piece. Over at MSP Mag, Lani Willis called it "a gut-wrenching experience I expect to be digesting for a very long while." (She meant it in a good way, I think.) And those of you music diehards who double as Twins fans (as I do) may have been surprised to see an extended post from the one and only TwinsGeek describing his daughter's experience as a member of the children's choir performing the oratorio with us. (Full disclosure: the Geek is an old friend of mine, and I've been known to pen articles on baseball and hockey from time to time in one or another of his various online and print publications.) His daughter's favorite part of the experience? "When Osmo pointed to us, and we standed up alone, and everyone clapped extra hard.” Well, naturally.

To Be Certain Of The Music

We're back in the recording studio this week, (actually, that's not entirely accurate - we make our recordings on the stage of Orchestra Hall, with our production team squirreled away with all their equipment in a backstage rehearsal room,) but the project we're working on couldn't be more different than the Beethoven symphony cycle that we've spent the last five seasons completing. This week, we're teamed up with a massive choir of adults and children, four vocal soloists, and an authentic Jewish cantor to record Stephen Paulus's gripping oratorio, To Be Certain of the Dawn.

Stephen is a well-known composer around these parts, and he's developed quite a reputation nationally, as well. (I've actually spent a large number of mornings this season playing another piece of his, written for the orchestra's Kinder Konzerts series, aimed at pre-school and kindergarten students.) This particular project had its genesis more than three years ago, when the rector of Minneapolis's Basilica of St. Mary commissioned Stephen and poet Michael Dennis Browne to create a new oratorio on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps in which millions of Jews lost their lives. The oratorio was to be a gift from the Catholic Church to Minneapolis's Temple Israel (the city's largest synagogue) and the Jewish community of the Twin Cities. We premiered it at the Basilica in 2005, with Temple Israel's outstanding cantor, Barry Abelson, intoning the opening and closing blessings, to packed houses and a positive critical reaction.

The piece is unusual in several respects. First, while it does not lack for chilling moments and angry climaxes, as you would expect from an oratorio focused on the Holocaust, the overall effect of the music and poetry is quite uplifting. To this end, Browne and Paulus took as inspiration a set of photographs of European Jews just going through the motions of daily life in the 1930s, before their world was turned upside down by the Nazi government. (The photos are projected on screens during the performance.) One photo shows two little girls shyly posing for the camera; another shows a young boy standing under a tree, while a much older man with a long beard leans back against the trunk.

From these photos, Browne created lyrics for the soloists that imagined the lives and thoughts of the people in the photos. The lyrics are simple and descriptive, and the music that goes along with them is light and airy. But somewhere in the middle of each of these snapshots of ordinary life, the chorus breaks in with vicious murmuring declarations: "Jews may not keep animals. Jews may not attend school. Jews may not imagine. Jews may not dream." It's a startling effect. There is no overt suggestion of violence in these lines, but there is that unmistakable quality of menace that every Jew living in Germany must have felt for years before it became fully clear just what exactly their government had in mind. Juxtaposed against the innocent imaginings of the lives of the ordinary people in the photos, these lines are devastating to listen to.

If the chorus is occasionally called upon to represent the evils of genocide and bigotry, the children's choir, which plays a major role in the oratorio, represents the opposite: simple human hope and goodness. Four times, the children sing a traditional Hebrew blessing, each repetition more forceful and determined than the last. Late in the piece, after the adult choir has sung of the terror of Kristallnacht, the children and adults join together with the soprano soloist to sing a Hymn to the Eternal Flame: "Every breath is in you / every cry / Every longing in you / every singing / Every hope, every healing / Woven into fire." And at the tail end of the piece, the final gut punch comes from the voice of a Holocaust survivor, as the mezzo-soprano soloist sings, "I have lived in a world with no children. I would never live in a world of no children again." As she finishes the line, and the combined choruses implore the audience in Hebrew to "love your neighbor as yourself," one final photo is projected onto the screen: a sea of children, staring innocently into the lens.

I'm not terribly well-connected to the world of modern composers, but I know enough to be fairly certain that there are composers and musicians who would consider Paulus's oratorio to be something less than serious music. His works tend to be accessible to anyone who hears them, and from what I've played and heard of his stuff, it seems clear that he is far more interested in connecting with audiences than in impressing colleagues with how smart he is. There are no tone rows, no endless cycling of minimalist progressions, just clean, simple lines and undeniably provocative harmonies.

For much of the last century, this approach has been a great way to get yourself shunned by the new music cognoscenti, as the avant-garde seized and held control of the internal taste mechanisms of the industry. But lately, composers who value such old-fashioned ideas as melody and emotional impact have been making a major comeback, and the exclusionary worldview of the modernists has finally started to lose its grip on performers and audiences. To my mind, this is a positive development, and as I watched countless members of the audience at last night's concert tear up as the final chorus swelled in Paulus's oratorio, I was as certain as I've ever been that this is what music is supposed to be.

Surreality

Speaking of the Grammys, for those of you who didn't catch the broadcast, you missed out on a performance of "Rhapsody in Blue" by the unlikely and slightly surreal pair of Lang Lang and Herbie Hancock. Hancock was the surprise winner of the night, taking Album of the Year over favorites Kanye West and Amy Winehouse. And it's always interesting to see Lang Lang, a classmate of mine from Curtis, because I remember him not as the rockstar of the classical keyboard with the artfully disarrayed hair, but as a quiet kid whose father sat with him in the practice room until the building closed at 11 pm every night.

As much as made-for-TV moments like the post-performance hugging irk me a little, it was nice to see at least one classical artist featured on the broadcast, particularly as none of the classical categories make it on TV. But imagine if they were televised - would that raise the profile of classical recordings and thus the classical music industry? With our tendendy to respond to anything that is glamourized, I'm inclined to think so...

Um, it's an honor just to be nominated...?

In case you missed the Grammys tonight, our nominated recording of Beethoven's 9th failed to win the Best Orchestral Performance category. This wasn't terribly surprising, since the recording came out more than a year ago, and there was less media interest in it than we got for our first couple of Beethoven discs. Hearty congratulations to Leonard Slatkin and the Nashville Symphony, who won our category and a couple of others for their recording of Joan Tower's "Made In America."

Oh, and just for the record? I totally called this one...

(Also, while we may not have a Grammy, my pals in eighth blackbird, who I wrote about shortly after the nominations were announced, nailed down the prize for Best Chamber Music Performance. Well deserved, and if you haven't heard their "strange imaginary animals" album, you really should...)

7 Tracks For A Frozen Day

It's ten below zero in Minneapolis today, with a wind chill occasionally approaching -30. It seems like we've had a lot of days like that this winter, and it's usually around mid-February that I start to get really fed up with them. But today, the sun is shining spectacularly (in very un-February-like fashion) and thanks to the dusting of fresh snow we got on Saturday, my neighborhood actually looks fresh and clean for the first time in weeks.

It's winter days like this that inspire artists and musicians (for better or for worse,) and since I have the day off, I thought I'd put together a soundtrack to go with the sun-drenched deep freeze. All links in the playlist below will take you somewhere where you can hear at least a sample of the music...

1. February - Dar Williams. Okay, so I just got done saying that today is the antithesis of a normal, depressing, predictable February day, but there will certainly be plenty of those ahead, and no one's ever expressed the sheer mind-numbing hopelessness of this month better than Dar Williams. My favorite line comes at the end of the song: You stopped and you pointed and you said, "That's a crocus" / and I said, "What's a crocus?" / and you said, "It's a flower." / I tried to remember, but I said, "What's a flower?" / You said, "I still love you."

2. Hard Weather Makes Good Wood - John Howell Morrison. The eMusic review of this excellent piece for string quartet and tape says that it sounds like Moby collaborating with John Adams. That sounds about right to me, and the performance it gets on this little-known CD is a deeply committed one, played by some of the best young musicians in the Twin Cities.

3. It's Going To Snow - Jeff Louie. Jeff is about as unusual as singer-songwriters come. His songs tend to be far more musically complex than most folk/rock types, to the extent that they can actually be disconcerting, since you're hearing chords that you would normally expect to hear only in classical or jazz. (No surprise that he started out playing classical violin and piano - he and I actually went to music camp together for several years.) This is one of my favorite songs of his, and it nicely captures the bleakness of winter, and of relationships that don't work out.

4. Symphony No. 5 (first movement) - Jean Sibelius. The mournful horn call that opens what I think of as Sibelius's best work sounds like it should be coming from miles away across a still, silent, snow-covered field. The uneasy rolling wind lines that emerge from it paint a perfect portrait of Nordic winter, and the movement develops excruciatingly slowly, just like this season. Eventually, the pain and bleakness are too much to bear, and the music explodes into a furious scramble, which ends abuptly, like the entire orchestra ran into a brick wall.

5. Snow Day - Lisa Loeb. I've always liked Lisa Loeb for some reason. She's not exactly the type of singer I gravitate to in general, but something about the slight edginess of her lyrics when paired with her syrupy sweet voice works for me. I don't think this song is really about snow, or winter, but it's catchy as hell, and in the middle of the longest season, it's nice to have a peppy pop song or two to lift your spirits.

6. January - At The Fireside , from The Seasons' Digest - Alexander Raskatov. Gidon Kremer's group of talented young European musicians, Kremerata Baltica, regularly turns out some of the best and most interesting recordings on the market, and their album, "The Russian Seasons" includes this gem for solo violin, strings, percussion, and prepared piano. Raskatov's description of the January movement reads simply: "It's terribly cold outside. An old clock strikes midnight."

7. Snow is Gone - Josh Ritter. It isn't. It won't be for a good while yet. But no song can jolt me out of the winter doldrums like this one. It's what I listen to on my iPod right before going on stage for any big performance, and it never fails to fire me up. I'm singing for the love of it / Have mercy on the man who sings to be adored...

Fund-amental II

A brief addendum to my post of two days ago - with politics in the air, government funding of the arts seems to be the topic du jour everywhere, including this recent NewMusicBox post.

Tracking The Innovators

An article from Helsinki's main daily paper caught my eye yesterday as I was running some online searches for my side job as a news editor at ArtsJournal. The subject was the opening of a couple of new classical music venues in the city, backed by violinist Pekka Kuusisto. Pekka's an old friend of our orchestra - he's soloed with us, and his brother Jaako is the concertmaster of Osmo's "other orchestra," Sinfonia Lahti.

The venue Pekka is helping to start is far from your average recital hall or chamber music space. In fact, it's closer to a rock club, offering serious but casual classical concerts in an intimate space that dispenses with most if not all the conceits of the concert hall. They even (gasp!) use amplification when it seems like it might improve the experience.

This kind of thing is actually happening a lot in Europe these days, and here in America, cellist Matt Haimovitz and others have been playing in rock clubs for years. Most of the concerts are relatively under-the-radar activities (although Haimovitz has become something of a media darling lately,) and word of mouth is still their main marketing device.

But let's face it: in a lot of cities, word of mouth is the only way that anyone in the local music scene, regardless of whether they play Scriabin or ska, gets anyone to their concerts. As media interest in quality music has dwindled, artists have learned to get creative in marketing themselves directly to their fans, and classical music is only just starting to wake up to the possibilities of viral video, social networking sites, and other newfangled methods of getting your product out there in the marketplace.

For years now, fans and purveyors of orchestral and chamber music have been bitching and moaning about the lack of exposure we get in the corporate media, the lack of popular interest in our product unless it's dumbed down to the point of cringe-inducing absurdity, and what some perceive as a general slow demise of our genre. But what musicians like Haimovitz, Kuusisto, and many many others have begun to grasp is that when you're no longer beholden to the mass culture, you're free to experiment, to seek out the niche audience that will likely fit you better than the teeming horde of Conventional Taste ever would.

As Sarah is fond of saying, "if you don't like change, you'll like irrelevance even less..."

Fund-amental

Super Tuesday was pretty exciting, as caucusing and primaries go - I listened to results rolling in all night as I drove from Fargo to Minneapolis - and it seems to have put us all in a heightened political state (level orange, perhaps?). An interesting post from February 5 by Soho the Dog (one of my bookmarks), of which I've excerpted a paragraph here:

"When the government funds arts that wouldn't gain sufficient traction in the free market for survival, those making this argument see it as somehow cheating, bending the rules, gaming the system. What they can never let themselves admit is that the rules of free-market capitalism are bent all the time—if they weren't, capitalism and any society based on it would collapse. When the Federal Reserve tinkers with interest rates and the money supply to ensure that the markets don't slip into runaway monopolistic inflation or an insurmountable depression, it's gaming the system. When Congress engineers tax credits and deductions to encourage corporate behavior that the market would otherwise unduly punish, it's gaming the system. Medicare? Unemployment benefits? Face it—it's government spending that keeps the economically disaffected from turning into revolutionaries. Any free-market capitalist system requires perpetual benevolent interference to protect it against its own potential for economic and political damage.

In receiving and expecting state support, the arts aren't playing outside the rules, they're playing by the exact same rules everybody else does."

And, in the spirit of impartiality, the opposite argument here.

In Soho the Dog's corner, we have, quite unsurprisingly, Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who has "propelled the National Endowment for the Arts to its biggest budget boost in nearly three decades, a $20.3 million increase to $144.7 million for fiscal 2008, which ends Sept. 30" according to this recent Wall Street Journal article.

In the opposite corner, we have, quite unsurprisingly, the Bush administration, who has "called for cuts at the National Endowment for the Arts... the administration proposed a cut of $16.3 million — to $128.4 million from $144.7 million", according to today's New York Times.

Those of us in the business, meanwhile, keep on fighting the good fight, doing what we do best - presenting great works of art to the broadest audiences possible.

A Super Tuesday Playlist

If you're the type who likes to coordinate music to your daily activities, here are a few ideas for music to vote by, from composers looking to effect change (local, national, or global) while under political fire of one kind or another. These are just off the top of my head - if you've got others to add, fire away in the comments...

1. Shostakovich, Symphony No. 7, Leningrad. Celebrating the glorious Communist victory over Nazi aggression! (Or was he?)

2. Sibelius, Finlandia. Freeing a nation from Russian oppression, and singing lustily about it.

3. Haydn, Symphony No. 45, Farewell. Fighting subtly for more vacation days.

4. Beethoven, Symphony No. 3, Eroica. Celebrating a great leader who turned out not to be so great after all...

5. Britten, War Requiem. A conscientious objector taking a hard stand against all military aggression, even the kind meant to protect him.

A second to reflect

Many thanks to all of you who attended our "Inside the Classics" concerts last week. I didn't really have a chance to reflect on those performances until tonight (in a hotel room in Fargo, ND, no less!), but wanted a chance to express my thanks to all.

Peter was a wonderful soloist to work with; for those of you who attended, when we rehearsed the "blindfolded conductor" bit, I told him to be ridiculous and unmusical and try to throw me off. Of course he just can't play unmusically, which made blindfolded conducting much easier than it should have been! And Sam, as always is the best cohost (and cohort) one could ask for. The orchestra, at this point, doesn't even blink an eye when we put a list of 18 excerpts in front of them, which speaks to their willingness to think outside of the usual symphonic box and go along with us on this grand experiment.

It was thrilling to see our houses fuller on both nights (particularly Thursday) than they were in November, and to see the number of people who stayed for the post-concert Q and A sessions. We hope we are creating something unique in this new series and appreciate both your feedback and support.

We just had a meeting this morning about our last "ItC" concert, featuring "Appalachian Spring" and are making initial plans for next season - look forward to seeing everyone at the next show!

Ensign Hicks To The Bridge!

In case anyone was in doubt about the lengths to which Sarah will go in fulfilling the duties of her assistant conductorship with our orchestra, the following cell phone photo, which I took backstage tonight during our pops concert, should serve as verification...


Yes, that is Sarah, wearing a Starfleet uniform, holding a tribble in her baton hand, and making the international sign for "I am a dweeby nerd." And yes: she was wearing this on stage, during the show, in full view of 2,450 people.

The best part, though, was when I stopped by her dressing room at intermission, as she had just finished changing into the Enterprise garb. At the sight of my raised eyebrow, she asked, "What? Does it look dorky?"

I just don't know how to even begin to answer that one...

Boldy going...

For all you Trekkies out there, the Minnesota Orchestra is presenting, tonight and tomorrow night at Orchestra Hall, a program entitled "To Boldly Go" featuring both music inspired by space (the final frontier) and the inimitable George Takei. We just finished the single rehearsal for the show (from 3-5:30 pm this afternoon), and I am blogging, eating dinner and getting ready for the 8 pm performance. It's a tough schedule for both orchestra and conductor, but we can't wait to see how many people show up for the costume contest and how the capacity crowd will react when Mr. Sulu walks onstage!