Beyond lip service

I've been trying to catch up on my reading - it's no small task to get through a dozen blog sites and peruse the arts sections of major papers, and I've gotten a little lax in my weeks off! Here's an article from May about a new educational initiative in Baltimore.

Venezuela's El Sistema has been the talk of the music world for the last few years, spurred on by Gustavo Dudamel's appointment to the music directorship of the LA Philharmonic last spring and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra's triumphant North American tour last fall; the pursuant national conversation surrounding the possibility of adapting the El Sistema "system" in the US has been endlessly fascinating.

"Music education is important" has been one of those sound bites that we as conductors continually drag out whenever we are asked about the place of classical/orchestral music in contemporary culture. Yes, studies have shown that kids in music tend to have better test scores, etc etc etc. But I so often feel like that it is only so much lip service; we in the orchestra business sometimes seem more bent on using the "music education" umbrella in creating a new generation of music consumers more than anything else ("audience cultivation" from a young age, as it were). And I can't tell you how many times I've heard a conductor talk about the significance of some educational initiative while in the meantime they themselves haven't conducted a children's concert or participated in an outreach event for years.

The difference with El Sistema, and now OrchKids in Balitmore, is the notion that music education is not just a tool for test-score improvement, or an added bonus for the most privileged of kids, but that it can be, in itself, a catalyst for social change. Which is a tremendous assertion, if you think about it. By taking some of the least privileged children in the country, systematically teaching them an instrument, providing them a safe haven after school, giving them a strong sense of community and self-worth and imparting the discipline and passion that help one succeed at anything in life, El Sistema has employed a "bottom-up" approach to music education. And in the process, it has provided a stabilizing force in the lives of its students, their families, and their communities at large.

It may all sound a bit idealistic, but it's not so far-fetched (after all, it's already been done in Venezuela!), and I was thrilled to see an El Sistema-inspired program get off the ground. What was even more thrilling was to see how it happened. Marin Alsop, the Baltimore Symphony's music director, received a MacArthur "Genius" Grant in 2005, to the tune of $500,000. To get OrchKids off the ground, Alsop donated the last $100,000 installment (as a 4-1 challenge grant). Which is a tremendous show of commitment to the possibilities of change, and a refreshing display of putting your money where your mouth is; Alsop is clearly paying more than lip service.

Embracing the Generation Gap

One of the challenges of coaching chamber music at Apple Hill is that, unlike most summer music programs, the campers we're working with, or "participants," in the local dialect, can range in age from 13 up to 95. There's no age limit on participating in a session here, and amateur adult musicians are allowed - no, encouraged - to keep coming back year after year. (Apple Hill is all about diversity in general - the camp t-shirts list dozens of countries from which participants have come over the years, and the racial and ethnic makeup is far more wide-ranging than any professional orchestra I've ever seen.) The adults aren't separated from the kids, either - it's perfectly normal to have a string quartet in which the membership features a 50-year age gap.

On the one hand, this is a wonderful idea. Adults playing music together for fun is an entertainment that seems to have nearly died out over the last century, with the rise of recorded music, and I'm all for including anyone as passionate as most of the adult participants here seem to be. Furthermore, having teenagers interacting with people two, three, even five times their age on a common level seems to do everyone a lot of good - the adults (particularly the oldest ones) seem positively rejuvenated by the experience, and the kids get a chance to see grown-ups at play, which makes adulthood seem a lot more interesting than it generally does when you're 16.

The flip side of the coin, however, is that coaching a chamber ensemble with both kids and adults in it is really, really difficult, for the simple reason that our brains are wired differently. Kids, of course, are continuously growing and developing the neural pathways in their brains that allow them to learn, which is why they pick up new skills so quickly. But the older we get, the more generally set our brains become, and the harder it is to form new pathways, and therefore, to learn new tricks. As adults, we compensate by using our lifetime of experience and sense of perspective to make up for our relative slowness in picking up new concepts and actions. It doesn't mean that kids are smarter than adults, of course - simply that we learn and respond to the world differently.

So, consider a string quartet in which two members are in their early teens, and two are north of 60. I've got one of those this week. I've also got one with three high school kids and one 30-something woman who teaches music at a high school. (I'm in awe of this teacher, by the way - imagine being someone who gives orders to kids for a living, and then volunteering to sit among them and take orders for a week!) And, just to round things out, I have a quintet made up entirely of young musicians under 25. (I call it my Control Group.)

The coaching experiences with these groups couldn't be more different, and even though it's occasionally frustrating trying to balance the needs of the two types of brain energy I'm working with, I feel like I learn a lot about human interaction just by trying. The main challenge is to remember that what works for one player won't necessarily work for another. Sure, the kids might end up bored for a few minutes as I slog through the seemingly endless repetitions needed to get a fresh fingering well and truly lodged in an adult's fingers, and the adults might sometimes marvel at a kid's conviction that he can get away with just showing up unprepared for a rehearsal and winging it. But for the most part, they all work remarkably well together, with a level of patience and good humor that I would never have expected.

I'm someone who has generally enjoyed being whatever age I am, and hasn't spent a lot of time mourning my lost youth or worrying about getting old. (College was fun, sure, but I don't really want to do it again, and as for aging, I just know too many elderly people who continue to be balls of energy to worry that there's a mandatory cutoff for enjoying life.) But I must admit that I spend nearly all of my free time hanging out with other people roughly my age, so it's great to get a chance to spend a length of time in close quarters with such a diverse group of musicians.

With very few exceptions, these people will never play music professionally, but it doesn't matter. Regardless of age, most of them aren't here to become the next Joshua Bell, or even the next Sam Bergman. They're here because they have an intellectual and musical curiosity about the world around them, and whether they're 16 or 60, they're here to have fun. I can get behind that.

Cutting remarks

Some last-minute work before we have to return the tile-cutter to Home Depot (truth be told, I'm wary of anything with spinning blades and happily let Paul do all the cutting). We wanted to retile the floor, too, but doesn't look like we'll be able to get around to that before I leave for Minnesota on Saturday.

Day 5: Tavener, The Bridegroom followed by Public Enemy, He got game

Who says an iPod can't have a sense of humor (and an ironic one at that)?

Listening to Public Enemy took me back to the mid-90's and the East Coast-West Coast hip-hop beef, Biggie vs. Tupac, Bad Boy vs. Death Row, etc. Imagine my delight to discover (with thanks again to Alex Ross) a monster summer jam devoted to calling out the likes of James Levine, the Kronos quartet and eight blackbird from the new-music duo Hybrid Groove Project. Holla!

Penultimate

Grouting is done!

Day 4: Brahms, Violin Concerto, III

Can someone explain to me the reasoning behind using this piece in the 2007 film "There Will Be Blood" (which I enjoyed immensely on DVD two nights ago)? The Johnny Greenwood is great, the Part works really well, but the Brahms seems so incongruous to me. Entertainment Weekly says "Leaps of romantic chordal grandeur from Brahms' Violin Concerto in D Major announce the launch of a fortune-changing oil well down the road from Eli Sunday's church — and then, much later, announce a kind of end of the world", but I don't know if I buy it. Any other thoughts?

Days That Make It All Worth It

So, as I mentioned a while back, I'm spending a couple of weeks in rural New Hampshire, teaching and performing at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music. It's my second summer here, which, as anyone who's ever worked at a summer camp will tell you, means that it's my first summer actually feeling comfortable in my surroundings. Like most other music camps, Apple Hill is chock full of people who've been coming for years or even decades, and it takes a newcomer a while to get his/her bearings. To make matters worse, I spent most of my time here last summer either on the phone dealing with a sudden and unexpected family crisis or rehearsing frantically for a performance of Bartok 4 that seemed to be on an impossible timetable. I left after putting in my two weeks, wondering whether I had come across as an antisocial jerk, and not 100% sure that I'd done a very good job as a coach.

As it turned out, I can't have screwed it up too badly, because I got asked back almost immediately, and judging from the number of Apple Hill people who found my Facebook profile and got in touch over the year, I must have at least been social enough to leave an impression. And that's a good thing, because I'm having an absolute blast this time around. I'm performing a Mendelssohn quintet that I've always wanted to play with four incredible musicians, two of whom I went to college with and have been waiting for the chance to reunite with. (The piece also induces a lot less stress than a Bartok quartet, which is nice when you have only six days to rehearse.)

I'm also coaching three small chamber ensembles - early quartets by Mozart and Haydn, and the Franck piano quintet - and as always, I'm struck by the unique challenge each separate group poses. On the one hand, I've done enough coaching in my life that I've developed a style that tends to stay with me regardless of who's in front of me. But one thing I learned from my college viola teacher was the importance of adapting to the needs of your students, and to me, that's the most challenging aspect of the job. I've had quartets so timid that the slightest sharp word would put them near tears, and others so enthusiastic that it was all I could do to keep them under control. Most fall in between those extremes, and the really fun groups have a mix of personalities in which a good coach can use the strengths of one player to draw out new skills from another.

It's a heavy schedule of teaching, rehearsing, and performing here - I'm actually working many more hours each day than I do back home with the orchestra, and since we live in the same basic area as the participants, I'm more or less always on duty if someone needs help with something. But places like Apple Hill, while they may be exhausting, offer the kind of experiences that professional musicians will often go out of their way to seek out.

When you make your living playing concerts week in and week out, it can become a grind, and grinding leads to cynicism and a lack of real appreciation for what we get to do for a living. Helping a group of teenagers learn how to pull off a single, confident, competent performance of a piece that was flummoxing them only a few days earlier is rejuvenating. More than that, it's a living reminder of similar experiences that made each of us want to play music for a living.

A few minutes ago, as I was writing this, the violist from my Franck piano quintet bounced in the door and flopped into the chair next to me. She's from Bulgaria, and is studying music in Boston. In our first coaching today, I wasn't sure how to approach her - she seemed a bit shy compared to the others in the group, and I didn't want to overwhelm her on the first day of what will surely be a difficult week. But here she was tonight, sitting here and talking a mile a minute about how much she loves viola, how her favorite composer is Shostakovich, and how excited she was to hear that a violist would be coaching her group. And all I could think about was how I used to sit on the porch at my own childhood music camp, talking a mile a minute to my favorite coach about how great the viola was, how Shostakovich was my favorite composer, and how excited I was to dig into the piano quintet I'd just been assigned for that week.

I think tomorrow, I'll try pushing her a little harder for that extra rich sound I need on her big solo in the Franck...

Almost done

As you can see, the tiling is done; all that's left to do is grout, seal and install a door.

Day 3: Dead Milkmen, RC's Mom

Huh? you say. For those of you who aren't from Philadelphia, didn't go to college in the 90's or are not aficionados of the punk rock scene, you probably wouldn't know the Dead Milkmen. Even if you did, you might not remember this track, the second off of 1988's Beezlebubba, which includes the following lyrics:

Gonna beat my wife
Look out!

Wife beatin'
Mistreatin'
Wife slappin'
It happens


(Sung in a soul/funk style).

At first, I didn't recognize the song (or who it was by), and was thus a little horrified (I'm not big on domestic violence, to say the least). And I was a bit confused, as I figured it had to be an ironic commentary on something, but I couldn't remember the context. Then I recognized the deconstructed funk groove and the James Brown-esque caterwauling as the creation of the idiosyncratically humorous punksters that are the Dead Milkmen. And I remembered the context; in 1988, Brown was briefly jailed for, yes, beating his wife (this was in his violent PCP phase), so the song is indeed an ironic commentary.

It made me think of how some music is so topical as to be rendered unlistenable unless it's within a specific context. The Dead Milkmen track is odd, derivative and offensive unless you understood when and about whom it was written (and then you might still find it offensive, but that's just a matter of taste!). So, in a way, it doesn't really stand up to the test of time.

Is the test of truly great music whether it can be taken simply as music, out of any existing context? I thought immediately of pieces like Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique; if we detached the music from the narrative of the artist's opium induced haze and obsession with his beloved, does the music stand up? For me, it certainly does; there is a musical progression that's both organic and logical that takes place over the course of the movements, from the yearning of the first two movements to the ominous rumbles at the end of the third that foreshadow the increasingly violent and macabre expression of the fourth and fifth movements. Sure, it's more fun to listen to that last movement imagining witches cackling and skeletons doing a grotesque round dance, but the music would work on its own regardless.

That's narrative context; what about historic context? Do we need to know that Beethoven had conceived of his Eroica Symphony as an homage to Napoleon (or even that he had Republican leanings) to enjoy the music? I think not. And that is, in large part, what makes that music great; it needs no context, because it is empirically powerful and moving.

As a more modern example, I thought of the film scores and event-specific pieces written by John Williams (and if you haven't figured it out over the last 8 months of this blog, I'm a huge Williams fan). His film music is magic in the context of the movie it was written for, but I find them just as inventive and evocative as pure music. And I don't need to know that "Summon the Heroes" was written for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics; it's just a great orchestral fanfare, however you look at it. It's timeless.

Sinatra is timeless, as are the Beatles; I think Billy Joel is timeless, Elvis Costello. I suppose some of this is a matter of taste, but I feel like it goes beyond that; the best music of any genre has a freshness and an immediacy about it that exists regardless of when or for what reasons it was initially created. I'm not a big reggae fan, but I find a lot of Bob Marley to be utterly timeless. I wonder what music others think have stood the test of time?

The 5% Reality Check

So, the other day, I noticed a short post on NewMusicBox from a young Minneapolis-based composer, pointing out that, according to a seminar he'd recently attended, the percentage of college music majors who actually go on to a performing career is a miniscule 5%. 85% of music majors do end up working in the music world to some degree, but considering that the vast majority of young musicians in college go into the experience assuming that they will have a performing career, 5% is a shockingly low number. The author of the post puts it even more starkly...

Practicing eight hours a day is a great way to become a virtuoso, but it's also a great way to develop an eating disorder, and apparently it makes you only incrementally more likely to sustain a career as a full-time soloist or orchestral player than someone who only put in four hours per day.

Assuming these numbers are correct (there's no attribution in the post,) I'm of two minds on the issue. As part of the 5% who succeeded in carving out the career I sought when I entered music school, I'm horrified that there are a) so many young musicians deluding themselves about their prospects, and b) so many mediocre teachers willing to accommodate those delusions to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars in tuition money.

This isn't to say that teachers ought to be discouraging the vast majority of their students from seeking careers in the field - obviously, it would be wrong to suggest that the success stories can always be predicted from the get-go - but even at many prestigious conservatories, there are, frankly, a lot of students who don't have the slightest chance of ever landing a "real" performing gig and making a living from it. And no one tells them this! Other students feel (correctly) that it isn't their place to shatter someone's dreams, teachers worry that telling a student to find another focus would lead to (legitimate) questions about why the student was accepted to the school in the first place, and administrators really aren't terribly interested in what students do or do not do with their degrees.

Worse, music is almost unique among "skilled trade" fields in that you can major in it at almost any college and university, regardless of whether that school actually has the faculty and resources necessary to train its students for professional careers in music. The kids at these schools by and large don't have a prayer of making the big-time, regardless of their talent, because they have no hope of getting the top-drawer training musicians must get in order to advance. This may not be a fair reality, but it is a reality.

On the other hand, many of the 80% of music majors who work in "the field" but don't perform for a living would probably say that I'm taking a very limited view of these numbers. After all, what percentage of students at an average liberal arts college in the US actually wind up doing exactly what their major would have indicated? One of my brothers majored in political science at Macalester and is now a professional cook, yet he doesn't consider his education to have been wasted, since it taught him a lot about the world and how to interact with it in an intelligent way. Couldn't music be the same?

Supporting this glass-half-full viewpoint is the fact that orchestra musicians are forever insisting that the folks who manage orchestras are doomed to failure unless they truly "get" the music business. So shouldn't we be appreciative of those who start out aiming for a performing career, but change course and carve out another niche for which they are better suited? We in the orchestra business get some of our best CEOs and management types via such progressions.

I guess my larger concern would be for the thousands of young musicians who haven't the foresight to see the demise of their dreams approaching, and either fall back on teaching other students whose ignorance mirrors their own (and whose employers choose to ignore their inadequacy,) or find themselves having to start their schooling all over in order to earn a degree they might actually use.

But like I say, I'm part of the 5%, and therefore not in the best position to judge. So what about it? Anyone out there a former music major, or someone who considered majoring in music? Do you regret the decision? Celebrate it? And do you agree or disagree with my premise that there are a lot of degree-granting institutions that just shouldn't even have a music major available? Your comments are eagerly awaited...

More construction

Progress has been made!!



As you can see, all the cement board is now up and the seams are sealed.

Musically, today, we switched to my iPod, which yielded, around hour 2:37 (during cement board measuring):

Day 2: Minoru Miki, Danses Concertantes I

Miki is the Japanese composer who has probably done most to seamlesly meld traditional instruments (such as the koto and shakuhachi) with a Western neo-classical idiom. One of his most notable works was commissioned by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1981, Kyu-no Kyoku - "Symphony for Two Worlds". It's a piece that I'm quite familiar with as I was present for all performances of the piece during its American premiere with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur.

Actually, I was acting as coordinator and translator during a North American tour by Pro Musica Nipponia, a traditional instrument ensemble founded by Miki in 1964, and our first stop was NYC. Part of the Philharmonic gig included a couple of Young People's concerts, where I was onstage, ostensibly to translate for the Japanese musicians - they were doing instrument demos and I was translating to English for the young audience. A funny moment, though, during an orchestra demonstration for "Peter and the Wolf" - Masur insisted on talking during the demos, and his heavily-inflected English made the word "duck" (the oboe solo in "Peter") sound remarkably liked "dog", much to the confusion and consternation of both audience and orchestra. I eventually jumped in and ad libbed a little discussion of how the timbre of the oboe was similar to the nasal quack of a duck - the orchestra looked at me with relief, the kids got it, but Masur looked at me as if to say "But that's what I just said!".

Miki is less-known outside of Japan; when we think of Japanese composers certainly the first who comes to mind is Toru Takemitsu, both for his concert music and his movie and TV soundtracks. And I have another personal connection here; I was narrator for a world premiere of a Takemitsu piece, Family Tree (conducted by Leonard Slatkin, who years later has become a mentor). Unfortunately Takemitsu, a composer I've revered for years, was too ill to attend the premiere, and I never got to meet him. But certainly a memorable week, yet again onstage with the New York Philharmonic, in front of a microphone.

So, for those of you who have asked me how I got to be so comfortable chatting onstage during our Inside the Classics shows, now you know - I've been doing it for years!

Constructing vacation

We've just begun our two weeks off between the end of the regular season and the beginning of the summer season (we have a week of outdoor concerts - Symphony for the Cities - before a month of Sommerfest). Sam's spending his vacation playing and coaching at Apple Hill. Mine was going to be a working vacation as well, but the set of concerts I was scheduled to guest conduct this week were scrubbed because the hosting orchestra very unfortunately had to cancel its summer season.

So, I find myself with an unscheduled week (unheard of!), which I guess I could spend sleeping in, eating takeout and playing XBox...or maybe learning Ariadne auf Naxos...but I'm really trying to get away from working/studying all the time - the brain needs to be stimulated in different ways, after all...

So, I've undertaken a construction project; begun yesterday and to continue through the next several days - I'm building a new shower in our master bathroom (and not by myself, fortunately; my husband Paul actually built said master bathroom from scratch 2 years ago, from wiring to plumbing to construction to toilet installation, so you could say he's pretty handy!). Here's the progress from yesterday:



The framing is done and the first few bits of cementboard are up. It's pretty time intensive work in close quarters, and a very long 10-hour day. What helps us while away the time (besides arguing whether the studs are plumb or not) is listening to our iPods on shuffle; we started yesterday with Paul's machine and its 3207 tracks.

I'm always curious what music people listen to, and the shuffle option on an iPod is perhaps the best way to get a cross section of someone's musical choices. So, here is the first in a series of musical musings on select iPod tracks (to accompany my construction photos.)

Day 1: Mahler 4, 3rd movement (which, incidentally, was preceded by Public Enemy's "Burn, Hollywood, burn")

Let me begin by saying I'm one of those people who love Mahler. Sam's written about people of my ilk and those who wouldn't think of sitting through a Mahler Symphony.

So, let me set the scene; we are drilling in cement board, and Mahler comes on. It's a quiet opening, barely audible over the screeching of the electric drill, but the tune was unmistakeable, the long-spinning string melody, and I had to stop construction and listen to the whole thing (it clocks in around 20 minutes - my husband was none too happy to be left alone with the cement board for so long). I remember how in college I would put on recordings of Mahler symphonies and absolutely wallow in them, in the true sense of the word - there is something immediately visceral about Mahler which compels me to emotionally wade into his music and which precludes participation in any other activity.

I have a theory that there are Mahler people and Bruckner people. I am absolutely not a Bruckner person (in fact, he's probably one of the few composers I really cannot conduct.) Both composer tend to be long-winded and grandiose. But for me, Bruckner, with his "cathedral of sound" and four-square phrasing, is too above earthly concerns, inhabiting an elevated spiritual space which seems utterly removed from the complexities of real life. Mahler, in contrast, seems obsessed (and often, manically depressed) by temporal matters in a way that speaks directly to my sense of our impenetrable and untidy existence. Bruckner gives us the metaphysical uplift; Mahler gives us the physical world, but in such a transcendent way.

My husband, the horn player, admits to enjoy playing Bruckner - but given a choice, he would listen to Mahler. I wonder if there are others who make this distinction?

100% Organic

Well, before getting sidetracked back there by disruptive clappers, I promised a great story about the specific associations orchestras can form with certain pieces of music. Those few of you who've been nosing around this blog since the beginning may already know this one - we talked about it on our first podcast back in November - but it's my favorite MN Orch story ever, and most of you probably didn't make it all the way through that magnum opus of an audio file, so here's the written version...

It happened in the summer of 2000, I believe, although it could have been 2001. It was a summer season concert of light classics - operatic stuff, mostly. On the podium was a conductor of some international reputation. Since I like my job, let's call him Gus.

Anyway. One of the works on the program was the omnipresent Intermezzo from Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. So we're slogging through it in rehearsal, and suddenly, Gus stops us, and snaps, "Where is the organ?" Well, none of us knew that there was an organ part for that piece, and apparently, neither did our keyboardist, because he wasn't even in the building. Gus insisted that there was an organ part doubling the strings in the middle section (the main melody), and that he had to have it, or the show could not go on. So the personnel manager arranged for the keyboardist to come in that afternoon for a special one-on-one rehearsal with the conductor, and we finished the morning rehearsal without incident.



Now, we don't have a real, full-size organ at Orchestra Hall, and the really high-quality electronic one takes quite a long time to set up and takes up a lot of space on stage, so for this brief piece, our keyboardist was using a small, high-end synthesizer pumped through the house sound system. You wouldn't want to use it for anything too important, but it sounds like an organ, so no big deal. But we would later find out that, during the afternoon one-on-one, Gus continually insisted that the organ was not nearly loud enough. Our stage crew tried to explain that it would be much louder that evening, with the board operator controlling the volume level from the back of the hall, but he would have none of it, and was reaching over the keyboard player to turn volume knobs and generally do anything he could to make the little keyboard louder.

None of the rest of us knew any of this, of course, and that night, we arrived at the Intermezzo, and began to play, with the synthesizer stationed near the door at stage right. We in the strings played the introductory segment, took a hefty luftpause, and began to launch into the slow, sweet melody that everyone knows. Immediately, it was clear that many, many, many things were horribly wrong. First of all, the organ, which had joined us in unison as requested, was playing at approximately the volume level of a jet engine, causing about half the audience to jump as if they'd been shot.

But this was not the worst of it. It seems that, in his rage at not being able to get the instrument loud enough in rehearsal, Gus had begun turning knobs more or less at random, and he had unknowingly turned the transposition knob one half-step to the sharp side. We had 60 string players sawing away in F major, and one impossibly loud organ doubling us in F#.

Even worse, the chaos of the moment utterly flustered our keyboardist, who… kept… playing. Gus was so apoplectic that he couldn't even signal a cutoff -- he just stood there on the podium, his arms fluttering and his face turning purple. The keyboardist knew something was wrong, obviously, but he wasn't entirely certain if it was him or not, and he figured that, with the organ turned up so loud, he'd better not just stop dead. So he kept on going. One of our percussionists was turning pages on the organ part, and actually considered pulling the power plug on the synth, but decided he'd better not chance it. Meanwhile, our friendly, supportive Minnesota audience was plastered against the back of their chairs by the dissonant noise.

After a couple of bars, when it became clear that the organ wasn't stopping, those of us with perfect pitch worked out what key it was playing in, and slid on up to join it, in the hope of salvaging something from the piece. But around that time, Gus cut through his near-paralysis with a mighty slash of his baton directed at the keyboardist, who, stunned, stopped playing immediately. So now, we had -- along with a significant decibel loss in the hall -- 30 string players in F, and 30 in F#. It took a full beat for us all to slide back down to the original key. By this time, one second violinist and one cellist were laughing so hard that they had had to stop playing entirely. The rest of us weren't too far behind. Gus was the color of a Minnesota Vikings helmet.

We finished the piece, somehow, and Gus stalked angrily offstage, with most of the audience sitting in stunned silence, and a few hardy Minnesotans offering polite applause. Before the door had even closed behind him, Gus was yelling in German at whatever unfortunate soul happened to have been standing in the wings. The orchestra burst into peals of laughter, except for the poor keyboardist, who had already made his escape from the building. A minute or so later, Gus stalked back out onstage, without a word or a smile or an apology to the audience, and continued the concert as if nothing had happened.

Every orchestra has a favorite train wreck story, but I've never heard a better one than ours. The only sad part is that our library claims not to have recorded the concert, so we don't actually have it on tape. But that's okay, really: to this day, whenever we play the Intermezzo, at least 4 or 5 string players are guaranteed to start the middle section a half-step high in the first rehearsal...

Light Blogging Ahead: This will likely be my last blog post for a couple of weeks, as I'm headed out East tomorrow to play and coach at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in rural New Hampshire. I'll try to post something while I'm there, but the nearest internet access is miles away, so no guarantees. I'll be back in Minneapolis somewhere around the 4th of July...

Torn from the tabloids (or Scientific American)

A recent slew of opera announcements has caught my attention, not least for the fact that each of these projected productions is based on contemporary, topical and perhaps controversial subject matter.

First up, the seemingly silly, an opera based on the brief but sensational life of Playmate/golddigger/Trimspa spokeswoman Anna Nicole Smith by Richard Thomas and Mark-Anthony Turnage. At first glance, it’s a superficially sensationalist, ripped-from-the-headlines topic by the same guy (Thomas) who was librettist/composer of “Jerry Springer – The Opera”. On closer inspection, it appears that this tawdry and tragic life isn’t so far removed from countless other opera heroines, from Dalila to Carmen, who manipulated men for adoration/power/financial gain. This could be an interesting production, particularly with Turnage, a highly-respected jazz-influenced English composer who has two very successfully operas under his belt, at the helm.

Next up, another tragic story, this time fictional; an opera based on Annie Proulx’s novel “Brokeback Mountain” (yes, the very novel that yielded Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning film) commissioned by the New York City Opera. My surprise at this production came not so much from the subject/libretto (although I find the idea of a cowboy opera absolutely charming), but from the composer, Charles Wuorinen. While Wuorinen is certainly no stranger to the novel-turned opera (his adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel, “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”, premiered at the City Opera in October 2004), he’s a seriously serialist composer whose works are notable for their unrepentant twelve-tone modernism that make little concession for populist tastes. It could be that because this story has been such a part of the contemporary cultural zeitgeist (not least for it’s honest treatment of a homosexual relationship) I have a hard time imagining it under a very different artistic/aesthetic guise. By the same token Wuorinen was highly lauded for his last effort for the City Opera (the aforementioned “Haroun”); “Brokeback” will be a reimagining that I look forward to with great curiosity.

Finally, another movie-connected opera based on Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” commissioned by Milan’s famed La Scala and to be composed by Giorgio Battistelli. Climate change has been at times a controversial topic (there are still some very vocal global warming skeptics who claim that current climate changes are due to cyclical global temperature shifts and not because of human-caused increases in greenhouse gas emissions, despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary) and certainly a rather loose and unrestricted basis for an opera (will there be an “Ozone Aria”?). "It will be about the tragedy of our present situation," Battistelli said. "It is a great challenge, of course, to write an opera on such an unusual subject. It is certainly not the story of Romeo and Juliet." To say the least. But from a production standpoint, there is the exciting possibility of using projections, SFX and other multimedia as part of the performance experience.

Opera tends to be more cutting edge than anything you would encounter in a concert hall; the theatrical aspect certainly supports innovation. In an increasingly visual/multimedia society, it has the upper hand in terms of visibility and popularity (one only needs attend an HD Met Broadcast to see that opera certainly reaches a wide demographic). What does this bode for the future of concert music?

Premature Jocularity

So. Anyone at the concert last night? No? Okay, here's what happened:

The big piece on the program was Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade, featuring our concertmaster, Jorja Fleezanis, on the big violin solos. It's a pretty massive piece, but, like a lot of tone poems, it ends with a whisper, the solo violin holding a solitary high harmonic as the winds and horns fade away underneath. It's a breathless moment when you do it right, and there's always a wonderful few seconds just after the sound drifts away, when audience and orchestra are waiting together for the air to clear, and then the applause can begin.

Only last night, that moment didn't get a chance to happen, because there was this guy. He was sitting somewhere around the 18th row on the main floor, dead center, right in the middle of Orchestra Hall's acoustic sweet spot. And clearly, he enjoyed the performance, and couldn't wait to let us know, because Jorja's bow had only just left the string when dude leaped to his feet, pumped his fist, and shouted, "YEAH!" before beginning to applaud wildly.

He was, I should stress, alone in this. There's always a lot of back and forth among musicians and audience members about whether we should really expect audiences to conform to our idea of when applause is appropriate, and I've said many times that it doesn't bother me a bit if someone is moved to applaud between movements, or laugh when something funny happens in the music. But this was not one of those times. This guy clearly wanted the spotlight to be directly on him, and was going to do whatever it took to accomplish that, even if it meant ruining that breathless moment for everyone else in the hall.

Osmo was not amused. He always hates early applause, and has frequently shown his displeasure to the audience when it happens. But this time, he was really angry, especially when the guy kept whooping and smacking his hands together as loudly as he could, even as people around him shouted at him to sit down, and Osmo whirled around to glare from the podium. When it was clear that dude wasn't going to quit, the rest of the audience began to applaud, knowing that they weren't going to get their moment back, and the concert was over regardless. Osmo glared harder, and extended a sarcastic thumbs-up at the offender, who pumped his fist a few more times in return. After what seemed like an uncomfortable eternity, Osmo finally motioned for us to stand, then swept off the podium angrily. It was nearly a half-minute before he would come back out to take his bows, and for a moment, I thought it was possible that he wouldn't reemerge at all.

Now, there is a school of thought that says that a conductor has no business chastising an audience member, even a clueless and rude one, under any circumstances. If the guy liked the performance that much, says this line of reasoning, why would you ever discourage him from showing it, especially with classical music so hard up for fans these days? Personally, I think this is hogwash. We've become so accustomed to the conventional wisdom (which is wrong, by the way) which says that classical music is in crisis that we've somehow decided that we should be the one entertainment form that has no rules of behavior, lest we put off a potential convert. But this argument presumes that concert hall newbies aren't just inexperienced, but actually stupid, childlike morons who have no idea how to behave in a public place. And I don't buy it.

Back when I was about 19, working as a counselor at the music camp I've been going to for more than 20 years now, one of the faculty decided to make use of the giant speakers we'd rented for a dance the night before to give the kids a Mahler 8 experience to remember. He invited them all to bring pillows and blankets down to the concert barn, and just lie there listening to the massive Symphony of a Thousand blasted over an audio system big enough to actually mimic the concert hall experience. The piece is 90 minutes, and a few kids wandered away as it wore on. One, though, returned about two minutes before the end, and stood silently in the doorway, waiting. And then, the moment that the last chord died away, and everyone began that wonderful moment of silent waiting for the emotion to drain away as well, the kid in the doorway spoke up. "That was a really long song," he said loudly. "I can't believe you guys sat here and listened to that whole thing!"

The room rose up as one and began shouting at him, and a few kids even attacked him with their pillows. His best friend sidled up to him from behind, and murmured, "Not cool, dude. Seriously not cool." And here's the point: the anger wasn't because this was a stupid kid, or a kid unable to take the measure of a situation like this, but precisely because he could have, and chose not to. He wanted the attention to be on him, not the music, so he found a way to make that happen, just like the jackass who was with us last night did. Not cool, dude.

Lingering Associations

A while back, Sarah was writing about earworms and the havoc they can wreak among musicians, and this week, I'm experiencing what you might call an extracurricular variation on the tune that gets stuck in your head. It's the tune that triggers a memory so sharp that you can't help but think of it every time the tune is played. This happens to orchestra musicians all the time, since we play many pieces of standard repertoire dozens, even hundreds of times over the course of our careers. Sometimes, the memory is highly personal, but in an orchestra, it's more often communal, something specific that happened at a certain moment of a certain performance that everyone will remember for the rest of their lives.

One example from the Minnesota Orchestra's recent history is the end of the Dvorak cello concerto. Back in 2000, when I was new in the orchestra, we played a young people's concert called "Dvorak's Discovery," in which a young boy somehow meets Dvorak and learns about his life. It was a somewhat corny show, though effective, and at one point, as Dvorak (who was played by veteran Twin Cities actor Steve Yoakam) was talking about his own childhood, the orchestra began to play the end of the cello concerto at a murmur underneath the speech. At one particularly peaceful moment in the music, Dvorak mentioned that he worked in his father's sausage factory as a child, then turned to his young friend and asked, "Do you like sausage?" Ever since, we can't make it through a rehearsal of that concerto without at least ten people asking their stand partners if they like sausage.

This week, the memory is visual, and far more recent in vintage, and it comes in the second movement of Scheherezade, which is the featured work on our season finale. Earlier this season (the same week as our second set of Inside the Classics concerts, in fact) we played the entire piece on another young people's program, with dancers from several local companies fleshing out the story behind the music for the kids. The choreography was very kid-friendly and acrobatic, and one move has managed to permanently invade my personal playback of the music. In the middle of the second movement, as the music swirls around in a lilting two-count, the dancers, who had been more or less lining up and moving in unison, suddenly broke free of each other in an instant and began bouncing like rag dolls around the stage, looking for all the world like a bunch of Dr. Seuss characters whose heads had just come unglued from their shoulders. By the last show, a number of us were subtly mimicking the dancers from within the orchestra, and this week, as we approached that same moment in the music, I felt my shoulders involuntarily dip and my head loll, and I heard my friend Jen Strom stifle a giggle behind me. I honestly don't know how I'm going to keep from doing it again in the concerts.

I've got another great story of a musical moment forever sullied and preserved in Minnesota Orchestra history, but it takes a while to tell, so I'll save it for my next post sometime this weekend...

More leisure suits

As Sam mentions in his previous post, we hosted/emceed the Orchestra's annual fundraiser, the Symphony Ball, which was a memorable night, not least for its ABBA-licious 70's-ness.

Osmo was in full regalia as well, here's a candid shot captured right after the show (he's such a good sport - please note the green-glitter platform shoes):

Leisure Suits And Long Nights

So, last night was the Minnesota Orchestra's annual Symphony Ball, our biggest gala fundraiser of the year. It's a massive undertaking, usually combining a mini-concert by the orchestra, a black-tie dinner, live and silent auctions, speeches, dancing, and all manner of drunken revelry. To be honest, it's not usually something I participate in beyond my orchestral duties. But this year, Sarah and I were asked to emcee the whole evening, so I was present from start to finish for the first time. It's a whirlwind evening, and you find yourself somewhat amazed that everything actually goes off as planned, although given how much time our development department and volunteer organizers spend nailing down every last detail, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised.

Anyway, the one somewhat unfortunate side effect of hosting this particular event was, um... how do I put this? Hm. Well, okay. It was this...

Fellow violist Matt Young helpfully snapped that shot with his cell phone in the men's locker room at Orchestra Hall, shortly after I finished changing into the green polyester leisure suit and ultra-paisley polyester shirt in which I would spend the next couple of hours. See, the theme of the evening was the music of Swedish supergroup ABBA, and the orchestra was playing backup to an incredible a cappella band from Finland called Rajaton, and Sarah and I had decided to get into the spirit of things with some rented disco-era costumes. Let's just say that one of us looked a lot better than the other...

Unfortunately clad hosts aside, the show was awfully fun to watch. Rajaton is a very high-energy bunch, and their voices are perfect for the ABBA hits. But back home in Finland, they're actually better known for their own a cappella material, some of which is positively shiver-inducing.



They're coming back to Minneapolis this fall to do a pops show with the orchestra, this time featuring the music of Queen. It ought to be a blast - there may be a lot that can be said against the pop music of the '70s, but it does seem to work unusually well with a full orchestra backing it. I know that, as a classical musician, I'm supposed to consider all pops work demeaning and beneath my dignity as an artist, but honestly, I love this stuff. How often does a violist get to rock out on an electric guitar riff that he grew up listening to on the radio? Sure, ABBA may not have Brahms's pedigree, but they knew how to work a serious hook...



Late update: Sarah has chimed in with more pics of our personal evening of That 70's Show. And like I said, some animals are more equal than others...

Elements

Having been raised in Hawaii, I have a certain affinity for the ocean (specifically) and water (generally). My husband, Philly-born and raised, spent childhood vacations in the Poconos and thus has a thing for mountains - he was in absolute heaven the three summers we spent together at the Verbier festival high in the Swiss Alps. Now, I like a good snowy peak, hiking on alpine fields and all that other great mountain stuff, but it's really a body of water (particularly the Pacific Ocean) that makes me happy. And it's more than mere enjoyment; I really feel like I'm in my element.

I'm on a short trip back to Minnesota after almost two weeks away, and I made it back to town in time to catch the Orchestra concert tonight. I've watched Osmo conduct countless concerts in my two years here, but it struck me that because of the vagaries of my schedule and the amount of time I spend on the road, I hadn't had the opportunity to see him do a Sibelius symphony. Luckily, I had that chance tonight.

When he is conducting Sibelius, Osmo is clearly in his element. And I don't say that glibly, simply because he is known as a fine Sibelius interpreter, or because both he and Sibelius are Finnish (although it probably does account for at least some of his affinity for that composer). The first half of the concert was excellent - a well-crafted and moving piece by Missy Mazzoli, a brief Bach transcription and a thrillingly played MacMillan percussion concerto, and Osmo was conducting with his usual keen focus and kinetic energy. But in the second half, with the Sibelius 6th Symphony, there was an almost imperceptible shift in his body language, a palpable relaxing of his posture, a more fluid vocabulary of movement that indicated an absolute comfort with the music.

It's not just about being intimately acquainted with a work; there needs to be a deep personal connection there. This sort of individual resonance with a work can come from continuous study and multiple performances over the years, but sometimes a conductor's profound affinity for a certain work or composer just is.

We conductors often find ourselves performing repertoire that, though great music (empirically speaking), holds no particular attraction to us. We might intellectually enjoy it and find it beautiful and worthwhile, but it holds no personal resonance, and we try to avoid performing it as much as possible; music is harder when you're not emotionally vested. I have my own list of works/composers in a "great music, but not for me" category (Bruckner comes to mind).

But with repertoire that has profound personal resonance, one finds a deep satisfaction in performance that's really hard to describe; there's just a rightness about it. It's easy to conduct when you're in your element. And it was lovely to see Osmo in his.

If Mario Had A Marimba...

As most readers probably know, we're winding up a three-week Percussion Festival this week at Orchestra Hall, and the offerings have ranged from slightly humorous to decidedly populist to deeply intellectual. Percussionists tend to come in for a lot of flak in the business (What do you call an anti-social alcoholic who hangs out with musicians?), but there really isn't much in life and music more fun than watching a bunch of folks wailing away at things with sticks. To that end, here's one of my current favorite clips floating around the series of tubes - the tunes in this medley should be comfortingly familiar to anyone who (like Sarah and me) grew up in the Age of Nintendo...

References

I'm always curious to see how classical music is referenced in popular culture, particularly movies - Sam and I have both written a couple of posts on the topic.

So imagine my delight last night when I caught a screening of "Ironman" during a scene in which Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges - who for years now I can only think of as the Big Lebowski) sits at a piano, tinkling out an unfamiliar classical-era-sounding bit of music. Or course I had to sit through the closing credits to learn the identity of the piece...which is apparently a tune from a piano concerto by none other than Antonio Salieri. This would be innocuous enough (though a little bit odd), were it not for context.

One of the central relationships in the movie is between Obadiah Stane and Tony Stark/Ironman (Robert Downey Jr., who I adore), partners in a weapons manufacturing company. Stane is the elder statesman, respected in the industry, savvy and mercenary, more business than brilliance. Stark is the younger, maverick genius, an inveterate party boy who nevertheless possesses most of the intellect, inspiration and creative spark of the pair.

(Spoiler alert) There is an underlying jealousy on Stane's part; in fact, it's Stane that sets out to destroy the younger man, setting into motion the entire plot of the film, a scenario that is oddly reminiscent of... "Amadeus". Stark plays Wolfi to Stane's Salieri, which makes it even more fitting that this is the composer being played by Stane in that piano scene. It's the kind of minute detail that's absolutely delightful in its obscure(d) reference, a cleverly hidden allusion.

The other music reference I caught (yes, yes, besides the tune from the 1966 cartoon version of "Ironman" being played in the casino scene) was the moment in which Stane (while doing something that will certainly cause Stark's death - I'll leave out the details, go see the movie!) describes the latest incredible invention of Stark's as "[his] ninth symphony" - a reference to the "ninth symphony curse", a superstition that one will die after the completion of their ninth symphony (usually a magnum opus - prominent examples include Beethoven, Bruckner and Mahler). Again, a reference that assumes a certain amount of historical/musical/cultural sophistication - which I find encouraging in a mainstream film. And fantastic action scenes, to boot! Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours on a free Monday night.

Musicians Behaving Badly

In recent years, it's become an article of faith among those who run orchestras that audiences are terribly turned off by the way orchestra musicians conduct themselves onstage. In particular, orchestras who continue to face inward when brought to their feet by the conductor are a favorite target, with the idea being that it's disrespectful not to face the audience that's applauding you. (The Minnesota Orchestra has had an unofficial policy of turning out to face the audience since shortly after I joined in 2000, and Osmo has occasionally reminded us that when we do this, we should try to remember not to allow the exhaustion of the concert to show on our faces, because it tends to look from the audience like either boredom or unhappiness.)

Other common complaints include musicians who look bored during concerts (especially if they are wind players who only play a few bars in a particular piece,) members of the orchestra speaking to each other during bows, and musicians whose dress does not appear to be up to the formal standards of the business. (This last type of complaint is nearly always directed at female musicians, who have a considerably less restrictive dress code than the men - we wear white tie and tails in the evening, black suits for matinees, while their dress code basically just says, "Wear something black.")

Musicians can get fairly defensive about these sorts of complaints, and I'll attempt not to do that here. There are those who believe strongly that we're on stage to play music, and that the visual component is irrelevant, and therefore not the audience's business. This is, of course, a ludicrous and self-defeating argument, since we're supposedly engaged in a life-or-death struggle of trying to convince people that the live music experience is better than sitting at home with your CD collection. Of course there's a visual component, and of course the audience will be affected if we look as if we resent them, or are bored by what we're doing.

That having been said, I have occasionally been stunned by some of the complaints orchestras receive, and amused by how contradictory they are. I've seen letters from patrons complaining that a particular musician was moving too much while s/he played, and letters complaining that the orchestra ought to move more, so as to indicate interest. (That different musicians have different physical styles which are not easily changed never seems to occur to anyone. I tend to be a mover, largely because I have a small frame and short arms for the instrument I play, and therefore I have to adjust my arm angles more than someone with longer arms would. I also find it easiest to play exactly with my principal when I roughly mimic his breathing and movements.) I've heard complaints from the audience that musicians look too unhappy while performing, but also know of at least one circumstance where a specific member of the Minnesota Orchestra was sharply upbraided for having been smiling too broadly at some orchestral inside joke during a concert.

An old friend of mine who started her career as the acting concertmaster of a Deep South orchestra reported that her employer received regular complaints about what she wore to concerts. One letter would blast her for wearing heels that were too high and therefore provocative (she is a tall, willowy sort,) and the next week, another complainer would write in to ask whether it was too much to ask that the concertmaster not wear ugly flats to a formal concert. Her black nylons were derided as too sexy, but even a flash of bare leg would draw another complaint. Interestingly, no one ever seemed to complain about anything to do with her performance as a musician.

It's easy to dismiss a lot of complaints about our comportment as nitpicking by the type of people who read newspapers only so that they can look for supposed examples of left- or right-wing bias. An analogy you hear musicians go to frequently is that of athletes on the field of play, who are hardly expected to adjust their facial expressions to suit the crowd. (It's a flawed analogy, of course, since athletes are constantly assailed by press and public for supposed violations of protocol and appearance that have little to do with the game.) But the reality is that musicians are just as concerned as anyone about the way we appear before the public, and debates rage regularly on industry message boards concerning what visual standard we should hold ourselves to.

I've always sort of fallen back on the idea that we ought to concern ourselves primarily with being whole-heartedly engaged in what we're doing on stage, and with enjoying the music ourselves so that our energy will be infectious. But that's a bit of a dodge on my part, really, since I've also spent time on this blog describing the various shenanigans engaged in by our viola section, both in rehearsals and in concert. Is it disrespectful of the audience for a handful of string players to occasionally get a bit silly during a show? Does the answer change if the music itself is silly and fun? Do we have a responsibility to always treat the music we're playing as Great Art That Must Be Respected, or has our genre gotten over itself enough to allow for a variety of atmospheres in the concert hall?

Those weren't rhetorical questions. I think it's safe to say that most of the readers of this blog don't fall into the stereotypical category of Stuffy Classical Music Fan, so I'm genuinely interested in what you think an orchestra's comportment ought to be. Fire away in the comments, if you would...