All for one, Part II

So, less than twelve hours after the final cutoff of "Broadway Rocks", I was on my way to Philadelphia for a concert at the Mann Center. Outdoor venues present their own complications (iffy acoustics, weather, flying/biting insects), on top of the usual challenges of producing a pops show. And this one had it's own special features; fog machines, lasers and on-stage projections. Yes, friends, I conducted a show with a Pink Floyd cover band, The Machine.

The orchestra-du-jour was the Delaware Symphony, and it was a reunion of sorts; having spent 9 years in Philly during my Curtis years (and beyond), I know many of the musicians in the area, including nearly a dozen members of the DSO. The orchestra didn't exactly know what to expect, particularly as there were quite a few who had never heard a Pink Floyd tune, much less entertained the possibility of ever playing one. Fortunately for me, the personnel manager of the DSO, who must have a fantastic sense of humor, hired my husband to fill in a hole in the horn section ("I think you know the conductor", he emailed). Paul's a big Pink Floyd fan, and he had originally planned to make the trip up to Philly to catch the show from the mosh pit. His presence in the orchestra ended up being utterly invaluable; more on that in a bit.

This is the kind of cross-musical collaboration that makes a good deal of sense, particularly because many of those Pink Floyd tunes have an orchestral bent to them to begin with. What made this particular show easy and logical (and this is an issue addressed more fully in Sam's previous post) were the arrangements, by violinist/arranger/pop musician Maxim Moston. Max's were the type of arrangements that make a conductor and orchestra happy; nothing too fussy or complicated, a few nice licks for the orchestra, straightforward/idiomatic writing, clean parts and logical rehearsal letters ("V1" and "B2" - "verse one" and "bridge 2", easy for the orchestra to identify and written in language that the band would also understand - a very savvy cross-musical touch).

The band, The Machine, was fantastic to work with (and if you closed your eyes, you'd swear you were hearing Pink Floyd!). This was the second go-around with this particular with-orchestra show, so some of the kinks had already been worked out. Sound levels are always an issue, even with sound shields protecting most of the orchestra; when we play with bands, the loudest element is usually the trap set, and there's no way to shield that save creating an entire plexiglass sphere around it. Standing right behind the drummer on the podium, my ears got a bit blasted.

Showtime brought a few surprises; this was certainly the loudest audience I've ever encountered at an orchestra show (although the enthusiasm is always energizing), and the level of illicit substance use, as far as we could smell onstage, must have been pretty substantial. Then, of course, there were the fog machines (what toxic chemical spews from those things anyway?) and the incredibly trippy laser show (a bassist joked "This is the only concert I've done where I've worried about both cancer AND epilepsy"). The performance-practice difference came when, during the first half, The Machine deviated from the set list that the orchestra and I were looking at and embarked on a 3-song digression that had me sweating for a moment (a lot of the recorded/synth openings of those tunes sound similar!); fortunately, my husband, from the horn section, sent me a note saying "That's 'Sorrow', not on list. Will tell you when 'Comfortably numb' intro starts."

When I took the stage at the second half, an intrepid audience member shouted, "We love you, Sarah!!", which satisfied my rock star fantasy for the evening. But more than that, it reminded me of just how much fun this audience was having; they were having a fantastic communal experience of hearing what was probably some of their favorite music being played by a great band with an added lush layer of orchestration. It was a truly participatory event, with the audience singing along to nearly every tune. And whenever The Machine acknowledged the orchestra, the audience gave a roar of approval, which is, of course, wonderfully gratifying.

Because, as I keep saying, we're all in this together; we're all musicians, we're all trying to reach other people in some way. Too often, I feel that the classical approach becomes exclusively cerebral. It's not that there's anything wrong with complicated music that requires the analysis of not only the musicians onstage but the audience itself (and sometimes the brain loves the exercise). But there's nothing wrong in performing and enjoying music that's immediately graspable, with an instant emotional effect either; in fact the ideal output of a performing arts organization finds a judicious balance of both.

Orchestras don't need to dumb down what they do; there will always be those who enjoy a straight-up classical concert (although the overture-concerto-symphony model is a bit tired). But there is a larger world out there, ripe for collaboration. And done in the right way (with music and arrangements that incorporate the best of both worlds), they can be gratifying musical experiences for all parties involved. What thrills me is the possibility of that larger world, and the chance to reach even more individuals. Because that is why I'm a musician.

Putting Up With Pops

Reading Sarah's post on the importance of an orchestra presenting a variety of styles of music, and presenting them all well, I found myself reacting in two very different ways. On the one hand, I agree completely with Sarah that classical music's history of behaving as if it is the only kind of "serious" music in the world is counterproductive, wrongheaded, and outdated in a world where genres seem to have less importance every day. I also don't think that our commitment to the music of Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Golijov is threatened by spending one or two nights a month playing something else.

On the other hand, I confess to being a musician who frequently dreads playing pops shows. I'm not against the format as a concept by any stretch, and even when I'm playing a show that truly makes me want to put a bag over my head, I don't have a lot of trouble sucking it up and remembering that no one's job is fun all the time. But I'd be lying if I said that I thought the way we as an industry present and perform non-classical shows was working very well, on the whole.

Some of my best memories are from pops concerts I've played over the years. My very first pops show, with the Alabama Symphony (my first gig out of college,) featured the legendary Tony Bennett, and I was in awe of his stage presence and ability to make the oldest songs seem fresh. Later that same season in Birmingham, I sidled shyly up to country superstar Kathy Mattea at a break in rehearsal and asked if she would sign my copy of Love Travels. Here in Minneapolis, I count the pops shows we've played with stars like Doc Severinsen, Eartha Kitt, and Rajaton (channeling ABBA) as career highlights.

But I've always been someone who believes that music basically comes in two flavors - good and bad. I don't know of any musical genre that I consider either 100% good or 100% bad, and by "good" I don't necessarily mean that I enjoy listening to it, merely that there is some level of artistry and intellectual content there to be discerned. And the reality is that some orchestral pops shows - a lot, even - are just bad. Badly written, badly structured, badly organized, and badly performed as a direct result of the first three bads.

I know some musicians who think we have no business being a glorified backup band for some singer-songwriter who was famous in the 1970s and is trying to squeeze another few paychecks out of his old hits by adding a few crappy string arrangements to the guitar strumming. I'm not wholesale against that kind of show, if there's really a role for the orchestra, and I don't think we should have to be the star of every minute that we're on stage, but I've spent far too many nights trying desperately to make those crappy arrangements sound like something other than the filler dreck that they are, and I've come to the belief that orchestras do not pair well with certain types of aging pop stars. (Throw in the fact that some of them are creepy and drug-addled to the extent that discerning members of the audience can tell that there's something wrong up there, and you've got a recipe for an uncomfortable evening.)

Another way that a pops show can go bad is when a well-meaning guest artist who really wants to make the best possible use of the orchestra gets overly ambitious, and shows up with orchestra parts that are either unmanagably complex, or simply don't fit the way our instruments are played. (Frequently, such guest artists also bring along their own conductor, when most of them would really be better off using our people.) Earlier this season, we played a couple of shows with a legendary rocker who I've idolized since high school, and unfortunately, the show wound up being fairly disjointed as we struggled to understand our parts and how they fit in with the band. Both critics who reviewed the show seemed almost apologetic in pointing out that the collaboration didn't seem to have worked terribly well. They needn't have apologized.

The tragedy of bad pops shows is that a) there are so many people who still seem to buy tickets to and enjoy them, and b) there are so many better ideas out there! The bluegrass revival going on in Nashville and around the country music world is a natural fit for what we do - imagine what brilliant performers like Bela Fleck, Jerry Douglas, or Chris Thile could do with an orchestra backing them! Composers like Todd Levin have already proved that a big enough orchestra provides a dance/house music experience that no synthesizer could ever hope to replicate. And hip-hop, which is completely ignored by pops programmers, would be a fantastic genre to introduce into the concert hall - participatory, original, and embracing of all other genres of music in its production and backing tracks.

Now, would these ideas require some sort of investment on the part of a forward-thinking orchestra? Absolutely. The reason that so many of our pops guests show up with terrible orchestrations of their music is because they are not in the business of orchestrating. We'd need to somehow find a way to connect guest artists with good composers who will know how to properly weave our sound into theirs. But those composers are out there, and plenty of us in the classical world know where to find them. Even more important, there are plenty of non-classical performers out there crossing genres, breaking down walls, and waiting patiently for us to make contact. And if it would mean that we could finally remove the stigma of pops as silly, inconsequential music, the investment would be well worth it in the long run.

All for one, Part I

An interesting week, marred a bit by jet-lag (Honolulu - Minneapolis - Philadelphia in the span of 3 days, a bit rough, but scheduling a vacation in the middle of a busy summer season is my own choice!).

First up, on Wednesday, was "Broadway Rocks", with a quartet of Broadway singers and the Minnesota Chorale. It's always fun to work with people who know exactly what they're doing, and all four singers in this show certainly fit the bill. Truth be told, I love Broadway stuff, no matter how schlocky it can get, and although "Music of the Night" can get a little tiresome (this was the 20th time I've done it, in its many guises), it's still a hoot to perform it with a singer who has the timing down cold (in this case, Doug Labrecque). It's also fun for the members of the Orchestra who are called upon to play outside of their usual box, as bassist Dave Williamson, playing electric bass for the show, did.

Pops shows like this are, without doubt, much trickier to produce than a usual subscription week. When I've tried to explain this to non-industry people, I'm always met with surprise, because audiences consider it to be "lighter" fare - isn't it then easier to put together? But here's the lowdown; the music played in Pops shows is usually arranged, written in a manner different from the standard classical repertoire (I'm often reading off of a piano/vocal score with chord changes and basic instrumental cues written in), often involves adjusting to a different style of music and to soloists who, quite literally, use a different vocabulary to discuss what we're doing (it's "the bridge after verse two" for the singers, 17 bars after rehearsal letter "F" for the orchestra). We're usually on an incredibly tight rehearsal schedule (we had a 2 1/2 hour rehearsal - with 20-minute break, of course - to get through 90 minutes of music). And often, it's a one-shot deal as there's only one performance (the second performance of anything is so much more relaxed and enjoyable!!!).

All that being said, I thrive on the thrill of tight scheduling, barely-controlled chaos during the show and having the chance to think outside of the classical box. And as the packed Hall and screaming standing ovation evinced, there are a lot of people out there who enjoyed it as well.

The Orchestra generally is good-humored about their forays outside the realm of Beethoven and Brahms, although there are certainly those who grumble (sometimes a bit vociferously). Orchestra musicians on the whole have very mixed feelings about these kinds of performances, mostly because, when faced with a chart from, say, Andrew Lloyd Webber or Elvis Costello or Tiempo Libre, there is a certain discomfort in that it is not the type of music they were trained to play. Some look at pop or rock or Broadway or salsa as somehow below their training and talent, a sentiment I can appreciate, being a product of conservatory inculcation myself; for better or for worse, in school I was constantly reminded of how rarefied my chosen studies were. In fact, sometime this past season, as I was about to take the stage for yet another Pops show, an Orchestra player sidled up to me and asked, quite sardonically, "So, this is what you went to Curtis for, right?"

To which I would reply, yes, it is. Because my rigorous conservatory education gave me the solid foundation of theory and orchestration and analysis and technique to approach any kind of music without trepidation. And because that solid foundation gives me the ability to bring a great deal of skill to all types of music, whether it was specifically included in my training or not. I recently met with a prominent New York public relations specialist who confirmed for me what I have believed for years; non-classical concerts (whether we call them "Pops" or "collaborations" or "special events" or whatever) are a sovereign entity unto themselves, a category of orchestral music-making that should be well-produced and of high quality. They are most often the biggest draws (and thus money-makers) in an organization's season, and they are the productions which then have the capacity to balance out the less populist (and perhaps more artistically interesting for the orchestra - I'm thinking Mahler 9) concerts. And we should all approach these presentations as a legitimate and significant part of an orchestra's output.

Classical musicians tend to be elitist; it's a part of our training. But I think this attitude does not in any way stand us good stead, particularly as we see the symphonic world slowly trending away from the straight "classical" concert as the only model of performance. If I call myself a musician, I should have the ability to understand and appreciate music as a whole, not just my (very small) corner of it. We all have our preferences (I'm not a huge country fan, granted, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the skillful way a song is put together or the ingenious tunefulness of a melody), but this cannot prevent us from acknowledging the legitimacy of other forms of music. Because, as musicians, we should all be in this together.

First Among Equals

I'm playing a piece of chamber music with Osmo this weekend, as part of our Sommerfest chamber series at Orchestra Hall, which is always an interesting departure from the normal orchestral routine. Like most musicians, I love playing chamber music in general, and this will be the second time I've had the chance to perform alongside the boss. (We played the Brahms clarinet quintet together last summer.)

Osmo plays clarinet more or less the same way he conducts. He has strong ideas, knows exactly how he plans to play a phrase before he begins it, values precision and rhythmic accuracy, and he makes a point of exploiting the widest dynamic range he can achieve. These are all the same things he asks us to do when he leads the orchestra, so if you're used to playing under his baton, you'll have no problem connecting with him as a performer.

What's somewhat surprising about having him sitting across from me as an equal partner rather than on a podium barking orders is how easily he seems to make the transition. Most instrumentalists who take up conducting do so, at least in part, because they want to be in charge. (Many of them were already pianists anyway, which is more or less the instrumental definition of being in charge of most situations.) They're frustrated by the limited role of a single player in a large group, and want a chance to define and shape the artistic sweep of the orchestral repertoire.

Once a musician becomes a conductor capable of sustaining him/herself in that role, few ever look back. Some might still play the occasional bit of chamber music (as Christoph Eschenbach has been known to do in Philadelphia,) or even take on a concerto (as our own Andrew Litton does regularly,) but the conductor persona is ever-present. There's never any doubt about who's in charge.

And that's what can sometimes make it difficult to play chamber music with a conductor. Chamber music is supposed to be a completely democratic effort, where every player has an equal voice, and the group decides together where the music will go and how it will get there. (This, of course, is why so many orchestral musicians, who spend our days basically obeying orders and shaping phrases in someone else's voice, consider chamber music to be an essential and rejuvenating activity.) Conductors are frequently unable to really embrace such an approach when they are used to being the only voice that really matters, and consequently wind up imposing their will on the rest of the quartet, or quintet, or whatever.

So it's more than a little bit surprising that Osmo seems to have no trouble putting aside his in-chargeness and submitting to the uncertainty of the group dynamic in a chamber music setting. On the podium, he's known to be exceedingly confident, even stubborn, and I can't think of a time when anyone in our orchestra has ever convinced him to change anything about his interpretation of any piece. Ever. This is a guy who has made some of the best orchestras in the world play along with the metronome he keeps on his conductor's stand! He does not lack for conviction, or the will to enforce his vision. And yet, both last summer and this summer, he has cheerfully allowed everyone in our chamber groups an equal voice to his own, and regularly agreed to go in a direction that he himself might not have chosen.

That's not to say that he doesn't have opinions. In particular, he has some very strong ideas about the Brahms quintet (widely considered to be one of the greatest works of chamber music ever composed, and beloved by all clarinetists,) and is willing to fight for them. But in the course of debating such ideas in rehearsal, he never plays the trump card, or even implies that he's holding one. In a collaborative situation, that restraint makes a big difference and, I think, allows the group a chance to achieve a truly unified performance.

Air Lang Lang

MN Orch marketing chief Cindy Grzanowski pointed me to this fashion blog post from April, featuring a soon-to-be-released celebrity-branded sneaker, in attractive black and gold, retailing for a fairly reasonable $85. The celeb in question? Um...

Yeah, that's piano superstar Lang Lang, there on the heel, and his signature just next to the third, um, racing stripe(?) on each shoe. Not only that, both the man himself and NY Phil music director designate Alan Gilbert were seen sporting the limited edition sneaks last week at the big Central Park concert. The mind boggles. The new Dudamel Dog in LA and Staccato's long-running Osmo Cosmo are one thing, but this seems like a whole new level of vanity marketing for our sleepy little genre.

So what's next in the brave new world of classical product placement? A Marin Alsop-themed pantsuit? A Joshua Bell line of high-end hair care products? The Nathan Gunn Ab-Master? The world may not be ready...

Musical mac and cheese

Stumbling out of an Airbus 330 after an eight-hour red-eye flight from Honolulu to Minneapolis at 5:30 this morning, I was bleary-eyed, comatose and cranky. I'm not a good flier to begin with, but the overnight thing compounds problems because I can't sleep on planes, leaving me completely useless the day I arrive (although I did manage to get through a vocal/choral rehearsal this evening for the Broadway show tomorrow). Exiting the plane, I made my way to the ladies room in the terminal in a miserable mood.

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of frequenting the facilities at MSP, let me say that I always look forward to hearing the music they play in them, which is invariably classical and runs the gamut from Haydn trumpet concertos to Debussy piano pieces. I find it a little odd that it's the only place in the terminal in which continuous classical music is played, but far be it for me to complain - and, besides, it kinda classes up the joint a bit, you know? So, this morning, at 5:40-ish a.m., the selection playing in the ladies room in the G terminal was Dvorak's String Serenade.

More specifically, it was the first movement of the String Serenade, which I find to be one of the more sublime creations on earth, and it's one of those pieces that invariably makes me smile. There's something about the melody that unknots the tension I carry between my shoulder blades, something that lets me breathe a bit easier. It's a piece which, for me, is tremendously comforting, and it did wonders in alleviating by crabby mood this morning.

I imagine we all have "comfort music", music we wrap ourselves with in times of stress or distress, music that we turn to time and again to calm us with its familiarity. For me, Chopin Marzurkas are the musical equivalent of comfort food; I'm almost always in the mood for them, they are somehow filling and deeply satisfying, and they're nice to curl up with on a cold night. When I'm having an existential crisis, the 2nd movement of Brahms's Third Symphony always seems to set me to rights. And for those days I'm feeling particularly gloomy and isolated, anything by Bach does the trick - I'm not quite sure how it works, but when I listen to Bach I no longer feel utterly alone in the world.

Not Necessarily The Moonlight Sonata

Most Americans my age or younger probably think of Dudley Moore (if we think of him at all) as the kindly, bumbling alcoholic from the Arthur movies. We may have a vague memory of him playing some piano in that role, but that's likely as far as the association goes.

And that's a great shame, because, in his heyday, Moore was one of the great musical comedians of the 20th century, and remains a legend in British comedy circles for his work with Peter Cook on the BBC in the late 1960s. He was also a gifted musician, interested in both classical and jazz, and even hosted a few serious documentaries on music in his later years.

One of my favorite of Moore's routines is from one of his earliest gigs, the transatlantic satirical smash hit, Beyond the Fringe, which sadly seems to be well out of circulation these days. This was an age when the basics of classical music were still common enough knowledge to be reasonable fodder for satire, and all manner of humorists, from Anna Russell to Victor Borge, were thriving on stage and screen. Moore's crowning achievement in this area is a 4-1/2 minute bit in which he doesn't say a word, just sits down at the keyboard, and creates an entire "Beethoven" sonata, complete with overwrought big finish. It still makes me laugh every time I hear it...



(Hat tip to former MN Orch CEO Tony Woodcock for first making me aware of this bit several years ago...)

Sweating Summer

One of the questions musicians get asked most frequently, usually by someone who works a standard 9-to-5 type job, is: so what does your typical work week look like, anyway? It's a complicated question to answer, since we don't really have "typical" weeks very often, and a lot of our most intensive work is done in our own private practice rooms at home, before we even start rehearsing a concert as an orchestra. During our regular season (which runs mid-September through mid-June,) we might spend three or four weeks playing nothing but our regular classical concerts, followed by a week in which we whip through 8 or 10 young people's concerts, plus two Inside the Classics concerts and a weekend pops gig for good measure. The week after that, we might not play any concerts, but spend the entire week recording a CD.

And then, there's the summer schedule. Summer is supposed to be a relaxing time, but for musicians, it's anything but. (This is actually pretty obvious, when you think about it. Since we're professional entertainers, it stands to reason that our busiests times of year should be when "normal" people have the most time to kill and interest in getting out of the house.) During the five weeks that make up our summer season, we'll play around 15 or 16 concerts, not including chamber music performances, and with the exception of the outdoor shows we play around the 4th of July, each of the programs we rehearse will be performed only once. (During our regular season, we might play four classical concerts in a single week, but all four will be the same show. In other words, it takes about four months of the regular season to cover as much music as we play in a single month at Sommerfest.)

As you might imagine, this makes the Sommerfest rehearsal schedule fairly chaotic. At the moment, we're in rehearsals for three completely different concerts, all of which will be performed this weekend. Here's what's on the schedule, concert-wise:

Friday, 8pm - a light but jam-packed concert featuring two waltzes, a few polkas, a bunch of brassy favorites like Bugler's Holiday, a hilarious concerto for two bassoons, and an almost totally unknown piano concerto by the dude who wrote Sleigh Ride.

Saturday, 8pm - An arm-buster of a program. A Verdi overture, Grieg's piano concerto, and Tchaikovsky's massive 4th symphony.

Sunday, 4pm - This concert is way the heck down in Winona, Minnesota, where we'll be helping wrap up their annual Beethoven Festival with a concert featuring Osmo conducting the 1st and 6th symphonies.

So, with that kind of repertoire stacking up on the docket, you can imagine how confusing the rehearsal schedule can get. Here's how it looked for us this week:

Wednesday - A double rehearsal day with Osmo conducting the two Beethoven symphonies. We know these pieces very well, having recorded them just last year, but this is the only shot we have to get them back under our fingers. We won't play either symphony again until the Sunday concert.

Thursday - Another double rehearsal day, with Sommerfest director Andrew Litton on the podium. In an unusual move, the morning rehearsal actually includes repertoire from both the Friday and Saturday shows. We start with the Verdi, move on to Tchaikovsky's 4th, then whip through some of the shorter pieces from the Friday concert. In the afternoon, we cover more of the Friday music, including the Bassoonapalooza and the Anderson concerto, and finish up by quickly touching the polkas and waltzes.

Friday - We'll have a single 2-1/2 hour rehearsal at 2pm, covering only the music for the Friday night concert. History suggests that Andrew will focus heavily on getting us to style the waltzes and polkas exactly the way he likes them.

Saturday - I never get used to our summer Saturday morning rehearsals. During the regular season, we rarely rehearse on Saturdays or Sundays, and never in the morning. Musicians tend to be night owls, so dragging yourself in for a 10am rehearsal the morning after a concert that ended only 12 hours earlier is no fun. But there we'll be, again with Andrew on the podium, to tighten up the Verdi and Tchaikovsky for the Saturday night concert, and rehearse the Grieg concerto for the first and only time.

What about Sunday? Well, with 3-1/2 hour bus rides on either end of the Beethoven concert in Winona, there won't be time for a rehearsal. We'll just have to snap to without getting a chance to test out the unfamiliar hall. Par for the course - the summer course, at least...

Newspapers Are Dead. What's Next?

Anyone who still bothers to keep track of our nation's mainstream media sources is well aware that these are dark days for newspapers and those who write for them. Here in the Cities, both of our so-called major dailies have been sold at a deep discount in recent years, and seen their news staffs and budgets decimated by cuts made in the name of preserving profitability.

The story is the same in nearly every city in America, and as the number of people reading the print editions continues to dwindle (which it unquestionably will,) and as the mega-corporations that own most of the papers continue to labor under the delusion that the answer is to either cut their way back to profitability (which doesn't work, in any industry, ever - ask any economist,) or find some magic formula to drag us all kicking and screaming back to getting a paper dropped on our doorstep every day when the same stories are available for free online, the big question seems to have become not whether, but when the first raft of big-city newspapers shuts down entirely.

You could do worse than to bet on Minneapolis-St. Paul to be a part of that first wave of disappearing papers, and a lot of us in town wouldn't even feel much of a void if it happened. Aside from sports coverage, which is still plentiful and of relatively high quality, neither the Strib nor the PiPress bears any real resemblance to a true big-city daily at this point, at least in their print editions. Furthermore, the best journalism going on in Minnesota these days seems to be happening online, at sites like MinnPost, the Minnesota Independent, and Politics in Minnesota, which are staffed by professional journos and are slowly but surely developing the kind of business model that may sustain the serious news business beyond the demise of print media.

Arts journalists - classical music critics in particular - have been hit especially hard by the changes in newspapering. Just as schools tend to be very quick to label the arts as a frill whenever tough budget decisions have to be made, newspapers have increasingly labeled serious cultural coverage as elitist and of no interest to the broader public, and instead converted the arts section into something like what used to be called a "women's section" back in the day - a few recipes, some lifestyle trend stories, a bit of fashion advice, and a whole lot of syndicated advice columns. And if there's space, they might go ahead and throw in a reprint of a semi-serious arts story from one of the wire services, so long as it's not too long and doesn't use any big words.

There's a lot of hand-wringing about newspapers' cultural abandonment in the orchestra world, as well, which is a bit surprising to me, since orchestras have largely been beaten bloody by newspaper critics for the better part of the last half-century. Sure, the weekly reviews (which almost no one reads) might compliment us on the way we played this week's concert, but larger analytical pieces are as likely as not to reflexively refer to classical music as a dinosaur, posit (generally without any real substantive evidence) that the entire business model of a symphony orchestra is outdated and unworkable in a modern economy, or to bemoan the local band's insistence on continuing to play Beethoven and Brahms when there's a whole raft of thorny stuff by Stockhausen that we could be torturing the audience with. Why we feel that our continued success as musicians is dependant on more of this nonsense is beyond me.

Actually, it's not quite beyond me. The concern emanating from orchestras and other large arts groups over the decline of mainstream coverage is directly related to the fact that the best way we know to get out the word about an upcoming concert or play or musical or whatever is to get one of the local scribes interested in writing a puff piece about it, and running it in the paper at roughly exactly the moment that we want ticket sales to spike. Traditional newspapers are remarkably accomodating about doing this, in a way that new media isn't. (At least, not yet.)

Still, as sad as it makes me that those who work in journalism are facing such dark and uncertain times just because the guys who write the checks have ceased to care about anything but the bottom line and lack the creativity to see the transitional path to online profitability, I don't see that it's really going to hurt those of us on the receiving end of traditional coverage that much when the whole newspaper ship finally sinks beneath the waves. Justin Davidson, formerly the outstanding classical critic for Newsday put it quite well in this piece on Musical America's web site: "The disabilities of the old business model are so profound that trying to remedy them by tweaking (or ravaging) the content is like spitting into a volcano: pointless and self-destructive."

Justin also has one of the more innovative ideas I've seen for the future of cultural criticism, and it's the only one I've read that actually proposes to weave together traditional journalism and user-generated content in a meaningful way. Check out his piece if you're interested, and chime in below in our comments section with your thoughts on newspapers, the arts, and Justin's modest proposal...

Gone fishin'

Yup, it's real, although pretty unbelievable, no matter how many times I see it (Waimanalo beach on Oahu, an hour or so drive from Honolulu, where I grew up.) I'm in Hawaii for the week visiting my mom, so I probably won't be posting until I get back. I fully intend to work on my tan on this hiatus, and although I have some work to do ("Broadway Rocks" show with the Orchestra next week, and a Pink Floyd show next weekend in Philly - more on that later!), I'll be in vacation mode. Hope everyone out there is getting some vacation time this summer...

And It's Root, Root, Root For the Twinkies...

Around this time of year at Orchestra Hall, while Sommerfest audiences are spending their intermission break sipping wine, strolling Peavey Plaza, or conversing on any number of high-minded topics, the best place to find about half our orchestra's musicians is clustered in a corner of our backstage lounge, watching the Minnesota Twins on one of the two TVs we've stacked on top of a filing cabinet there. (We even have cable!)

Why two TVs? Well, we've had one forever, or at least as long as I've been around, and it was fine for baseball season (if a bit small for a whole roomful of people to try to watch,) but during the winter, disputes were known to break out between the hockey crowd and the basketball crowd over which sport should be on, and eventually, our principal cellist used his winnings from our annual NCAA March Madness pool to buy us a brand new set, and our wily stagehands threw a splitter on the cable wire, and voila! No more arguments.

Well, okay, there are arguments. But they tend to be your standard-issue sports talk arguments, which, as everyone knows, are fun, right up until they aren't anymore. And with multiple games playing on multiple sets simultaneously, there can be some very entertaining (and confusing) crosstalk in our little corner...



I recorded that last November, I think, just to hear how much we sound like a bunch of typical morons at a sports bar. Quite a bit, apparently. By the way, the cast list for that little bunch of nonsense, as best I can make out, includes yours truly, bassist Dave Williamson, violist Megan Tam, and violinist Mike Sutton on the hockey talk; cellist Tony Ross, percussionist Kevin Watkins, and horn player Mike Gast talking hoops;and violist Richard Marshall asking questions about a sport I can't identify.

So, anyway, back to the Twins. They're doing awfully well this year, quite a bit better than anyone really expected in what was supposed to be a rebuilding year, which is great for us in the orchestra, because we tend to make a lot of noise in our little sports corner when good things are happening to our teams, and it's always nice to go back on stage with a bit of extra adrenaline. But what's impressed me most about the Twins this summer isn't anything they've accomplished on the field: it's something they dared to do off it, in full view of the public, despite virtual assurance that they'd come off looking more than a little goofy.

If you've watched any Twins games this season, you probably know what I'm talking about. The team, always known for the great TV commercials it produces, got its entire pitching staff together to record a promotional ad in which, for no apparent reason, they stand on chorus risers in the middle of an outdoor diamond and sing about themselves to the tune of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," while pitching coach Rick Anderson conducts them with a miniature bat.



That takes some serious guts, if you ask me. Imagine if someone asked you and everyone you work with to sing a little song for everyone in your city to watch on television for the next six months. (Actually, you don't have to imagine it. There's a reality show on TLC that does exactly that...) And the most amazing thing about it is that, with the notable exception of Matt Guerrier, these guys all seem quite capable of singing on pitch! I mean, none of them is going to be taking gigs away from Nathan Gunn anytime soon, and maybe I'm just imposing a stereotypical view of professional athletes on the situation, but doesn't it seem surprising that the Twins pitchers can (almost) all sing decently?

Just one more reason to love 'em, I guess. Now, if you'll excuse me, SportsCenter's about to start...

Wish you were there...

...for the rehearsal for the Piano-e-competition on Thursday afternoon. The kid were great - all poised and prepared, a few quite exceptional - but the kicker was when the orchestra finished with the concertos and went to work on Tchaikovsky's Symphony #5. If you recall, towards the end of the last movement, there's a huge cadence in B major; repeated chords, ending in a full stop, before the triumphant return of the theme in E major. I've certainly sat through (and, once, conducted) performances where the audience, perhaps a bit antsy after 40-some-odd minutes and believing that the end has been reached, starts applauding wildly in the grand pause.

Sam and I have remarked many times on the Minnesota Orchestra's sense of humor, which was abundantly evident that afternoon. When we reached that cadence point in the symphony during rehearsal, the entire orchestra started hooting and hollering and applauding in the grand pause. Instruments were raised, wolf whistles made; one violinist even half-stood up. What I found most amazing in this display of mirth was that not a single musician missed a beat after the outburst, and the movement was completed as if nothing had ever happened.

Just as with the "I didn't do it!" instrument raise, it was an instinctive and spontaneous moment, and funny as hell. I'm telling you, this orchestra has quite the sense of humor...

Best Day of the Year. (No, Really.)

As you probably know if you're reading this blog, we're kicking off the Minnesota Orchestra's Sommerfest this weekend, beginning as usual with the massive, day-and-night-long Day of Music. Considering how many thousands of people this event draws every year, it's difficult to imagine that anyone who regularly attends the orchestra hasn't been yet, but if you haven't, for some reason: for God's sake, get yourself down to Peavey Plaza tomorrow! Yes, all the performances are still 100% free, and yes, that means first come, first seated for the indoor shows, and yes, that does mean you have to get there super early if you want to see us play Tchaikovsky's 5th at 8pm, but honestly, even if you don't make it into Orchestra Hall at all, the rest of the acts should keep you more than satisfied. (Unless, of course, it thunderstorms, which I'm told is a possibility. If it does, I think we can all assume that it's Paul Douglas's nefarious revenge on his former employer and our Day of Music media partner.)

When a couple of our management types, now long gone from the organization, conceived the Day of Music back in the early part of this decade, I'm not sure they had any notion that it would become the local music phenomenon that it has. The acts that have played on our stages over the years run the gamut from electronica to roots rock to hip-hop to world beat to old-time folk, always with a healthy dose of the kind of straight-ahead club rock that Minneapolis is known for. I've loved it from the start, and more than once, I stayed at the hall all night after we finished (one year, I even got to introduce Gary Louris of the Jayhawks and Adam Levy of the Honeydogs to a screaming crowd at a midnight show,) finally heading home when the children's music started up on Saturday morning.

Oh, and the orchestra plays as well. And that's actually one of the great ironies of the whole enterprise: supposedly the centerpiece of the whole event, the orchestra actually winds up being just another performance in the massive slate. Much of what gets written by local rock critics about the Day of Music doesn't even mention that our staff are the ones who book, coordinate, and organize the entire operation. It's a counter-intuitive way of marketing yourself as an orchestra, but I love that someone had the guts to try it, because it makes the whole day seem like Minneapolis's event, not the Minnesota Orchestra offering a supporting role to a few bands. And despite the enormous expense (in both money and time) of putting on a free event of this magnitude, I know that it's worth it, because the people who fill the hall for our 8pm concert are always the most enthusiastic crowd we see all year long, and a fair number of them have told me they've never been to see us before, and that they're definitely coming back.

Anyway, like I say, if you've never been, you need to come. The Day of Music kicks off Friday at noon, and runs through Saturday at 3pm. (They'll take an overnight break this year from 1am-9am, which makes me a little bit sad, but is probably a good idea, since the years I stayed all night, the spectators tended to be outnumbered by the musicians and staff by 3am .) If you're looking for a few great acts worth seeing, Star Tribune pop critic Chris Riemenscheider's got you covered. I like his list, and I'd throw in the Honeydogs (8pm on the Peavey Plaza south stage,) the Spaghetti Western String Company (10pm over on WCCO-TV's plaza stage,) and the Charles Lazarus Group (4pm on Peavey north) as well. See you there...

Postscript, 10.49pm: Okay, fine, so everything outdoors got rained out before 10pm. Whatever. We had fun inside. And it's actually sort of amazing that we got through seven full years of this event without a rainout, so I guess we were due. (I'm still blaming Paul Douglas, though. His known pal Don Shelby was walking all too casually around the plaza about three hours before the deluge, and I'm guessing he was doing an elaborate slow-motion rain dance on Doug's behalf...)

(Not quite) fearing for my livelihood

A video of ASIMO conducting the Detroit Symphony in May (coincidentally enough, the week after I conducted the DSO). I confess that I found the fluidity in the motion rather extraordinary (he's quite a piece of engineering!!). I've been asked countless times after this video hit YouTube whether I feared for my livelihood, but I think the answer is pretty evident. No matter how sophisticated the technology, it is impossible for any machine to duplicated what a musician can do, until machines can learn intuition, and the delicate push/pull of a dynamic situation (like conducting) where one is making split second decisions about how to lead and convince and cajole - not based on an equation, but on a primal gut instinct. And I don't much care for his phrasing, or his lack of rubato.

I had written, shortly after ASIMO's debut, to Leonard Slatkin, a mentor I first met at the National Conducting Institute in 2002, and after discussing all manner of other topics, he answered my question about robot conductors: "As far as ASIMO goes, let's just say that it is not ready for the NCI yet." Good to know...

Forest for the Trees

As a general rule, musicians tend to be suspicious of marketers, agents, and other PR types. It's not that we think we can do without their services, of course, but we're taught from the first time we pick up an instrument that the music we play is deeply meaningful stuff, and selling it to the public like its a case of beer or a football game seems somehow wrong to us. Throw in the fact that people who work in music and people who work in PR each tend to speak in a very specific insider language, and that they aren't the same languages, and the gap widens.

The best way of explaining it might be to say that musicians harbor a deep-seated fear that the people who market us would be happiest if we agreed to drop all the Mahler and Stravinsky and just play the 1812 Overture and an assortment of Beatles arrangements every week. And on the other side of the coin, the folks who dedicate their professional lives to making our performances seem like something the public should spend its money on are frequently exasperated and baffled by musicians' seeming disinterest in (or even outright opposition to) any effort to make what we do more accessible to the people buying the tickets.

All of which is to say, it's an uneasy partnership. Everyone's on the same side, really, but not always on the same page. And as a result, a lot of marketing techniques that the for-profit world of commerce takes for granted never really get tried when the product being pitched is an orchestra (or a theater or a museum, for that matter.) So I'm always on the lookout for the obvious sorts of ideas that those of us in my business frequently miss while we're too busy worrying about being taken seriously.

Here's one now - promoter/agent Amanda Ameer, blogging about just this sort of thing over at ArtsJournal, points out that retail marketing has become so sophisticated and subtle that just this week, she walked into a clothing store she had no need to go into, just because it was inviting (by design.) She then compares the techniques employed by the store to those employed by Carnegie Hall, just down the block, and concludes that Carnegie isn't even marketing in the same ballpark. Forget the stock posters that ring the building, says Ameer - why isn't there music playing from just inside wide-open doors, or a video display touting upcoming concerts? Why should the public take an interest in what you're selling if you don't seem terribly interested in offering it up?

This is the kind of thinking that led the Minnesota Orchestra a few years back to adorn the entire front and sides of Orchestra Hall with giant pictures of Osmo, the orchestra, and even a few audience members. At the time, it was supposed to be a one-year thing, just to get people talking and spruce up the look of our 30-plus-year-old facade. It worked - we got plenty of press coverage out of it (my favorite write-up was from local writer Christy DeSmith, then of The Rake, who described Osmo as sporting "a slightly dopey smile, as if he had just bumped his head,") and the "wrap," as we call it, leaves no doubt about what our building is, and what you'll find inside. There's no longer any thought of going back to the unwrapped look.

The music world is so wrapped up in itself (by necessity - doing what we do for a living requires a ridiculous level of single-minded devotion to purpose) that we frequently forget that the rest of the world doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about Beethoven symphonies and the new Grapes of Wrath opera. And when we do remember, we tend to look for ways to make the general public as obsessive about music as we are, rather than finding ways to draw in the casual listener, or even random people who have no idea that they might enjoy the concert hall experience. And that's a shame, because - as Ameer's blog post demonstrates - it's not that hard to make people want to walk in your front door.

Above the din

The Orchestra has just finished up a week of outdoor concerts all over the place, from Hudson, WI to Winona and Plymouth MN, playing the usual July 4th fare - Sousa marches, classics "lite" (think "Toreadors" from Carmen), John Williams movie scores and, of course, the "1812 Overture".

I've always found the ubiquity of this tsarist barn-burner at July 4th festivities kind of humorous; as a piece about Napoleon's defeat by the Russians, quoting both "La Marseillaise" and "God Save the Tsar", it seems an odd choice for concerts celebrating American independence! So how did this particular piece become the expected concert closer to every Independence Day bash?

We have Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops to thank. In 1974 Fiedler positioned the "1812" as the grand finale to a July 4th concert at the Esplanade, complete with real cannon fire, bells pealing from church steeples and a coordinate fireworks display at the end. It was a ploy to increase attendance at the Pop's summer concerts, and it made the desired impression. Never mind that crowds were whooping it up for a piece by a prominent Russian composer in the middle of the Cold War...Fiedler was certainly a savvy showman, and this genius bit of marketing captured the public's imagination (the concert was broadcast nationwide).

Of course, then, other orchestras followed suit, and "1812" has become the "patriotic" staple it is today. I don't think it's coincidental that this is perhaps the only piece in orchestral repertoire that calls for cannon fire (can anyone think of another?). It certainly expands the sonic landscape, and on most night this week I could hear the cheers and whistles from the crowd when the first "boom" occurred - audiences seem to love the noise. Those onstage, not so much - I saw a few dozen pairs of earplugs being inserted by strings and winds at an appropriate moment pre-cannon.

Outdoor concerts are tough in their own way, particularly because you are dealing with far less-than-ideal acoustics. Compounding the problems of players not being able to hear each other is the fact that we are amplified; players then have the problem of hearing their amplified performance a split second after they have heard the live version, wreaking havoc on ensemble. It usually takes a piece or two to adjust to the bounce-back of sound; I try to be extra-clear at outdoor shows, because often players can't trust what they hear and actually need to "trust the stick".

Flying insects don't help - by the encore of "Stars and Stripes" last night, I was doing more of a mosquito-shooing dance than conducting. And I'm still nursing gnat bites from Winona.

All that being said, it's gratifying to play to largely enthusiastic audiences, and to take the Orchestra to communities who might not otherwise be able to hear us. At Hudson, by the end of the concert, there were several dozen children right in front of the stage, dancing and twirling and jumping to the music, which was really sweet (although I was worried about one ebullient twirler who seemed poised to go careening into our cello section!). And for myself, I treasure these concerts because it's another opportunity to chat with audiences from the stage, to bring down the "fourth wall" and engage them with the music in a more personal way. I could think of few better ways to spend a 4th of July...although next time, I'll use more bug spray!

Where You Least Expect It

I'm spending today and tomorrow making the long drive back to Minneapolis from the East Coast, and at the moment, I've stopped for coffee and a nostalgic look around at my old college town of Oberlin, Ohio. From what I've seen so far, not much has changed, although the downtown storefronts look like they could use a lick of paint, and the hummus plate at the coffee shop at the corner of Main and College Streets has gone severely downhill since my time.

I didn't actually intend to write a blog post here, but driving in from Cleveland, I had one of those fun, unexpected on-the-road experiences, and thought I'd share. Back in the day, when I was an idealistic college student obsessed with radio in all forms, I was a secret fan of a talk radio host at Cleveland's WTAM-AM named Mike Trivisonno. Triv wasn't exactly the most erudite guy on Ohio's air - in fact, he pretty much reveled in being the least, filling the familiar talk radio role of championing the uneducated, blue collar white guy (for you Minnesotans, think of an aggressively Italian version of Joe Soucheray.) But he was damned entertaining, for the most part, and captured the spirit of the decaying but scrappy Cleveland perfectly, to my mind.

Anyway. There I am, earlier today, cruising by downtown Cleveland on Interstate 90, when I realized that it was just about the time of day that Triv used to come on the air. Out of pure curiosity, I tuned in AM1100, assuming that his slot was probably no longer his, and that I'd shortly be listening to Sean Hannity, or some other syndicated loudmouth. But there was Triv, right on schedule, and sounding like he was still doing more or less the exact same show he did when I was in college - two parts sour old coot, one part stand-up comic, and about eight parts professional contrarian. Nothing you'd want to listen to for hours on end, but I was happy to stay tuned for a bit.

And then, without warning, it happened. Coming back from a commercial break. Triv told one of his interns to turn on his mic and introduce himself. The kid, who sounded about 19, did, and Triv then asked him to describe what he'd done the previous evening. "Oh!" said the intern. "I was down at Public Square, watching the Cleveland Orchestra!"

I cringed. I've heard hard-boiled talk radio types bring up classical music before, and while it's not always a guarantee that they're about to go on a populist rant against snobbery and boredom, it's a surefire thing that they aren't going to have the slightest clue what they're talking about. So I was shocked to hear Triv immediately come back with, "Now, I heard they had about 80,000 people out there, which is just awesome, 'cause you know, that orchestra of ours, they say it's one of the best in the world!" (Which it is.) He went on to ask the intern about the racial and economic makeup of the crowd, and was audibly pleased to hear that it wasn't "the kind of snobby ties and suits crowd you might probably see when they're playing at Severance Hall."

At this point, one of the producers jumped in to point out that, actually, the crowd at Severance tends to be pretty diverse and casual, as well, and the intern confirmed it. I figured this would be the end of the conversation, but instead, Triv wanted to know when the intern had gotten into listening to classical music, and what he liked about it. This went on for ten minutes, an eternity in drive-time talk radio, as the self-professed "dumb Italian guy" of Cleveland radio extolled the virtues of, arguably, America's greatest symphony orchestra. And the fact that he went right back to talking about his poker weekend in Vegas and the local idiots who think Travis Hafner has been taking steroids after the next break just made the whole thing more satisfying.

One of the toughest things about selling classical music as a general interest entertainment these days is getting past the fact that it's just not even on the cultural radar screen for a large percentage of the public anymore, at least not in the way that movies, pop music, and Christie Brinkley's divorce are. (Many orchestra subscribers would probably prefer that it remain that way, too, which is one of the major reasons that it does.) And while I don't want to imply that ten minutes of relatively lightly informed music talk on a news/talk station equates to progress, it makes me happy.

And, hopefully, it's awakened me enough that I've got another few hours of driving in me before this day is over. Have a good holiday weekend, all, and if you don't have plans for the 4th, you might consider catching Sarah and the orchestra just before the fireworks on the shore of Lake Minnetonka out in Excelsior tomorrow night...