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history of behaving as if it is the only kind of "serious" music in the world is counterproductive, wrongheaded, and outdated in a world where genres seem to have less importance every day.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.