Oh Say Can You Sing

On this, the last day of baseball's regular season (unless you're the White Sox, the Tigers, or the Twins,) let us take a moment to consider the North American practice of singing or playing national anthems before sporting events, a tradition which may cause more cringeworthy moments than any other type of musical performance. Musicians (and non-musicians who can tell the difference between Ashlee Simpson and Deborah Voight) attending ballgames almost always have to look away from each other to avoid giggling or groaning during the anthems, and you need only run a quick Google search to come up with hundreds of embarrassing attempts.

Part of the problem, of course, is that The Star-Spangled Banner is really difficult to sing. It spans more than 1-1/2 octaves, whereas Oh Canada and Take Me Out to the Ballgame require only a single octave's range. If you aren't careful to start on the right note for your particular range, you may find yourself in a world of hurt when the rockets start glaring, as Carl Lewis famously found out one night at a Chicago Bulls game...



Then, there's the fact that a shocking number of Americans seem more than a little fuzzy on just what order the lyrics come in...



The problem isn't helped by the fact that a lot of sports teams seem to view the singing of the anthem not so much as a musical performance, but as a chance to let some ordinary fans on the field. The Minnesota Twins, for example, tend to trot a bunch of elementary school "choirs" (should you really be allowed to call it a choir when everyone is singing in unison?) out onto the MetroDome turf to shriek the anthem while giggling and poking each other, perhaps on the theory that no one is ever going to sound good in a Dome with an antiquated sound system, so why the hell not? The Minnesota Wild, by contrast, have had a succession of professional and semi-professional singers on staff to sing the anthems at each game, but then the Wild have pretty much had a handle on the whole choral music thing from the beginning.



In Canada, they seem to take the whole anthem thing awfully seriously - in Ottawa and Montreal, actual Mounties with voices good enough for the operatic stage are regular anthem singers, and Irish tenor John McDermott frequently stops by to do the honors for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Even at a minor league baseball game I once attended in Winnipeg, the anthems were sung by a shockingly talented barbershop quartet.

But taking pride in our obvious shortcomings seems to be a distinctly American quality, and there's actually something endearing about clearly unqualified vocalists willing to risk public humiliation for a shot to stand on a field with a microphone. There but for the grace of God and all...

The Chaos Within

This week, our concerts feature an unusual centerpiece, at least for American audiences: Ralph Vaughan Williams outsized, hourlong extravaganza known as "A Sea Symphony." The piece brings together a full orchestra, a pipe organ, a soprano soloist, a baritone soloist, a full 300-voice choir, and a secondary offstage chamber choir for an amazingly ambitious setting of texts from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Amazingly for a work of such massive scale, it was Vaughan Williams's first attempt at writing a symphony, a fact which shows a bit in his, shall we say, optimistic use of dynamic markings. (Frequently, the full orchestra will be playing a heavily scored passage marked fff while the choir is singing a key line of text. If we actually played it as written, the choir would either need to be heavily amplified, or made up of roughly 3,000 voices.) It has the feel of one of those huge Mahler magnum opuses which sweep you up in a whirlwind of contrasting and conflicting sounds, and then deposit you, many minutes later, at the finish line, where you stand, slightly disoriented, wondering exactly what just happened and why no one warned you it was about to.

And if that's how it feels from the audience, just imagine how a piece like the Sea Symphony sounds and feels from within the orchestra! This is actually one of the biggest challenges of doing what we do for a living - making a large piece of music sound cohesive in the hall when, in truth, each of us playing it on stage can only hear a small percentage of the sounds being produced. Making matters worse for me this particular week is the fact that our revolving system of seating currently has me sitting dead last in the section, way the hell back on sixth stand. From where my stand partner Ben Ullery and I are sitting, we might as well be trying to play the piece via a video hookup from St. Cloud.

Back in 2004, when the orchestra was on our first European tour with Osmo, and I was writing a mini-blog documenting the trip for ArtsJournal.com, I described the challenge of moving from the front to the back of a string section this way...

To anyone who has never spent time playing in an orchestra, this probably sounds strange. After all, the first and last stands of violas are no more than 15 feet apart on the stage, and with the stands so tightly grouped, you might expect the sound to be generally the same throughout the section. It isn’t. In fact, the best way to describe the audible difference between what I heard on Friday night [when I was at the front of the section] and what I heard on Sunday [at the back] is to give you an exercise to do. If you have a really good stereo, put on a recording of a Beethoven symphony (or whatever) and listen to it for a few minutes, standing just off to the left of the left speaker. Done that? Good. Now, play the same recording again, but this time, make the following adjustments:

1) Stand behind the speakers.

2) Move the subwoofer behind you. (This is the bass section, directly over your shoulder.)

3) Get a friend to stand ten feet behind you and off to your right, and have this friend play some loud trumpet solos while the symphony is playing.

Now, since 2004, we've adjusted our seating arrangement slightly, and the piece I was writing about wasn't anywhere near as massive as the Vaughan Williams, so those three adjustments are no longer quite accurate. To approximate my situation this week, let's do this: stay standing behind the speakers, but move that subwoofer about 100 feet to your right, and face it away from you. Turn the treble more or less all the way down (no way are you going to be hearing the first violins with any degree of accuracy,) place a set of earmuffs on your head (earplugs are almost a necessity in a piece like this,) and have that trumpet-playing friend invite six co-conspirators to join him directly behind you (four feet is more like it than ten this week,) armed with trumpets, trombones, and tubas. That should do it.

Faced with a situation like this, a back-bench string player's best bet is to watch your principal like a hawk, and try to match bowstrokes whenever the audio isn't in your favor. But no dice: my principal is completely out of my field of view this week, and the violas are split into two, three, or even four parts much of the time, so I'm not necessarily playing what he's playing in any case. So that leaves Osmo as my last line of defense, and even he's not a sure bet: remember, he's got a lot to keep track of up there, and if he's focusing on keeping the choir on pulse, his motions will likely be of little help to me, and even if he's locked onto the orchestra, I can't presume that all of his cues or corrections are meant to apply to me, specifically.

So there's a fair amount of guesswork involved in a performance this huge, and I'm always somewhat amazed when we pull one off. Of course, given where I'm sitting, I'll probably have no idea whether we have pulled it off this weekend until someone in a more advantageous slot tells me so. So if you're coming to either Friday's or Saturday's show, I'd love to hear your impressions afterward in the comments. Does the thing hang together with the cohesion we hope for? Or do you occasionally get that uneasy feeling that not everyone on stage is exactly on the same page for a moment? Or does it not even matter with a work this involved and over-the-top, since the spectacle is half the attraction? Chime on in as you wish...

Backtracking...

...to the season opener concerts here with the Minnesota Orchestra from last week. Fresh off of a fairly recent blog discussion of applause between movements (scroll down to the comments), what did we get during the Friday evening performance of Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez but...applause between movements. Anyone out there attend this particular show who'd be willing to weigh in? I'm always curious.

Kagel's Finale

Over the weekend, some sad news hit the arts pages - Argentinian-born composer Mauricio Kagel has died, aged 76. In all likelihood, you've never heard of Kagel, since he was the very model of the anti-establishment, avant-garde composer, and as such, his music never achieved wide fame among the general public.

While I'm a big evangelist for new music in general, I must confess that a lot of what goes on on the fringes of the music world doesn't really hold much interest for me. I always thought John Cage was somewhat overrated, I never thought much of "chance music," and I'll always believe that the academic world of composition is ill-served by allowing avant-garde types to belittle the efforts of young composers who seek to write music that a majority of people would enjoy listening to.

But Kagel, in addition to being a supremely talented composer, had a quality that many hyper-intellectual music types lack: a great sense of humor. From the Washington Post's obituary: "[Kagel's] pieces include a string quartet to be played by gloved musicians using knitting needles; a lecture on avant-garde music that is interrupted by music and mime; and an orchestral piece in which the conductor tries to get through a performance while negotiating with hostage-takers."

Oberlin percussionists performing Kagel's Dressur

Back when I was a student at Ohio's Oberlin Conservatory, I got to take part in one of Kagel's more, shall we say, theatrical works. The piece was called Finale, which is an odd title for a one-movement work. But the meaning becomes clear roughly two-thirds of the way through the performance, when the conductor begins clutching his chest and stumbling at the podium, eventually having a full-fledged heart attack and "dying" on stage. (Our conductor, who was not even thirty years old and in great physical shape, had a tough time pulling this off realistically, but it was probably for the best. Had the septuagenarian who led our larger orchestras been conducting, someone in the crowd would undoubtedly have called 911 when he fell...)

Once the conductor has collapsed, Kagel's score calls for the orchestra to immediately stop playing and leap to their leader's aid. The concertmaster takes his pulse, and sadly shakes his head at the other players. All slowly return to their seats, where, conductorless, the whole ensemble plays the Dies Irae, at which point, presumably, the audience gets the joke. The piece winds up this way, and if I'm remembering correctly, Kagel dictates that the conductor is not allowed to pop back up and bow at the end. Either he may lie "dead" on the stage until the whole audience has left, or, according to Kagel, he may actually have died, in which case the problem will sort itself out.

Finale, to me, perfectly represents Kagel's outlook on music and life. It's a serious piece, albeit one with a dark joke buried in it. The composer himself put it best: "What most interests me is the laugh that stops in your throat, because you realize that laughter is the wrong reaction."

Who Killed Cleveland's Critic?

An eye-popping story happened across my computer screen earlier today - longtime Cleveland music critic Don Rosenberg has apparently been told by his bosses at the Plain Dealer that he will no longer be assigned to review Cleveland Orchestra concerts, a duty he has had for 16 years. Rosenberg isn't being fired, though - just "reassigned" and banned from covering arguably the best orchestra in the US, and Cleveland's most prominent cultural group.

So what's really going on here? Well, Rosenberg, though widely respected as a writer and critic, has had something of a bee in his bonnet ever since the Cleveland Orchestra's current music director, Franz Welser-Möst, took up his post in 2002. As Tim Smith, another respected critic, put it on his blog, "Don has judged that Welser-Möst is lacking in certain abilities in certain repertoire, that he doesn't necessarily get the best out of music or the eminent ensemble." As a result of this conclusion, Rosenberg has been handing out more unfavorable notices than one would normally expect to read about an orchestra as august as Cleveland's.

But so what, right? Critics have their opinions, orchestras feel wronged, this happens all the time and no one loses their job over it. (Relations do get frosty at times: at one of America's most prominent orchestras, which I won't name for obvious reasons, newly arriving musicians are told specifically by their management to never, ever speak with or return calls from the local paper's lead critic.) And as Smith points out, correctly, Rosenberg was hardly on a crusade against Welser-Möst, and gave him good reviews nearly as often as bad ones. So why exactly would the Plain Dealer have so nakedly allowed itself to be manipulated into pulling the writer off the beat?

The answer is almost certainly that someone in the chain of command at the paper has an involvement with the orchestra, either as a fan, a donor, or even a board member, and s/he got tired of reading Rosenberg's swipes at the man on the podium, especially with Welser-Möst having recently signed an extension which will keep him in Cleveland through 2018. (A glance at the orchestra's annual report shows that retired Plain Dealer publisher Alex Machaskee is part of the board's executive leadership. Did he make a phone call or two over the Rosenberg issue, perhaps?)

However it happened, it strikes me that orchestras do not serve themselves well when they demand (and are granted) a wholly compliant press. Yes, critics who are scared of losing whatever "access" we deign to give them (which, frankly, isn't much under the best of circumstances) are more likely to write the latest puff piece the way we want them to, and run it on the date we think will maximize ticket sales. But looking at the long term picture, this type of servile critic quickly loses credibility with his/her readership, which is what leads to people not really caring whether there are people writing about orchestras.

Today's public is more media-savvy than at any time in history, and they can tell the difference between promotion and analysis. And while the relationship between those who perform and those who write about performers will probably never be anything but uneasy, it crosses a dangerous line for those on the performance side to exercise backroom power to remove a writer they find inconvenient.

Late addendum, 09/23/08: I don't really know whether a traditional journalistic "full disclosure" is necessary on a blog, but since the CEO of the Cleveland Orchestra has seen fit to respond to this post in the comments, I might as well add one. For what it's worth, I spent several years in college studying orchestral viola with Lynne Ramsey, the First Assistant Principal Violist of the Cleveland Orchestra. I did not contact her, or any other member of the orchestra, before writing this post.

Three minute egg

No, not some sort of esoteric reference, but a neew arts website. Ruminations from the Orchestra's first rehearsal of the season can be seen at the September 17 post, "the start of the season". I like the sports analogy, which seems an apt one, as musicians, like athletes, worry about maintaining conditioning in the off-season and about stamina in the long haul.

Going Out On Top

As many readers of the ItC blog have no doubt heard by now, the Minnesota Orchestra's concertmaster of 20 years, Jorja Fleezanis, announced at this morning's rehearsal that she will be leaving the orchestra next June, and devoting the remainder of her professional life to teaching at Indiana University's prestigious school of music.

As the saying goes, her announcement was a shock, but not a total surprise. While I hadn't heard so much as a rumor that she might be thinking about leaving us, I know that she's always been passionate about teaching, and I've heard her say in the past that at some point before she retired, she hoped to be able to devote herself to it full time. That she chooses this moment to bow out of her orchestral career on her own terms seems wholly in keeping with the individual she has always been.

Jorja is a legendary figure, both in Minnesota and the wider music world, one of the rare musicians who is as effortlessly eloquent with her words as she is with her instrument. And while she can sometimes look stern and icy from the audience, with her shock of white hair (with occasional black or even purple streaked through it) and her fierce concentration during performance, those of us lucky enough to know her always think first of her easy smile, her genuine warmth and generosity with every one of her colleagues, and her boundless enthusiasm for the job.

We've got nearly a whole year to say goodbye to her, and I'm sure the ovation she'll receive when she walks out to begin this week's season opening concerts will be topped only by the one she'll receive at the other end next June. And of course, I'll be sure to make some time to sit down with her for an exit interview to be posted here on the ItC site at some point during the year. But for now, feel free to use the comments section below to say anything you'd like about Jorja's remarkable 20-year tenure in Minnesota. I'll be sure to pass your thoughts and memories along...

"Sexy Babes" (that got your attention, didn't it?)

Classical musicians as fashion feature, no problem. But Playboy? I wonder if these "Sexy Babes of Classical Music" agreed to appear in this article/online poll, and what the winner of the poll receives?

Damn The Tuxedos!

Composer/critic Greg Sandow had an interesting post over at his ArtsJournal blog this weekend, positing, with photographic evidence, that the formal dress sported by orchestras is an outdated remnant of a time when ordinary citizens of a certain class dressed much the same way on a daily basis, and orchestral music was largely the province of those certain classes. Greg's conclusion: "There isn't any [such] context now. Formal dress for classical performances just looks weird, and ancient. Time to put a stop to it."

Now, before I wade hip deep into this debate, let me state for the record that musicians are quite divided on the subject of concert dress, as are audiences. (The comments on Greg's post show that his readers are hardly of one mind.) In the last few years, I've begun to get the sense that a critical consensus is forming within the ranks of those who write about classical music for a living that it's time to think about ditching the white-tie-and-tails look, but even among those who agree with that statement, there's no widespread agreement about what should replace the tuxedos. Suits and ties, such as we wear for daytime concerts and pops? Simple black-on-black ensembles for everyone, which would have the men of the orchestra matching the women, who have never worn anything approaching the formality of a tux? T-shirts and jeans?

I'm not going to bother getting into what about the formal look turns some people off, and makes others happy, because I think both sides of that debate are fairly obvious, and have been hashed through ad nauseum elsewhere. Instead, I'd like to provide an argument in favor of ditching the tails that I haven't seen anywhere else. It's the major reason among many that I hate our dress code, and it has nothing to do with "looking professional" or making us more accessible to anyone who might find the formalwear intimidating and off-putting.

The argument is this: tuxedos are almost unimaginably uncomfortable to perform in, especially for string players, who must have pinpoint precision control of hundreds of small and large muscle groups at all times during a performance. The heavy tailcoats, needlessly bulky vests, ruffled shirts, and bow ties seemingly designed to get in the way of any shoulder-hoisted instrument quite simply make it harder to play well. I honestly believe that we become less elastic and adaptable as an ensemble the minute we put on these multi-layered monkey suits, and I can't believe there hasn't been a full-scale revolt before now.

Summer dress is even worse (again, if you're a man. Women's orchestral dress codes are almost always far looser, and never require topcoats under any circumstances.) Those white dinner jackets we wear with black bow ties and tux shirts are nearly always made of polyester, making them ridiculously hot for summer wear, and they're also nearly always badly tailored, which is an absolute killer when you're a violinist or bass player who needs a full range of arm motion. (Why don't we get non-polyester, you ask? Well, you know how there are always a few musicians wandering the stage in what look like unacceptably dirty white coats? Those are the cotton ones - they simply don't come in real, true white, so either you go poly or you look filthy.)

If you ask me, switching to a suit-and-tie dress code, as some high-profile European orchestras have done, doesn't really address the larger problem that topcoats make playing string instruments needlessly more difficult than playing without a coat. The women don't wear coats, and most of them look perfectly fine in their concert black. Why couldn't those of us with y chromosomes simply start wearing something more in line with what our female colleagues wear? A simple black button-down shirt with black dress pants and dress shoes is visually smooth, comfortable to play in, and in no way makes the orchestra look unprofessional or sloppy. (This, of course, is the dress code the Minnesota Orchestra employs for our Inside the Classics concerts.) For summer, we could switch from black shirts to white, as, again, the women already do.

Now, I know all the arguments for keeping things as they are, and I realize that many of you reading this probably aren't buying my contention that tuxes are really all that awful to play in, since orchestras have been doing so for ages, and sound perfectly fine. And as I said, there is no shortage of orchestra musicians who believe strongly that the formal look is an integral part of our presentation, and would hate to see a change.

But if you ask me, the truth is in actions, not words, so I tend to keep a close eye on what my colleagues choose to wear at our periodic chamber music concerts throughout the year, when no strict dress code is in place. Over the past years, I've seen colorful vests, well-tailored suits (mainly on wind players,) simple black ensembles, vibrant colored tops, and even a feather boa donned for effect during a classic film score.

What I have never, ever seen is a member of the Minnesota Orchestra choosing, of his own volition, to play a chamber music concert in white tie and tails. Why? Because they're awful to play in. Simple as that.

New traditions

Well, we're back to work again, and I just had my first rehearsal of the season, a lot of music to get through for a Season Sampler Concert tomorrow. Coming offstage after quite a workout, I thought of an article I read a couple of days ago about the liquid reward waiting backstage for some conductors (see paragraph 3). Perhaps a fantastic new tradition to put in place for the Minnesota Orchestra?

...which also led my thoughts back to a concert I did with the National Symphony Orchestra back in 2002 as part of their National Conductors' Institute. It was my first concert with a major American orchestra and it really was a thrilling experience on many levels. But the image that really stays with me from that night is walking off after a successful Don Juan, unexpectedly greeted by a towel and a Fitz's root beer from the smiling stage manager. (Fitz's was the preferred post-concert quaff of then-Music Director Leonard Slatkin, who also headed the Institute.) Nothing like drinking what the boss drinks to feel like you've (almost) arrived...

Tragedy and Release

The anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is always a solemn occasion, of course, and while some of the sting of that awful day has begun to be replaced with a less immediate sense of general mourning for many Americans, we need only look back at some of the music that was written and performed in its aftermath to remember the unfathomable impact of such violence on our national consciousness.

There was anger, of course, most notoriously exemplified by Toby Keith's crass and juvenile tribute to America's ability to kick foreign ass, "Courtesy of the Red, White And Blue." But despite the furor over that song, which many commentators used as an indicator of the growing polarization of America in the months and years after the attacks, the country anthem written in the wake of 9/11 that has stood the test of time was a much more introspective one, penned by Alan Jackson.

Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning - Alan Jackson

Classical composers also leaped to respond to the tragedy, with John Adams' monumental symphony, On the Transmigration of Souls, being the most prominent and widely performed new work to be inspired. But for me, the music that will always carry with it the memory of the terrible events of that day, as well as the hope we all felt as we watched the country come together in mourning, is the Nimrod movement from Elgar's Enigma Variations.

It was this gut-wrenching four minutes of music that the Minnesota Orchestra played on our season-opening concerts, just two days after the attacks, as a tribute to the fallen. Before beginning, our music director, Eiji Oue, asked that the audience remain silent after we'd finished, as a gesture of respect and remembrance for all who had lost their lives that day. I'll never forget that silence - there were tears running down my face, and I could hear several choked sobs both on and offstage - but I'll also never forget how cathartic it felt to be able to respond to such unimaginable hate with unimaginable beauty...

Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with Daniel Barenboim

Seriously, folks...

In a recent New Yorker article )"Why So Serious?"), Alex Ross discusses the ritualization and relative rigidity of the format of modern-day classical music concerts. Included are the usual suspects: the overture-concerto-intermission-symphony format; the insistence on silence between movements of larger works; the curatorial aspects of creating an "intellectual journey" through the combination and chronology of repertoire; and the general seriousness that hovers over all of the proceedings, which seems to "elevate and stifle the music in equal measure". Perhaps the most quotable line: "The overarching problem of classical music is the tuxedo".

Certainly an oversimplification, but it's hard not to agree with much of Ross's premise. It made me ruminate over the eternal debate about applause, and when (and how) it should occur. On one hand, there's something thrilling about the expectant hush that comes over an audience when the baton is raised; on the other, there's something awkward about consciously silenced enthusiasm after a spectacularly well-played first movement. Why delay the expression of delight? In the early 19th century (the era of the "potpourri" programming) the first movement of a work may have very well been the only one heard - intermingled with other works, often more of the "light classical" vein. Audiences were apt to mill and murmur and applaud when they felt applause was warranted, even if it was in the middle of a piece.

This made me think back to a concert I conducted last weekend at the Mann Center in Philadelphia with acclaimed alt-rocker Ben Folds and members of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia (COP), which was a blast for me (it's always fun to work with people whose upcoming albums you pre-order on iTunes). Although it was a "concert with orchestra", the capacity crowd of several thousand was certainly there for Folds and not for the COP (and most likely, few were regular classical concertgoers), and thus it was a perfect environment in which to observe audience reactions unaffected by expected standards of classical concert behavior.

Interestingly, they acted much like 19th century concert attendees would: there was a constant milling, the movement of people coming from/going to the concessions area; an underlying murmuring; spontaneous applause from different sections of the house in reaction to different elements (from humorous song introductions to the brief violin solo in the middle of one of the charts); people shouting out requests (read the section in the Ross article about Liszt); enthusiastic hooting when a particularly popular song began. There were a couple of numbers where there was a smattering of (quasi) rhythmic clapping, one song where Folds asked the crowd to act as the chorus of "oooo"s (in triads, no less!), and several in which there was a palpable quietness because of the nature of the music (notably "Fred Jones Part 2" and "The Luckiest"). In short, appropriate responses to the ebb and flow of music and emotions within a concert experience.

Neither I nor the orchestra (or, presumably, Ben Folds!) was ever distracted by what was going on in the crowd, which was never rowdy or disrespectful (in fact, Folds gave an extended shout-out to the COP and orchestral music in general); there was an interaction and a clear connection between those of us onstage and those in the audience; and both performers and concertgoers left with a feeling of satisfaction that comes from sharing the ephemeral experience of well-played live music.

While realizing that this sort of concert experience would be difficult to duplicate in the classical concert hall (and would certainly not work for particular repertoire), it's clear to me that it's the kind of thing that makes people want to go out and spend their hard-earned money in a sober economic climate to hear live music. And the irony is that it's also the kind of behavior that is discouraged in the average orchestral performance.

The other thought that arose from reading the Ross article was the expectation of a "clockwork routine" in orchestra concerts - two halves, each 40-50 minutes in length. It's given us all a somewhat inflexible notion of how long concerts, or pieces of music within a concert, should be (which is why some people are thrown off by, say, the colossal nature of Mahler symphonies). It reminded me particularly of some of the commentary we received over the course of our first season of "Inside the Classics", notably the sentiment that a 24 minute piece (like "Appalachian Spring") didn't constitute enough music for an entire second half of a concert. While I understand people's preferences for a certain amount of similarity to a "conventional" orchestra performance, it seemed lost on those who critiqued the timing of the featured pieces that the very premise of the series was to create a different way of approaching a concert experience. Which just goes to show how ingrained those expectations of an orchestral concert experience are.

Balancing the need to meet a certain amount of expectation with the need to push boundaries is the crux of the issue, and it's hard to know if the proper equilibrium is being struck. But seriously, that's the trick, isn't it?

Being Prepared

I was recently reading a review of the Houston Symphony's season opening concert (a friend of mine was soloing with them,) and was struck by something essentially non-musical that bothered the critic enough to merit a mention:

After Houston Symphony Society president Jesse B. Tutor finished his remarks... he gestured to the empty stage and asked the audience to welcome the orchestra.

Nothing happened. The audience's applause almost died out before a musician came through a stage door.

Classical music organizations still don't get that such slip-ups are inexcusable in this day of ultra-produced entertainment.

Now, conventional wisdom among orchestra musicians says that we are there to play music, and the audience is there to listen to music, and we shouldn't be asked to act, or sing, or make fancy entrances, or do anything more than what we've been trained to do in music school. If a conductor or manager wants to make us try something different, we'll give it a shot, usually with maximal grumbling and minimal enthusiasm, and if it all goes wrong, fine with us. Proves our point.

This, of course, is exactly the kind of attitude Sarah and I have been trying to do away with in our Inside the Classics concerts, and we're lucky enough to be doing it with an orchestra that couldn't be more willing to dispense with the conventional wisdom, so long as it's done well. And by done well, I mean making sure that the musicians have the information they need to execute whatever we're asking them to do, while not burdening them with a lot of extra stuff they don't need to know.

I can actually picture what probably happened in Houston. The musicians were probably told only that they'd be entering after their president spoke to the crowd. They may or may not have been clearly told that his exit applause would also be their entrance applause. I'm guessing that they don't have a lot more room backstage than we do, so 95 or so musicians would have been crammed into the wings waiting, probably unable to hear more than a bit of what was being said onstage. In all likelihood, there was no one offstage assigned to actually cue the musicians to enter. In other words, everyone just sort of assumed that this simple bit of theater would work on its own.

The fact is, though, nothing that happens on a stage, no matter how simple the idea seems, just works on its own, and orchestras wanting to do things in a new way are usually caught flat-footed when it comes to executing things like this. Even the best-laid plans can easily go awry for the dumbest reasons.

For instance, last fall, the Minnesota Orchestra decided to open the first concert of our new season with John Corigliano's Promenade Overture, partly because it's a cool piece, but mostly because it begins with an empty stage, and calls for each section of the orchestra to enter separately. The last player to enter is the tuba, who comes out belching and honking just a few bars before the piece ends. It's gimmicky, yes, but it's awfully fun to watch, and seemed like a nifty way to reintroduce the orchestra to our audience.

But here's the problem: like most American orchestras, the concerts we play on opening week of a new season always, always begin with the national anthem. (I don't really know why, but I don't know why we sing it at baseball games, either.) Furthermore, the rules of playing the national anthem (yes, there are rules) state that if you're going to play it, you can't play anything else before it on the program. So our plan to have an empty stage at the beginning of the concert so as to give the Corigliano maximum effect would now be compromised. Astonishingly, no one had thought of this until two days before the concert.

The logical thing to do would, of course, have been to skip the Star-Spangled Banner. I know everyone's terrified of seeming unpatriotic these days, but honestly, I doubt that 95% of our audience even remembers that we do this every fall until they hear the snare drum kick in. Alternately, we could have disregarded the rule (who's going to arrest us, really?) and played the anthem after intermission or something. But we did neither. In typical symphony orchestra fashion, we played the anthem first, after which every single musician got up and left the stage, after which we played the Corigliano. It was still a cool piece, but the humor and drama the composer intended was out the window.

I think the problem orchestras run into when trying to do things in a more highly-produced way is that good ideas are rarely backed up with enough preparation and attention to detail. Something as simple as having four musicians leave their seats and come to the front of the stage at our Copland show last spring required me to prep additional parts for those players, tape those parts to extra music stands, place the stands where they would be out of the way for the bulk of the show, mark where each advancing player should stand at the front of the stage, mark the conductor's script to show where to cue the players to start moving, time my speech to end as they reached the front, and about six other things I've forgotten. Had I just said to the four players, "I need you to come to the front of the stage for the last excerpt of the first half, so start moving when I'm talking, and bring your music," the whole thing would likely have been a choreographic disaster.

Getting orchestras used to adding a subtle theatrical element to our performances is, I think, a good idea. But if we're going to do it, we need to do it right, and that means putting a lot more thought into the execution than most orchestras bother with.

Maybe We Should Start Painting Our Faces?

A cool new study came out last week, in which researchers asked a wide-ranging sample of music fans to describe aspects of their personality, then used the data to correlate different types of people with the genres of music that best suit them. The study's been getting a fair amount of play in the arts press this weekend, largely because one of the more amusing findings is that classical devotees have a lot in common with heavy metal fans.

There are some hare-brained ideas about why this might be: "Out of all of the main genres of music heavy metal and classical are the ones which require the most discipline to play – they're technically very difficult and involve playing at inhumanly fast speeds," said one fan of both genres in the UK's Independent newspaper. I don't know about that - it seems to me that jazz deserves to be in that conversation as well, and I'm not sure I buy the idea that most metal bands are all that technically accomplished - but I do find plausible the assertion of the study's author that classical and metal fans share a "love of the grandiose." (Think Wagner's Ring cycle as an analogue for your average KISS show - plenty of costumes, pathos, shrieking, and over-the-top emotion in each.)

One interesting part of the survey that isn't getting reported on much is the finding that classical fans, while "creative and at ease with themselves, [are] not outgoing." I wish I could say this surprises me, but it doesn't. 80 years of being told that your favorite music is anachronistic and elitist by the supposed mainstream music press will have that effect on people.

I also wish that we could measure today's most devoted classical listeners with those from 100 years ago, before the culture of recorded sound took hold. There's a huge subset of classical listeners today who rarely if ever bother to venture out to the concert hall, because they find themselves invariably disappointed by Local Orchestra X's failure to reproduce exactly their favorite recording of Great Work Y. It's sad, because I've always felt the same way about classical music that I do about hockey - you're just not really experiencing it unless you're actually there live and in person, and the best parts of both experiences will never be fully translatable on TV, radio, or CD.

And now that I think about it, I'll bet Metallica and Black Sabbath fans feel the same way...

Putting words into mouths

In the spirit of orchestral lip-synching and discussions on political speechwriting, I thought it would be an apropos moment to share my favorite example of putting words/sounds into other people's mouths. (This made the rounds on Youtube about a year ago, and it's one that I go back to when I need a laugh!)

Who Knew Nixon Was Such A Softie?

In honor of closing night at the Republican Convention across the river, here's a clip of another (in)famous Republican politician tickling the ivories. (And yes, that's Jack Paar introducing him.) For some reason, the sound cuts out about 40 seconds before the end of the clip, but you'll have the general idea by then...



Judging by the reference to "last November" and the joviality of the question about "future political plans," I'm guessing this was in 1961, after Nixon had lost the presidential race to Jack Kennedy, and not post-Watergate. (Come to think of it, a post-Watergate clip would probably have been in color, too.) Thanks to MN Orch online marketing guru Brian Mangin for pointing me to the clip...

Saying Something Nice

As everyone knows, the Cities are swarming with Republicans this week, and the whole metro has taken on a strange feel. Cities don't come much more liberal than ours, so playing host to the biggest GOP gathering of the year feels slightly off-kilter. I wasn't going to blog about it at all, partly because it has nothing to do with music, but mostly because my mother taught me that if I didn't have anything nice to say, etc. etc.

Two things changed my mind. First off, I got stopped on the street in downtown Minneapolis today by a bearded guy who was very enthusiastic about my work. At first, I assumed he was a fan of the orchestra (I'm continually amazed by how many people in Minnesota can pick individual members of the orchestra out of a crowd,) but when he started asking me questions about Keith Olbermann, I stopped him, and gently asked, "Sorry, but who do you think I am?"


As it turns out, I apparently look a lot like NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd, who has been getting a fair amount of national airtime in recent weeks. If only Sarah looked like Chris Matthews, we might be able to arrange to get Inside the Classics some exposure on MSNBC... (Insert your own joke about fewer people watching MSNBC than attending our concerts.)

Secondly, it occurred to me that I actually do have something nice to say. Regardless of what you may think of the current administration and its approach to governance, I've always been quite taken with the fact that we have a Secretary of State who can play piano at something approaching a professional level.


Dvorak Piano Quintet, split in two for some reason

Condoleezza Rice is actually something of an amazing woman on a lot of levels (if you're interested in a fascinating, completely nonpartisan look at her and the rest of the Bush brain trust, check out James Mann's excellent book, Rise of the Vulcans,) but it's the piano playing that really gives me pause. Not that she plays, you understand - I know a lot of adults who still play music for fun - but that she plays awfully well. She plays like a woman who still puts in a couple of hours practice on a daily basis, and I can't imagine where she ever finds the time.


...part two.

So there: an RNC blog post that didn't mention Sarah Palin's daughter, John McCain's age, or the protesters who decided that the proper way to show their displeasure with the GOP was to smash the front window of Macy's. Do I win a prize?

Digging The Scene

It was somewhere around the middle of my time at Greenwood this August that I found myself sitting in the middle of a crowd of around 150 people squeezed into a tiny church on a lonesome dirt road in the little town of Whately, Massachusetts. I'd been brought by a longtime friend, with whom I often trade favorite songs and artists, to hear a rare performance by a quartet of singer-songwriters who call themselves Redbird. To call the foursome a band would be a reach - they only play together once or twice a year, they quite clearly don't spend a lot of time rehearsing together before they take the stage as a group, and they each have solo careers that consume the bulk of their time and energy.

But they're also all amazing artists who obviously love working together, and the show I saw that night in the hills of Western Massachusetts (made all the more engaging by the space, a room so small that the performers weren't miked at all) immediately ranked among my favorite live music experiences of all time. What's more, it brought home a reality that should have been obvious to me a long time ago: my deep and abiding affection for rural New England, where I've spent at least a few weeks of just about every year of my life, is based almost entirely on the incredible diversity and quality of musical life I've enjoyed there.

I know. This sort of thing shouldn't qualify as a revelation coming from someone who makes his living playing music and evangelizing from the stage about it. But for whatever reason, it wasn't something I'd ever really thought about before. I've always been someone who goes looking for the characteristics that make a town, city, or state unique, and the best way to get me started on a foam-at-the-mouth rant is to bring up suburban sprawl, with its attendant homogenization of local American culture. So my assumption, I guess, had always been that the places I've loved to live, work and play have earned my affection through characteristics that go well beyond music.

But as I sat listening to Redbird, it occurred to me that I can pretty much divide the US (and the world, I suppose,) into areas that I care deeply about, and others I don't, and in every instance, the ones I love are the ones that have introduced me to a unique musical culture. And the places I've lived, even for long periods of time, that didn't inspire me musically are the places I don't tend to think a lot about after I've left, regardless of what other positive qualities they boasted.

Birmingham, Alabama may be a redneck joke to most Americans, but to me, it's where I learned to really understand both bluegrass and gospel music, and where I had the honor of being a part of a life-altering MLK Day concert at the famous 16th Street Baptist Church where four little girls were tragically murdered by the KKK in 1963.

Helsinki, Finland will always have a special place in my heart, not just because of the famous Finnish love for classical music, but because of the almost unbelievable diversity and enthusiasm of the city's buskers and street musicians. Cologne, Germany had me hooked for life after I heard the children's choir sing a Catholic mass at the looming cathedral that dominates the city center, and then surprised me again during Karneval with polka bands so good that they almost made me like polkas.

It was a local music scene, too, that convinced me to stop taking orchestra auditions once I landed in Minneapolis. There are many things I like about Minnesota living, but the fact that, on any given night of any given week, I can have my pick of ten or twenty great local bands playing in bars, clubs, and concert venues across the Cities goes right at the top of the list. It's not just that there is a local music scene - it's that there's a damn good music scene that is immediately identifiable as Minnesotan to anyone who's spent time in it.

Western Massachusetts may seem like a collection of hippie-infested colleges and small, cloistered hilltowns to those who pass through on their way to New York or Boston, but I know it as the only place in America where, over the course of a single week, I can hear the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra play Kurt Weill, the boys of Kronos play an utterly stunning new work for string quartet and tape by a young woman from Serbia, a brilliant 19-year-old cellist (who I guarantee will be familiar to you within a decade) playing a solo Kodaly sonata for 50 wide-eyed 12-year-olds, a coloratura soprano premiering a set of three new songs written as payment for a landscape painting, and, of course, Redbird, and all the other musicians who make up Western Mass's enviable acoustic music scene.

I don't really have a larger point in any of this, I don't think, and you may still be rolling your eyes at the absurdity of a musician having a revelation that music is important to him. But I've found myself wondering, since that night in Whately, whether music is this big a tug on everyone's affections for a given place. Can you be happy living in a city or town without a decent live music scene? In the age of the iPod, do you still need a diverse, thriving collection of clubs and concert halls to make you happy? These aren't rhetorical questions - the comment button awaits you...