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.