Hallowe'en Madness

Almost every year, our principal horn player, Mike Gast, throws an all-orchestra Hallowe'en bash at his Uptown abode, and every time he does, there wind up being some truly excellent costumes. So here, for your All Hallows Eve enjoyment, are some shots I snapped at this year's party, which, since we're working tonight, took place last weekend...

Our gracious host, with bassist Dave Williamson in the duct tape.

Oboist Julie Gramolini, cleverly costumed as herself several years ago in the Air Force.

Outreach/Education staffer Mele Willis channeling her inner Alaska governor.

Flutist Wendy Williams as Cindy McCain. Ah, election year.

Trumpeter Chuck Lazarus doing his best Joe the Plumber. (Be glad this isn't a rear view. Chuck went all out for plumber authenticity, if you know what I mean.)

Violist Megan Tam spent hours sewing this. She's "Undecided." Get it?

Oh, yeah. I was there, too...

Murphy's Law

Weirdest thing happened this morning at our Coffee Concert featuring MN Orch conductor laureate Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. Intermission had ended, the orchestra tuned, and Stan, who is about to turn 85 but has more energy than I do, came striding out and took his bow. We got ready to start Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, which begins with a long, low hum in the contrabassoon and organ, before the trumpets come in with the famous theme from 2001. Only, as the applause died and Stan raised his arms, the room rumbled a bit, and kept rumbling, at roughly the same pitch as the opening hum of the piece.

Stan, startled, looked around to see if the organ was already playing for some reason. It wasn't. He looked next at Jorja, who tried to quietly explain that the construction outside on Marquette Avenue was causing the noise. (What are they doing to that poor street, by the way? It looks like a war zone from 12th all the way up to the light rail station!) Orchestra Hall is pretty well soundproofed, but when you've got jackhammers and other heavy equipment working underground right next to it, there's really no avoiding some intrusion. Stan didn't understand what Jorja was telling him, and by this time, people in the audience were looking around worriedly, and wondering if we were ever going to start the piece.

It was around this time that a woman about 20 rows deep on the main floor started talking. I don't mean whispering. I mean talking in a full, clear voice, although I don't know whether she was speaking to anyone in particular. I couldn't make out much of what she was saying, but as half the hall began shushing her, I distinctly heard her say, "What? They haven't even started yet!" Which was true, but as the entire orchestra plus Stan was now staring at her with confused looks on our faces, she might have been able to ascertain that she was part of the cause of that.

Meanwhile, the rumbling stopped. For about three seconds. Then it started again, and Stan again looked to Jorja for help. At this point, we'd all been waiting for nearly two minutes. Jorja shrugged, and said, "We're gonna have to play through it." So Stan raised his arms again, and cued the contrabassoon and the organ, who came in perfectly in time with a giant hacking cough from the front row. Some days, you just can't win for losing.

A Song For America

One of the things that people who don't work in the music business probably don't have a firm grasp on is the sheer number of musicians a major symphony orchestra employs. And I'm not talking only about the 95-100 musicians you see on stage when we're performing, although we're certainly an intimidatingly large bunch. Orchestras our size typically employ close to 100 non-performers as well, and you'd be amazed at how many of them also play (or used to play) music seriously, if not professionally.

Just taking a glance through our artistic staff roster (the people directly involved with the day-to-day artistic administration of the orchestra, as differentiated from the folks in, say, payroll or HR,) I see an operations manager who sings in the Minnesota Chorale, an education director who plays viola in the Minnesota Opera Orchestra, and a personnel manager who used to be a professional violinist. Our former CEO, Tony Woodcock, who now runs New England Conservatory, is an avid amateur violinist. Brian Newhouse, who hosts our weekly live broadcasts on Minnesota Public Radio, used to sing semi-professionally. And Kari Marshall, the orchestra's Artistic Administrator and one of the unseen hands guiding Inside the Classics, is a lifelong flautist.

And then, there's Kellie Nitz. Kellie works in our personnel department, dealing with all the whiny musician complaints and scheduling snafus that most of us never think about when we're practicing for the next concert. I've known Kellie since she started working for us a number of years back, and it never occurred to me to ask whether she played an instrument herself, until a couple of summers ago, when I was wandering Peavey Plaza during the Day of Music, and found myself looking up at her as she stood on one of the outdoor stages, thwapping a bass and wailing into a microphone.

As it turns out, Kellie spends her off hours as a member of a truly awesome Minneapolis rock band called Mighty Fairly. They've already got one full-length album to their credit, and they'll be throwing a release party for their second one next month at Bunker's, in the Warehouse District. And this fall, they entered a songwriting contest sponsored by Rift magazine, in which bands were challenged to write a song completing a sentence that begins, "My America..."

According to Kellie, Mighty Fairly banged out their submission in less than two days. And they won. (Told you they were awesome.) After realizing they might have a hit on their hands, they created a video to go with the song, featuring a wide variety of Minnesotans completing the My America sentence themselves. Parts of the video nearly made me tear up, and the chorus of the song has been stuck in my head all week. (And I'm not tired of it yet.) So as the country steams towards next Tuesday's date with the ballot box, here's a song to sing while you're waiting in line...

Big week, Part II

A quick follow-up to Part I, which covered the choice of repertoire for my subscription concerts last week.

During the first rehearsal last week, I opened by mentioning to the Orchestra that over the course of my two seasons with them, I had conducted over 70 performances (yes, I counted!), and of those, not a single one received more that one rehearsal, which was kind of an astonishing thought. All of our Inside the Classics, Pops, Sampler/Preview, educational and outreach concerts are done on a single rehearsal, and preparing a show on one rehearsal is a skill set unto itself, and one I feel like I've pretty well mastered. The pace is relentless, and there is little time to go back and fix anything but the most egregious of errors. (During a recent Sommerfest concert, I recall, we were missing the ending to a piece due to a library mishap. We had no time to fix and rehearse, so we simply crossed our fingers and played it for the first time in the performance that night with a singer, no less!) What counts most is absolute clarity of intent.

But rehearsing a subscription week is an utterly different experience, and I often had to remind myself to slow down my usual hyper-efficient pace - we had four whole rehearsals - a luxury in itself. More rehearsal times means more time to work on the larger musical shape of a piece, as well as tackling the smallest details. Often, on those one-rehearsal shows (and particularly if it's something unfamiliar), I feel I have to pull the ensemble along by sheer force of will. Having the time to work on passages over multiple rehearsals helps us establish a groove together, which means that come concert times there are sections which will simply "happen", ensemble-wise, which allows me to focus more on the purely musical aspects.

Rehearsing is an interesting psychological process as well, because over the course of those 9 or so hours, one establishes a certain synthesis through both compulsion and compromise. It's never lost on me that an orchestra is a collection of individuals, and the concomitant variety of predilections and perspectives; it's the conductor's job to get everyone on board with a single viewpoint, and so it needs to be one that everyone can respect even if they don't necessarily agree with it.

In the end, for me, the rehearsals are the most challenging (and thus the most interesting!) part of the whole process. Concerts are thrilling, yes, but we couldn't have gotten to that point without the work before. Performing, despite its conclusive nature, is the easy part, where you enjoy the fruits of your labor; the magic of a concert can only come from cumulative, careful work in rehearsal.

Making The Political Personal

Unlike, say, actors and rock stars, classical musicians aren't known for taking public stands on political issues. In fact, most of us try to avoid partisan subjects entirely when we're in public view. Part of the reason for this is that we're so dependent on the continued good will and fiscal support of the public, and while it's fair to say that a majority of musicians (like most people in the arts) lean to the left, our audiences tend to be all over the map, politically. Also, there's the obvious fact that classical musicians aren't really all that famous, so there's little reason to suspect that our speaking out on issues of the day would have any impact at all.

But this year, I've noticed a few instances of musicians making political noise. This week, the blogosphere is falling all over itself to report that among the dozens (hundreds?) of celebrities who have now produced videos and TV ads opposing a California ballot measure that would amend the state constitution to specifically prohibit same-sex marriage is none other than violin über-star Itzhak Perlman.



Normally, I don't know how I'd feel about this. Celebrity speeches rarely hold much interest for me, and I don't really understand why anyone thinks that Margaret Cho's opposition to a ballot issue is going to affect anyone's vote but Margaret Cho's. (Especially since the "No on Prop 8" campaign is already running some pretty clever ads that actually might swing a few votes.)

But what makes Perlman's ad powerful is that he isn't speaking as a celebrity - he's speaking as a father of five children, one of whom is openly gay and married to a same-sex partner. As a result, the ad comes off (to me, at least) as more personal and less preachy. What Perlman is saying sounds a lot like the things my parents say whenever issues like this come up in the national debate. (I've been out to my family since I was a teenager, and I'm constantly amused by the fact that my always supportive parents are often far more outraged by antigay rhetoric than I am.)

So what about it? Does it bother you when someone like Itzhak Perlman steps into the political arena for a cause he clearly has a personal stake in? Does it bother you that there is currently a banner adorning Orchestra Hall touting Minnesota's own proposed constitutional amendment which would dedicate new funding to the arts and the environment? If you've spotted any Minnesota Orchestra musicians sporting McCain or Obama stickers on our instrument cases after a concert recently (and there are some prominent examples of each,) were you surprised? Pleased? Offended? Let us know in the comments...

Big week, Part I

As Sam noted in his recent post, I've been a little preoccupied this week with my subscription debut with the Orchestra.

In many ways, it's a big deal; it's my debut on a series that's considered both "front-ranking" and the most artistically significant. And, of course, Minnesota is a major American orchestra, so these concerts carry a weight, in terms of my career, far beyond Minneapolis; other orchestras and presenters watch with interest when a staff conductor takes on a major program.

In many other ways, this week has been just business as usual; first of all, because I've certainly conducted subscription concerts with many other orchestras (albeit smaller organizations), and second, because this is my home orchestra, everything has been a well-known quantity (there's certainly a huge benefit to knowing an ensemble well).

Since this week's program has been in my book for about 10 months, I've had ample time to wrap my head around the program - which is a challenging one, both for myself and the Orchestra! Two pieces were "given" to me - the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante for Winds and Copland's "Quiet City", pieces meant to showcase members of the Orchestra as soloists. I ran with the whole idea of showcasing our musicians, which is where the idea of Concerti for Orchestra (Shchedrin and Lustoslawski).

I've been asked why I chose the Lutoslawski as my main work rather than, say, the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, which is certainly a better-known piece and a staple of the repertoire. My choice of Lutoslawski comes from two strongly held convictions; one, that part of my job as a musician is to champion lesser-known but artistically worthy pieces that can help broaden the standard repertoire (in particular, if I have a powerful connection to those pieces), and two, that as a young conductor, my artistic growth is enhanced by working on repertoire that is not already ingrained in an ensemble.

Osmo and I agree on that second point (we chatted about it sometime last season). An orchestra of Minnesota's standing has played the standard repertoire countless (countless!) times - just thinking about the collective experience with, say, the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, is staggering. Which means that the Orchestra has deeply etched ideas of how that piece should go, how the work "feels" when played by this particular ensemble, and which idiomatic or traditional "extras" (not indicated in the score, perhaps, but part of an accepted performance practice) that they'll execute without even thinking about it. All of which, while easy on an ensemble, is hard on a conductor, particularly if you have a differing view of the work. The challenge in this lies in getting an ensemble to see your perspective and to adopt that view over the rehearsal period.

Rehearsing a piece that hasn't been played in 15 years (1993 was the last time the Lutoslawski was performed here) presents very different challenges, mostly because there is little collective perspective of the piece. Ask the Minnesota Orchestra to play, say, any Brahms Symphony, and they'll happily fall into a groove - everyone knows how they fit in with everyone else, everyone knows what to listen for, everyone knows where the challenging passages are, everyone knows the variations of tempi. Given a less familiar work, there is a shallower collective understanding to fall back on, making an orchestra more reliant on the conductor, which presents me with more work to maintain ensemble.

But the benefits far outweigh this challenge, because a less familiar piece allows me to work with a much cleaner state. Without strong predispositions toward a piece, it is much easier to mold the musical architecture from my own perspective of the work. And this musical molding, of giving a piece a viewpoint that is both true to the intent of the composer and unique in its perspective, is the most fascinating work that I can do as a conductor. And working those details and making artistic discoveries is heightened when working on less familiar repertoire.

It's been an enormously rewarding week from a personal viewpoint so far; over the weekend, my second post on the topic will delve into the rehearsal process and the concerts themselves.

Sarah's Big Week

In case you're wondering why you're not hearing a lot from our Ms. Hicks on the blog this week, the answer is that, well, she's kinda busy. This is a huge week for Sarah - her subcription debut with the Minnesota Orchestra, and (as she noted at our first rehearsal of the week,) her first time getting more than one rehearsal for a concert with us after more than 70 (!) performances in Minneapolis. (As we've noted more than once, the orchestra gets 4-5 rehearsals for a subscription concert week, but only one chance to rehearse pops shows, young people's concerts, and Inside the Classics.)

Making a major orchestra debut is always a nerve-racking experience for a young conductor (and make no mistake, Sarah is a seriously young conductor - mid-thirties is about 13 in conductor years,) and thus far, Sarah's been handling it with extreme calm and efficiency in rehearsal. I'll leave it to her to talk about the specifics of the experience, but I think we should have some awfully fun concerts ahead of us this week, and if you normally only come to our Inside the Classics shows, I'd strongly encourage you to check out Sarah's programs on Thursday and Friday.

The repertoire for these concerts (which Sarah picked out) is some of the most interesting we'll do all year, and it really highlights the orchestra as a whole. I know all the ads we're running for this program say "Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante," (shades of last year's Mahler 9 program being promoted as "Schubert's Unfinished Symphony," no?) but the real meat of this concert are the bookending pieces by Schedrin and Lutoslawski. Not exactly household names, true, but the Lutoslawski is an incredible magnum opus that manages to be intellectual without ever becoming off-putting, and the Schedrin is just good, hard-rocking fun. (If you remember the percussion extravaganza we put on last spring, Schedrin was the composer of that ridiculous and wonderful adaptation of Bizet's Carmen.)

So if you've been waiting for a chance to see Sarah conduct without the goofball standing next to her cracking silly jokes the whole time, here's your chance. And don't forget to come back to the blog after the show and let us know what you thought...

Musical Isolationism

David Patrick Stearns had an interesting piece in this past Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer (one of the few American dailies that still employs not one, but two full-time reporters covering the classical beat,) in which he points out a puzzling new development in our industry. Stearns writes: "With a weak dollar, strong euro, U.S. visas requiring much paperwork, and risk-wary American presenters, the once-global community of classical musicians has become fragmented in ways that beloved, familiar talents on one side of the ocean are unknown on the other."

Now, to some degree, America and Europe have always had differing views of various composers and performers, and what's trendy and popular in New York or Boston might be seen as unimportant or unmusical in Berlin and Vienna. But the point Stearns is making is that the musical universes of Europe and America increasingly seem to be operating on parallel tracks separated by a brick wall. We in the States simply don't get to hear a lot of the top European talent that's out there these days, because getting permission for them to enter our country has become such a hassle.

Case in point: the Finnish a cappella group, Rajaton, with whom we performed last weekend's pops shows, almost didn't make it to Minneapolis, despite months of careful preparations by both their people and ours. They had a valid American work visa that was supposed to cover them for several US performances over the course of a calendar year, as did conductor Jaakko Kuusisto, and since none of them were carrying instruments, they wouldn't even need to worry about all the hassles most musicians have to go through every time we try to get on an airplane.

But the day before we were scheduled to have two rehearsals for the Rajaton show, word filtered through Orchestra Hall that conductor and band were stuck in Edmonton, Alberta, where they'd just done the same show we were about to do, and were being denied entry to the US pending a closer examination of their paperwork. Our people, who have been through this garbage more times than they probably care to remember, got on the line to whatever government entities you call in these situations, and figured out that the hang-up seemed to be that our guests were European citizens trying to enter the US through Canada. Apparently, this sends up all sorts of red flags over at Homeland Security, I suppose on the general assumption that a terrorist wanting to sneak into the US might figure he had a better shot if he could come across the border from a country friendly to America. (If, in fact, there are any of those left.)

The upshot of the delay was that we had to cancel one of our two rehearsals when it became clear that there would be no one present to lead us or sing with us. And by the time the second rehearsal rolled around, only conductor Kuusisto had managed to make it past the border patrol. So we rehearsed the whole show without our soloists (some of us did, ahem, try to be helpful by singing key passages of our favorite Queen songs as we played,) and crossed our fingers. And eventually, late Thursday evening, Rajaton managed to get on a plane bound for MSP, courtesy of an artful, complicated, and completely ridiculous bit of paper-shuffling that involved our management, their visa, and for reasons that will never really be clear to me, the Charlotte Symphony.

The show went off without a hitch, thanks mainly to Kuusisto's perfectly prepared and meticulously annotated orchestra parts. But I can't helping thinking that, were I a European performer going through what our guests had just gone through, I'd think seriously about whether I wanted to accept any future offers to perform in America. And that's bad news for all of us.

Through the ages

The hand-wringing over the "graying of classical music audiences" seems to crop up fairly cyclically - as it has this month, in various print and online publications. An interesting back and forth has been going on, spurred by Leon Botstein's Wall Street Journal article from a few weeks back. To summarize the most salient point:

Classical music has always appealed to older adults who, with the passing of years, tend to contemplate the kind of daily life conundrums that are freighted with ambiguity and complexity. The average classical listener has historically hovered around middle age. This is encouraging, as there is no shortage of baby boomers on the horizon.

The rest of the article discusses conservatories packed with students, the existence of more youth and professional orchestras than ever, and the rising interest in Western Classical music Asia and South America.

Then comes Greg Sandow's counter-argument over on ArtsJournal. Sandow, in a nutshell:

Studies from 1937, 1955, and 1966 show an audience with a median age in its thirties, and in the first two studies in its early thirties. Studies done in the 1970s, which I haven't talked about here, show an audience older than that, but nowhere near as old as it is now. Studies by the National Endowment for the Arts show the audience growing older between 1982 and 2002.

His other issues center around Botstein's use of statistics (with which I tend to side with Sandow - pointing to an uptick in ticket sale income between two seasons (04-05 to 05-06) as a harbinger of good times for the industry in no way takes into account larger factors; for instance, if 03-04 was simply a particularly dismal year. Statistics used out of context can paint any picture you want them to) as well as the overall financial status of classical music organizations.

The refutation to Sandow's assertions come from Matthew Guerrieri over at Soho the Dog. His most interesting bit is summarized in this graph:



Which basically tells us:

Notice that the linear trendlines for life expectancy and audience age track almost exactly—and that the average first-marriage age has been rising even faster since 1970 or so. (You can find a similar rise in average first-birth age among women over the same period.) Which circles back around to Botstein's point—classical music has historically played to an adult audience, it's just that the passage into adulthood—as indicated by first-marriage age—has been getting later and later, and the length of adulthood—as indicated by life expectancy—has been getting longer and longer.

Essentially, Guerrieri's point is that Sandow has used statistics out of context as well - and now, all we have to do is wait for someone to point out a glitch in Guerrieri's analysis...although I agree with his particular line of reasoning.

From my understanding of the information available (a combination statistical data, various analyses and a dash of anecdotal evidence), classical music audiences - particularly subscribers - skew older because of the privileges of age; greater financial stability/disposable income (although in these rocky economic times, this is not necessarily a given), empty nests (although adult children are living with their parents in record numbers - more on that in a minute), increased free time, and a deepening in personal aesthetic tastes (this last one is a bit nebulous, but then again, think of how people develop tastes for, say, fine wine). In other words, at a certain point in life, people have the time, means and inclination to become more involved in concert-going.

I'm careful to stipulate "point in life" because this harks back to Guerrieri's assertion that age can only be analyzed in direct correlation to both lifespan and important life milestones. Which reminds me of a fairly recent article in Newsweek about delayed adulthood (the article focuses on men, although I think the same could be said about women).

The notion of not just audiences, but specifically subscribers, is a whole can of worms unto itself - a topic for another time.

Language Barrier

In yesterday's post, I talked a bit about conductors and arrangers who "speak the language" of orchestra musicians, and how important that can be to the success of a non-classical orchestra performance. And that got me thinking back to an uncomfortable experience I had several years ago, during one of the early years of our Composers' Institute.

The folks who run the Institute make a point of trying to select as widely varied a group of young composers as they can to participate in the week of seminars, rehearsals, and performances, which means that we in the orchestra get the chance to engage with a lot of different schools of musical thought in a single concert. Some of the composers we see are ultra-serious types, whose music reflects a deep commitment to academic rigor and complex multi-layered composition. Others are more outward looking, if no less serious about their craft, and it's not at all unusual to dive into a piece that looks technically daunting, only to find that you're playing a deconstructed riff from a '70s funk band, or some such. And a select few of our visiting composers come at the work using an entirely different musical vocabulary than the one we're used to.

It was one of this last group that I encountered several years ago, when I'd been asked, along with violinist Stephanie Arado, to lead a seminar for the institute composers on upper string writing. The idea was for us to go through each participant's composition line by line, ask them questions about why they chose to write certain passages in a certain way, and help (if we could) in making their music clearer and more idiomatic for the musicians who would be playing it.

The seminar was going fine - I'm always amazed by how open most composers are to constructive criticism, and how eager they are to engage with musicians, qualities which are not always reciprocated by performers - until we turned to a work that had baffled me when I first looked at it. This was a jazz composition, scored for orchestra, but written almost entirely in the musical language of jazz.

This was a problem. Classical musicians, string players in particular, are almost never conversant in jazz, partly because we usually don't need to be, but mostly because, unlike rock music or country or showtunes, all of which are fairly simple for an experienced musician of any kind to grasp and play, jazz is hugely complicated and difficult to play, just like classical music. Unless you've spent a serious amount of time studying it, you're just not going to be very good at playing it. (I studied jazz on the side for a couple of years in college, and I'd still be considered below beginner level in my understanding and ability.)

There are, of course, ways to work around this gulf if you really want to hear an orchestra play jazz. Duke Ellington did it very successfully, by writing out jazz scores in purely classical-style notation, and all but removing improvisation from the mix. And countless composers use elements of jazz in their orchestral music. But what never changes is that, in order for the orchestra to play it the way you want it, you pretty much have to write it out exactly as you want the sounds to come out of the instruments. When you have a combo of 3-5 jazz musicians playing a tune, improvisation and spontaneous creativity are a natural thing. When you have 16 first violins who all have to play in unison to avoid complete aural chaos, you just can't have folks wandering off on their own.

The composer in our seminar wasn't having any of this, though. When Stephanie and I queried him as to what he was actually after in writing his score in a manner that classical musicians would have great difficulty reading (some chunks, in which he had simply written in chord changes, were completely outside our ability to interpret,) he began an extended rant on the narrowness of the classical music education system, and said that it was the responsibility of orchestra musicians to diversify their knowledge.

I quickly agreed with him, and I believe Stephanie did, as well. Conservatories don't offer nearly enough diversity of instruction, and I've always thought that orchestras in general would have a far stronger sense of rhythm and ensemble if every music student was required to study jazz. But this was neither here nor there, we said to our apoplectic composer, when you've written a piece of music that you want to be performed by an existing orchestra, today, under today's conditions. You know for a fact that they can't really execute what you're asking them to with the notation you've chosen to use, so why not look for a way to say what you want to say, using the orchestra's language?

He was furious, insisting that it wasn't his job to limit himself as a creator of music simply because musicians were too lazy to look beyond their comfort zone. I tried to calm the situation by asking whether he meant for the orchestra to fail, whether the meta-statement he wanted to make with the music was, "I have given you a piece that you can't play because you lack context, and this should make you curious about what else might exist in the world that you don't know about." No, he insisted, that wasn't it at all. He wanted the piece played as written, and he saw no reason other than stubborn disinterest that it couldn't be done.

I wish I could say that we resolved this - Aaron Kernis, our new music advisor who runs much of the Institute, made some valiant attempts to bridge the gap and achieve some small changes in the scoring that would at least give the orchestra a toehold to cling to. But in the end, we were in a stalemate. It was as if I had walked into one of the better taquerias down on Lake Street and complained loudly that few of the employees there seemed to speak English. In the larger scheme of things, immigrants to America will probably be better off learning English, yes, but that's irrelevant to my immediate quest to order lunch, which even my non-Spanish speaking self would be perfectly capable of doing under the circumstances.

In the end, the orchestra read the piece (this was thankfully before the era in which we began holding a public performance at the end of the Institute) as written. And we more or less failed utterly to play it correctly, sabotaged as we were by our own limited knowledge, and the immovable ideology of the composer. Pity.

How To Make Your Orchestra Rock

A while back, we were talking about pops concerts, and why musicians frequently seem to have a bad attitude about playing them. Basically, it comes down to the high percentage of such shows that seem like they'd be better without the orchestra. When you sit down to play a concert with some famous pop singer, and the charts on your music stand consist of a bunch of long sustained tones and an occasional flourish at the beginning or end of a song, it's dispiriting. You feel like you're not contributing anything to the show, and in truth, you aren't.

But this weekend, we're doing a pops show that couldn't be more engaging, or fun, or make better use of the orchestra. The stars of the show will be the amazing Finnish vocal group, Rajaton, who you may have seen singing ABBA tunes with us in the past. This time, they're taking on the music of Queen, and regardless of how you feel about '70s music, there's no question that, like the ABBA show, this concert was designed with an orchestra in mind. And I can prove it. Exhibit A: It's a rare thing to get to a pops rehearsal and see this many notes on your stand...

(click the image to see it full size)

And that's a fairly typical page in this show. There are about 20 more just like it. It's actually fairly challenging to play, something that I'm not sure I've ever said about a pops show before. There are even a few viola solos! The entire band is really involved in what's going on musically, and there's a lot going on.

So who's responsible for these Rajaton shows being musically better than nearly any other pops concert I've ever been a part of? Well, when we played the ABBA concert, Osmo did some of the arrangements himself, and that made a huge difference. Not only is Osmo a reasonably good orchestrator, but he knows how an orchestra works. You'd be amazed at how many composers and arrangers don't. Only a musician who's really spent time in and around orchestras is going to know, for instance, that inner strings can do a lot to create interesting textures in the sound, or that there's no point in having the strings do a bunch of impressive-sounding passagework if you're going to have the entire brass section playing full force at the same time.

For the Queen concert, the arranger is Jaakko Kuusisto, who just happens to be the concertmaster of Osmo's "other" orchestra, Finland's Lahti Symphony. (If memory serves, Jaakko also did some of the ABBA arrangements.) He's also conducting the show, which he's done many, many times before in other cities. So right there, two important plusses: an arranger who knows as much about how to use the orchestra as it's possible to know, and a conductor who knows the material cold, and how best to take the orchestra through it in a short amount of time. (We only get one rehearsal for pops shows.)

That one rehearsal for the Queen show was this afternoon, and while we didn't technically get to hear Rajaton's part of the performance (long story, tell you later,) I'm blown away by the quality of the music. Jaakko even drops a few inside jokes into his arrangements - my sharp-eared stand partner, Megan Tam, noticed that, towards the end of We Are The Champions, the horns suddenly started playing the famous tune from the last movement of Sibelius's 5th Symphony! (Those Finns, honestly.) And because he's an orchestra musician himself, rehearsing with Jaakko on the podium felt like we were rehearsing a standard classical program. He speaks our language, and made sure that our parts spoke it, too.

Now, the obvious question: How soon can we get Jaakko to churn out a Spinal Tap pops show?

What it means

No doubt that these are rough times for all. Although here in southeast Texas (where I am for a guest conducting week), the economic climate is a bit more upbeat. Still, it's hard not to get swept up in the sense of gritted uncertainty.

But sitting on yet another flight (my sixth in 12 days!) today I have a small moment of clarity and conviction. I'm reminded that whenever I need comfort, I turn to music. Whenever I need a brief escape from the pressures of life, I turn to music. Whenever I need a reminder of my essential humanity, I turn to music.

And I think of the audience in Orchestra Hall last week, at the end of a dreadful tumble of days, some faces preoccupied, of course, but some faces transported. It reminds me that what we as musicians do is vital, now perhaps even more. And that all art provides an imperative reminder of what it means to be a thinking and feeling being. And that no number of bank closures can change that fact.

And that the world is always better with a bit of such idealism.

Looking For A New Classic

Last night, the NHL's Minnesota Wild opened their 2008-09 season at home against the Boston Bruins, a fact which was noted in eye-rolling fashion by our principal trombonist, Doug Wright, during the stage-setting break between the first and second works on our Saturday night program, when he walked into the musicians' lounge to find five musicians plus Osmo clustered around the TV, checking the score before we had to rush back onstage for a piano concerto. (Doug, who doesn't play the concerto, had the right to make fun of us. The hockey obsessives in this orchestra do tend to be fanatical, even by sports fan standards, and I noticed that Osmo had one of our personnel managers reporting the score of the game to him as he came offstage for intermission, as well.)

Later, at the end of intermission, principal cellist Tony Ross had to literally drag Osmo out of the lounge by one arm when the "on stage" call was heard, lest he plant himself permanently in front of the game, where the Wild had jumped out to a 4-1 lead. This, of course, is why Osmo doesn't have a TV in his private dressing room.

Meanwhile, up in Canada, a music-related hockey drama has been slowly unfolding over the past several months, ever since the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation somehow managed to lose the rights to the theme music to Hockey Night in Canada.



Let's understand the seriousness of this. Those of us who live south of the 49th parallel and have no connection to our neighbors to the north probably can't really grasp just how famous the Hockey Night theme is. The closest we can probably get is the Monday Night Football theme, but even then, I'd wager to say that a far higher percentage of Canadians can sing you the hockey theme than Americans can sing that pumped up NFL jingle. It's a major cultural touchstone for a proud hockey-loving nation, and it's now gone from the airwaves of the national broadcaster.

(That's not to say it's actually gone completely. The reason CBC lost the rights is that it was outbid for them by commercial broadcaster CTV, which owns TSN, Canada's version of ESPN. TSN broadcasts multiple hockey games to the entire country every week, and the hockey theme now prefaces each of them. But to a lot of Canadians, that's just not the same thing.)

So, CBC was in a spot. Obviously, it wasn't going to cancel Hockey Night in Canada, a Saturday tradition that still draws some of the highest ratings anywhere. So it needed a new theme, and it turned to the public to get it. Culling 15 finalists from over 15,000 entries it received from across the country, the network spent a ridiculous amount of time over the past month or so flogging its viewers to vote for a winner. Last night, they revealed the winner live just as Hockey Night in Canada went on the air...



The winning composer is Colin Oberst from the western province of Alberta (note to Bright Eyes fans - that's Colin Oberst, not Conor - no relation as far as I know,) and I have to say, while his theme isn't the classic that the original theme was, I like it a lot. It's up-tempo, innocent, and a bit old-fashioned, which is just so Canada, and the Celtic pipes that open and close the song are a distinctive nod to Atlantic Canada's roots in the British Isles. And all in all, despite the fact that many will likely never forgive the CBC for letting the original theme get away, the whole contest strikes me as a great way of involving the audience in something they care passionately about...

Overheard...

...at tonight's concert, which ends with Messiaen's L'Ascension, a rapturous 29 minutes which, while eminently accessible on some level, is not without its challenges:

(a well-dressed couple pushes up from their seats in Tier 1)

Man: "That was such...dream music, of a dream world, I really liked it."

Woman: "Well, I hated it."

The conversation continued as they exited and walked down the corridor - I tried to follow the thread until they were out of earshot (I didn't feel like stalking them down the stairs!). It struck me that this is one of the best reactions any concert could elicit. As much as I'm a big supporter of concert-as-enjoyable-entertainment, I find satisfaction in the counterbalance of concert-as-challenge. The Messiaen affected this couple enough (albeit in dialectically opposed ways) for them to continue the experience of the concert beyond the confines of the actual performance. Which, to me, is the level of both emotional and intellectual engagement we strive for when we present art.

A small victory - a little bit of light in what has been a pretty rough week!

Fix This Concert

Composer Nico Muhly has been playing a fun and snarky game with violist Nadia Sirota (an old friend of mine, for the record) over at his blog. He calls the game "Fix This Concert," and it was inspired by the New York Philharmonic's season opening program, which Muhly and others have complained was far too unimaginative and lacking any intellectually challenging music. (Orchestras are accused of having no stomach for complex music almost as often as we're accused of assaulting audiences with complex music.)

In Muhly's game, you try to improve the existing program by substituting one or two works for the ones currently on the program, but do so without completely changing the nature of the evening. In other words, despite the fact that I'm pretty sure that Tchaikovsky's overplayed, overwrought 4th symphony wouldn't be Muhly's first choice as a concert anchor, he leaves it where it is on the Phil's opening night program, because he understands the orchestra's need for a warhorse to sell tickets to those who are just looking to hear a big, bombastic piece they don't have to work to understand. But he replaces a similarly overplayed Berlioz overture with a short piece by Jacob Druckman, who is a brilliant composer not enough people know about, and then changes a somewhat treacly Ibert flute concerto to a more forward-thinking concerto by Christopher Rouse. And presto, you've got a better program, at least according to Muhly (and me,) without changing your soloist or your anchor piece.

Now, I'll be the first to defend an orchestra's right to program whatever we think will sell the most tickets (most of the time, anyway.) But I think Muhly makes an excellent point with his game: there's no reason that we can't spruce up our programming without seeming to thumb our nose at more conservative audience members. Half the reason that many in our audience think that they won't like new music is because we're relatively careless in choosing what composers we feature, and under what circumstances. Programmed smartly, a new work frequently garners the most enthusiastic reaction from our crowds, and has the added benefit of making our ticketbuyers more comfortable with the idea of mixing Beethoven with, say, Harbison.

So let's play Fix This Concert, shall we? Below, I'm listing a concert program the Minnesota Orchestra will be presenting this November. It's not a bad program by any stretch (unless you're fundamentally opposed to viola solos,) but it does seem to be a bit "safe." Can you make it better, without completely gutting it? Fire away in the comments, and I'll update this post with my own "fix" in a few days...

The Program:
MOZART Overture to Abduction from the Seraglio
BERLIOZ Harold in Italy
DELIUS "The Walk to the Paradise Garden" from A Village Romeo & Juliet
ELGAR Enigma Variations

Update, 10/11/08: Y'all can feel free to keep chiming in with your own fixes in the comments, but having had a couple of days to think about it, here's my take. Although Harold in Italy is the biggest, longest piece on the program, Enigma is pretty clearly the anchor piece, so it stays. On the viola front, I'm substituting Sofia Gubaidulina's riveting and virtuosic viola concerto for the Berlioz - although a very different kind of piece, I think it pairs well with Elgar's emotional character. The Delius I'm dropping altogether. And as much as I love the Mozart, I'm not sure it fits the character of this program all that well, so I'm substituting Holst's underperformed Brook Green Suite, giving our concert distinctly English bookends, with a challenging but soulful interior work. I'd buy a ticket to that...

Naked Trombone Aggression

Fun moment in rehearsal today: one of the pieces we're tackling this week is Ravel's Alborado del gracioso, which is basically eight minutes of (hopefully) organized chaos, with a French accent. It's been a while since we've done it, and we've never played it under Osmo that I can remember, so as we read it through for the first time, we were all pretty well buried in our parts, concentrating solely on making our own wildly complicated lines fit into the larger sound. I'm still sitting at the very back of the viola section, so I was particularly intent on locking in with my principal, 20 or so feet in front of me.

So you can imagine my reaction when I heard what sounded like a toppling tower of soup cans coming from just over my shoulder. I nearly jumped out of my skin, and jumped again a moment later when I felt something heavy and metallic roll smack into my right foot. Almost immediately, there came a voice from the low brass, who sit on high risers right behind the violas: "Uh, little help?"

Apparently, what had happened was that one of our trombonists, Kari Sundstrom, had been trying either to insert or remove his huge metal mute while still keeping up with the furious pace of the piece, and in his haste, had sent the thing spiraling into the air, where it clattered down at my feet. Mutes get dropped and kicked all the time back there (and Sarah's written about what happens when they do,) but this was a mute drop with a whole new level of forcefulness, and the whole band stopped playing to laugh and point.

Trying to pretend that I hadn't just cowered like a child from a falling mute, I stood up, grabbed the mute, and marched it back to Kari, planting it firmly at the base of his stand and instructing him to hold the hell onto it, or I'd keep it next time...

Clapping, part III

A few last thoughts on the clapping question.

Also, some Clapping Music. It's utterly hypnotic...

Embracing What's Next

An e-mail dropped into my inbox this afternoon from one of our hardworking artistic staffers, Beth Cowart, detailing the schedule for this year's edition of the Minnesota Orchestra's Composer Institute. I blogged about the Institute last fall, shortly after we launched the Inside the Classics site, and every year, I'm amazed by how much work the composers we feature and our staff guiding them go through in a single week.

The public only sees one night of the institute - the final performance of all the featured works - but the composers are here for eight days or more, attending a dizzying array of seminars, Q & As, and training sessions on everything from how to write idiomatically for bassoon to how to deal with copyright and licensing issues. And somewhere in there, they get to hear their work rehearsed, picked over, and performed by a major orchestra.

Earlier this year, the American Composers Forum, which is based in St. Paul and has been a major partner in making the Institute what it is today, put together a video showing some of last year's highlights, as well as interviews with the composers, Osmo, and our concertmaster, Jorja Fleezanis, who is well known as a major advocate for new music. It's well worth a look...

Ask An Expert: Think of the Children

We got a great question this week from Chris Larson, who may or may not be aware that his query ties in perfectly with our ItC season theme of child prodigies, boy wonders, call 'em what you will...

Q: Many of the most successful performers (and composers) start seriously pursuing music at a very young age, often at their parents urging. Do you think it's fair for parents to push their young children towards a career in music so early on? And conversely, do you think there's a certain age at which it is "too late" to start a career in music?

Back when I was a kid, a violin teacher named Kay Slone, who specialized in the popular Suzuki Method of childhood music instruction, wrote a book called They're Rarely Too Young and Never Too Old To Twinkle. (The Twinkle part refers to the tune, "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," which is the first actual piece of music every Suzuki student learns to play.) The book reflected the inherent optimism of the teaching method, which was developed by a Japanese teacher in the dark days following World War II, as a way to put smiles on the faces of traumatized Japanese children struggling in a war-ravaged country.

In developing his method, Dr. Suzuki, who had been trying to learn the German language as an adult with great difficulty, latched onto the realization that infants and young children grasp their mother tongue with a speed and cognitive strength that adults can never match. He reasoned that many of the complicated muscle movements and cognitive abilities required to play a musical instrument could, perhaps, also be taught more readily to children if the style of teaching approximated the way a child learns to speak. So Suzuki students learn to play music before they can read a note of it, and they learn to memorize entire books of short songs and play them on command before ever learning what a major triad or a hemiola might be.

The relevance of all this to Chris's question is revealed in the Wikipedia entry on the Suzuki Method: "Suzuki believed that every child, if properly taught, was capable of a high level of musical achievement. He also made it clear that the goal of such musical education was to raise generations of children with 'noble hearts' (as opposed to creating famous musical prodigies.)" He also believed that in order for children to be successful in learning music, their parents needed to be deeply involved in the process, even to the extent of learning their instrument of choice alongside them, and practicing with them daily.

And this, of course, is where things can go off the rails. Parents may all be well-meaning, but not all of them are good at distinguishing between what their children want, and what they want for their children. And as a teacher myself, I can tell you that it's never hard to spot the parents who are already thinking of the day their child will be a star even as they're still struggling to learn Song of the Wind.

I don't think there's anything wrong with a parent nudging their child in the direction of studying music, even at a very early age. I also don't see anything wrong with a father teaching his son to catch a baseball while he's still in kindergarten. However, I might raise an eyebrow if I saw a father forcing a kid that young to spend three hours a day taking batting practice and running fielding drills in the hope that he might grow up to be the next Joe Mauer. I'm not a parent, but that strikes me as bad parenting.

I tend to believe that kids find their own level in the world, and while I think it's great for parents and teachers to expose them to as many new experiences as possible (how will they find out what they love to do if no one shows them the choices they have?), I've known too many brilliantly talented young musicians who burned out before they turned 20, or became deeply depressed and socially inept adults as a result of having had their childhoods effectively stolen from them by overly ambitious parents. (26-year-old superstar pianist Lang Lang is just out with a new autobiography in which he details a harrowing childhood spent nearly chained to the piano bench by his seemingly monstrous father.)

But I also know just how many of the young musicians I've known began playing music either because their parents did, or because their parents suggested it. And with few exceptions, no one forced them into some foolish pursuit of stardom, and no one made them practice 8 hours a day instead of having friends and hobbies. We grew up playing because we loved it, and to be a kid who didn't play an instrument seemed unthinkable after only a couple of years at it. Our closest friendships were forged at weekend youth orchestra rehearsals and summer music camps.

Most of us didn't turn pro, ever. Music was a hobby, a path to friendships and partnerships, but not a career goal. And that's good, because music is not only a damned hard way to make a living, but too many professional musicians find their love of the craft diminishing with the daily grind. And that's where the second part of Chris's question comes in and clashes with the first part: yes, you can be too old to have a realistic shot at a career in classical music. And if you're a string player, the cutoff age, when you absolutely need to have gotten a good start, is probably around age 10. (It's a few years later for winds, brass, and percussion, but starting earlier is almost always better.) Most of us who play in major orchestras started way earlier than that - I was 4 when I got my first violin. (My parents would want me to add that it was entirely my idea.) And that's where Dr. Suzuki was dead on: it's just far, far easier to learn the basics of playing an instrument while your brain is still conditioned to be learning everything about the world.

Delinquent

Sorry for the sparse posting on my part; I've been trying to finish up some arrangements for our Scandinavian Christmas concert in December and, in the parlance of my Hawaiian roots, it is kicking my 'okole. Arranging and composing always seem to take me much, much longer that I anticipate; add to that the fact that I've just recently switched from Finale to Sibelius, and things slow to a crawl (although I think I prefer Sibelius, now that I'm getting the hang of it...).

We're not even into the thick of the season, and I'm already pretty swamped. Different concerts have different timelines; for instance, for subscription shows, I need a ton of time to focus on the repertoire, as it's usually a good amount of music, and it's all about the music. As I've described in several posts, learning repertoire, or even polishing up repertoire that I've already done, is a time-consuming process - you just can't fake preparation. I've got my subscription debut with the Minnesota Orchestra coming up, which is preceded by a subscription show for another orchestra (more on that at a later date!), so that's a good amount of repertoire to contend with.

Then of course we have our very first "Inside the Classics" concerts coming up in November, which require a different kind of preparation - scrip-writing, preparing excerpt lists, memorizing lines, etc. Time-consuming in a very different way! Pops concerts present their own challenges, particularly if I'm providing arrangements. Not to mention that I head to Fort Wayne tomorrow to rejoin Ben Folds on his fall tour (we did a show together in Philly in early September and hit it off). All of which tends to lead to blogging delinquency! But, as they say, a busy conductor is a happy conductor...