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.