Pushing The Limits

The Composer Institute is in full swing now, with the participants going through daily seminars with musicians from different instrument groups of the orchestra, each of whom pick apart the scores mercilessly, pointing out any register problems, notation vagaries, and other issues that will make the parts either difficult or impossible to play. I've led some of these seminars in the past, and with very few exceptions, I've been deeply impressed with the humility of the composers as their work is critiqued, and their openness to new ideas, even when they don't entirely agree with what's being said.

One of our blogging composers, Ted Hearne, discussed this difficult process today, and brought up an issue that seems to come up more and more as composers push the envelope of what musicians can do on stage:

One of the composers called for the timpanist to hit the copper bell of the drum, and there was massive resistance to this idea from the percussionists. "I didn't do it for John Corigliano, I'm not going to do it for you," the timpanist was relayed as having said. I understand this mentality, given the price of the drum you're asking a professional to play in an unconventional, potentially damaging way. However, some string players don't like to play col legno [hitting the string with the stick of the bow] and some piano technicians won't let you prepare the piano or touch the strings either... The question is: as a composer, where do you draw the line?

Now, this is a tricky problem. The reason our timpanist doesn't want to hit the bell of the drum is that timpani are a) hugely expensive and b) more fragile than you might imagine. The drum wasn't designed to be struck anywhere except the head, and even a small dent in the kettle can affect the quality of sound. But Ted's also right that musicians can be awfully whiny about unconventional methods of playing their instruments, and some musicians are more squirrelly than others, so it's nearly impossible for a composer to find that imaginary line when dealing with an ensemble as large as a symphony orchestra.

Just for instance, a few weeks ago, on the program Sarah conducted, the Shchedrin piece called for some of the string players to rap the sticks of our bows on the edge of our music stands (which are made of either metal or hard plastic) in a fast rhythmic pattern for about 15 seconds. I knew immediately that I couldn't do this. My primary bow, which I purchased from MN Orch violist Myrna Rian when she retired a couple of years back, is worth over $16,000 (more than my viola, actually,) and is my most prized possession. (I also haven't finished paying it off yet.) It's made of rare Brazilian pernambuco wood, which is uniquely stiff yet flexible, but still as fragile as you would expect a thin dowel of hardwood to be. When Myrna owned it, she never even played col legno with it. I do (gently,) but I draw the line at thwacking it repeatedly against a sharp edge.

Ordinarily, I might have switched to one of my backup bows for the piece (I have two others, one of which I might be willing to risk against the stand,) but the Shchedrin is a fairly tricky piece, and I wasn't comfortable trying to perform it on a less than stellar piece of equipment. So instead, I armed myself with a sturdy pencil, and knocked that against my stand in the performances instead. (Since pencils are shorter than bows, this also made my rhythm much more accurate, too.) I would say that more than half the viola section did the same.

Still, my refusal to execute the passage exactly as the composer wrote it doesn't mean that I think he shouldn't have written it. These things tend to be situational, and most of the time, if a musician balks at a direction in the score, a suitable compromise can be found. So I generally think that composers are better off asking for exactly what they want, but being prepared to negotiate later if necessary.