Flight Risk

The other day, I had the following conversation with an old friend, a violinist in El Paso, on her Facebook page:

Her: I'm trying to remember how to play the violin...

Me: The bow goes in the left hand, I'm almost certain.

Her: And what do I do with my right hand?

Me: Hold your beer. Duh.

This exchange is a variation on what is more or less a running joke among professional musicians - that we all stop practicing whenever we're not working for a couple of weeks and lose our ability to play. For the most part, it really is just a joke, because most of us can't afford to take an extended break from our instruments. We tote them along on vacations, family trips, cross-country drives, and squeeze in a few minutes of practice wherever we can, because you'd be amazed by how long it can take to recover, musically speaking, from even a week off.

But in recent years, the renewed emphasis on airline security has made traveling with an instrument, even one which fits in the overhead compartments, a logistical nightmare. Oboists who've forgotten to remove their reed knives from their cases face grilling by TSA flaks, string players are told our cases must be checked because they don't fit neatly into the stupid little carry-on sizing box (you can't check a string instrument, under any circumstances, because the cold baggage compartment would crack it, not to mention that any number of baggage handlers would be hurling it around like a duffel bag,) and God help the poor traveling bassoonist, whose instrument looks like nothing so much as a disassembled rocket launcher under the x-ray machine.

Every musician has at least one airport horror story, and most of us have a lot more than one. (My best one involves getting left standing on a tarmac in Detroit as my plane taxiied away without me after I refused to put my viola in the baggage compartment.) It's gotten so bad in recent years that a lot of us actually have started to leave our instruments behind when we travel, especially at peak travel times. It's an uncomfortable feeling to not have your instrument at hand for days at a time when you're used to it practically being an appendage, but increasingly, I find that I just don't have the stomach for the inevitable fights with pushy security folk, harried gate workers, and snippy flight attendants.

So when I got back from spending Christmas with family out in Portland, Oregon, I was a bit nervous about what I might have lost in the week since I'd touched my viola. I'm playing a wickedly hard piece of chamber music in a few weeks, and I'll also be playing a movement of the Mendelssohn Octet on our next Inside the Classics concert, so I can't afford to be a step slow at the moment. And even now, after three days of regular practice, I still feel the effects of having stopped cold turkey for the holiday.

But on the plus side, taking an extended break can sometimes help cure you of bad habits that had begun to creep into your playing. Because your body has forgotten whatever stresses were causing this muscle to tighten or that joint to flex the wrong way, you can start fresh, and just focus on recreating a fluid technique. So there is that silver lining.

Still, I and every other musician I know are eagerly awaiting the day when our government gets over its obsession with what one journalist recently dubbed "security theater," and once again grants my viola the hassle-free flying privileges it deserves. But I'm not holding my breath.

Takin' It One Concerto At A Time...

Back when I worked as an editor at ArtsJournal.com, my boss and I used to have occasional friendly debates over whether sports analogies used in the service of explaining parts of the arts world were a) a useful tool, or b) a plague on literate humanity. I'll grant that such analogies are way overused in all areas, but sports are so omnipresent in our society, for better or worse, that a writer or speaker attempting to acquaint an unfamiliar audience with, say, the culture of orchestras, can at least assume that a sports analogy will not go over the heads of most of those on the receiving end.

For some reason, a lot of musicians I've known have been extremely attached to the idea that what we do onstage is heavily relatable to what professional athletes do. And in truth, there are some distinct similarities: the relationship between a music director and his/her musicians is much like the relationship of a head coach to his players, and when the partnership goes south in either situation, it tends to be both ugly and public. On another front, just as a football team tends to be only as good as the worst players on its offensive line, orchestras are full of unsung and virtually anonymous players without whom whole performances would collapse.

But of course, the analogy breaks down after a point. The glaring difference between the Minnesota Orchestra and the Minnesota Wild is that we don't have an opposing team on stage with us, doing everything they can to stop us from performing Beethoven's 7th. (Insert your own viola-section-as-opposition joke here.) Additionally, we don't do our jobs with anywhere near the constant media glare that athletes do - the vast bulk of the press coverage we receive is positive, and reporters who really dig for the seamy underbelly of the business (and yes, there is one) are few and far between.

Still, I love the analogies, myself, and lately I've found myself compiling a list of my favorite quotes from athletes real and fictional, and wondering how they would translate into my professional world, were the media ever to start forcing us to hold post-concert press conferences...

Original quote: "My game is like the Pythagorean Theorem! There is no answer for it! (pause while he thinks this over...) Well, okay, there is an answer for it. But by the time you figure it out, I've got 20 points and ten boards." -Shaquille O'Neal

Orchestral version: Our trumpet section is like the Second Viennese School! There is no solution to it! (pause...) Well, all right, there might be, but by the time you work out the tone clusters and retrograde inversions, we've played the scherzo and started in on our post-concert beers.

Original: "You don't need a quadraphonic Blaupunkt, you need a curveball!" -Crash Davis, fictional catcher portrayed by Kevin Costner in the greatest baseball movie ever made

Orchestral: You don't need a $5000 tux and a Grammy award, you need to learn to play in rhythm!

Original: "American football is just Rugby after a visit from a Health and Safety inspector." -Anonymous

Orchestral: Mahler is just Brahms after a good working-over by six bipolar musicologists and an alcoholic philosopher.

Original: "A coach's main job is to reawaken a spirit in which the players can blend together effortlessly." -Phil Jackson

Orchestral: A conductor's job is reawaken a spirit in which the players can blend together without ever realizing that they're following orders.

Original: "Swing hard, in case they throw the ball where you're swinging." -Duke Snider

Orchestral: Play hard, in case the notes on your page turn out to be the important ones.

Original: "You got to be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too." -Roy Campanella

Orchestral: Maturity's important if you're gonna make your living in an orchestra. But you'd better not forget what it felt like when you were 16 and slammed your way through a Mahler symphony for the first time.

Original: "The harder I practice, the luckier I get." -Gary Player

Orchestral: The harder I practice, the luckier I get.

Travel Madness, Part the Second

Merry Christmas to all!!

Travel Madness!

Sorry for the paucity of posts, it was a nutty week! Between the Scandinavian Christmas show with the Orchestra and hightailing it to LA for more Christmas merry-making I've had little time for...well, anything besides traveling, rehearsing and conducting shows (although I did get to visit with a bunch of West Coast friends).

And now, as usual, I'm killing time in an airport because I've missed yet another connection. I'm not sure if the ready availability of (still reasonably) affordable air travel is a boon or a bane. In the next 10 days I'm in 6 different cities: Richmond, Philadelphia, Princeton, San Francisco Raleigh and DC. So, please forgive the sparse posting! Although I'll certainly have something entertaining up for Christmas...

Oh Night Divine

I don't know what it is about musicians that causes us to prize twisted, awful versions of melodies that everyone else treasures, but we do. Most likely, it has something to do with the ungodly number of times that we play such melodies, especially at Christmastime, and the secret desire we all harbor to be part of such a meltdown. Sarah's Messiah organist on crack is probably the most circulated of such holiday calamities, but having endured more painful singalong gigs than I care to remember, I like the simple sweet sadness of a classic (but difficult to sing) Christmas carol being massacred by an 8-year-old, foul-mouthed cartoon character...

(Don't worry - there's no need for a NSFW tag here. Cartman keeps his language civil in this one, even if he does seem to believe that O Holy Night includes the line, "Jesus was born, and so I get presents...")



Merry Christmas, all. I'll be out of town spending the holiday with family this week, so posting may be sparse. We'll get things back up and running before the New Year...

Oh Kaplan, My Kaplan

There's a good chance that you've never heard of Gilbert Kaplan, even if you follow the music world pretty closely. On the other hand, if you're a devoted Mahler fan, the type who has more than one complete set of his symphonies and strong opinions on the issue of Claudio Abbado vs. George Szell in the matter of Mahler's 6th, you likely know exactly who Gilbert Kaplan is. (Yes, Spartacus, I see you waving.)

Kaplan is an extremely rare bird in the orchestra world - an amateur musician and Mahler devotee who, some years ago, decided to devote himself to learning how to conduct Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, and to do so more accurately and convincingly than anyone else. Never mind that Kaplan isn't and never has been a professional conductor - he has passion, and intellect, and drive, and isn't that supposed to be all it takes to achieve our dreams in America?

So, for some time now, Kaplan has been traveling the world, conducting Mahler's 2nd (and only Mahler's 2nd) with orchestras large and small. By and large, he's been received with great enthusiasm by critics, who have latched onto his fascinating narrative and penned profile after profile of the eccentric and obsessive Mahlerian.

There's just one problem: Kaplan is apparently a terrible conductor, at least according to the New York Philharmonic, which just performed the Resurrection under his baton. According to a story running on the front page of the New York Times' arts section today, the Phil was so horrified by Kaplan's lack of stick-waving ability that the musicians called an emergency meeting with their CEO the day of the concert to vent their frustrations. The next week, one of the orchestra's trombonists took to his personal blog to lay out a devastatingly specific takedown of Kaplan, and by extension, of anyone who actually thinks the job of a conductor is so unimportant that a complete novice should be allowed to stand in front of one of the world's great orchestras.

So, before I wade any deeper into this obviously prickly story, 3 statements:

1) I have never worked under Kaplan, nor have I ever heard a performance he has led, so I won't be making any attempt to assess his abilities here.

2) I'm actually stunned that the NY Phil, which (like so many orchestras) is normally fastidious about controlling all information in and out of its organization, has been as forthcoming about the whole thing as they have, with a spokesman actually acknowledging to the Times that Kaplan won't be asked back, and (so far as I can tell,) no internal attempt to muzzle David Finlayson's blog writings. Good on the Phil!

3) Not that Finlayson (who I've never met) needs my help in defending his writing, but I noticed that one angry commenter on his blog accused the Phil musicians of whining after they'd already agreed to be conducted by Kaplan. This needs clarification, because it's probably a common belief that musicians pick their guest conductors. We don't - while we can always provide individual feedback on specific conductors who appear in front of us, and that feedback may hold some sway on occasion, decisions on who leads our concerts are made well above our pay grade.

Now, since I've already said I'm not going to talk about Kaplan specifically, let's talk about the larger issue here, which is the all-too-frequent gulf between what critics and audiences think of a conductor, and what musicians think of the same conductor. Without getting specific, I can confidently say that there are conductors of some considerable reputation, who have appeared to critical acclaim in front of the Minnesota Orchestra, who we in the orchestra consider to be utter frauds. I can't count the number of times that I've sweated my way through a concert that is just barely staying on the rails because of the incompetence emanating from the podium, only to open the paper the next morning and see the conductor lavished with praise for his "elegant turns of phrase" or some such nonsense.

Now, part of the problem is simply that, for a critic writing about a single concert, for which s/he has not been allowed or had the time to attend any of the rehearsals, it's almost impossible to truly judge what elements of a performance are happening because the conductor ordered them, and what elements the orchestra is simply playing on it's own initiative. So most critics stick to the time-honored tradition of holding the conductor responsible for more or less everything, good or bad. It's not a great tradition, but it's better than guessing at who was responsible for what.

The larger problem, I think, is that audiences, critics, and musicians all have different expectations of what a conductor should be. Most audience members, beyond simply wanting to hear an engaging concert, want a conductor who gives them some visual sense of what they're hearing, a sort of physical guide to the music. Critics often seem to want a conductor who reminds them of their favorite conductors from yesteryear, and they also prize those who manage to look interesting without showboating. (Critics also love conductors who physically reach out to the orchestra, and get the players to react physically as well. Exhibit A at the moment would be all the cooing over Gustavo Dudamel getting his Venezuelan youth orchestra to dance in their chairs, which admittedly is pretty cool.)

Musicians basically want two things from a conductor: a) a clear, precise beat, and b) clear, precise rehearsal instructions backed up by an obvious knowledge of the score. Beyond that, we don't really care how physical our leader is, or whether s/he scowls or grins on the podium, or whether s/he has a nifty life story.

So who's right? Well, I'm obviously biased, and I'll preface this by saying that I don't think any of the above viewpoints are wrong, exactly. But it seems to me that unless you have the two elements that the musicians are looking for, you will not have a truly great concert. You could have a good concert, or an exciting but obviously flawed concert, but it won't be one of those mind-blowing experiences that you tell your friends about. And at the prices we charge, I feel like we ought to be striving to provide those experiences as often as humanly possible.

The problem with the critical viewpoint is that critics, like all journalists, are tasked with setting the world around them to an engaging storyline, and conductors and the concerts they lead don't always come with a neat or salacious narrative. So critics naturally gravitate to the ones that do, the same way that sportswriters gravitate to Sean Avery every time he opens his stupid mouth, while ignoring quiet production machines like Mikko Koivu. I don't think music critics deliberately snub quietly efficient conductors in favor of demonstrative ego factories, but I also know that the latter do tend to attract a lot more press than the former. And that's how you end up with the NY Phil's dirty laundry splashed all over the pages of America's leading daily...

Late addendum: I only just noticed that this post is our 300th entry here at the ItC blog. During the relatively brief period that we've been blogging, Sarah and I have filled this little wad of bandwidth with just over 157,000 words, which works out to something close to 300 pages in your typical Word doc. I don't actually know whether that has any significance at all in the greater blog world, but considering that we've been open for business for a mere 14 months, I'm calling it a milestone. Happy tricentennial (or whatever) to us, and let's hope there's a lot more silliness and pot-stirring to come!

Osmo Blagojevich?

12/19/08: I have been ordered by members of our management team to remove this post. I don't agree with the decision, but it's not my call. Sorry...

Encore!

I know, I know, I've posted this before, but it's just too good! And it's one of those things that never fails to make me laugh (there are a couple of those in my life).

Here it is; the most appalling ending of the Hallelujah chorus that has ever been (and hopefully ever will be). I challenge you to listen to this with a straight face!

Is Freedom Overrated?

For those who like ruminating on composers and their craft, there's an excellent piece up over at NewMusicBox which asks the question: does the diversity of musical styles in use at the moment really offer composers the creative freedom that many believe? Or, as the article puts it, "is the progress from a common practice to a diverse one truly progress, when it compels us to choose between a reactionary, audience-friendly idiom, an exclusionary avant-garde, or a sober modernism or ironic postmodernism that hovers between these two extremes?"

In other words, back in the 18th and 19th centuries, there was basically one set of rules for how music was written, and while composers regularly pushed the envelope (chords that were considered wildly dissonant in Bach's time, for instance, became commonplace by the time Brahms and Wagner came around,) everyone followed the rules. Then came the 20th century, during which rabble-rousers like Arnold Schönberg, John Cage, and Steve Reich discarded the rule book chapter by chapter, until it seemed that you could put together any combination of notes and silences and call it music.

Of course, there are still rules - it's just that composers have their choice of any number of different rule books, which bear little resemblence to each other. The Modernist rule book is longer and more complicated than the old tonal rule book was, while the Postmodern rule book is more like a single sheet of paper with the sentence, "Don't do anything the modernists do" scrawled across it in crayon. The Neo-Romantics have their own rules, based heavily on the rule book of 100 years ago, and function basically as if the Modernists and Pomos had never existed. And for the composers who place themselves in the New Complexity camp (don't ask,) there are presumably hundreds of rules, but they don't matter because the music will wind up sounding like someone just dropped a piano onto a bagpipe regardless.

So do composers benefit from being able to choose from such a wide array of philosophies? Do audiences? Those who despise dissonant music would probably wish for everyone to go back to writing tonal music with the old rules, but reducing the number of dissonant works wouldn't necessarily mean that the music would be better. Statistically, only a very few composers build a legacy that significantly outlives them, so you're always going to hear more bad or mediocre new works than you will mediocrities from the 19th century. It's not that there weren't plenty of mediocre composers back then - we've just stopped playing their music.

Common sense would seem to dictate that when composers fragment, it takes music as a whole longer to evolve, which could be why we've gotten a bit stuck in the decades since Schönberg started messing around with his twelve tones. Still, it's probably impossible to really assess the impact of philosophies that are still developing, and I know several composers who believe that all the navel gazing should really be left to musicologists and historians, and that composers just ought to write whatever music speaks to them. And with that, we've come full circle...

Bon anniversaire

A belated happy birthday to Olivier Messiaen, who would have turned 100 yesterday. Messiaen's works have been featured by orchestras around the world this season (including the Minnesota Orchestra, a concert which I've blogged about.)

(Coincidentally, Des Canyons aux Étoiles has just popped up on my iTunes shuffle...funny how these things work out!)

In celebration, an excerpt of one of my favorite of his works:

Just Watching

I had an interesting day at work yesterday, and I somewhat doubt that I'll ever have another one like it. We're playing Handel's Messiah this week, and as is standard these days, the orchestra and chorus are both cut down to chamber size, so as to be more authentic to what Handel would have expected for a performance of his oratorio. Now, whenever we cut string players from a performance, we always leave one extra player in each string section for the first few rehearsals. This player is called the "plus," and won't play the concerts unless someone else in the section gets sick. So basically, you rehearse the repertoire, and are then on call for the performances.

I'm the plus for our Messiah this year, and I know already that I'll be playing Sunday's concert, since our principal will be out of town that day. So I showed up for rehearsal yesterday afternoon and took my place at the back of the reduced section. But only a few minutes into the rehearsal, the conductor (the estimable Christopher Warren-Green) realized that, with such a small orchestra, the extra players were making it difficult to accurately judge the balance of sound. Since soloists frequently struggle to be heard above the orchestra in Messiah, proper balance is a real concern. So, smiling apologetically, Chris looked at those of us in the plus chairs, and said, "How would you feel about not playing - you know, just watching?"

We felt fine about it, since obviously, we've all played this piece many times, it's not overly difficult, and as long as we were still in the room, we'd hear and see whatever particular changes and stylistic things Warren-Green might ask for. But as I put down my viola and settled in, I immediately felt profoundly out of place, like an interloper who'd snuck into the orchestra and was just standing there, staring at the musicians. I felt like this for the whole afternoon, especially once the chorus showed up. (Since they were behind me, I now had 40 or so people watching me watch the orchestra. Surprisingly, only one asked me what the hell I was doing there if I wasn't going to play.)

I tried putting a magazine on my stand eventually, just to give my mind something to do when nothing requiring my attention was going on. (Wind and brass players, who frequently have long gaps or even entire movements where they don't play, do this all the time, sometimes even in concerts.) But I found that I couldn't focus on the article I was reading while the orchestra was playing. If I heard something start to pull apart in the ensemble, I reacted physically the same way I would have if I'd been holding the viola, leaning in towards my principal and bobbing my head with the pulse. It was a very odd sensation, almost like an out-of-body experience. This was my orchestra, and I was on stage, but really, I wasn't, at least not in any way that mattered. Disconcerting. Sort of fun, in a pseudo-voyeuristic sense, but still, disconcerting.

Brazen Tactics

2009 is shaping up to be one of those years at the Minnesota Legislature, and at legislatures across the country, as well. Most states are predicting massive deficits (I said most,) and since, unlike the federal government, states aren't allowed to run deficits, taxes have either got to be raised, or important programs have to be cut. And guess which option tends to be more politically palatable to your elected representatives?

Yeah, you got that right. Raising taxes in the midst of a deep recession might be an economically sound move, but no way is the Distinguished Gentleman From Lyon County (or wherever) gonna have that particular vote on his record when the 2010 elections roll around. (And truth be told, since the stock market tanked, I haven't seen many of those Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota yard signs that were so popular with Twin Cities liberals a few years back.) So stuff is gonna get cut. Lots of stuff. To the bone. And that means that, over the next several months, we can more or less expect interest group after interest group to truck out to the Capitol, hats in hand, begging for the cuts to be less severe than they're expecting.

The arts are always one of the first things to get slashed in this sort of environment, mainly because it's all too easy for grandstanding politicians to imply (implicitly or explicitly) that only rich robber barons care about the symphony or the thea-tah, and that cutting them is actually a boon to ordinary, hard-working Americans who like monster truck rallies and apple pie. (Never mind that it's the musicians and actors working in the symphonies and theaters of America who have largely rallied to provide low-cost or no-cost educational options to kids whose schools have had all their funding for such things yanked by the very same politicians who now want to step on the throat of the arts.)

Making things worse this year is the fact that Minnesotans just voted fairly overwhelmingly to pass the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment, which, while controversial, demonstrated pretty dramatically that the residents of this state continue to place a very high value on the things that separate us from, say, Delaware - wide open spaces, beautiful lakes and rivers, and cultural offerings far out of proportion to our size as a populace. Trouble is, this statement by voters isn't being seen by those at the Lege as a sign of where their constituents' priorities lie. No, it's being taken as a slap in the face, a repudiation of the legislative branch as the holder of the governmental pursestrings, and most ominously, a clear guide to what programs they ought to cut first.

Yup, that's the logic at work over in certain corners of the Capitol. Because the residents of the state just voted in huge numbers to fund the arts, the outdoors, and the environment whether the Lege has the guts to agree or not, a number of legislators are now openly proclaiming that every existing program focusing on one of those three areas that they still have control over ought to be axed, or at least severely cut back. Never mind that the new funding wasn't meant to replace existing funds, but to supplement them - it's all about political expediency, and the noise machine that is talk radio and the blogosphere should provide just enough political cover to prevent there from being any real consequences for defying the fairly obvious will of the electorate.

Interestingly, one legislator says that there might be a way to prevent the seemingly inevitable slashing and burning of the nonprofit sector that's likely to be on the way in the 2009 session: just demand more than you got last year, and do it with a straight face...

"Did the Wall Street lobbyists stop lobbying for the $700 billion bailout? Did the auto industry people stop lobbying and say, 'Oh please, don't cut us!'... You have to have the confidence to do what the big players do—which is ask for more."

It's a brilliant strategy when you think about it, and it'll be interesting to see whether any of Minnesota's non-profit leaders have the gall to actually try it. I suspect that, for it to work, it would take a coalition of many groups all working in concert, and even then, the Lege might simply shrug and cut away. But it's a better idea than any other I've heard lately, and in this year, in this state, it strikes me that our actions, or lack thereof, could go a long way towards determining whether Minnesota continues to sport one of the highest qualities of life in America, or decides that good enough is just gonna have to be good enough, which I believe is the state motto of Nebraska. What was that about a cold Omaha...?

(Disclaimers and disclosures: the Minnesota Orchestral Association contributed $15,000 towards statewide lobbying efforts to pass the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment, although no one in the MOA ever asked me what I thought about it. Secondly, contrary to popular perception, the Minnesota Orchestra is not funded by the government, but by individual and corporate donors as well as by funds drawn from our various endowments, all of which were built with private money. It is my understanding that the orchestra could wind up receiving funds from the proceeds raised by the new amendment, but where that money will go, and in what amounts, has not yet been officially determined. Finally, as stated in our Blog Policies, the views expressed in this and all other posts are not necessarily those of the MOA, its staff, or 97 of the 98 musicians of the orchestra.)

"Online" Orchestra

I've often bemoaned the slow pace of change in large arts organizations, particularly in relation to 21st century media. Which was why I was both delighted and fascinated by a recent article in the New York Times about a new "online" ensemble, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra.

In short, musicians from around the world are invited to apply by downloading sheet music provided on the site (from Tan Dun's "Internet Symphony No. 1") and submitting a video of themselves playing the selection. There's even a video of Tan conducting, to keep you in absolute tempo, because the winners of this audition will then be part of a mash-up to create an online "performance" of the entire piece.

The other component is the video submission of a standard repertory piece - that puts you in the running for a chance to play the live version of the "Internet Symphony" at Carnegie Hall, if you are selected by YouTube viewers in an American Idol-style selection process, of course.

A great use of modern media and technology, in my book, and I'll be curious to see the final product(s). Part of the purpose, ostensibly, is to create a more organized dialogue about classical music on YouTube, which is a fine idea. I cringe a little, however, when thinking about comments that may be left on audition videos; I've seen enough snide (if not downright cruel) comments attached to individual performance videos to know that the anonymity of the internet allows for a degree of mean-spiritedness usually not seen in face-to-face interactions. The eternal optimist, I hope to be pleasantly surprised!

Of course, the project has its celebrity promoters - Tan Dun and Michael Tilson Thomas, or course, and the inimitable Lang Lang lends his own peculiar flourish. My burning question, though, is this; isn't the "Internet Symphony" simply a glorified expansion of the Olympic Medal Cermony Theme from the 2008 Beijing Olympics (with a bit of Eroica added in for good measure)? Which seems such a terribly unoriginal musical idea for such an innovative project. Take a listen and judge for yourself (the Olympic Theme becomes recognizable at about 1:06').




And here's the Olympic music (with Tan conducting, too!) for comparison.

Tuning Out The Crisis

Everywhere you turn these days, the news seems to be bad and getting worse by the hour. In the orchestra world, the most positive headline I've seen in weeks was from the Cleveland Orchestra, where they've just barely managed to balance their budget by exhausting a bridge fund which will now do nothing for their future financial situation, leaving them precariously balanced on the edge of a million-gallon drum of red ink. And that's the best scenario we're seeing for orchestras at the moment. (As I write this, the Minnesota Orchestra is holding our own annual meeting, where I'm told we'll also be announcing a balanced budget for 2007-08, but of course, we're preparing for the same kinds of historic challenges as everyone else in what are sure to be some lean years ahead.)

It's on days like this that I always make sure to turn off the news and put down the budget projections for at least a few minutes, and spend some time doing or watching something that reminds me of why I love what I do for a living. Thankfully, in the age of YouTube, such reminders are never too far away. Those of you who've been reading this blog almost since the beginning may remember my fondness for violinist Gilles Apap, he of the crazy Mozart cadenza. Say what you will about the dangers of not taking serious music seriously, but Apap is unquestionably a serious musician who never fails to make me smile. Even in days like these...

Behavior Modification

Chicago-area violinist Holly Mulcahy has an article up over at The Partial Observer that has been making me cringe all week. The title is "How to Alienate Your Audience In 10 Easy Steps," and it's a full frontal assault on the subculture of professional orchestral musicians. Among the sins Mulcahy outlines: glaring at audience members rude enough to cough or shuffle during concerts, rolling eyes when a colleague on stage makes a mistake, refusing to smile (ever), deflecting compliments from the audience, and noticably sneering at anyone who enjoys "light" classics or pops.

It's a difficult article for me to read, because I've seen everything on Mulcahy's list go on in orchestras I've played in (the Minnesota Orchestra included) on a regular basis, and for most of my career, I've wondered how exactly we as an industry get away with it. More than that, I've wondered why I often feel like the only one who thinks it's a problem. (I'm sure I'm not the only one, but you'd be amazed how many musicians become hugely offended when told, even politely, that their onstage comportment could stand to be improved.)

So why is it that members of symphony orchestras seem to think that it's perfectly all right to look sour, glare at the audience, or hold involved conversations while standing to acknowledge the audience's applause? (That last one's a personal pet peeve of mine.) I've been thinking about it for a while, and I've come up with two theories.

The first is that we do it because we literally don't know any better. Musicians, alone among performing arts professionals, are never, at any point in their training, taught to be performers. We're taught how to play music, and how to take direction. No one ever teaches us the tricks that actors, dancers, and singers learn, such as how to make the whole auditorium feel like you're looking at them, how to walk across a stage without ever putting your back to the audience, or how to take a curtain call. The full extent of our exposure to the choreography of the stage is that, at some point, we'll probably be told of the tradition that, if you are a man, and you are performing with one or more women, you should allow them to leave the stage ahead of you. (I don't know why we still do this, actually, but pretty much all of us do in solo and chamber music situations.) But we've simply never learned about how one goes about looking engaged while on stage. (Important note: looking engaged is very different than actually being engaged. Either one is possible without the other.)

But many of the same musicians I've seen sporting wrinkled, stained tuxedo shirts and looking like they just ate a lemon during the bows wouldn't think of dressing or acting this way for a string quartet performance, and that goes to my second theory, which is that there's actually something about playing in an orchestra that leads to a lack of awareness of how one's behavior might be perceived.

Bear with me, here. While most of us who play in orchestras for a living love our jobs, it is a very different profession than many people imagine it to be. While musicians now have much greater control over workplace conditions than we used to (thanks to collective bargaining,) we still have essentially zero control over moment-to-moment artistic decisionmaking. The conductor, regardless of whether s/he is a genius or a moron, has absolute power over how we shape every phrase, whether we follow the directions in the score to the letter, what speed we play each piece, and countless other minutiae that, in any other musical situation, would be the province of the people holding the instruments.

Now, of course, there's a very good reason for this, and it's that you can't reasonably give 98 people an equal voice in these things without chaos erupting, so someone's got to be in charge. But the lack of artistic control does lead some musicians to feel like little more than cogs in a huge machine. (This is exactly why some musicians wouldn't join an orchestra for anything.) The sheer size of the ensemble also makes you feel pretty small and insignificant at times, especially if you're a string player surrounded by 10-15 other people playing exactly the same notes that you are. You can grow to feel downright invisible, in fact, and that, I think, is what leads some musicians to believe that they can do whatever they want to do on stage, because no one's really looking at them, specifically.

This is an industry-wide issue, and I've never seen a professional orchestra that really seemed to have the problem licked. In fact, orchestra managers and staffers frequently throw up their hands when asked about it, believing that musicians will be so resistant to any attempt to change our comportment that it's not even worth wading into the muck. And while I'm not going to deny that there are a few musicians out there so disconnected from reality that they don't think the audience has the right to expect anything but pretty notes from them, the vast majority of us are horrified when we hear that we've offended the people who paid good money to come see us.

Here's the bottom line: if there's one thing that orchestra musicians are good at, it's following directions. We may be a bunch of prima donnas at heart, but when we're given an order from someone in authority, we grumble and snarl... and then we do as we're told. If an orchestra, any orchestra, wanted to change the way we look and act during bows, all it would take is for someone in authority to make it a new rule - no different from the rules that control what we wear for our concerts and what time the rehearsals start. And someone ought to.

Bully pulpit

The Louisville Courier-Journal just ran a commentary/critique that reminded me of how far we've come in our expectations of an optimal concert experience.

The gist of the article: the Louisville Symphony presented a concert with Beethoven - Prometheus, Strauss - Metamorphosen, Beethoven - Symphony No. 3, a program in which the first two pieces connect thematically to the Symphony. The critic's complaint? That there was passing mention of this fact in the program notes, but nothing more was made of it. As he writes:

Still, consider how much more could have been accomplished. What if Mester had asked the orchestra to play a snippet from the "Prometheus" incidental music in which the "Eroica" tune appears? Then the orchestra might have followed up by playing the excerpt from Strauss's "Metamorphosen" that also alludes to the symphony?

It's lovely to have pre-performance comments by orchestra CEO Brad Broecker and a board representative, but that's no substitute for having the music director inform their listeners. All it takes is a little planning and, yes, imagination.


Which, to me, points out to the tremendous sea change that has been going on in our business. The implication is that it's not enough to entertain; the point is to educate and enlighten. This is particularly important in the context of current cultural norms; whereas 50 year ago, we may have been able to assume a certain level of knowledge about orchestral music and standard repertoire, these days, with the push to expand and diversify audiences, we can no longer make those assumptions.

What was even more fascinating to me was the direct plea to the music director to do some pre-concert explanations - certainly many organizations have pre-concert lectures (including the Minnesota Orchestra - the "Music Up Close" program), often led by a musician or musicologist or sometimes the conductor of the concert. More to the point, the suggestion in the Courier-Journal was for the explanation to involve the orchestra, to essentially be an integral part of the concert experience for the entire audience, not just an added extra for people who bothered to show up early.

Speaking from the podium is a topic that I've frequently
addressed, and it's a major feature of my work. After all, conducting is the ultimate bully pulpit, why not use the opportunity to enlighten? As I keep saying, the concert experience will undergo further (and maybe radical) changes within my career lifetime, and it behooves us all to think about what keeps audiences engaged and enthralled.

How To Generate Interest: Be Interesting

The fallout from the Boston/Rozhdestvensky debacle last week is continuing, in the press and the blogosphere, at least, and Boston Globe critic Jeremy Eichler advanced the conversation in what I thought was an interesting way in Sunday's paper:

The incident also shed light on a deeper problem of the orchestra condescending to a potential audience. If the BSO had the artistic vision to bring Rozhdestvensky to its stage, it should have had the marketing courage to stand behind its reasons for doing so.

Now, if I'm running the Boston Symphony, I have an easy rebuttal to that: artistic courage is all well and good, but are we really serving the public if we intentionally market ourselves in a manner that we know from past experience will either confuse people or put them off the music we're offering? How can we introduce people to an extraordinary conductor if they're not in the concert hall to begin with, and why should they come if our advertising implies that they're morons for not already having heard of one of the performers, especially if there's another performer on the program who they do know?

But Eichler fleshes out his argument in compelling fashion...

The plight of classical music in a free-market economy has never been an easy one, especially in this country... Yet the ace in the pocket of orchestras and performing arts groups is that they are selling an experience that is simply not interchangeable with anything else. But it is easy for that message to get lost as marketing strategies increasingly come to mimic the techniques of the entertainment industry at large. Is there really no other way?

Well, there might be. And I like Eichler's focus on the singular experience of live music in a great concert hall as the product we ought really to be promoting, rather than semi-famous guest conductors and soloists. All of this, of course, goes back to a problem we've discussed here in the past: programs that marketers believe will sell poorly if marketed honestly (regardless of their artistic merit) are increasingly being sold to the public as something other than what they are. (Exhibit A would be that Mahler 8/Schubert Unfinished incident from last spring that upset a number of you Mahler fans. It happened again this fall with Sarah's subscription concert debut, when a program of Lutoslawski and Shchedrin concertos for orchestra was advertised as "Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante," which was clearly not the centerpiece of the evening, and wasn't the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante most music fans would have assumed it was, in any case.)

Eichler sums it all up better than I could:

When the BSO chooses to present innovative programs, that approach should be trumpeted, not seen as a reason for apology... Ultimately, the easiest way to market classical music is to have something genuinely exciting to sell.