Ask An Expert: Climate Control

Regular commenter Emily Kroeck asked a good question about Sarah's last post, so I thought we might as well make it a tour edition of Ask An Expert. Emily asks:

Q: How is instrument temperature and humidity controlled on tours where flying is involved? I'm particularly curious about the big and numerous instruments like basses and cellos. Do musicians with smaller instruments carry them on in flight, or is every instrument stored in one temperature-controlled parallel universe that the stage crew then taps into at each destination? Also, does [the orchestra] bring along all of its own instruments or do you borrow some from host venues (I'm thinking of percussion instruments?)

Long before we ever leave on tour, our staff distributes to each musician a questionnaire on which we must, among other things, declare whether each of us will be hand-carrying our instrument from city to city, or placing it in the care of our crew, which has dozens of specially designed and built trunks ready to accommodate them. For those who play instruments too large to carry onto planes, the answer is obvious, but for those of us who play smaller instruments, it's a tough call. The downside of "trunking" your instrument is that you usually won't have access to it between concerts, leaving you only an hour or two of warm-up time to get reacquainted each night.

But hand-carrying can be a real problem, too, since many airlines are none too pleased to see dozens of bulky instruments taking up the overheads, and technically, they don't have to let us bring them on board. (On this tour, we're actually doing a fair amount of bussing between cities, so this is less of a concern.) Furthermore, if you're hand-carrying, your instrument is subject to whatever changing weather conditions happen to be around at the moment, whereas the trunks travel in special climate-controlled trucks and cargo planes. For instance, it's about 15 degrees warmer and a lot drier in Stuttgart, where we've just arrived, than it was in Cologne, which we left 5 hours ago. Temperature and humidity can really affect the sound of string instruments in particular, so you have to set your own priorities.

However, despite the logistical difficulties, we do bring all our own instruments from Minneapolis, even the percussion equipment. (The lone exception is pianos, since Steinway grands are standard equipment in every major concert hall in the Western world.) You might think all percussion is the same, but our own Kevin Watkins was just telling me the other night that he'd gotten a look at the Berlin Philharmonic's xylophone, and was shocked to see that it's two "keyboards" lay parallel to each other, whereas American xylophones have one layer elevated above the other, like uneven parallel bars. It would be pretty hard to adjust to something like that on the fly.

Emily's comment also included the following: The artist's bar thing is COOL. Never mind that I'm not in an orchestra nor have aspirations to be in one - I'm jealous anyway.

This is not, technically, a question, but I'm taking it as the perfect excuse to post some more video of my very favorite part of the European concert hall/backstage cafe experience. Specifically, the clip below was shot in Cologne, in the very moments after our concert ended on Thursday night, as I made my way from my seat onstage into the wings, where I partook of a Cologne Philharmonie tradition that really ought to catch on in every concert hall in the world...



That's right. In Cologne, you have a glass of beer in your hand before you put your instrument down. Not only that, it's a local brew - Kölsch - which, while not exactly a highfalutin' beer (I once had a Surdyk's worker sneer at me for asking if they had any,) tastes excellent when you've just spent 35 minutes sweating your way through Nielsen's 5th Symphony...

Strangely the same

Pictured is the Orchestra during a touch-up rehearsal onstage at the Philharmonie in Cologne.

The stage is clearly a departure from what we know back in Minneapolis - for the last two concerts, we've been in venues that are "in the round", with the audience essentially surrounding the stage. Acoustics are divergent as well, and it makes the orchestra sound very different than when back in Orchestra Hall; both Philharmonies (in Berlin and Cologne) lent a clarity to what was coming off the stage that is in stark contrast to the wash of sound I'm used to hearing back home.

So, everything is different...but strangely the same. The pre-concert activity is identical, wherever you are in the world:


The unpacking of bass cases, which is where our bassists store their instruments whether back home or on tour (bassist Bob Anderson).


Warming up (Doug Wright, our principal trombone).


More warming up (yep, that's Sam!).

There's something comforting about the consistencies of those rituals, even as we traverse the miles (sorry, kilometers - we're in Europe!) - the sameness amidst the differentness.

One distinct difference:


Many European halls have an "artist's bar/cafe" backstage (something we miss back in Orchestra Hall), very convenient for either a quick bite pre-concert or a post-concert quaff (violinist Julie Ayer and cellist Mina Fisher find time for hydration and a quick chat at the backstage cafe in the Berlin Philharmonie).

Hearing It Our Way

Back when this tour began, Sarah and I were discussing the various things we might want to get into on the blog during our travels, and one of the first things we thought of was using our dual video recorders to give you all a sense of how different the orchestral experience is when you're in the middle of it as opposed to listening from the audience. I've written before about the fact that moving your position on stage even a few feet is enough to place you in a totally new sound world, but I realize that it's hard to conceive of exactly what I'm talking about if you haven't experienced it.

So back in London, when the orchestra got together at the Barbican Centre a few hours before concert time to rehearse the John Adams work that's opening our programs, Sarah and I decided to take simultaneous videos of the first minute or so of this wildly complex piece from completely different perspectives. Sarah's clip (which is also available in high-def if you click through to YouTube) is from more or less the best seat in the house, dead center, about 18 rows back from the stage. You'll notice that you get a full swath of orchestral sound, with various instrument groups popping in and out of the texture at various times. (In particular, keep an ear cocked for the running melody in the strings that comes in around the 0:32 mark...)



My video (and keep in mind that this is exactly the same music, being played at exactly the same time that Sarah's video was taken) was shot from the back of the viola section, just where I'm sitting for this tour. (The scroll you can see bobbing in and out of view in the lower right corner is mine, in fact.)



Quite a contrast, isn't it? In my version, the piano and brass are hugely dominant, our connection to the front of the viola section is purely visual (you generally can't hear anyone who's sitting in front of you in an orchestra,) and the violins and cellos are essentially a rumor. Oh, and that viola explosion you hear at the 0:35 mark? That's just me and my stand partner, Ben Ullery, sitting right next to the video machine, trying our best to fit seamlessly into that rising string figure I told you to listen for in Sarah's clip. We can't hear anyone else's part in that figure, of course, so we're just counting furiously and watching our principal like a hawk to be sure that if we have to be wrong, at least all the violas will be wrong together. (This is a treasured principal of orchestral playing, one which takes a long time to get used to: it is far, far better to be together than to be right.)

This is quite literally how we experience every piece of music we play as an orchestra. Even for those sitting near the front of the band, the aural experience is limited by the sound that reaches you - my principal, for instance, has an excellent idea of what the rest of the string principals are doing, and he gets a good blend of wind sound, but there could be an utter train wreck going on in the back of our section, and he likely wouldn't hear a thing.

You do get used to working like this, but it never actually becomes easy. And tonight, here in Cologne, we'll be testing our ensemble skills again, as we haul out Nielsen's 5th symphony for the first time in two weeks, and attempt to sound like we know exactly what we're doing...

Tour McUpdate

Just time for a quick post as I sit here with a surprisingly decent cup of coffee at a McDonald's on Budapesterstrasse here in Berlin. (I know, I know, I normally wouldn't think of going into a Mickey D's in Europe, either, but let's just say that the Internet situation has been somewhat dodgy lately, and every Golden Arches on the continent is guaranteed to have a connection to the wireless service I subscribed to before leaving home.)

Following last night's concert in Berlin, we've actually now played two of the three truly high-profile concerts of the entire tour - the last will be at our final stop in Vienna one week from today. From here, we head to Cologne, Duesseldorf, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Luxembourg, and we'll be changing up our repertoire a bit, playing Nielsen's 5th in place of the Beethoven tonight, and Sibelius 2 in Stuttgart.

More reviews of our London concert have appeared: The Guardian has weighed in with a reasonably good notice, and The Times (Britain's leading daily where prestige is concerned) is positively effusive, even implying that Osmo has lost weight since his last trip to London. My favorite review so far is from The Telegraph: "The Minnesota sound is magnificently 'up-front' and vivid throughout... Vänskä and the Minnesotans built a cumulative tension through every twist and turn [of the Beethoven,] right up to the final explosion of joy at the end."

Here in Berlin, we played the same concert last night to an enthusiastic if somewhat sparse crowd at the legendary Philharmonie just down from Pottsdammerplatz. Sparse, you say? Why, yes, I say. But... but... Joshua Bell, you say? Yup, say I, but you've got to remember that Berlin hosts the very best soloists, orchestras, and chamber ensembles nearly every night of the week, and much as our European profile may have been building over the last several years, few in this capital of the music world know or care what Minnesota is. Prairie Home Companion doesn't come in here, if you know what I mean, and the average Berlin concertgoer might be forgiven for looking at the posters and thinking, "Hm. Beethoven with something called Minnesota? Nah. I'll wait for the Berlin Phil to play it again..."

Still, those who were with us last night were a great audience, and demanded encores from both soloist and orchestra at the end of our respective portions of the concert. The first half flew by for me, as I was struggling slightly to adjust to being seated in an entirely different part of the stage than I've been sitting in. But in the second half, I managed to relax and just enjoy the incredible privilege of playing Beethoven in arguably the greatest concert hall in the world. Osmo clearly enjoyed himself, too - when he was presented with a flower bouquet at the end of the concert, he accepted it, then turned and left it on the conductor's stand as a gesture of gratitude to the orchestra.

I'm about to miss my bus to the airport now, so I'll wrap this up by promising once again to have some video for you soon. We've shot a number of good clips - the problem has been finding a wireless connection speedy enough (and free enough) to upload them. Hopefully, Cologne will have one of those...

Late Update, 6:25pm Central European Time: Cologne does, in fact, have one of those, although not so much with the "free" part. Also, the BBC broadcast our London concert on Radio 3 in the UK last night, and they've made it available for free on their website until March 4. Also, Minnesota Public Radio will be broadcasting the same concert on their Classical Music Service (99.5fm KSJN in the Twin Cities) this Friday night at 8pm Central...

Encore, Encore

We’ve just finished the first concert of the Tour, to a small sigh of relief by all. Firsts are always hard, even more so in a major venue (the Barbican) in a big center of the arts (London). The audiences were certainly appreciative (as was our first review), and after several curtain calls, both our soloist Joshua Bell (on the first half) and the Orchestra itself (in the second) presented encores.

Josh pulled out a novelty by Vieuxtemps; Souvenir d’Amerique, a set of variations on “Yankee Doodle” (he described it to the British audience as a “tune from the Revolutionary War – sorry about that, by the way…”, to much laughter). It’s a fun piece of fluff, impressively played, carrying some of the virtuosic feel over from the last movement of the Barber Concerto (albeit in a very different musical idiom). The audience had already been stirred up by the Concerto, and it made sense to keep up that level of energy.

Osmo was brought back onstage several times after the “Eroica” in the second half, and after his third trip to the podium he turned back to the Orchestra and quickly launched into one of two encores brought on tour, Sibelius’s “Valse Triste”. Those of you who have heard Osmo and the Orchestra perform Beethoven (or have heard it on the highly-regarded recording) know that there is an angularity and forcefulness to it that is very particular to this combination of conductor and orchestra – there is nothing sentimental about it. It’s not to say that it’s not passionate music-making; there is just a directness in the vitality that infuses the performance that keeps it from becoming overemotional.

The Sibelius encore, however, is a very sentimental piece; there’s a heart-breaking quality about it, with its reflections of ghostly memories. It’s one of those heart-on-sleeve pieces (or as much as a Finn would wear his heart on his sleeve!) where the emotional content is immediately evident. It also calls for a smaller orchestra and has a smaller-scale quality about it that also stood in stark contrast to the Beethoven. The effect was to take the audience on a rapid mood swing that led to a completely different place at the end of the concert.

I rather liked the effect of ending something so structured and of an easily-identified musical idiom and finishing the evening with this deeply moving wisp of Sibelius with it’s 3 quiet "chimes" (played by four solo violins) at the end. If nothing else, it gave a glimpse of a completely different side of both the Orchestra and Osmo.

I’m writing this post during a short plane ride from London to Berlin, where we’ll land, head to the hotel, grab a bite and then head to the Philharmonie for an 8 pm performance. Tomorrow: Cologne.

Crunch Time

It feels like forever since we left Minneapolis, and even longer since the orchestra played a concert (last Thursday night,) but today, finally, is the first official day of the tour - Concert #1, at the Barbican Centre in London. When we gather on stage for a brief rehearsal late this afternoon, it will have been five full days since we last drew our bows together, and to be honest, that kind of gap scares the life out of me. Professional orchestras generally work on very tight schedules, rehearsing and performing a concert in the space of only a few days, and our ability to play as much music as we do is largely based on there not being big gaps in the preparation time. Throw in the fact that last Thursday's concert was, according to pretty much everyone, not our best work, and today becomes a vitally important day.

The London concert is arguably the most important of any European tour for an American orchestra, simply because it's where we'll get the bulk of our critical reaction from the English language press. At a time when newspapers are seeming to breathe their last in many cities, London still sports close to ten dailies, and nearly all of them employ full-time classical music critics with very strong opinions. (Back in 2004, I wrote about a concert we played at the Barbican that garnered two diametrically opposed views from two prominent London critics, both named Andrew.) We've heard there will be 7 or 8 critics in attendance tonight, and one thing you can be sure of: they won't care that it's been five days since our last concert. We need a knockout punch tonight to get us off on the right foot, and that means everyone stepping up together to find whatever spark was missing last Thursday.

Sarah and I promised you some video content on this trip, and we're planning to take our first stab at it in this afternoon's rehearsal. With any luck, I'll get the results up and posted before we leave for Berlin early tomorrow morning...

In Which The Blog Goes All Arty And Introspective (For A Change)

While Sarah and most of the rest of the orchestra are still getting over their jet lag from Saturday/Sunday's overnight flight from Minneapolis to London, I'm feeling downright energetic today, having taken the opportunity to jet over to the UK a day early to visit some friends and reacquaint myself with one of my favorite cities.

This morning, I hopped on the Tube and headed down to the area just south of the Thames known as Bankside. For my money, the view from the south bank of the river looking back into Central London is the perfect encapsulation of this complicated metropolis. From a single vantage point, you see London's past, present, and future colliding before your eyes. Look one way, and the sooty, majestic dome of St. Paul's Cathedral fills your field of vision, until you glance down to see Anthony Caro's futuristic Millenium Bridge leading from Bankside to the Cathedral Gardens. Look to the right, and the gleaming cone of the glass skyscraper known as The Gherkin towers above stately old Southwark Bridge. Glance back over your right shoulder, and the unmistakable thatched roof of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre rises comfortably from a riverside walkway which also leads next door to the massive, warehouse-like Tate Modern, arguably the world's most celebrated contemporary art museum since its opening in 2000.

It was the Tate that had brought me here, and specifically, a newly opened exhibit focusing on two of the giants of the Russian/Soviet Constructivist art movement, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova. Having grown up in the dying years of the Cold War, I've always been fascinated by all things Russian, and studied Russian language, literature, art and history through my high school and college years. I remembered Constructivism as something of a precursor to Socialist Realism (though I suspect that real art scholars would call that a distortion,) and more generally as an art movement that I'd never really understood in my school days, so I was eager to take another whack at it.

The original Constructivists (not to be confused with New Constructivists - ain't art fun?) essentially believed that art had become far too bourgeois and enamored of its own worth, and wanted to reduce the artist's profession to something simpler and more scientific than had been the case in the 19th century. Rodchenko and Popova shared a belief that art could and should be made in the same way that an engineer designs a road, by arranging existing materials in a highly meticulous fashion and eschewing emotionalistic flourishes. Their work is doggedly geometric and, usually, completely abstract (they would eventually break with even visionary abstractionists such as Kandinsky over what they saw as Kandinsky's over-reliance on the physical world.)

In looking over the works in the exhibition and reading about the evolution of the Constructivist philosophy, I was struck by one particular paragraph detailing the context of some of Rodchenko's early works. The catalogue reads: "Rodchenko's own investigations placed a particular importance on the line as the sole essential element in a work of art. Colour, tone, texture and surface, he argued, could all be eliminated as mere decoration, or as techniques for imitating the appearance of things."

Now, this is useful information when you're looking at Rodchenko's paintings, but taken simply as a mile marker in the developing ideology of an art movement, it bears the unmistakable ring of rigidity and absolutism, which, to me, is where any ideology (artistic or otherwise) begins to go off the rails. Indeed, only a few years after commiting to the supremacy of line, Rodchenko would paint three flat canvases with a single primary color - red, yellow, and blue - and declare that he had essentially ended the universe of painting. That kind of brash self-importance can be amusing, and even informative, but is always self-defeating in the end, if you ask me.

I bring all this up because, as I wandered through the Tate exhibit, I found myself thinking a lot about the piece of music that will be opening every concert we play on this tour, beginning tomorrow night at the Barbican. It's a not-terribly-well-known work called Slonimsky's Earbox, by one of the lions of American composition, John Adams, and to be perfectly honest, I have a bit of a problem with it.



Let me stress that I have no problem at all with John Adams as a composer. His Chamber Symphony is, in my opinion, one of the very best compositions of the late 20th century, his operas are frequently revelatory, and he has demonstrated throughout his career a willingness and ability to evolve and adapt with the times that most composers haven't the talent or imagination to achieve.

That having been said, there are some Adams pieces that I find myself inwardly frustrated with when I perform them, and Slonimsky is one of them. It's the kind of piece that many listeners and critics would label as "minimalist," though that label has been known to annoy Adams. Essentially, it's machine music, steadily driving forward through the use of snippets, small motives, and repeated drones. It doesn't have melodies or traditional harmonic motion, and instead uses the ever-changing blend of disparate sounds to create a flow. Dynamic changes, when they occur, are stark and jarring, and traditional phrasing is almost non-existant (at least, on the individual level at which musicians normally think of it.)

This may be a flawed comparison, but as I stared at the Rodchenko paintings, I began to see them as a visual representation of Adams's Slonimsky. What better way to describe such music than as a highly developed representation of line and geometry, with a bare minimum of colo(u)r, tone, texture and surface serving as mere ornament? In a way, Adams is asking the listener to experience a complete work of music performed by that most vibrant and versatile of ensembles, a full symphony orchestra, but to do so without most of the normal accoutrements and contexts that an orchestra provides.

I suspect that this may be the reason that Adams's music has a tendency to be easier to listen to than it is to perform. Even if we disagree with a philosophy that says that only line and geometry are important to the creation of art, our minds are fully capable of indulging the idea long enough to appreciate a painting created under those strictures. Similarly, a piece like Slonimsky can sound to the human ear like a constantly bubbling fount of musical ideas, even as it asks the musicians performing it to put aside many of the ideas and skills that we're trained to bring to every new piece we play and focus only on the endlessly cycling notes in front of our eyes.

It occurred to me as I left the Tate that Rodchenko was lucky to be working in a medium like painting, where his canvasses are left to history exactly as he imagined them. Poor John Adams has to simply trust that overanalytical performers like me won't screw up his musical ideas at the first opportunity just because we don't fully agree with the philosophy behind them...

Acclimating

We've made it to London. Today: jetlag, acclimation, making sure we look right before crossing. Tomorrow: rehearsal and concert at the Barbican.

And we're off...

...for Europe for a 12-day, 8 city tour. We'll be blogging regularly; look forward in particular to our video posts (both Sam and I have Flips, with which we hope to capture some of hectic spirit of moving 100+ people daily).

And, yes, we're flying, of course, but couldn't resist the picture.

On Company Time

Back around this same time of the year in 2004, when the Minnesota Orchestra was heading out for a major European tour, there was a fair amount of excitement among press and public about it, and the advance coverage we got (it was Osmo's first year as music director, so there was a certain audaciousness to an attempt to showcase our collaboration internationally after such a short time) bordered on breathless at times. I wrote an extensive blog about the tour for ArtsJournal.com, and the amount of attention it garnered from both the mainstream press and ordinary people following the tour seemed positively unreal.

It's decidedly different this time around, and not only because our orchestra's rise under Osmo's directorship has become something of an old story after five years. The fact is, with the world economy well and truly in the crapper, and everyone wondering how the fallout will affect each of us personally, it's an awkward time to be mounting something as big and flashy as an international orchestral tour. To a lot of folks on the outside, it might even seem insensitive. So why not just stay home and quietly wait for things to perk back up at least a little bit before we go gallivanting off around the globe?

The answer is both complex and simple at the same time. The simple answer is this: tours are planned years in advance, and to call off a tour that is already fully planned and funded would do untold economic damage to our orchestra, to each presenting organization that will be hosting us, to the thousands who have bought tickets, and most importantly, to every individual who works for any organization associated with the tour. As with any business hit by an unexpected wave of misfortune, it's the aftershocks that can do the most damage.

Our orchestra has had a policy in place for a number of years now that says that we do not pay for touring out of our general operating budget, which is the budget that the money we receive from ticket sales, endowment draws, and general contributions goes into. If we decide that a tour is a wise use of our time and resources, the money for that tour must be raised separately from our main budget, and the tour cannot be confirmed until that money is in place. In other words, we would actually hurt our financial position by not touring, since the money that's offered to us to pay for it cannot be used for any other purpose.

There's also an aspect of all this that I think sometimes gets lost in the shuffle when everything we hear on the news suggests that the world is circling the drain and we're all going down together. I thought of it recently when I read of a sharp exchange between a local reporter and an executive with the Minnesota Twins, who were unveiling the design of the multimillion dollar public plaza at their new ballpark in the Warehouse District. The reporter asked whether the Twins didn't think it a bit crass to be trumpeting such a project at a time when people are losing their jobs in other industries. The executive's response was, "Not every company is bankrupt, you know."

The importance of that statement was more or less lost in the ensuing brouhaha over whether this was or was not a slap at the reporter's employer, which is bankrupt. But the truth of the statement is that every company has employees, and every last job in the world is frighteningly valuable right now. For the Twins, a profitable company, to scale back their plans simply because they were worried about appearances would affect not only their company's bottom line, but the jobs of every construction worker who's employed on the project, every individual who works in the team's sales, ticketing, or promotion offices, and every employee of every company that does business with the team. Given that fact, wouldn't it be irresponsible of the team, which, again, is on firm fiscal ground, to fail to undertake such a project?

Blogger Andrew Taylor wrote an excellent post a couple of weeks back about the strange notion that funding the arts at a time of fiscal austerity might be considered irresponsible, pointing out that arts organizations are workplaces like any other, and employ many millions of Americans whose salaries, benefits, and fiscal stability are as important (and as at risk) as anyone else's. Many of those employees are not artists or performers themselves, but bookkeepers, stagehands, designers, payroll managers, and all manner of other office workers. As Sarah put it when she and I were discussing this earlier today, "Is a carpenter who builds opera sets for a living less of a carpenter than one who builds houses?" Not in my world.

By my count, the Minnesota Orchestra employs nearly as many non-musicians as we do musicians. They're incredible people, as deeply committed to their jobs as I am to mine. And at the end of the week, they never get the chance that I do, to stand on stage and be applauded by thousands of people for their work. And the task of those at the top of our organization is to do everything possible to make our company thrive, even in the worst of times, so as to protect not only my job, but the job of every 9-to-5 (or 7-to-7) worker we employ. It's a scary time, yes, everyone knows that. But we're not going to climb out of this hole by continuing to dig ourselves in.

Ears wide open

We're in the midst of preparations for our European Tour - five rehearsals this week instead of the usual 4, and our customary concert schedule has shifted to allow for our travel itinerary this weekend, meaning that we have concerts Wednesday and Thursday rather than over the weekend.

My job as cover conductor on the tour entails being prepared for the extremely unlikely possibility Osmo is unable to conduct, but another function I will also provide is being the pair of ears in the halls as we do our pre-concert soundcheck in each venue. One of the things I'm most looking forward to on our European jaunt is hearing the Minnesota Orchestra in some fabulous halls, including the Philharmonie in Berlin and the Musikverein in Vienna. While I've heard the the Berlin Philharmonic and Vienna Philharmonic play their own halls, I've never heard my "home" orchestra in them, and I imagine each will be distinctly different from our home, Orchestra Hall.

Each hall is an utterly different animal; musicians feel it the minute they get onstage. Orchestra Hall has its own acoustical anomalies; you can hear someone unwrapping a cough drop in row 29 from onstage, but you often can't hear people across the stage. Certain sonorities carry better that others, and everything changes completely when there is a sizable audience sucking up some of the reverberations.

I have a pretty unique perspective on our hall, because I'm one of the few people who spends a great deal of time both onstage and in the audience; I certainly get the "stage perspective" during the 30+ concerts I conduct every year, but when I'm covering for Osmo, I'm out in the hall hearing the acoustic from the audience's perspective. Musicians rarely have the chance to listen to the Orchestra from out in the hall - and when they do, they invariably express surprise in "how it all sounds out here".

I try to bring my insights from both perspectives to both parts of my job; when I'm on the podium, I need to remember that, for instance, while the horns may sound rather subdued from my perch, they'll actually carry very well out in the hall, and when I'm out in the hall listening for balances while Osmo conducts, I try to listen for the details that can be heard in the hall that you can't hear on the podium because such a huge wall of sound is rushing towards you!

People often marvel, "As a conductor you must have the best seat in the house"; well, yes and no. Yes, the immense rush of sound with everything coming at you from all directions is pretty thrilling. But, no, because the sound is "unmixed", unblended - halls are built so the optimal sound reaches the audience, not the podium. It takes quite a bit of experience to discern the relationship between what you hear and what it actually sounds like (if that makes any sense).

The challenge for the halls on tour is that I'll have no stage perspective (and presumably Osmo will have no time to amble into the hall and have a listen), so any suggestions I may have for him about balances will have to be taken on faith. It's all part of the experience, and one I'll be taking in with ears wide open.

Showing Off

As we await the arrival of legendary violinist Joshua Bell, our soloist for this week's concerts as well as our upcoming European tour, I thought I'd share one of my favorite virtuoso violin videos from a master of a bygone era. Willie Hall is the gentleman's name, and as nearly as I can tell, he's actually playing everything you hear in this clip, some of which is pretty incredible despite the low fidelity of the recording.



Your move, Mr. Bell...

On The Road Again

With the orchestra about to embark on a major European tour at the end of next week, we're all starting to think about the logistics of such an undertaking, and preparing in our own way for the various challenges that might lie ahead. Most of the concert halls we'll be playing are familiar to those of us who've been in the orchestra for a while, and our tour staff does a remarkable job of taking care of us, but there are always unexpected problems that crop up when you're trying to move over 100 people, 90-some instruments, roomfuls of wardrobe trunks, and tons of other cargo around the world. Particularly grueling for our stage crew will be the first week of the tour, when we'll play five concerts in five cities in five nights.

The range of things that can go wrong on a tour is remarkable, and it's amazing that more concerts aren't canceled as a result of some unforeseen glitch. Back in 2004, when I was blogging about touring for ArtsJournal.com, I wrote a minute-by-minute description of the day that we and all of our gear had to get from Glasgow, Scotland to Lahti, Finland in a single 12-hour period (with a two-hour time change and winter weather working against us,) and we almost didn't make it. And just this week, an even worse situation was unfolding for the Philadelphia Orchestra in Budapest, and only some quick thinking and quicker emergency rehearsing saved the concert.

Sarah will be along on the tour as the cover conductor, and naturally, we'll both be blogging as we go. We've even procured some video capability, so assuming that we learn how to use it, you can expect at least a few multimedia moments as well. The orchestra's intrepid Outreach Manager, Mele Willis, is also hard at work on an eTour web site aimed at kids, so if you have some of those, watch this space, and we'll let you know when Mele's site goes live.

Lastly, if you want to really get inside the touring experience, the BBC is teaming up with Minnesota Public Radio and the man who hosts our Friday night live broadcasts, Brian Newhouse, to produce a week's worth of radio programming about the Minnesota Orchestra, including a live broadcast of our tour-opening concert at London's Barbican Centre. The BBC offers a live stream of Radio 3, and MPR's Classical stations will be rebroadcasting the London concert during our usual Friday time slot. I'll have more details as we get closer to the date.

Notes from the Heartland

I'm leaving Sam and my colleagues to finish out their week of Nordic finger-torture; last night I arrived in Ohio to do a concert with the Columbus Symphony featuring the Kingston Trio. (My burning question about Charlie and the MTA; if Charlie's wife could slip him a sandwich, why couldn't she slip him a nickel??)

The Columbus Symphony has been through some mighty trying times over the last year or so, and the musicians seem relieved to be back at work despite the sizable paycut they've agreed to take. A perception-altering fact; with a population of 747,755 (the 15th largest metropolitan area as of 2007), Columbus now supports an orchestra of 53 full-time musicians playing a season reduced from their previous 46 weeks to 38, while Minneapolis, at 377,392 the 46th largest city, supports a 98-member orchestra for a 52-week season. Which always begs the question; what ideal combination of factors - history, corporate sponsorship, board leadership, community pride, charisma of music director - lead to such discrepancies?

Rehearsal went well this morning (it's a good band), and musicians seemed to be in pretty good spirits; I'm sure many readers join me in saying I'm glad your back, Columbus Symphony!

A few other thoughts:

Regional jets + 66 mph gusts (the Columbus airport was purportedly shut down for awhile. I certainly don't think we should have even tried to land) = one of the scariest flights I've ever been on, and you regular blog readers know I fly 40-60 times a year. I've been on bumpy flights before, but...sheesh...

Now, air travel has, admittedly, been pretty miserable the last few years, what with all the mergers and flight cutbacks, and I understand the frustration of missing multiple connections and taking 20 hours to make what should have been a 5 hour trip. However, I remind everyone, if a reservation agent on the phone or the check-in person at a previous airport has messed up your re-(re-re-, depending on how many connections you've missed) booked flight, please do not scream at the gate agent! It's like yelling at Steve Campbell because you didn't enjoy the performance of Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony (N.B., there are no tubas in "Jupiter" - yes, Steve's in the orchestra, but did he contribute to that particular performance? No. Is the gate agent culpable for the inadequacy of some other Northwest Airlines employee a thousand miles away? No.) (I witnessed this scene as I was on a cancelled/rerouted/standby-only flight to Columbus via Milwaukee - the screamer made the gate agent cry!)

Finally, as much as traveling has become an enormous pain (and the part of my job I least enjoy), it allows me (and every traveling musician) to experience life somewhere else, firsthand, which I find immensely important. It's easy enough to become so entrenched in everyday life that we start seeing things from a very singular perspective. Being on the road, meeting people from all over, experiencing daily existence in dozens of cities across the country (and around the world) remind me that there are always half a dozen ways to look at anything, and a million ways to approach the basic truths in life (family/community, art/beauty - you know, the good stuff). It makes every day fresh for me, which I wouldn't trade for anything in the world.

Nielsen's Fresh Hell

Okay, yeah, I'm a terrible blogger - nothing new on the site for three days. I apologize. It's just that things are extremely busy around the shop this week, as we get set to take off on a major European tour on the 21st of the month, and we've begun rehearsing the repertoire that we'll be playing in London, Berlin, Vienna, and a handful of other cities. In particular, we're working like dogs on what may well be the most difficult piece of orchestral music I've ever played:



Oh, I know, it doesn't sound so bad at the start, right? Well, just wait until the 2:07 mark, and then listen to what the strings are doing. All that little noodling around with sharp-edged bowstrokes? That's brutally difficult to do, especially that softly, and most especially when the composer chooses to have every single string player playing the same notes at the same time. Keep in mind that, for the most part, we can't hear each other across the stage, so we're going almost entirely on visual cues, cues which require us to look up at the conductor and our principals constantly, which we can't actually do in this case because the notes are so ridiculously counter-intuitive and difficult to play that, if we look away from our music for even a moment, we will crash and burn like you wouldn't believe.

Those four pages of 8th-note hell are hardly the extent of Carl Nielsen's torture devices, either. Around the 5:25 mark of that clip above, he decides to drop us into an absurdly fast-moving fugue that's almost as difficult to navigate as the unison section. And way back at the top of the first movement of the symphony, the viola section spends nearly five continuous minutes hammering our fingers down in the same repeated pattern, which becomes so physically painful after a while that our principal has given each of us carte blanche to stop playing and rest our fingers whenever we need to.

We've actually played Nielsen's 5th under Osmo before, a few years back. (It was actually the first week of work for one of our violists, Matt Young. What a way to start your new job!) I sort of figured that, this time around, it would be easier for me to play, since I'd have the familiarity of a past performance. No dice - it's still absolutely brutal - and if you'll excuse me, I'm off to spend the morning hacking away at it again. Talk to ya later, if my hands don't permanently seize up before the end of the week...

Patterning

No, this isn't going to be a post about quilting or psychomotor skills, I promise!

I've written about the methodical way I approach score-study, and it came up at a discussion during brunch this morning. A non-musician friend asked how we kept all that sound organized in our brains - how do you remember what's coming next? To which I answered, it's all about pattern recognition. Or more specifically, understanding the particular patterns of pitch, rhythm and emphasis that are initially established in a piece of music, and discovering how these morph (or, occasionally, remain the same) throughout the work. Which might sound a bit clinical, but it's an approach that's useful in that it can be applied to any composer and any style.

Which all made me a bit philosophical, because isn't life all about pattern recognition? Certainly true with all human relationships; we strive to understand the patterns of those individuals around us ("normal behavior"), because a shift in the pattern indicates something has changed. Food for thought.

Maybe I'm thinking of patterns because discussions of the topic have been floating around the blogosphere lately (another "pattern" in itself? Now I'm reading into everything...) For instance, a great post about words that made their inaugural appearance in the latest Inaugural Address. It's a fascinating list of words - I particularly like the sequence "tirelessly - toiled - towards" - and was surprised that, in a post 9/11 world, "firefighter" is making its first appearance. And now I've added a word to my vocabulary (hapax!).

Which reminded me of an exhibit at the Weisman I saw last fall in which artist R. Luke DuBois took State of the Union addresses and arranged words in a kind of "eye chart" according to frequency of use ("Gentlemen" made the most appearances for George Washington, "Terror" for George W. Bush). I actually attended the opening, during which DuBois did a set - he's a composer as well, and I recently discovered that he does some really interesting stuff.

My last pattern observation; when I'm wrapping up a precious few days at home, as I am now, I tend to become a bit more reflective and philosophical.

Ask An Expert: The Bottom Line

To pick up where we left off on Wednesday, Mike had asked a series of excellent questions about the various roles that money plays in the orchestra business. We answered two of them to do with musician pay in that post, and now we turn to the thornier issue of how dollars in and dollars out affects programming decisions. Here were Mike's questions:

Q: How do financial matters impact the particulars of performances at Orchestra Hall? Do performances change based on attendance, interest, funding? Do finances have a role in deciding what/how performances are given?

For the answers, I'll turn things over to Kari Marshall, the artistic administrator for the Minnesota Orchestra. Kari is involved in nearly all of our programming decisions, and she is also the staffer who Sarah and I work most closely with in developing our Inside the Classics concerts. (She also once won the orchestra's wildly popular NCAA March Madness pool despite not caring one bit about basketball, which was awesome if not terribly relevant to this blog.) Here's Kari's response:

Mike’s question about financial matters is one of those that all arts organizations, no matter their size, grapple with regularly. How does one balance fiscal responsibility with artistic mission? I remember many a late-night conversation about this very topic with my classmates in graduate school!

My role at the Minnesota Orchestra involves working with the Classical subscription series as well as Inside the Classics, so my answer refers to those areas of the Orchestra. In general, we do our best to make sure we are responsible with the finances while also providing a worthwhile and artistically satisfying experience for everyone in the concert hall. If you follow the blog regularly, you may recall that Bob Neu, our vice-president and general manager, contributed to an Ask An Expert inquiry just over a year ago. In that answer, Bob explained the process of planning a Minnesota Orchestra season.

Another stage of the planning cycle involves coordinating the entire season’s schedule with our marketing department. The classical subscription season, for instance, is a complicated puzzle of two, three or four concerts per week. The process of putting that puzzle together includes discussions about how each week may impact the organization’s financial situation. At the same time, we strive to offer a balanced variety within the program choices we offer.

Once a season is set, we do not change the Inside the Classics or Classical concerts based on attendance, interest or funding. The financial implications have more of an impact on future planning than the week-to-week programs that occur in a season. For instance, if a performance sells really well and the audience raves about their experience, we want to analyze why in order to make informed decisions. If a performance does not do well, we look for an explanation. (Was it the time of year? The weather? The repertoire? Or something else?) Hopefully this knowledge helps us provide the best experience for players, funders, and most importantly audience members.

More Japanese madness

Ever since I posted my "Vegetabulous" videos I occasionally receive YouTube links to further musical silliness, most often of the Japanese variety (and, oh, my friends, there is no shortage of it...).

My latest submission:



The crux of the drama being what kind of rice to choose with the "breakfast set" (white or "mixed" - with meat/veggies/flavoring mixed in). The side dishes sound "gorgeous"! But wait, there's a third option, rice with mushroom ("mattake gohan"), which sounds delicious, but there are only two servings. No problem, Mom and Daughter will share, so they can have both white and mushroom rice. But this makes Dad a little envious, what shall we do? Fate seals the decision; breakfast time is over, declare the servers, lunch will begin soon!

Who comes up with this stuff??

Ask An Expert: The Money Shot

It's been a while since we answered an Ask The Expert question around these parts (remember, if you have a question about anything music or orchestra-related, you can click the Ask An Expert button to submit it, and we'll do our best to find someone who knows the answer,) but Mike is about to more than make up for lost time, with a record batch of five related questions:

Q: How do financial matters impact the particulars of performances at Orchestra Hall? Do performances change based on attendance, interest, funding? Do finances have a role in deciding what/how performances are given? ([For instance,] we originally thought the smaller size of the orchestra at the Mendelssohn concert was due to economic conditions.) How are the musicians paid? Do they typically have other jobs?

That's a lot to answer in one shot, and they're all excellent questions, so I think the best thing to do is to break this up into two separate blog posts. I'm qualified to answer Mike's last two questions, so I'll do that here, and then we'll have someone involved in the orchestra's programming process answer the rest in a later post.

Musicians in a major orchestra like Minnesota are salaried, and paid year round. (There are, at the moment, 16 or 17 American orchestras that do the same, and dozens more that pay regular salaries to their musicians, but don't pay them year round.) For players in ensembles like this, the orchestra is our full-time job, and our contract more or less compels us to put our orchestral duties ahead of anything else we might choose to do on the side. (So the answer to Mike's last question is no, musicians in the Minnesota Orchestra typically don't have other jobs, although many of us teach, coach chamber music, or play in summer music festivals when we have the time.)

Small orchestras (small by budget size, that is) can sometimes be what's called "per-service," which means musicians are paid a set amount for each rehearsal and concert they play, and they may be guaranteed a minimum number of services per year, but it is generally not possible to make a living solely from a job in a per-service orchestra. One example of this type of orchestra would be the Minnesota Sinfonia.

Salaries in the orchestra business can range from less than $10,000 per year to well over $100,000. (Certain crucial players, like concertmasters, can even make multiple hundreds of thousands, if they're considered among the very best in the field.) There are a handful of bands at the top of the field (ours included) in which it is entirely possible to make a very comfortable living and support a family without a second income, but the vast majority of orchestral musicians never land one of those plum jobs. There are a lot more $30,000 a year jobs than $80,000 jobs in this business, and whenever a major orchestra announces an open spot, you can count on there being dozens or even hundreds of candidates lining up to audition. (In 1999, when I auditioned here, there were 122 violists competing for two chairs in the section.)

It's interesting that some people assumed that our cut-down orchestra for last week's Inside the Classics concerts was a budget decision. There's a pretty strict rule against that sort of thing - we play the music we play with the number of musicians it was meant to be played with, and leaving someone out to save money would not be acceptable under any circumstances. In Mendelssohn's time, orchestras were smaller than they are now, so we cut back our string section, and of course, didn't include any wind, brass, or percussion players unless Mendelssohn wrote a part for them. (Besides, since the orchestra's 98 full-time musicians are on salary, we wouldn't save any money by cutting players from a given show.)

Of course, we play excerpts from works other than the featured one at Inside the Classics shows, and those of you with sharp eyes last week may have noticed that our tuba player, Steve Campbell, was on stage to play the very first excerpt of the night, from Mendelssohn's overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, and that he then left the stage, never to return. I apologized to Steve before the show for making him come in to work just to play 4 minutes of music and then leave, but he gave me the same response you pretty much always get from musicians in that position: "Hey, no problem. It's my job."

We'll finish up answering Mike's questions tomorrow or Friday...

M-I-C-K-E-Y...

For any of you who attended the Bobby McFerrin/Cantus concert at Orchestra Hall last Friday, you know what I'm talking about (for those of you not fortunate enough to attend, it was a lyric from the audience-sing-along encore).

McFerrin has always been a think-outside-the-box musician, and his concerts never disappoint. There are a few things you can count on (a lump-in-the-throat beautiful version of "Blackbird" and, if you're lucky, a laugh-out-loud funny 7-minute musical condensation of "The Wizard of Oz"), and then there was the new element, the collaboration with Cantus, which yielded moments of utter spontaneity that were surprising to the performers as well as the audience.

Two observations (from my vantage point in the soundbooth in the back of the Hall - where there was a gaggle of standing-room-only audience members taking it all in): first, how utterly relaxed he is onstage. I've certainly seen many other performers with a very comfortable stage presence, but McFerrin's is different - you don't get the fleeting moments of tension or expressions of super-conscious thinking. I'm thinking a lot of it has to do with the fact that what he does on stage is so improvisatory in nature, even if it's planned out. If you're always making it up, it's hard to mess it up. Backstage I asked him if he put a lot of thought into what sounds (consonant and vowel combinations) he used for different registers or patterns. He looked at me quizzically, then told me no, not at all, just what came out at the moment.

It reminded me of the notion of the limitation we classically-trained types are always dogged by, on some level; the fact that what we do is written out, dictated to us, in a way. Yes, there are those few who have incorporated improvisatory skills into classical performance (a skill that used to be commonplace back in the day - and organists still have it as a regular part of their training), and yes, there is of course room for individual turns of phrases that may change night to night, but the fact is that we can't mess with a Brahms Symphony on the spot. We can't even really change a Brahms Intermezzo on the spot - it then ceases to be Brahms. It's a limitation within which we find infinite freedom, but a stricture no less.

It also reminded me of an article I read in a recent Gramophone magazine, an interview with pianists Martha Argerich and Stephen Kovacevich, two artist I admire a great deal, to whom performing is not a relaxing prospect at all:

Argerich: "...one doesn't choose to be a performer...It's not your free choice...Maybe you want to learn and move closer to music, and, yes, to what you love - but that doesn't mean that you enjoy the performing."

Kovacevich: "It's a kind of torture as well, sometimes."

The other post-concert thought was about the amount of audience participation - a lot! - McFerrin had us chiming in for everything from the theme to "The Beverly Hillbillies" to the Bach-Gounod "Ave Maria" (there were some lovely voices in the audience!) and, most notably, one song where he had us accompanying him on a series of pitches. He taught us the pitches by standing at a particular point onstage, singing a pitch, and having us repeat it. He moved over a foot or so, sang a different pitch, had us sing it, etc. He taught us 4 pitches, then proceeded to leap around stage on those four points, and the audience sang the pitch corresponding to the point, as taught.

What was surprising then was the fact that at a certain point, he started moving beyond those four points, up to nearly an octave lower and an octave higher than the original pitch set, and the audience kept in the same mode (and no, it wasn't a major scale). It was completely unconscious, simple, and I unthinkingly sang along.

It wasn't until I left the concert that it even occurred to me that he'd taught us 4 pitches out of a pentatonic scale, and we just went along with it and what came naturally. The music-analysis part of my brain was completely shut off, because I so instinctively knew what he wanted that I didn't need to analyze. And neither did anyone else in the audience - they just sang along, naturally, with what sounded right to their ears.

Which to me goes a long way to show that the natural, unconscious and automatic understanding of the organization of pitch and rhythm that is the basis of music is absolutely instinctive. It's inborn and innate within us. And what's more powerful than that?

Taking It Out On The Kids

I ordinarily try to stay away from the kinds of debates that ensue when politicians threaten to cut arts budgets to deal with economic troubles. People who work in the cultural field tend to get all up in arms at times like this, claiming loudly that the arts are vital (which I agree with, obviously) and that arts groups are "always the first to be cut" when times get tough. And while it's true that the arts are an easy target for those wielding the budget knife, I generally have a tough time arguing that subsidies for theaters and museums should be treated as more vital than, say, school lunch programs. So I just choose not to engage the argument most of the time, and quietly thank the heavens that I'm not the one who has to make such decisions.

But I admit to being a bit indignant over this business of Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty wanting to essentially shut down a school that has been a beacon of arts education for the entire US since its inception. The Perpich Center for Arts Education was created with the primary support of former MN Gov. Rudy Perpich and his wife specifically to insure that a serious arts curriculum could exist in perpetuity in the state, even when economics dictated that many ordinary public schools trim or eliminate art, music, and dance programs. Furthermore, in its more than two decades of existence, it has made a point of accepting students from all economic backgrounds, and even offered a boarding option for outstate kids in order to insure that it didn't become the type of resource funded by the state that can only be taken advantage of by kids in the Cities.

Under Governor Pawlenty's budget plan, the Perpich Center would see its 2010-11 budget slashed by 30%, which would kill the boarding program immediately, and cause catastrophic cuts to the school's core educational offerings. The cuts would get even deeper in subsequent years. Furthermore, the governor wants to eliminate the center's unique admissions process, under which students audition much like they would for a college-level music, dance, or theater program, and replace it with the rules that govern charter schools. This would mean, among other things, that the school would be populated on a first-come, first-served basis, regardless of whether prospective students have any interest in or aptitude for the program they'll be enrolling in.

Now, as I said, I generally try not to get sucked into debates like this, because goodness knows, I have no idea how I would close a $4.8 billion budget hole. And if the Perpich Center were just another training academy for kids with wealthy parents, I wouldn't be writing this post at all, because those kinds of kids will always have options in life. But the Perpich Center isn't that kind of place. It's a model of what public education can be, and it inarguably has made a huge difference in the lives of countless Minnesota kids who otherwise might not have had any chance of making a career out of their assorted talents. Its graduates are just one more example of the value Minnesota has always placed on both education in general and the arts in particular. And I think it would be a great shame if that legacy were snuffed out, just to plug less than a half of one percent of that gaping hole in our state budget.

But that's just me. If you disagree - if you think the economic woes we're facing as a state and a nation are just too great to justify investing in anything more than bare-bones K-12 education at the moment - that's fine. I get that argument, and I don't share the traditional liberal view that fiscal conservatives are monsters who want to deprive children of a well-rounded education.

Still, I'll say this. A cut like the one facing the Perpich Center is very likely to get lost in the shuffle in a budget cycle like this, so if you don't think it ought to happen, well, it might be time to sit down and tap out an e-mail to your reps in St. Paul. They won't know how you feel unless you tell them, and believe me, they've got a lot of voices shouting in their ears right now.