Encouraging Dissent

Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette has an interesting post up on her blog this week about an odd sort of groupthink that frequently seems to permeate the classical music world:

"Why do we all have to like the same composers? I’m sure that we could find movies or books that we disagree about without it seeming quite so heretical. (Actually, my husband doesn’t care for Bruckner, and I love Bruckner, and we manage to continue a happy marriage regardless.) Anyway, I think we need to embrace these disagreements, because they help get classical music off its film-star pedestal and into an arena where we can interact with it, have opinions about it, dare not to like it."

I like the comparison to other art forms, because whereas critics who write about movies, books, and theater spar continuously over the quality (or lack of quality) of what they're reviewing, many classical music critics seem to feel constrained only to review the performance of a piece of music, and rarely discuss the merits of the work itself. And given how passionately many classical fans feel about their favorite composers, I'd probably do the same in their shoes. It's really not worth the trouble you're going to stir up by saying in print that, just for instance, Bruckner's symphonies are overrated, long-winded, and boring.

Midgette has another theory about why critics should be more open about their likes and dislikes, though:

We talk a lot about how to reach new younger audiences: well, they’re not fooled by didactic lectures and hollow praise. I have a host of anecdotes about times I felt I reached someone who was new to classical music by giving them permission not to like it.

Now, this rings very true to me, and I've got an anecdote of my own. A few years back, we were playing the world premiere of a newly commissioned work, and from the opening moments of the first rehearsal, we knew that we were in for a very tough slog through some incredibly dense, modernist stuff that our audiences were just going to hate. It's never fun trying to get through music like that, because we can see the audience visibly hating it, willing it to be over, and nobody wins in that situation. You can always hope that the audience will be so incensed that they'll do something dramatic like refuse to applaud, or even boo the composer, but most American audiences are far too polite to ever consider such acting out.

Now sometimes, when we're playing a new piece, we'll invite the composer to say a few words about it before we play it, which can sometimes have the effect of making the audience more open to what they're about to hear. But in this case, the composer of what I'll call the Noise Concerto wasn't actually going to be at the concerts, so Osmo decided to speak to the audience instead. I couldn't imagine what he was planning to say about a piece that basically everyone agreed was unlistenable. Here's what he said (to the best of my memory - this was several years ago, and I don't have it on tape):

"When I first received the score for this piece by [Composer X], I thought to myself, 'Oh, no.'"

At this, there was a slight gasp and some nervous laughter from the audience. Osmo went on, "It seemed so dark, and so difficult, and with so much happening all over the orchestra, and I didn't know whether anyone would be able to listen to it. But now, as we've been rehearsing and playing it all week, and we have begun to understand some of the composer's ideas, now I think... well, now I think still "Oh, no" in many places."

The audience erupted in laughter. Osmo wasn't done: "But," he said quickly," what does Vänskä know? I am hearing the piece for the first time just as you are, just as we all are, and when we play it, you will have your own conclusions, and those are what matter."

It was a masterful way to introduce the piece. There was no question, once we'd finished the premiere, that the vast majority of those in attendance fell into the "Oh, no" camp, but the amazing thing was that it was clear from the looks on people's faces as we played that, by giving them permission to hate the piece, we had made them more open to giving it a chance. At some of the work's loudest, most headache-inducing moments, I even saw a few people smirking or chuckling, as if to say, "Wow. This must be one of the 'Oh, no' places."

The lesson, I think, is that people who know they're allowed to have their own opinions on what we're doing on stage are far more likely to engage, and to view concerts as something they participate in, rather than as something static that is set in front of them. Midgette sums it up nicely:

"We don’t need boosterism: we need to regain a sense that this field matters, and that there are reasons for everyone to care about it, beyond a dutiful sense of “it is great and we should.” That's the basis of a love of music, an amateurism, that sustains, rather than distant appreciation of isolated, glamorous performances."

Transylvanian fun

...in the form of a musical glass duo playing "Il vecchio castello" ("The Old Castle") in, well, an old castle, the Hunyad Castle (Castelul Corvinilor) in Hunedoara, Romania, site of the imprisonment of Vlad III of Wallachia (more commonly remembered as Dracula). The piece works well for both the instrument and setting - eerie, atmospheric. Fun stuff. Make sure to listen through to the end - they do the "Ballet of the Chicks in their Shells" too.

Ask An Expert: Musical Chairs

It's been two months since we last did an Ask the Expert post, and season ticket holder Judy Kinsey has a question that I'm actually surprised hasn't come up on the blog before now:

Q: I noticed, but didn't really pay attention, a few years ago when the orchestra's seating - the placement of sections on the stage - changed. The cellos moved to the middle and the double basses to the left. And maybe more that we didn't recognize. A friend who hadnt been at a concert for awhile attended a concert recently and was very surprised. She asked me when that happened, and why. I didn't remember when exactly, and I didn't know why.

Well, Judy, first of all, thanks for being a subscriber! People like you make our marketing department very, very happy. As for the seating, you're exactly right that we underwent a major change in how our string section sets up on stage a few years back. Prior to the switch, we sat in the configuration that's most familiar to American audiences - first violins on the outside edge of the stage at stage right, second violins just to the inside of the firsts, violas on the inside stage left, and cellos on the outside edge at stage left, facing the first violins. The basses were arrayed behind the violas and cellos at stage left. It looked like this...

(click the photo for a larger view)

Shortly after Osmo took over as music director, however, he started experimenting with a different seating, which was actually widely in use in the 18th and 19th centuries. Under this system, the two violin sections face each other across the stage (with the seconds where the cellos used to be,) the cellos jump to the inside spot next to the firsts vacated by the second violins, and the basses shift to stage right to stay near the cellos. Violas and first violins stay where they were. So the new seating looks like this...

(I know you can't see the first violins, but trust me, they're just left of the cellos...)

The rationale behind this seating is twofold: first of all, since much of the repertoire we play was written by composers in the 18th and 19th centuries, it makes sense to arrange the strings the way those composers would have expected. Secondly, by separating the violin sections, you create a very cool stereo effect in the concert hall, especially when you're playing music by a composer (Beethoven, say) who liked to play the violins off each other frequently. Some reviewers have even claimed that they can hear the effect of the antiphonal violins on our Beethoven recordings. (A third benefit could be that, by moving the cellos to an inside position, their soundboxes are facing out at the audience, but I don't know whether that actually makes a huge difference in the sound.)

Initially, Osmo had us sit this way just when we were playing Beethoven symphonies, and he then quickly amended that to "Beethoven and anything written during Beethoven's time or earlier." I think it was less than a year later that we switched to using that seating full-time, unless there's a compelling reason not to. (For instance, we almost never use it for pops shows, in which the orchestra tends to be spread further apart on the stage and the violins need to be close enough to hear each other.)

The switch wasn't without controversy: the cellos have a lot less room in their inside position, which has been a source of concern. And of course, it can be very difficult for the violins to hear each other across the stage, so we sometimes have to spend extra rehearsal time tightening up the ensemble. But we did take a poll of the orchestra a couple of years back, and the results were strongly in favor of sticking with the new seating. We're not the only US orchestra using it, and it's fairly common in Europe.

There have been other changes on our stage in the last decade, too. When I joined up in 2000, for instance, we didn't have any risers on stage, so the winds and brass just sat directly behind the strings, with everyone on the same flat level. This tended to result in a lot of complaints from the strings that the brass were trying to kill us with volume, and from the brass that the strings were a bunch of whiny princesses. It was also a problem for the back of the winds, where percussion instruments might be inches from the head of a horn player.

We started using risers immediately when Osmo took over, and these days, the winds and brass are arrayed at three different levels above the strings. We've also experimented with miniature risers for the back desks of violins, who are the furthest string instruments from the podium and therefore benefit from an assist in seeing over the players in front of them.

Basically, there's no right answer to the seating question. I would argue that there is a wrong one, though, and it's a model that a number of orchestras still inexplicably use. This model uses our old seating, with the violins together at stage right and the basses at stage left, but flips the violas and cellos, placing the violas on the outside edge of the stage. (When I played in the Alabama Symphony in the late 1990s, this was the seating we used.)

So basically, you've just done two nonsensical things: 1) placed the violas - the one string section guaranteed to basically never be in charge of things like tempo and harmonic flow, a section whose main job is to listen as carefully as possible to everyone else and bind together the top and bottom of the ensemble by following - in a location on the stage where they will essentially not be able to hear anyone else clearly; and 2) turned the softest instrument group on the stage to have their soundboxes directly facing the back wall rather than the audience. (Insert hilarious viola joke here.) That seating drove me up the wall, and I've never heard any adequate justification for it, but like I say, you still see it. (I'm pretty sure the New York Philharmonic even uses it, but let's face it, there's no accounting for New Yorkers.)

So, Judy, there it is: more than you probably ever wanted to know about where we plunk ourselves down on stage. Next time, maybe we can get into opera pits...

Quick turnaround

Apologies from me as well for being a spotty blogger, although I can't claim Aho as an excuse. Instead, it's been a couple of days that reminds me how flexible and versatile my job requires me to be.

This weekend found me in Atlanta with a whole bevy of shows with jazz trumpeter Chris Botti and the Atlanta Symphony (three in two days). I first worked with Chris when he came to play with the Minnesota Orchestra; we hit is off from day one, and he immediately booked me for upcoming shows.

This kind of work poses challenges very different from, say, conducting Lutoslawski - jazz requires a different kind of timing than what classical training prepares you for, and without a feel for it, it's impossible to set the right mood orchestrally. It also requires a flexibility that's no longer a part of the classical sphere - in the middle of a chart, the band might go off on a riff or elongate a solo. I guess the closest equivalent might be playing a different cadenza every night, but that doesn't begin to explain the improvisatory nature of what goes on onstage, and what I need to do to make sure everything's going to fit correctly (at one point on Friday night I was trying to figure out how to mime "B3" - a rehearsal number - to indicate to the orchestra that we had to repeat back to a certain section - all while keeping track of where the band was going. Challenging, but so much fun, for some reason...).

Of course, the rockstar aspect to these shows is undeniably fun - cheering, adoring fans, stage-shaking set playing, roving spotlights, pre-concert cocktails, etc.

I flew home yesterday on 2 hours of sleep (the rockstar behavior continues post-show, of course...), took a nap, drank a pot of coffee and started back to work on a 27-minute world premier for narrator and orchestra that I'm performing this week with the National Symphony Orchestra for a set of Family Concerts. Which is about as divergent, both musically and generally speaking, from this past weekend as one could get!

I'm used to switching gears on a weekly basis (and, as Sam points out in his post below, orchestra musicians are pretty adept at it), but this switch is a particularly extreme juxtaposition of the very disparate kinds of concerts I do. It highlights for me the flexibility I need, both as a musician and as a stage persona, to create a concert experience for divergent audiences. But it's also what makes my job endlessly challenging, and I sure do love a challenge.

Home Stretch

In case you're wondering about the blog silence over the last several days, it's largely a result of just how busy this particular chunk of the season is for the orchestra. We're in the final weeks of what we oddly call our "winter season" (it's really the whole season minus Sommerfest - insert your own Minnesota winter joke here,) and our artistic planning team backloaded a huge amount of very tough music this year, which is causing no small amount of scrambling on the part of the orchestra.

Last week, we played a brand new (and massively outsized) concerto for violin and full choir by Jennifer Higdon, and then finished out the week with a completely separate jazz program featuring our own Chuck Lazarus on trumpet. (This was no ordinary pops show, either, where the orchestra could afford to just slide into our chairs at the last minute and glide through a bunch of easy half notes and slapped-together arrangements. As a member of the orchestra, Chuck knows exactly what we're capable of, and his orchestrations take full advantage of that knowledge.)

This week, our marketing department is selling our concerts as a chance to watch us make a live recording of a Tchaikovsky piano concerto with the estimable Stephen Hough. And we are, in fact, doing that, and that will certainly be no small task, but I feel fairly confident in saying that it's a virtual guarantee that not a single musician in the orchestra is spending any serious practice time on the Tchaikovsky as we get ready for our first day of rehearsals tomorrow. And the reason that we aren't exactly focused on the concerto is that we're all frantically cramming on the ridiculously difficult piece that will be on the second half of the program: Kalevi Aho's 10th Symphony.

We've played some Aho in the past - he's one of Osmo's favorite living composers, and I quite like what I've heard of his music, too. But this piece, well... let's just say that professional musicians are not easily intimidated by new challenges (you can't really succeed in a business that requires you to practice, rehearse, and perform a new two hours of music every single week without having a fair bit of confidence in your ability to pick things up quickly,) but I started hearing whispers and squawks about the Aho nearly a month ago, when the parts first started trickling into the stacks of folders we pick up to practice for upcoming concerts. The first violins, in particular, have taken to wandering around backstage looking shellshocked, and murmuring to each other, "I mean, have you seen that part on page 26? How do you even play that?"

What makes the Aho so insanely hard from an individual player's point of view (as opposed to the perspective of the full ensemble) is that a) much of it is very, very fast, and b) much of it is very, very high up in the register of each instrument. It's one of those situations where we're pretty well used to playing fast things, and there's really no one in the Minnesota Orchestra who's afraid of a few high notes, but when a composer puts those two things together, and then sets up a lot of the notes in such a way that your brain is tricked into thinking it detects a pattern only to discover that your perception just caused you to play six wrong notes in a second-and-a-half... that gets frustrating.

As if all that weren't enough, a glance at the orchestra's rehearsal schedule tells me that not only have we not added a fifth rehearsal to the week (four is our norm, but we've done five before when the repertoire posed a particular challenge,) the Aho is only scheduled for two of the four rehearsals. 'Cause, y'know, we're recording a piano concerto, too, and there's a Nielsen tone poem that no one's ever heard of on the program as well, so efficiency will have to be the watchword of the week.

The chaotic pace of things doesn't end with this Saturday night's concert, either. To cover the possibility that our recording producers won't have gotten absolutely every take they need of the Tchaikovsky from our three performances, we've got a patch session scheduled for 10:30pm Saturday night, right after the show, which could run anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. We'll repeat the same act next week, when Mr. Hough records a different Tchaikovsky concerto with us. Oh, and did I mention that next week's concerts will open with a 16-minute world premiere by a composer who once participated in our Composers' Institute, and whose music, as I recall, tends to be extremely complicated to prepare? Or that we'll also be spending a day auditioning for new staff conductors on repertoire ranging from Brahms to Stravinsky to Rodgers & Hammerstein? 'Cause we will.

Not complaining, you understand. I love my job. But right now, I need a nap.

Audience Participation

Hey, who needs a break from all the doom and gloom that's been dominating the music biz lately? I do, for one, and a comment on a recent post (from a gentleman who believes that new music has been useless and unlistenable roughly since Schönberg came along) got me thinking about the uphill battle we still have to fight to convince today's audiences that most composers got over the whole "noise as music" thing years ago, and a lot of great young composers are writing stuff that's just begging for exposure to a mass audience.

Case in point: my friend Geoff. One of several composers I've commissioned solo viola music from over the years, Geoff has lately been dedicating the lion's share of his time to projects aimed at children. At the moment, he's working on a set of string quartet albums that help young musicians develop their ensemble skills while at the same time allowing them to play "real" pieces of music. And a couple of years back, he actually wrote an entire opera for kids. This wasn't some dumbed-down piece of pop crossover masquerading as opera, either - it was very serious music on a very unserious subject: namely, bugs. The Bug Opera premiered in Massachusetts, and has since been performed by a few professional regional opera companies around the US. There's even been interest from overseas - a company in Stuttgart is awaiting a German version.

The plot of The Bug Opera is pretty simple: the main character is a mosquito who finds the idea of sucking blood disgusting and mean. But of course, if she doesn't suck blood, she'll die, so the opera finds Mosquito embarking on a quest to resolve this primal conflict. On the way, she meets a pack of mindlessly gluttonous caterpillars, a deadly and unrepentant spider, and a paper wasp who becomes sort of her Jiminy Cricket. It's the kind of piece that, when you see it performed, your first thought isn't "My, what intellectually stimulating music, and such a wonderful lesson in the complexity of life!" No, the first thing you think is: "That is just way cool. Why didn't anyone think of this sooner?"



Interestingly, Geoff (and his librettist/wife, Alisa) developed the opera in the same way that they're developing the string quartet project: by holding dozens of workshops and mini-performances with kids around the country while the pieces are still being written. The idea is that, if you write a piece for kids while sequestered in your home, you won't know whether you succeeded until opening night, and if the audience isn't impressed, well, too late. So by giving kids a chance to interact with bits and pieces of the work as it's being put together, Geoff gets instant feedback which he can then use in tweaking and improving what he's doing.

I actually had the chance to be a part of one the workshopping moments for The Bug Opera, at the summer camp I've written about before where Geoff and I both teach. Along with a few other faculty members, I sang the caterpillar's "Eat, Chew, Chew" chorus for the pre-teens at the camp, and Alisa (who is also an accomplished coloratura soprano) sang the spider's creepy come-hither aria. All the while, Geoff had a video camera trained not on the performers, but on the kids, to get a record of their reaction to all sorts of musical and dramatic moments. It's amazing how much a child's face can tell you about whether or not you've captured their imagination.

Geoff's latest project (the string quartet thing) will actually be getting a workshopping of its own this summer at Minneapolis's own MacPhail Center for Music, before moving into its final phase of composition and eventual public performance, which should happen in 2010. It's not the sort of high-profile project that gets a composer labeled The Next Big Thing, but it's one more example of the amazingly diverse place that the music world has become these days, and of the creative approaches musicians, composers, and others are taking to get their work out into the public ear.

[Full disclosure: In addition to being a good friend of Geoff's, I also serve on the board of Hybrid Vigor Music, a small non-profit company that provides support and guidance for both The Bug Opera and the Quartet Project. I have no financial stake in any of it - I just think what Geoff is doing is worth sharing.]

Old school, new school

An interesting exchange recently about arts education regarding an Ofsted report on art in primary and secondary schools and artist David Hockney (whose work I’ve know since I was a kid – his stage set for L’enfant et le sortilege resided in a contemporary museum a few blocks from my childhood home). The point of contention; that elementary school-age boys were not interested in the visual arts when instruction focused more on drawing and painting than on use of technology (digital cameras and computer graphics programs). Hockney counters that it’s a matter of quality tutelage vs. “bad, boring teachers”.

Hockney also asserts: "I was appalled when I read that school inspectors say boys are turned off art when it's too heavily focused on drawing and painting…It's a bit like saying schools shouldn't be bothering with grammar.”

Despite my avid interest in every great new thing, be it technology, pop culture or gadgetry, I’m a huge back-to-basics person. One can’t really fathom the next step in the development of an art form, be it sculpture or music, unless one has a firm grasp of both the basic building blocks/techniques and the long-standing traditions. It’s difficult to advance a technique unless you’ve fully mastered its mechanics; it’s harder still to rebel against tradition unless you have an ingrained understanding of it.

The flip-side, of course, is a willful adherence to an outmoded methodology just for the sake of tradition, which I find just as problematic.

From the musical side, in my frequent collaborations with young composers, I find that those with the most rigorous training in traditional harmony, formal analysis and counterpoint are the ones who are best able to take an innovative approach that finds full expression. Composers who have only a very basic grasp of theory and analysis (and you would be surprised at how many fit the bill), no matter how creative, are in the short-term unable to practically express those fresh ideas, and in the long-term much less able to keep developing them.

What makes me particularly supportive of Hockner’s critique is that he himself has successfully integrated his “traditional” training in color and composition with newly available technology; his latest exhibit is of works drawn and painted using a computer – it’s nice to see someone “walk the talk”.

Pardon the Interruption

The great political satirist Molly Ivins once wrote that there was nothing in the world so irritating as someone who stops in the middle of a perfectly good argument to insist that everyone define his terms.

So you have my apologies for what follows here. A few weeks back, I wrote about the wave of articles that inevitably appear during an economic downturn claiming that American orchestras can't possibly continue to exist without massive overhauls to our business plan. My point was that such articles usually don't contain a lot of data, and that they frequently miss the point of the deep cuts that orchestras are forced to make at times like these. The money line was: "The headlines trumpeting layoffs and salary givebacks aren't evidence of the failure of a business model. They're a demonstration of how the model bends without breaking."

I really was going to let that be the end of it, but then, this weekend, no less illustrious a paper than the Chicago Tribune ran a commentary that so completely missed the reality of the orchestral situation that I feel I have no choice but to stop the argument and demand a defining of terms.

The author's main point is nothing new: the business model for American orchestras is broken. (Evidence presented to support this thesis: none.) His solution: everyone, from music directors to guest conductors to CEOs to soloists to musicians in the better-paying ensembles, needs to take pay cuts. Big ones. Now. (He also implies that this isn't already happening, which it is.) That's it. That's his whole solution. And this is where I have a nit to pick, because, wait for it... salaries are not a business model.

That's really all I wanted to say. If you want to have a debate about the way American orchestras fund themselves and operate as organizations, let's do it. If you believe that the existing system, in which private donors and corporations make voluntary donations to support a huge (by non-profit standards) corporation that presents orchestra concerts, is unsustainable, let's talk about that. And if you (saints be praised!) have a new model you think will work better, by all means, we'd love to hear it!

But by saying that the whole organizational model has failed (again, without evidence of a failure,) and then saying that the solution is for everyone to make less money, you're making the embarrassing admission that you don't know what a business model is. What you're actually proposing is the same business model, only with everyone earning less. Which, as I mentioned, is pretty much what's already happening, orchestra by orchestra.

Honestly. It's enough to make you wish that business writers covered our beat instead of arts journalists. Almost...

One Man's Energy Is Another Man's Interpretive Watusi

Sarah's written recently about the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in the playing styles of various orchestras, and about how ingrained the performance culture of a single orchestra can become in each of that ensemble's musicians. Since most of us spend nearly all our time playing as part of only one group, we come to think of our way of playing music as How One Plays Music. Even when a major shift in leadership occurs, such as a new music director or concertmaster, the collective musical memory of the ensemble is always a major factor in shaping the sound.

Audiences and critics, too, get used to the local style that they hear week in and week out, and they tend to filter everything they hear through that familiar prism. This is why a conductor like Christoph Eschenbach, who everyone seems to agree is a brilliant man and fine musician, can be hailed as an orchestral savior in Houston, and then be greeted with what amounted to a community-wide shrug when he become music director in Philadelphia. It's not necessarily that there's anything wrong with Eschenbach, or with the Philadelphia Orchestra. It's just that the communal playing style of the orchestra didn't turn out to be a great match with the personal style of the conductor.

Another case in point that will hit a little closer to home: Osmo's down in Chicago this week, conducting the Chicago Symphony in a program of (what else?) Beethoven and Sibelius. I have it on good authority that he's been having a fine time in his debut with the Chicagoans, and the critics have said some nice things as well. But one passage from Andrew Patner's otherwise positive review in the Chicago Sun-Times struck me odd:

"[Vänskä] is clearly an individual with his own ideas. It must be difficult even for seasoned players to know what those ideas are, since he communicates in a bizarre fashion, offering a sort of interpretive Watusi with a beat that seems wrong when it is discernible."

Now, along with being pretty unnecessarily snippy, that sounds nothing like the Osmo I know (and I'm also a bit taken aback to think that there's a music critic in a major American city who doesn't seem to realize that a conductor's ideas are largely communicated in rehearsal, not through some magic twirling of the baton during the concert.) While there's no denying his physicality as a conductor (using his body to channel and direct the energy of the orchestra is one of Osmo's signatures, and he's hardly alone in this style,) I've never found it to be difficult to discern what he wants us to do, even in his first appearance with us back in 2000.

So what would seem so different to an observer in Chicago? Presumably, Patner has no prior axe to grind with Osmo, and was only passing along what he thought he saw during a performance about which he actually said many nice things. The first thing that occurs to me is that the CSO is an orchestra steeped in the highest European classical traditions, and their music directors and principal guest conductors over the decades have generally reflected that legacy. From Daniel Barenboim to Pierre Boulez to the incoming Riccardo Muti, the orchestra has usually played under conductors who, while not without flair, prefer to maintain a relatively refined podium demeanor. The music should speak for itself, says this philosophy, and the musicians (conductor included) are doing the composer a disservice if they call attention to themselves in any visual way.

So it's only natural that Osmo, who throws himself as physically into every performance as he asks his musicians to, would cut an unusual figure on Chicago's podium, and to a jaded critic who's not used to such visual stimulus, I can see how it could even seem off-putting. But I'd be very curious to know what the CSO players thought of their week with our boss (not least because they so recently let out a public cry of disappointment when the LA Philharmonic snapped up the young Venezuelan wunderkind Gustavo Dudamel, an over-the-top physical stick-waver if ever there was one, as their next music director before Chicago could offer him the job.) It's always possible that what seemed jarring to a regular concertgoer could have felt like a refreshing change to those on stage.

Or not. It's a mysterious thing, chemistry, and the audience's willingness to come along for an unfamiliar ride is probably an element of the equation that we don't consider often or carefully enough.

More opera avante garde

If you thought a Klingon opera was weird, try this on for size: an opera sung underwater.

Opera, perhaps because of it's theatrical elements, has often been more cutting-edge than orchestral music, a trend that has become more notable as of late (I'm thinking in particular of the Lincoln Center Festival's production of Zimmerman's "Die Soldaten" at the Park Avenue Armory). Chamber musicians and soloists, as well, have been thinking outside the box in terms of alternatative performance venues (The Knights, Matt Haimovitz). I've always been a proponent of creative concert formats and exploring new performance spaces (I'm at the end of the article).

As always, orchestras are latest in the uptake. I know, I know, the usual argument is that it's cost-prohibitive, acoustically unideal, etc. etc., but to all of that, I say, take a gander at the "Die Soldaten" review (link above) again. Opera is far more costly to produce, with built-in sound issues (singers/orchestra), but if the interest is there and the effort is made, the possibilities of an extraordinary, unique and memorable artistic experience abound.

So why the lag in the symphonic sphere? Is it an overreliance on tradition? Reticence to think really creatively? Fear?

tlhIngan maH!

That's "We are Klingons!"...in Klingon, of course.

I caught the new "Star Trek" movie last night, and while I enjoyed it immensely (although it was actually Klingon-free), I found Michael Giacchino's soundtrack oddly hollow. The reorchestration of the original TV series theme which accompanied the end credits was particularly under-driven. Maybe it was a conscious effort to avoid the kitsch-factor of the original, but taking away some of the rhythmic impetus (as well as the signature vocal line) made it fall a bit flat. Call me old-school if you like; I'll take it as a compliment.

"Star Trek" in its many incarnation has inspired fervent fandom all over the world, which has occasionally spilled over into the musical realm. The most recent - workshopping a Klingon-language opera. Klingons, in the Star Trek universe, are a wrinkle-headed warrior race. What's fascinating is that an actual language has been created for this fictional race, and that people pursue serious linguistic study of said fictional race with its concocted language.

The proposed Klingon opera, "u", involves not just Klingon language but also enthomusicological research. I'll be interested to what kind of creative notation system, harmonic language and structural methodology will be "discovered", boldly going where no man has gone before.

Postscript - although not a superfan, I'm certainly a little bit of a nerd...

Passion Play

I read an interesting post on a local blog written by some of Minnesota's best professional chefs this past week, in which baker Solveig Tofte (of the justly famous Turtle Bread Co. in southwest Minneapolis) inveighed against people whose supposed "passion" for something (food, for instance) is belied by their lack of willingness to actually put in the work necessary to make a career of it...

"Passionate people tend have a romantic idea about what it means to be a baker, and we all know how long romance lasts. So these guys work for a week or two, and then I get to work at midnight and they’re in their car crying because nothing is as they thought it would be... Or they take all day making one baguette, cut it open to analyze the crumb structure and want accolades for doing such a great job."

I imagine that Tofte's post struck some readers as cynical and mean-spirited - after all, isn't passion exactly what's supposed to drive creative types? Don't we want our chefs (and actors, and musicians, and athletes) to be passionate about their work? Why would you try to discourage people with passion from making the object of their enthusiasm their life's work?

The world is full of people who are absolutely, devotedly passionate about everything from baseball to Beethoven, which is why people are willing to shell out their hard-earned money to watch Joe Mauer hit or the Minnesota Orchestra play a symphony. Those of us who perform for a living, whether on a stage, on a field, or in a kitchen, quite simply wouldn't have careers were it not for the existence of such people, and none of us should ever lose sight of that fact for a moment.

But on balance, I tend to agree with Tofte's sentiment. When I look back at the people I went to music school with, and I assess which of us were the most vocally passionate about music, I can't deny that those tended to be the people who didn't end up making it in the professional music world, at least as performers. Like Tofte's wannabe bakers, they romanticized the idea of playing music for a living to such an extent that either a) they were unable to objectively assess whether they themselves were good enough to make it in a very tough business, or b) they found the mind-numbing drudgery of daily practice and the complicated politics that permeate the musical workplace antithetical to their notion of what the life of a musician should be. Disillusionment is the enemy of the passionate, because it robs them of of any sense that what they're doing with their life is worthwhile.

Meanwhile, those of us who took a more pragmatic view of our chosen career path (it's a very cool job, yes, but it's still a job, and you can't expect it to be great fun every single day) have tended to weather the storm better. Call it cynicism if you like, but the reality is that it is not in my job description to love the music I play. My job is to play the music that's put before me (most of which I have no hand in selecting) in such a way that it will cause the audience to love it.

Much of the time, of course, I do love the music I play, but would anyone find it acceptable for me to turn in a bored-sounding performance of a piece I happen to think is overrated or that I've played ten times before? Of course not. In other words, the job of an entertainer is not so much to be passionate as to inspire passion in others. And it's an important distinction, if a somewhat touchy subject...

Looking For The Flames

I've written before about St. Paul's T.D. Mischke, the former KSTP radio talker who once showed up at Orchestra Hall just to watch a rehearsal and chat excitedly with as many musicians as he could collar. These days, Mischke's taken a new gig over at City Pages, our alternative weekly paper, where he conducts a daily online "radio" show and, even better, writes regularly for the paper and its web site. Not surprisingly, he's instantly become one of the most indispensable columnists in town. The man has a way with words, and when he turns his thoughts to music, well...

"They said God help the artist who doesn't want to rebel. Have mercy on the poor bastard who isn't running away from something pleasant and beelining toward something dangerous. Because that's where the fire flares all night long. And if an artist, a musician, a songwriter, isn't looking for the flames, then he's found himself a deadly little pocket of comfort, as edgy as a new suburban development, as easy as a patio. Then he's no artist at all."

That paragraph ought to be carved in stone at every concert hall, musicians' union local, and music school in the world, if you ask me.

The Great Chin-Rest Incident of Aught-Nine

Well, as Sarah alluded to yesterday, we had some added excitement at our Carnegie Hall concert Monday night, when our distinguished soloist had his chin rest come loose midway through the Sibelius concerto, and had to pull a fast swap with concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis. This is a big deal for any soloist, but fortunately for Leonidas, Jorja doesn't play just any violin. Her instrument was made in 1700 by the Italian master Matteo Gofriller, and one friend of mine in the audience said that he actually liked the dark, penetrating sound of Jorja's instrument even more than Kavakos's Stradivarius.

The New York Times reviewer noted that Jorja "tried to fix the violin during the concerto but could not." What he didn't mention is that the way she tried to fix it was by removing an earring and going all MacGyver on the chin rest mechanism. (Chin rests are attached to the instrument via a simple padded clamp, which is usually adjusted with a tool that looks like a piece of stiff paperclip.) When she couldn't get the thing tightened properly with the earring, she removed it entirely instead, and proceeded to play the rest of the concerto, sans chinrest, on Kavakos's instrument.

This actually further complicated matters when the concerto was over, because it was more or less guaranteed that the audience would want an encore from Kavakos. But his signature encore - an arrangement of Tarrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra - uses a ricochet bowstroke so insanely difficult that it had our entire string section baffled when we first heard it last week. Could he pull it off on an unfamiliar violin? Would he even try?



Well, of course he could. And did. And the place went nuts. All in all, little disasters like this tend to turn quickly into good stories to tell other musicians over a beer later on. In fact, an hour or so after the concert, I found myself swapping similar stories with a couple of friends in a bar across the street from Carnegie. One friend remembered a soloist breaking a string mid-concerto, and turning to the concertmaster, only to find that his string had also just broken. Another friend recalled a snotty young concertmaster at Juilliard who once refused to give up his instrument to a soloist in need, a breach of orchestral protocol if ever there was one.

And then, there's the swap story to end all swap stories - it involves violin superstar Midori, and the incident in question pretty much made her famous...

Slowly, with intense inner torment

Mahler scores are notorious detailed with nit-picky instruction to both player and conductor - woe betide the conductor who hasn't figured them out before the first rehearsal, when a suspicious wind player might test their preparedness by asking a pointed question about an obscure marking!

A list of translations can prove very helpful. Or, in this case (a "memo" to the New Philharmonia Orchestra of Newton, MA), very funny (via Alex Ross).

To whet your appetite:

GERMAN - ENGLISH

Langsam - Slowly

Schleppend - Slowly

Dampfer auf - Slowly

Mit Dampfer - Slowly

Allmahlich in das Hauptzeitmass ubergehen - Do not look at the conductor

Im Anfang sehr gemaechlich - In intense inner torment

Alle Betonungen sehr zart - With more intense inner torment

Getheilt (geth.) - Out of tune

Immer noch zurueckhaltend - With steadily decreasing competence


Sorry for the spotty posting - I've been on a busy guest-conducting week, and the Orchestra, of course, has been at Carnegie (read the glowing review here). I'm disappointed to have missed some excitement - namely, soloist Leonidas Kavakos and concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis in a violin switcheroo mid-Sibelius. Sam, I'm sure, will have some first-hand insights when the Orchestra returns!

Mashing Up Ludwig

One of the great things about living in the digital age is the easy availability of incredible pockets of creativity that simply wouldn't have found any distribution channel before the era of the internet and user-generated content. YouTube, in particular, has become a way for talented people to share the kind of wildly creative but commercially non-viable projects that would otherwise likely never have existed.

I suspect that no musical genre has benefited from this phenomenon more than hip-hop. (And no genre has benefited less than classical, for a number of frustrating reasons that I'll leave for another day.) As a style that has always specialized in piggybacking on other genres through sampling and other techniques, hip-hop is uniquely positioned to take advantage of technologies like "autotuning," which allows the user to manipulate the pitch of voices and sounds. In other words, what would seem gimmicky and trite in, say, jazz, just comes off as fun and creative in hip-hop.

But gimmickry can be fun, too, and I've spotted a number of truly impressive efforts lately that make silly but impressive use of autotuning. For instance, you know that awful infomercial that seems to be on every half-hour or so lately? Wouldn't it be a lot more tolerable if that smirky little Vince character had a beat you could dance to?



Even better, wouldn't hot-button issues like gay marriage and climate change be a whole lot easier for everyone to deal with if the talking heads on TV sounded like this...?



I bring all this up because we're playing Beethoven's 7th this week, and along with being one of my favorite pieces in the world to play, it's a symphony that a good friend of mine once did something similarly creative with. If you've ever watched South Park, you know that there's a wheelchair-bound character named Timmy who can only say his own name. He says it a lot, and with great enthusiasm every time. In fact, his energy level is so high that my friend thought it could just about match the energy he'd heard that week at Orchestra Hall, where we'd been playing Beethoven's 7th. And it wasn't long before I was handed a homemade CD featuring this brilliant mash-up. (Listener advisory: it starts off pretty subtly - definitely listen all the way through to get the full impact...)



The credit for that little bit of genius goes to Mr. Benjamin Johnson of St. Paul, Minnesota. Benjamin's a former dancer with James Sewell Ballet, and these days makes his living as a massage therapist in Northeast Minneapolis. He also went to a heck of a lot of trouble to dig up this file when it became clear that everyone else he or I had ever given it to had lost it. Somebody buy that boy an auto-tuner...

Opera plots 4 u

A fantastic use of technology over at The Omniscient Mussel; a contest to create the ultimate opera plot synopsis in 140 characters or less, submitted via Twitter (or blog comment, if you must). The celebrity judge? Superstar soprano Danielle de Niese. The prizes? You gotta see it to believe it. It's made the press everywhere. (Winners from the first contest here.)

Such buzz! I wonder if this is duplicable in the symphonic field?