Quarter for your thoughts

We've begun our epic Symphony for the Cities week that takes us from Hudson, WI to Plymouth, Winona and Excelsior, MN. They're all outdoor venues, which present their own very peculiar challenges (I don't usually have to fight gnat swarms on stage at Orchestra Hall), but also their very particular pleasures (including the throng of kids dancing on the grass right in front of the orchestra).

On Monday night in Hudson, I turned to the audience before starting "Radetzky March" to explain to them how I'd cue their "clapping entrance", how I would indicate a soft dynamic, a loud dynamic and, most importantly, how I'd cut them off. "Now, I want you all to stop clapping right on my cutoff. If I hear any clapping after the cutoff, you own me 25 cents." I've asked for dollars in the past (and something I've done with student orchestras playing, say, rhythmically complex pieces like "The Rite of Spring" - "don't fall in the hole!"), but I figured it's tough times for everyone, so a quarter would do. It garnered some chuckles from the audience.

The Orchestra and I then started "Radetzky"; I cued the audience to come in, they clapped as softly as I indicated, then went to forte on my cue. At my cutoff, a thousand people stopped clapping - well, OK, except a few stragglers, who I pointed out in the crowd, grinning. We went through the series of clap soft/clap loud/stop as we performed the piece, and at the last chords the rhythmic clapping quickly disintegrated into applause.

I thought nothing more of our little clapping exercise as we finished up the program (I have to confess I get tired of doing "1812"...). After our Sousa encore, as musicians began to pack up, I was chugging bottled water behind the bandshell when a woman approached me.

"I just wanted to give you this," she said, handing me a quarter.

"Actually, this is for my husband. He kept clapping after you stopped us, all three times. I guess he doesn't follow direction too well. Anyway, he was too embarrassed to give it to you himself, so I'm doing it for him!"

I had a good laugh. If this keeps up, maybe I can buy a soda at the end of the week...

Back At The Beginning Again

People who attend our Inside the Classics concerts often ask Sarah and me how long we spend preparing each show. We never know quite how to answer: on the one hand, we generally have only a single 2-1/2 hour rehearsal with the orchestra for each show, so in that sense, the whole production has to come together awfully quickly, no matter how complicated we've made the thing, logistically speaking. (This is usually accomplished by giving the orchestra only a bare minimum of information about what we're planning - just the facts and cues that they absolutely have to know. It's more efficient from a rehearsal perspective, and has the added benefit that the musicians are as surprised by the audience at some of the shenanigans we pull on stage.)

But of course, we start working on our ItC season quite a while before the orchestra shows up for that one rehearsal. The repertoire that we'll be covering over the course of a season, for instance, has to be finalized almost a year in advance, to give our marketing team enough lead time to plan strategy, design brochures and other ad campaigns, and solicit subscribers. After we finish that task, Sarah and I are generally immersed for the next several months in writing, tweaking, and executing the current season's concerts, after which we give ourselves several weeks to decompress. (Decompress being, of course, a relative term, since I spend those weeks continuing to play in the orchestra, and Sarah spends them jetting off to all manner of conducting engagements.)

Eventually, we reach a point in early summer when we schedule a big meeting to start planning the next year's shows in earnest. Basically, this involves each of us doing some preliminary research on the pieces and composers we've chosen to highlight, and then getting together to bounce ideas off of each other. Most of what we come up with at this meeting won't wind up in the actual concerts you see at Orchestra Hall, but some of our best bits have come from these early get-togethers. We also try to identify as many potential stumbling blocks as we can, and plot strategy for avoiding them. Lastly, we divvy up a few tasks that have to be accomplished before we can begin scriptwriting in earnest.

Today was that day. Today, as it happened, was also the day that we had a larger meeting with members of our upper management and artistic staff to discuss wider plans for the series, and try to determine which of the pie-in-the-sky ideas we all have for the future are workable, and which are probably best left in the pipe dream stage. And all of this is happening none too soon, because tomorrow just happens to be the day when Sarah and I will sit down in front of a camera and record the set of video clips that get scattered around our web site each season wherein we try desperately to explain just what we're planning for the year and why you should care enough to come to the concerts.

Looking at my notes for those video sessions, I see that I have several paragraphs of thoughts ready to go for one of our '09-'10 shows, and a few bullet points for another. For the third show, my note pad says, and I quote: ".......uhhhhhh." So, that'll obviously need to be fleshed out a bit before the camera rolls.

In any case, we're now officially off and running on a process that won't hit its first major deadline until nearly Halloween. I keep thinking that maybe one of these years, we'll learn how to bang these shows out in a week or two, but I'm not holding my breath. Besides, everybody needs a good summer project, right?

A Critic Runs Smack Into The 21st Century

In what I can only describe as a distinctly English rant, Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones tried to explain this weekend what makes him qualified to pass judgment on other people's work...

"The reason so much average or absolutely awful art gets promoted is that no one seems to understand what criticism is; if nothing is properly criticised, mediocrity triumphs. A critic is basically an arrogant bastard who says 'this is good, this is bad' without necessarily being able to explain why. At least, not instantly. The truth is, we feel this stuff in our bones. And we're innately convinced we're right."

I understand that point of view, especially since Jones goes on to lay bare the role his own ego plays in doing his job. There's a distinct parallel there, too, to the egos of the artists, actors, and musicians who spend their lives having judgment passed on their work by people like Jones. If a critic is an arrogant bastard who declares things good and bad, then who are we but arrogant bastards who lay something out on the stage with the implicit declaration that it is good, and then dare you to disagree?

Still, I think there's an angle that Jones is missing here, and it's that, for most of the history of art, the only real recourse available to an artist whose work had just been trashed by a self-appointed expert was to either hunt him down and punch him in the nose, or write a whiny, self-indulgent Letter To The Editor, which would be read only by other whiny, self-indulgent types looking for their own letters.

Today, of course, the entire world has its say on every issue under the sun on a more or less continual basis, here on the series of tubes. Which is to say, there's nothing stopping an artist or performer who feels wronged by a critic from firing back in any one of a hundred ways. There's also nothing stopping anyone else in the general public from offering up their own critique, however ill-informed or brilliant. And as Jones's little screed suggests, critics have been getting a wee bit sensitive about this of late...

"Of course, by being so blunt, I run the risk of vilification. I will be seen as a vapid snob, elitist, etc. But I am no more guilty of these traits than anyone else who sets themselves up as a professional critic; I'm just trying to be honest... Unless you think you're right, you shouldn't pass verdict on art that is someone's dream, someone's life."

I guess. But one of the first things that artists (and athletes, and politicians, etc) in previous eras have always had to learn to survive is that firing back at a critic is a losing battle. If you ask me, the real lesson here is that it's about time that critics grew some thicker skin and stopped endlessly trying to justify their existence to people who disagree with their perspective.

The headline on the Guardian column reads, "Art criticism is not a democracy." It's an odd thing to write, since art criticism is, in point of fact, every bit a democracy these days, as the 129 comments appended to Jones's work attest. And the "professionals" had better figure out a way to stay on top of the pile before someone comes along and knocks them off for good.

Brief absence again

Taking a mini-vacation this week (attending a wedding in Vegas) - back on June 29.

Context Is Everything. Unless It Isn't.

My former colleague over at ArtsJournal.com, Laura Collins-Hughes, has detected a noticable uptick in the number of people who seem to be reading and talking about Dickens lately, and she speculates that it may be that the gloomy, moralizing Dickens is the ideal author for Hard Times. Which is interesting, because I have to confess that Hard Times make me want to read David Sedaris and watch old Eddie Izzard routines until I forget that we're in Hard Times.

I wonder, too, about the music people choose to listen to when the real world is getting to be a bit much to bear. Does it make you more likely to look for something deep, dark, and meaningful on a concert program, or something escapist and light? What's the better cure for an economic malaise and global unrest, something that socks you in the stomach but makes you think, or something that lets you just drift away from reality for a while? Mahler 6 or The Marriage of Figaro? Britten's War Requiem or Bernstein's West Side Story? Sinead O'Connor or Sonny & Cher?

More importantly, does anyone's choice really change that much when times aren't tough? If you answered Mozart, Bernstein, and the Bonos above, would you really be likely to drop $50 on an evening of Mahler if your 401(k) was looking a little better and there was peace in the Middle East? Or are we just who we are in our cultural preferences, regardless of global circumstances?

Heaven 'n' Hell

A stunning video installation in the elevator of the Standard Hotel in NYC by artist/director Marco Brambilla, depicting an eye-popping journey from hell to heaven:



It's positively Boschian (with Brueghelic undertones!), and I love that Stravinsky was chosen as the soundtrack - it's looped and manipulated, of course, but very well done, seamless.

A more hi-def version can be found here for your viewing pleasure, and worth watching to catch the profusion of images - it's ridiculously replete with pop-culture references - see if you can spot Michael Jackson...

Driven to Distraction

An article in Sunday's Chicago Tribune talked about the impact of skyrocketing parking rates and 24-hour meters on the Windy City's cultural institutions. Basically, the article's thrust is that "getting folks to come out to your entertainment venue involves convincing them that they're going to enjoy themselves, but no one enjoys stressing out about parking, and that stress has become increasingly difficult to escape."

This is a problem everywhere in America, especially in cities like Minneapolis/St. Paul, where almost everyone seems to drive everywhere. Urban sprawl has also given rise to a class of arts aficionados who are used to parking for free in vast suburban lots, and consider city density to be a major inconvenience that makes them far less likely to spend an evening downtown. Those living in the urban core (and my bike-commuting, transit-riding self is definitely guilty of this) often dismiss these suburbanites and their gripes with a roll of the eyes and a rant about how spoiled Americans are, but the truth of the matter is that arts groups cannot afford to be even the least bit dismissive of anyone at a time when we should be endlessly grateful to every person who even considers coming through our doors.

Unfortunately, those same arts groups usually aren't in a position to do much about the problem. Some orchestras (ours included) offer discounted parking to subscribers, or run special shuttle buses from various suburban malls to concerts, and that's nice, but the vast majority of audience members are still going to drive themselves to the show, and when they're angry at having to pay $9, $12, or even $20 to park within an easy walk of the show they're attending, it's not the parking ramp attendant who gets vented at - it's us.

We do a fair amount of audience research for Inside the Classics, and whenever we ask about negative parts of the concert experience, we get loads of people who thought everything that went on inside the hall was great, but ohhhhhh, the parking situation! And the construction! And the traffic downtown! We used to get even more complaints than we do now, back when the ramp immediately across from Orchestra Hall was prominently labeled "Orchestra Hall Parking Ramp," leading many to assume that we owned it, or at least had some control over it. We didn't, and we don't, and the people who do were kind enough to change the name to the "11th & Marquette Ramp" at our request a while back.

Some orchestras (like the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra) address the issue by meeting the suburban audience where it lives, playing regular run-out concerts at small venues in first- and second-ring suburbs. It seems to work well for the SPCO, but some think it just encourages people's wrongheaded notions about cities, and a pragmatist would point out that moving a 33-piece chamber orchestra around the metro is a heck of a lot less expensive than moving a 95-piece symphony orchestra. As if to prove the point, the Minnesota Orchestra had to cancel a popular suburban concert series in Mahtomedi last year for lack of funding.

So what about it? How much do issues like the high cost of parking downtown affect your ticketbuying decisions? And what do you think those of us putting on performances in the downtown core ought to be doing about it?

Ask an Expert: New Leaders and Weekly Paychecks

Two timely questions dropped into our inbox this weekend. One has an easy answer, and the other is more complicated. To start with the easy one, Jean wants to know...

Q: When will we hear who is going to be the new concertmaster? Have there been any try-outs yet? Can the existing violin players apply?

There has, in fact, been an audition, just a few weeks ago, which included both internal candidates and violinists from outside the orchestra. However, unlike with most auditions, concertmasters are almost never hired without first spending a few weeks playing with the orchestra. So at this point, we have two excellent finalists for the job, both of whom will be playing as guest concertmasters in the coming months, after which a final decision will be made. I've been asked not to name the finalists at this time (which is sort of weird, since everyone will see them on stage next fall, but whatever, not my call,) but I can tell you that both of them are dazzling violinists and wonderful individuals besides (I happen to know both of them.) I can also tell you that neither is currently a member of the Minnesota Orchestra. Stay tuned...

Moving on to a question I'm surprised we haven't been asked before, Liz is wondering...

Q: How much does someone in a professional orchestra typically earn in a year?

Liz, you simply would not believe how much it can vary, depending on everything from the prominence of your orchestra to the number of weeks in your season to the fundraising capability of your board, and even to the country you make your living in! (For instance, musicians in the very best orchestras in America, Germany, and Austria can expect to earn a comfortable living, while musicians in orchestras of similar quality in the UK and Holland earn shockingly little money.) Also, orchestras have payment structures for things like recording and broadcasting that can differ wildly, and some orchestras have set salary numbers for principal players while others allow each titled player to negotiate his/her own contract, so even putting a baseline number on a musician's salary can be tricky.

But to give you a general idea, I'm looking at a wage chart put out annually by the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians, which comprises the 52 largest orchestras (by budget size) in America. The most recent chart I have is from the 2007-08 season, and the base annual salary of a rank-and-file musician that year ranged from $25,162 (Virginia Symphony) to $122,720 (Boston Symphony). And even that's misleading, because only the very largest orchestras pay their musicians year-round. (There are also hundreds of smaller regional orchestras around the country, which pay even less than Virginia. The Shreveport Symphony, in Louisiana, recently slashed the base pay of its musicians to less than $10,000 per season.)

The Minnesota Orchestra's base salary for that season was $93,002. That made us America's 11th-highest paying orchestra at the time, just behind the Detroit Symphony, and just ahead of the Cincinnati Symphony. Those rankings have shuffled a bit since then, because not every orchestra negotiates their contracts at the same time. Also, as you've probably read, a lot of orchestras, battered by the effect of the stock market collapse on their endowments and the overall dismal economy, have been asking musicians to reopen contracts and take pretty hefty pay cuts to stabilize their organizations, and musicians are, by and large, doing just that. So no one is quite sure what the "new normal" will look like when it's all said and done.

All in all, the answer to your question is that music is no way to make a good living, except when it is. If you make it to the very top of the profession, you'll be doing about as well as a college professor at a major school, and that's plenty good for most people - none of us got into this line of work because we wanted to be millionaires. But the vast majority of professional orchestra players will never earn anything like a substantial paycheck, and that's without even considering all the musicians who never manage to win a full-time orchestra job, and cobble together a living on the freelance scene, subbing with an orchestra one night and playing a wedding or two the next. And no one knows coming out of music school where they're going to wind up on that continuum...

Landings, endings

Just had a great week off at home (I'm finding scheduled time off to be a real necessity these days - gotta maintain that equilibrium in life!). Thus the absence of blogging on my end last week - I've been enjoying (as I'm sure you have) Sam's great series on outgoing concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis.

I feel fortunate to have worked with Jorja over my three seasons with the Minnesota Orchestra, and luckier still to have known her not simply as a musician but as the force of nature that she is. The amount of focus and the intensity of her musical intent is always palpable, and her devotion to maintaining that very visceral connection to sound transcended her personal feeling about what she was performing (once, after a rehearsal for a tricky mid-century Soviet piece that was obviously new to the orchestra, she dryly commented, "Well, that's not without its merits.")

Those who only saw her in performance missed the most distinctive part of her wardrobe - Jorja has a great collection of quirky, colorful shoes, which I remarked on often - it's all a part of her very individual style.

But what I admire most about Jorja is her ability to parse a conflict, musical or otherwise, find a workable solution, and instate it with directness and a minimum of fuss - she saved the drama for the music itself. It's a rare clear-headedness, the hallmark of a great leader - and a great lady - along with her lively humor and generosity of spirit. She will be missed.

But Jorja is not the only departure; we are also bidding a very fond farewell to hornist David Kamminga. Rank-and-file members of orchestras tend not to get splashy spreads in the local paper when they retire, but if anyone deserved one, it's Dave, who, at 42 years or service, has one of the longest tenures with the MO (perhaps the longest? I've got to do my research...) that I know of. He's also one of the many Minnesota Orchestra couples - his wife Marcia Peck is a longtime member or our cello section (unabashedly adoring - and adorable - picture below):



Dave's musicianship, steadfast enthusiasm and gentle spirit will be missed, but one of the things we will miss most about him is known only by the lucky few who have been on a Minnesota Orchestra Tour: every time the Orchestra is on a flight together, upon landing Dave chants a fragment of the second theme of the last movement of Tchaikowsky's 4th Symphony, to which everyone responds, "Hey!". My understanding is that it's a kind of Russian prayer of gratitude for the safe landing (although it just sounds like "labidabida dostoyeva" to me...). It's a funny tradition, and one that I'm sure caused distress to the passengers around us (not to mention the flight attendants who might have thought we were about to stage a hijacking).

So, here it is, my tribute to Dave - "the chant" from 5 of the 6 flights we took as an orchestra on this spring's European Tour (the last one was on our flight from Amsterdam to the Twin Cities - someone asks "Where is it?", principal horn Mike Gast points to the back of the Airbus 330, and then you can hear it, faintly, above the din):





Dave has passed the torch to violinist Michael Sutton - Mike, you've got some very big shoes to fill...

Jorja & Margaret

To put a bow on this week of blog tributes to our soon-to-depart concertmaster, I wanted to post an essay I originally wrote for Showcase, our in-house program book. For one reason or another, I never submitted the piece for publication (the focus of the issue I was writing for changed, as I recall, and I wrote something else instead,) but since it directly concerns a side of Jorja that our audiences never get to see, I didn't want to let it go unread forever. Here it is...

My grandmother, Margaret Terry Trowbridge, was 82 when I moved to Minneapolis in February 2000. A native Minnesotan and lifelong fan of the Minnesota Orchestra, she could not have been more proud for one of her grandchildren to be joining the ranks at Orchestra Hall.

But in one of those cruel twists that life throws at us when we least expect it, she never got the chance to watch me play as a member of the ensemble she had loved for so many years. In the same week that I had been auditioning for my position in the orchestra in November 1999, my mother and her siblings had confirmed what they had suspected for some time: my grandmother was entering the middle stages of Alzheimer’s, a baffling, infuriating disease that would eventually rob her of her ability to communicate, to identify her surroundings, and even to recognize the people she loved most.

With our family scattered across the country, the decision was quickly made to move her to a care facility out East, where my mother would be nearby to visit regularly and attend to her increasing needs. It was a painful transition for my grandmother. Even before the disease tightened its grip, she had a hard time remembering where she was, and more than once in those first months she spent in southeastern Pennsylvania, she angrily confronted my mother for not having yet taken her to hear me play with the Minnesota Orchestra, unaware that we were now more than 1200 miles apart.

And yet, music continued to be her sustenance, even as her own mind betrayed her. My mother brought her a steady supply of the music she loved best, and listened as she reminisced about the many concerts she’d heard. But these stories weren’t about trips to Orchestra Hall. They were about the smiling, gracious violinist who had dropped in regularly to play for the residents of her retirement community in Minnesota and talk to them about music and life and whatever else they wanted. These were stories about Jorja Fleezanis.

I honestly don’t know how often our concertmaster made the trek to that retirement community in Eden Prairie in those years before I joined the orchestra. But I know how much those visits from Jorja meant to a woman who, while never a musician herself, had made certain that I hauled out my pint-sized violin at every family gathering I attended as a child. I know that, even as her condition worsened and she became less sure of the world around her, my grandmother remembered Jorja’s visits with vivid clarity. (She even began to embellish them: a couple of years after the move, my mother overheard her proudly telling another resident of her Pennsylvania home that she had just recently been a violin student of the great Jorja Fleezanis, and what do you think about that? Being a Pennsylvanian, the other resident had no idea who my grandmother was talking about, but that didn't diminish her pride and enthusiasm in the slightest.)

We all know the effect that music can have on us as people, but we rarely consider the profound impact that a single musician can make. Jorja is just one among many musicians to make a point of reaching out to the wider community, but her generosity of spirit, her willingness not only to perform but to listen, to connect herself to the people around her, will always stay with me.

My grandmother passed away quietly on March 16, 2006. I don’t know how many members of our family she could have recognized in those final hours. But I know for a fact that she would never have forgotten the gift of music given to her by the woman who has stood at the front of our stage for the last 20 years.

Exit Interview, Part 4

In the final part of my talk with Jorja, we spend some time discussing the serious matter of one of the most frequently gossiped-about aspects of our concertmaster's public persona. Also, we find out what musician in the Minnesota Orchestra most influenced her over the years, what piece she's looking forward to never having to play again, and what conductor she desperately wishes she could have had the chance to work with.



If you'd prefer to download our conversation and listen to it on your iPod, just right-click (CTRL-click on a Mac) here and save the file to your computer...

One slight correction to the audio in this part: a few days after we spoke, Jorja came to me backstage and asked whether one of my questions had been what orchestral piece she would most miss playing. That was one of my questions, to which she had, to my surprise, answered with two choral works. As it turns out, she thought I had asked exclusively about choral works. Taking into account the entire orchestral repertoire, she now says that her answer would be Debussy's Iberia...

Tomorrow, we'll wrap up Jorja Week here on the blog with a personal reflection from my family's past, and we'll be back to our usual snarky tones and wide-ranging topics next week. Hope you enjoyed the interview, and if you want to lift any of the audio for use on your own site, please do. We'd appreciate a link back to the ItC site, but there are no other restrictions, so distribute as you wish...

Exit Interview, Part 3

Our audiences have known for years not to expect the expected from our concertmaster, and as my conversation with Jorja continues, I ask her when and how she decided to focus her solo and chamber music opportunities on repertoire that most people have never heard before. Jorja also talks about her love of long-forgotten early-20th-century music, and makes a plea for musicians and orchestras to stop limiting ourselves in the pursuit of great music.



If you'd prefer to download our conversation and listen to it on your iPod, just right-click (CTRL-click on a Mac) here and save the file to your computer...

Exit Interview, Part 2

As my conversation with Jorja Fleezanis continues, we get into the issue of how an orchestra's sound and personality change over time. Jorja also talks about how unhappy she was in her first orchestral job (in a very prominent American orchestra,) and how that dissatisfaction led her away from the orchestral world, and then back in, with a determination to pursue a leadership role in other orchestras.



If you'd prefer to download our conversation and listen to it on your iPod, just right-click (CTRL-click on a Mac) here and save the file to your computer...

Exit Interview: Jorja Fleezanis (Part 1 of 4)

It seems like a long time since our esteemed concertmaster announced, back in September, that she'd be leaving us at the end of this season after twenty years in the first chair. Jorja and her husband, musicologist and author Michael Steinberg (who appeared in a couple of our early Inside the Classics shows,) are headed to Indiana University, where Jorja will take up a new position teaching orchestral violin to the next generation of great young musicians.

Meanwhile, we've already held auditions for a new concertmaster, and whittled our options down to two deeply impressive finalists who our audiences will get to see in action for several weeks each next season before the final decision is made. But Jorja won't be easily forgotten by those of us in the orchestra, and the connection she's made over the years with the wider Twin Cities community has been a deep and powerful one. She's a unique figure, musically and personally, and she's always reminded me of that one really special, out-there teacher we all had in high school, the one who you wind up telling people about for the rest of your life.

As soon as Jorja made her big announcement, I knew that I wanted to sit down with her and spend some time talking about her life in music, and the legacy she'll leave behind here in Minneapolis. Last week, she invited me up to her riverfront condo and agreed to answer anything I asked of her. We talked for nearly an hour, and I'll be posting our conversation in four parts between now and Thursday. To start things off, I asked whether she'd had time to consider the gravity of this being her very last week as the leader of the Minnesota Orchestra...



If you'd prefer to download our conversation and listen to it on your iPod, just right-click (CTRL-click on a Mac) here and save the file to your computer...

Postscript: For those who can't get enough Jorja, she'll be Kerri Miller's guest on MPR's Midmorning program on Tuesday. You can listen live on your local MPR News station Tuesday at 10am, or through the MPR live stream... After the program airs, MPR will post the archived audio on this page.

The Best Medicine

When you spend your professional life immersed in some of the most complex music ever written day in and day out, the way orchestra players do, it can sometimes be hard to remember the simple power that music has to make us smile, or laugh, or just feel good about the world.

And then, someone sends you a link to a video of a piano-playing couple, married 62 years, giving an impromptu recital in the atrium of the Mayo Clinic.

Go ahead. Try to watch it without smiling. I dare you.



Thanks, Fran and Marlo. I really needed that today...

Not too cool to care

One of the few pleasures of travel these days is that the endless flight delays at least afford me the luxury of catching up on my reading. At the top of the stack this afternoon is the most current edition of Harvard Magazine (insert Ivy League joke here), which includes an article on John Adams' recent autobiography, Hallelujah Junction (which will soon be at the top of my reading stack!).

Although certainly one of the most respected and recognized composers of his generation, Adams has often taken a critical bashing. A minimalist aesthetic isn’t for everyone, I know (though it would be unfair to say that Adams is simply a minimalist - it’s merely a jumping-off point for him); but it’s hard to deny that, beneath the surface gloss, there is a distinct and direct musical voice at work.

Adams frequently cites his early musical influences - Rodgers and Hammerstein, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin – influences not just from a stylistic standpoint but from a pedagogic one as well: “I made more progress in my command of harmonic practice by reproducing these pop songs [by the Doors, the Beach Boys, and others] from memory at the piano than I ever did by my forced marches through the figured bass treatises.”

But, as Adams himself says, “I am not a vernacular composer”; rather, he’s a classical composer with multiple points of reference. To him this is an important distinction, as he finds that much contemporary classical music is “complex and self-referential. For me, though, inspiration comes from trying to connect with an audience. Music is fundamentally the art of feeling.”

Which, for those espousing a more European/avante garde aesthetic, might be a radical statement. Emotion in music should be an obvious given, but it’s a complex premise for both composers and performers. From a composer’s perspective, the question might be, should one simply try to express a personal feeling? Or is the duty of a creative artist to tap into a more universal zeitgeist? How does the expression of a personal emotion translate when put into a performers hands? From the performers viewpoint, does one’s expression of the music need be tied to the (assumed) original emotional intent of the composer? Or does one inject one's own personal sentiment? And how does that all translate to the listener – the emotional intent of a composer filtered through the prism of meticulously organized (and notated) sound and interpreted by yet a separate entity?

In times of emotional crisis, the old adage has it that it’s not as important to know exactly what to do as it is to simply care, and that maxim holds up well in this exchange as well – or, as Harvard Magazine puts it:

One spring night in 1976, Adams was driving his Karmann Ghia convertible through the Sierra foothills and listening to “Dawn” and “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” from Götterdämmerung. “I said out loud, almost without thinking, ‘He cares.’” It was a matter of the sensual and emotional power of harmonic movement; for Adams, it was also a matter of sincerity.

“Caring”, on the surface of it, seems so wide-ranging and ambiguous, particularly from a performer’s perspective. Music-making is certainly a visceral experience, and there are those who throw themselves into it with extreme physicality – a way of showing that one “cares”. Yet for some musicians, this very visible expression of caring smacks of insincere showmanship. Grandstanding is a disservice to the actual music; by the same token, many concertgoers find it engaging from a purely visual standpoint, which then perhaps makes them “care” more about the performance. But is this really the kind of “caring” we want to encourage?

Some artists, however, while equally physically demonstrative, are not so to the detriment of the music; it’s hard to qualify what makes the difference, but for me it goes back to that matter of sincerity. I’ve long admired Yo-Yo Ma for his utter involvement when he plays – there’s something both selfless and intensely personal at the same time. And for me, he’s one of those rare artists who is clearly engaged not just with the music but with everyone else on stage, and with the audience as well. It’s a kind of total immersion in the experience of music that results from sincerely caring.

A sense of caring applies not just to individual artists, but to ensembles as well. I had a recent guest conducting experience where an oboist was playing, during a concert, with legs crossed (a big no-no – it’s kind of an “I couldn’t care less” stance). Needless to say, the playing wasn’t so engaging.

The quality that I love most about my home band, the Minnesota Orchestra, is that it collectively throws itself into every performance, be it the first concert in a subscription run or the last concert in an 6-Young-Peoples-Concerts week. The level of commitment and engagement is always inspiring; it’s absolutely tangible to the listener, and it’s a constant reminder to me that when we care about what we do onstage, the audience mirrors the sentiment right back to us. And that wonderful, wordless communication is why we all chose a life in music.

Speaking of Faith (From the Keyboard)

Pianist Stephen Hough, who's been dazzling our audiences lately (and will be doing so again this week, as we work on a continuing project to record all of Tchaikovsky's piano concertos live in concert for a CD set to be released next year,) is someone I've always admired greatly as a musician, but never thought much about as a person. This is pretty common for an orchestra musician - for the most part, we don't get to know our soloists personally. (After all, since there are close to 100 of us, and we're only on the same stage with a soloist for a few hours, it would be positively oppressive for any number of us to try to engage socially with a guest.)

But Minnesota Public Radio's Brian Newhouse, who hosts our weekly live radio broadcasts, frequently gets the chance to sit down with each of our soloists, and occasionally, he surprises me with the direction he takes the interview. For instance, it seems that the man I've thought of only as a supremely gifted pianist also has a deeply religious side that he's quite happy to talk about. He's even written a book about it.

This is a pretty unusual thing in the classical music world. Not musicians having a religious life, of course, but being willing to talk publicly about it. Religion has become such a contentious issue in recent years that I think most of us would no sooner speak to the press about it than we would offer up our views on presidential politics or Roe vs. Wade.

But Hough has a remarkably easy way of talking about his faith, and it comes across as so genuine that I can't imagine anyone ever begrudging him his desire to share it. The whole conversation's worth listening to, but here's my favorite line. As soon as I heard it, I thought of a cousin of mine who's been a Maryknoll missionary in South Korea for most of his adult life, and who would probably agree with every word...

"What's so wonderful about spiritual life is that there are really no experts in it, and I think the ones who spend their whole lives doing it feel like beginners..."