The Occasionally Audible Audience

With the start of a new season, all of us in the orchestra are reacquainting ourselves with everything from the repertoire we're playing to the sometimes curious conceits of the concert hall. (It's amazing to me how unfamiliar some of the simplest acts, like remembering to stand up when the conductor walks out at the beginning of the show, can be after only a few weeks away.) And of course, we're also reacquainting ourselves with our audience.

Sometimes, that's a wonderful experience. Last Saturday, as we were plowing through Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije, I caught sight of a couple in the front row who I hadn't seen at any previous concert. I'd guess they were in their late 30s, and as soon as I noticed them, I knew I'd be watching them for the rest of the evening. He was slightly balding, tall and attractively slim, with an intense quality to his face, and he had the kind of eyes that seem to suggest that he's absorbing literally everything going on around him. She had dark shoulder-length hair, wide eyes, and a devastatingly pleasant smile. I know about the smile because the more we played, the more she smiled.

The two of them spent the whole of the concert reacting quietly to every single thing that happened on stage. Every time Osmo showed off a flashy move, or crouched down to indicate a pianissimo, her face would light up, and his eyes would flash. When the second violins and violas began scrubbing furiously during a passage in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, the two of them stared wide-eyed for a moment, then turned to each other to make sure the other had seen it. Together, they had that innocent quality of children seeing something incredible for the first time, but judging by how knowingly they looked around as the music played, I'm certain they've spent some time in concert halls before.

By their mere presence, these two made the concert twice as enjoyable for me. I desperately wanted to corner them before they left and tell them what a pleasure it is to play for people who are so obviously enjoying what we're doing, but in the end, I decided not to, for fear that it would make them self-conscious, and thus less likely to buy front-row seats next time.

Then, of course, there's the other side of reacquainting with your audience. We've yet to have a cell phone interrupt the music (that I could hear, at least,) possibly because our usual pre-concert admonition to turn them off is being augmented at the moment by a special announcement from Osmo regarding the fact that Hyperion is recording our first two weeks of concerts for a CD project with pianist Stephen Hough. But I'm guessing it won't be more than another week or so before we get the first cell-based intrusion of the season.

It's never easy to know what to do as a performer when this happens. Most of us settle for pretending we can't hear it, or tossing a brief glare or head-shake in the direction of the offender. But every once in a while, someone snaps, and confronts the rudeness directly. Actor Hugh Jackman is the latest to make headlines for this, having broken character in his New York production of A Steady Rain to chastise an audience member whose phone. would. not. stop. ringing...



The best onstage reaction I ever saw to a cell phone intrusion was from comedian Paula Poundstone, who was midway through a set at the old Guthrie Theater (this was sometime around 2001) when a phone started to ring very loudly. Without missing a beat, Paula turned towards the sound, and insisted that the phone be handed to her immediately. As soon as she had it in hand, she answered the call, and proceeded to improvise five of the funniest minutes of stand-up comedy I have ever seen in my life, centering around the caller's reason for calling at that exact moment.

As it happened, the person being called had inadvertently locked his housemate out when he left for the show, and the housemate was trying to get the keys to get back inside. Paula actually convinced him to catch a bus to the Guthrie to reclaim the keys, and half an hour later, the caller came trotting down the aisle for his keys, which Paula handed to him personally, before creating another few minutes of impromptu laughs from the situation. It was utterly brilliant.

So, anyone else got a favorite story of a performer retaliating against the audience? I collect these, so seriously, chime in down in the comments. If there are any truly great ones, I'll pass them along to Osmo for possible future use...

Conductor hero

A conducting game very much in the vein of "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band"...except the cues have even less to do with the music in the conducting version than they do for the other two, making it an oddly amusical experience. Interesting idea, although I'm not sure what it does except to equate conducting to pushing a bunch of buttons. Oh, if only it were so easy...

Late September Brevia

I'm in the home stretch of my move - house was finally packed Tuesday night, movers arrived Wednesday morning just as I was leaving for Philly, and now I'm in Washington DC between a rehearsal and performance for a show with Ben Folds and the National Symphony Orchestra. I'm driving home after the show to a now-empty house in Richmond as my husband plays his final concerts as Principal Horn of the Richmond Symphony.

I other news: it seems like every year that there's an article like this about women in the conducting field. I've kind of stopped reading them because they always say the same thing; we've made inroads (cue JoAnn Falletta and Marin Alsop), but it's still hard out there for a chick, orchestras are conservative in nature and change moves at a glacial pace, etc etc. It always bugs me that the finger is pointed at orchestras as bastions of old-school conservatism; look at the fact that there are only thirteen female CEO's of this country's 500 largest publicly traded companies.

Speaking of Marin Alsop, the Baltimore Symphony opens their regular subscription season with my friends Time for Three. They are absolutely fantastic, and great guys, to boot.

And speaking of conductors, I leave you with a virtual tour of the posh backstage pad of New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert.

Let's See Sarah Do This

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Sarah Hicks isn't a dynamite conductor. I'm just saying that I doubt she's ever wrangled an orchestra, a choir, Madonna, the Beatles, and a herd of sheep in a single rehearsal...



But I suppose I could be wrong about that.

Celebrating The New In NY

It's a whole new era at the New York Philharmonic, as the Phil's new 42-year-old music director (and native New Yorker) Alan Gilbert took up the reins last week, live on national television. It's always a lot of fun to watch one of the first concerts a professional orchestra plays under a new MD - not because they're likely to be the best concerts of the new MD's tenure, but because everyone on stage is so eager, so energetic, and so determined to show what they can do. We saw it here in Minneapolis when Osmo took over in 2003, they saw it in Dallas and Pittsburgh last season when Jaap van Zweden and Manfred Honeck took over the outstanding orchestras of those two cities, and now New York is enjoying its own honeymoon.

As I was watching the Phil's opening night performance on PBS's Live From Lincoln Center, I was struck by a couple of things. The first was that Gilbert has immediately changed the seating of the orchestra's string section to match the "antiphonal violin" arrangement that Osmo put in place at Orchestra Hall several years ago. Having played at Avery Fisher Hall myself, I'm guessing this change is a bit of a cold shock for the musicians - it can be very hard to hear across the stage in that hall, and when the musicians you've always been able to hear suddenly switch places with the ones you haven't heard in years, it takes time (and a lot of effort) to recalibrate. But according to the New York Times, the players at the Phil seem more than game.

The second striking thing about the performance was that Gilbert had chosen to open his tenure by commissioning a brand new work from the Phil's new resident composer, Magnus Lindberg. The piece was, in a word, breathless, and I actually rewound my DVR to the beginning to listen to it twice more after it was over. It was the kind of piece that people who still believe that all living composers are writing unlistenable music full of dissonance should hear - a ball of energy unleashed across the orchestra, filled with the unmistakable symbolism of the Phil's new beginning.

That having been said, the performance of the Lindberg sounded to me just ever so slightly muddy, as if it could have benefited from one or two more rehearsals. And this is always the problem with performances of new music - orchestras work so fast, and on so many different pieces of music simultaneously, that we count a lot on our muscle memory from whenever we last played what we're playing now. And when it's a world premiere (especially a difficult one, and the Lindberg sounded pretty tricky,) that muscle memory hasn't been created yet. So you do your level best, try to hear the really important cues that you can't afford to miss, and then, when you run out of rehearsal time, you just put your head down and play. And most of the time, with a really good orchestra, it works out fine, as it did in New York last week.

But I've always wondered why, given the limitations of what even a great orchestra can accomplish with a brand new work in 2 to 3 days of rehearsal time, we focus so much on world premieres, and so little on repeat performances of newer works. After all, I'm guessing that one of the reasons the audience at the infamous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring reacted so badly to it was that there's simply no way that the orchestra had a real handle on the piece yet. How could they? Stravinsky had written a ballet score unlike anything ever produced before it, and a piece that still challenges every professional musician every time it's performed! Now imagine if that world premiere had been simply chalked up as another notch on the chart that orchestras keep to prove they're committed to new music, and never performed again. Would we ever have recognized its greatness?

In the decade that I've been in Minnesota, we've played more world premieres than I can count, and as a big fan of new music, I'm thrilled with that fact. But I can think of at least five of those pieces just off the top of my head that I'd love the chance to play again. And again. And again, until that muscle memory kicks in, and we can nail a world-beating performance of that piece every bit as securely as we nail Beethoven's 7th. Think how we could change audience perceptions of living composers if they got the chance to hear them more than once, and at a level of performance comparable to the old warhorse symphony on the second half of the program!

I'm not saying every new piece deserves this treatment, of course. The thing about world premieres is that you're essentially paying for the act of creation, and you have no idea what the quality of the finished score will be until the first rehearsal. But when we get our hands on one of those truly rare gems that more composers than you'd think are turning out these days, I'd love to see those of us in the orchestra world seize the chance to make them a permanent part of our repertoire. And maybe the NY Phil could start with that Lindberg...

Boredom & Rage In 9/32 Time

Humor and classical music just aren't found together nearly as often as they ought to be, and Philadelphia Orchestra trumpeter Jeff Curnow has been working on doing something about that. He's been producing downright hilarious YouTube videos on various aspects of the music business for some time now (under the guise of selling trumpet mouthpieces,) and now he's about to launch a new series of online videos for Drew McManus's Inside the Arts site under the header, "What's Bothering Jeff?"

Orchestras can be downright infested with gallows humor, both good-natured and not, so I'm always impressed to discover a musician who, while maybe a bit on the cynical side, has obviously found a way to channel the frustrations of the job into something productive and hilarious. Here's my favorite of Jeff's videos to date, detailing the frustrations of having to play certain, shall we say, overly academic (read: pompous & unplayable) works.



The title of the piece alone is enough to make me start giggling, but my favorite parts are the brief shots of the written score. I wish I could say that I've never actually played a piece that featured time signatures like 15/1 and 9/32, but of course, I have. The marking underneath the first part of Excerpt 1 ("slowly at first then with angst") actually reminded me of a very specific American composer who shall remain nameless. And while I can't say that a composer has ever asked me to play a high C while screaming with my mouth closed and hitting my instrument with a hammer, I did once play a piece during which I was supposed to sing in harmony with what I was playing, and another during which the composer wanted me to beat on the back of viola with the metal end of my bow.

At times like that, as the late lamented Molly Ivins once said, you've either gotta laugh or cry, and crying's bad for you.

Vesti la Kellogg's

It's going to be a busy couple of weeks for me, between starting a new job, selling a house and organizing a cross-country move, so please forgive the spotty posting. While I might not have too much time for deep thoughts (I'll leave that to Sam), I do have time for occasional amusements, such as this classic Rice Krispies commercial:

Carolina On My Mind

Amid the sea of bad financial news enveloping the arts world, two happy items (both from North Carolina, coincidentally) stood out this week. First of all, it was announced today that our Ms. Hicks has added another orchestra to her business card - she's starting immediately as the new associate conductor of the Raleigh-Durham-based North Carolina Symphony! (No, that doesn't mean she's leaving Minnesota. In fact, you'll be seeing a lot of her at Orchestra Hall this season.) Presumably, this means lots more frequent flier miles for Sarah, and regular home delivery of fresh Carolina barbecue for me. Everybody wins!

On the other end of the state, the Charlotte Symphony's mood saw a potentially devastating budget situation turn bright at the last moment, in a stunning demonstration of just how generous and goodhearted people can be in a crisis. The orchestra, which has been fighting a growing deficit problem that began long before last fall's near-collapse of the financial system, was on the brink all summer, and the CSO's musicians just agreed to a whopping 20% pay cut last week. (If my math is correct, that means that their base salary will be something like $30,000 this year.) Still, no one knew whether it would be enough to stabilize the badly listing ship, and things turned even darker when the city's Arts & Sciences Council threatened to reduce the orchestra's annual stipend from nearly $2m to $150,000.

Then, out of the blue, on the same day that the Council told the orchestra that it could have as much as $900,000 if it met tough fundraising targets, two prominent Charlotte families stepped forward to pledge $1 million each to the CSO! It's a massive amount for an orchestra Charlotte's size (and really, it's massive for anyone - million-dollar donors don't grow on trees,) and while it won't solve all the orchestra's problems, it certainly puts them in a much more positive place heading into what everyone knew would be a very tough season. And at a time like this, that's about as good as good news gets...

Perspective

I've never been an arts manager, nor have I ever had any desire to be one. I've never thought that being CEO (or even general manager) of an orchestra sounded like anywhere near as much fun as playing in one. And while there have been times that I've wished I had more of a say in how things were (or weren't) being done in the upper ranks of the organizations I've worked for, I usually find myself quite grateful that someone else has to make almost all of the tough decisions for me.

Times like this, when the economy is sputtering and spitting while trying to decide whether it's ready to overcome its yearlong tubercular coughing fit, offer up near-daily reminders of how hard the jobs of those running U.S. arts organizations truly are. And lately, as I've waded through the reams of news stories of the latest cuts, layoffs, and salary givebacks across the industry, I've begun to notice a new trend among those who analyze such data for a living. It's a wave of stories that could all be headlined, You Must Make Hard Choices (But Wait, Stop! You Can't Cut That!!!)

Basically, the formula for each of these stories is that a) everyone knows times are tough and painful cuts are necessary for arts organizations to survive, but b) arts organizations are notorious for underspending on Area X at even the best of times, and therefore c) arts groups will be dooming themselves to an even deeper and longer recession if they don't immediately start spending more on Area X.

Generally, articles that follow this basic formula are written by extremely knowledgeable people with long experience in the field. Michael Kaiser, the president of Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center and one of the widely accepted sages of arts management in the U.S., has been trotting around the country warning arts groups not to play it too safe at a time like this, and making the case that what people really want from us in a deep recession is more art, more content, and more daring programming, not less.

And just this past week, a fascinating analysis out of Stanford University suggested that the real problem with our spending priorities in the arts is that, because we're so focused on the creative side of the ledger, we perennially underfund our own infrastructure (everything from up-to-date computer equipment to the desks and chairs in our offices,) which makes it impossible for the office workers who keep us afloat to do their jobs properly. In a fiscal crisis, such infrastructure funding typically sees the deepest cuts and the longest road back from the brink, mainly because it's easier to woo donors with a pitch that involves a renovated theater or a new education program than with an office upgrade to Windows Vista.

Despite the fact that both Kaiser and Stanford are almost inarguably correct in their assessments, there's no shortage of "Yeah, but..." responses available. Some would point out that it's fairly easy for Michael Kaiser to espouse daring programming ideas from his perch atop one of the richest and most securely funded arts organizations in the world. (The Kennedy Center is a jewel in political Washington's crown, and as close to untouchable as an arts group gets.) And while the Stanford folks are correct up to a point, most arts managers would say that the cost of putting on a shoddy, underfunded show that the public can see is far higher in the long run than the cost of forcing those behind the scenes to make do for a while with outdated software and tiny, unpleasant office space.

And then there is that uncomfortable bottom line: when you're in charge of going out and finding money for the arts group you believe so deeply in, you can't just go and explain all this to each of your potential donors. Because let's be honest: with the exception of a few truly devoted individuals, your donors don't want to hear about all the tricky little Catch-22s you're faced with every time the Dow drops a few hundred points. They're happy to support you to the best of their personal fiscal ability, and most of them will take at least some interest in the overall health of the organization, but figuring out the most responsible place for each dime you take in? That's just not their job. It's... gulp... yours.

Over the last decade or two, musicians have been getting steadily more involved in how the orchestras we play in are managed, with mixed results. I'm in favor of that trend, generally, if only because I think the increased communication that results increases the likelihood that we and our staff and our board members will be forced to at least occasionally consider how the organization looks from somewhere other than where we normally sit.

But like I say, someone has to make the truly tough calls at the end of the day. And while I may not always like the calls that are made, I'm always impressed with those who are bold enough to make them, knowing that their jobs and the jobs of everyone under them could be on the line if they get it wrong. That's not a job I could ever do, any more than they could do mine. It's a tough thing to remember sometimes, but an important one for all of us in this leaky boat called The Arts.

I'm seeing colors

Back after a much-needed summer hiatus! Now, to ease myself back into regular blogging...

An ex-musician friend happened upon this video of Beethoven's 5th Symphony - a "visual representation" of music:



For a "color code" of what each line represents, click here.

This makes me think a bit of (don't laugh, now...) the vocals "notation" used for "Rockband" (yes, the video game for XBox/Playstation/Wii), which I find genius in its simplicity and accessibility. It's a reminder that there are a myriad ways to notate pitch and time (we in the orchestra business tend to get stuck on the dots and dashes on five lines that we look at every day).

Other cultures have very different systems:



Japanese Shakuhachi music.



Russian Znamenny chant.

And finally, an interesting link outlining alternative notation within the Western classical notation.

Symphony Of A Thousand (Facebook Friends)

Who says social networking is just a way to waste time when we should all be working? Atlanta music critic Pierre Ruhe noticed a fascinating exchange on composer John Mackey's Facebook page the other day...

"Mackey, a fine composer who writes high-energy music for wind ensemble and lives in Austin, Texas, is writing a trombone concerto. He's got the New York Philharmonic's Joseph Alessi as soloist and a New Jersey concert band for the premiere, but he wants to give the concerto a shelf life. Deadline is November. Already several weeks into it, he's been posting updates to his Facebook friends.

Early this afternoon, he posted a new status update:

John Mackey can't decide whether to put saxes in the Trombone Concerto. Was going to score it for "orchestral winds," but I'm missing the sax section in the quiet sections."

Now, as it happens, I'm Facebook friends with Mackey (he wrote a fantastic bluegrass-inspired piece for string trio that I've played,) so I noticed the status, too. It didn't occur to me to offer an opinion on the sax or no sax issue, but apparently, plenty of others did, and the "conversation" that ensued actually seems to have helped John make a decision. So clearly some people are actually using Facebook for productive purposes! Just, um, not me.

Sick Sad System

The current national debate over health care reform is one that musicians are watching particularly closely. Certainly we're all wondering what our health insurance system will look like on the other side of the debate, but as an industry, the music business could be deeply impacted by a changed health care model.

First of all, many musicians are part of that 46 million-strong voting block that simply can't afford any insurance at all. Freelancers who bounce from gig to gig (and that's most musicians, by the way) are almost never offered benefits, even when they substitute for the same orchestra or contractor frequently. So unless they can piggy-back on a spouse's employer-based insurance plan (which frequently isn't an option, since musicians have a habit of marrying other musicians,) their only option is to purchase one of the horrendously expensive individual plans offered by private insurers. Assuming, of course, that they don't have any preexisting conditions.

Even those of us lucky enough to have full-time jobs with large orchestras (and therefore, access to pretty good insurance coverage) could benefit hugely from new controls on the system. Orchestras are the 800-lb. gorillas of the music world, yes, but as businesses go, we're pretty small. The Minnesota Orchestra employs fewer than 200 people, and that means that, when our management asks insurance companies for bids to cover us, those bids come back awfully high, because the insurance companies don't really need our business.

Contrast that with a large corporation with tens of thousands of employees: the insurance companies desperately want that large pool of policies, so they cut the corporation a break on the individual rates. Basically, the fewer employees you have, the more each individual policy is going to cost.

Then there's the fact that musicians tend to actually use our health insurance. Performance injuries are extremely common, and the kind of injuries we get tend to be the kind that require extensive rehab. So annual rate increases are often sharply higher for us than they might be at your company.

There's been talk for several years now of trying to pool together all the full-time orchestra players in the US in an effort to get one big insurance plan for all of us, but since every state has its own laws regulating health insurance, and every orchestra has its own collective bargaining agreement governing everything from how much money we make to how long the rehearsals are, no one's holding their breath for a national OrchestraCare plan.

But something's gotta change. Like so many businesses, orchestras are being financially crippled by the rising cost of insurance, and no one has yet offered a solution that can garner enough political support to become law. In fact, my understanding of the plans on the table is that the employer-based model would remain the primary insurance delivery system in most cases. That's great news for my insurance company, but it's sure not good news for me or any other musician.

Playing The Race Card

Happy Labor Day, all! Everyone nicely recovered from their State Fair food coma and ready to dive back into the real world? Excellent. Me, too. So let's start the fall with a thorny topic I've been meaning to write about for quite a while.

The issue of race in America's classical music industry is an omnipresent embarrassment that few musicians like to talk about. Orchestras tend to be made up largely of highly educated individuals who consider themselves extremely open-minded. Many musicians volunteer their skills to inner city schools, and some go out of their way to offer affordable lessons to kids who can't afford the going rate. And yet, nearly every American orchestra remains a sea of Caucasian and Asian faces, with African-Americans and Hispanics a glaring rarity.

Now, it would be easy to chalk this up to institutional racism, just as the lack of women in orchestras until shockingly recent times was a result of deliberately exclusionary policies. But it's not that simple: nearly every American orchestra now holds its auditions behind a privacy screen and identifies candidates only by a number, so that the audition committee cannot (theoretically) know who is playing. And while the advent of the screen nicely fixed the gender problem, it hasn't done anything much to add more musicians of color to the ranks.

Conventional wisdom among musicians is that the racial imbalance in our industry is a direct result of the racial achievement gap in America's schools. Public schools in poverty-stricken districts (which, of course, tend to have higher percentages of black and Latino students) frequently have no music program at all, or a severely underfunded and understaffed one at best. And when you consider that it's not at all unusual for string players, in particular, to begin taking lessons at the age of 4 or 5, a lack of easy access to instruments and lessons can kill a potential musician's career before s/he leaves elementary school.

There's also a distinct social aspect to music that might feel exclusionary not just to blacks and Latinos, but to any family that doesn't fit the usual demographic. I grew up participating in youth music programs that were centered in major cities, but nearly every kid in the programs came from the suburbs, and from families with money. My suburban public school had its racial diversity bussed in from Boston, but the Saturdays I spent in the heart of the city playing in orchestras and string quartets were, for the most part, lily-white. It would never have occurred to any of us to suggest that people with darker skin than ours couldn't play music every bit as well as we did, but neither did it occur to us to wonder why they weren't doing exactly that.

Because music takes a lifetime to master, it's very easy for all of us to point the finger backward at school boards, politicians, and even parents who choose not to expose their kids to music. But as Peter Dobrin pointed out in a blistering column in the Philadelphia Inquirer last month, that sort of buck-passing lets those of us in the industry off far too easy. "It's time to stop saying the talent isn't there, and to stop citing the objectivity of the audition screen. The only thing the screen hides is the audition process, and it's not even doing a very good job of that anymore."

As I read Dobrin's larger point, he's suggesting that orchestras won't start showing more racial diversity until they are forced to by some mechanism other than a blind hiring process. So imagine if the orchestra business suddenly instituted an aggressive affirmative action program (leaving aside the thorny issue of whether the current Supreme Court would allow such a program to stand) and began giving preference to black and Latino candidates. Musicians would scream bloody murder, of course, because this business is supposed to be entirely meritocratic. But wouldn't such a system immediately give the largest organizations in the music world a vested interest in improving the quality and availability of music education programs for underprivileged kids?

In the early years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, business owners could plausibly claim that the reason they continued to hire whites at a far, far higher rate than blacks was because of a lack of proper education and skills training in the black community. Yet, since the entire system had been set up to keep blacks at a disadvantage, a system had to be devised to force people and governments to change that system in order for the situation to improve. Simply saying blacks were equal to whites wasn't enough to improve their access to upper levels of society.

I'm not suggesting that a system of racial quotas for orchestras would fix the problem in our business. But there's no question that it is a disgrace for an industry that spends so much time talking about our value to the wider community to still, in 2009, be less racially diverse than your average corporate boardroom or Congressional subcommittee.