Cool new stuff

I'm always on the prowl for cool new stuff, and the Eigenharp certainly fits the bill. It takes the idea of a composite instrument and takes it to a new level (the range of sounds seems limitless) - I especially like that sensors in the mouthpiece are sensitive enough to pick up tonguing which can then be translated into articulations on any instrument. (And the Apple geek in me loves that it only runs on Macs).

How much fun would it be to play around with one? Anyone out there have one and wanna lend it to me (hey, a girl can dream...)?

Check out this demo:




(A shoutout to Tony Tompkins for turning me on to this while selling me a gym membership. Now that's good salemanship.)

FutureClassics Redux

This year's edition of the Composer Institute is now a week behind us, but those of you who missed the FutureClassics concert and want to hear some of the music that we were blogging about can now hear it online, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio. The main audio player on this page has the entire concert in one continuous track, but if you want to listen to individual pieces, look for the list of repertoire in the center column.

Classical MPR announcer (and onetime professional flutist) Alison Young hosted the concert and interviewed each composer onstage just before his/her piece was performed. We've found that having a live host serves two important purposes: 1) giving the audience a chance to get some background on what to expect, as the pieces that make up the concert are usually quite diverse, and 2) giving the percussion section the time they need to change over their entire area of the stage, since massive percussion setups seem to be the new black with today's composers.

Nearly everyone I talked with (both in the orchestra and in the audience) agreed that the level of skill displayed by this year's Institute participants was the highest it's ever been, and that's saying something. The music ranged from effervescent to soaring to overwhelming, and I strongly suspect that more than one of them will be showing up on a Minnesota Orchestra program in the not-too-distant future...

Happy Thanksgiving!

A little feel-good story for you this gray (at least here in the upper Midwest) Thanksgiving Day; Placido Domingo signed autographs post-performance last night until nearly 2 am. A wonderful thought, on two levels: 1) that an artist of his stature would be so gracious with his time, and 2) that there would be so many fans (purportedly over 500) seeking autographs!

Fighting For The Right To Complain

This past week, an honest-to-God US Congressman introduced a measure on the floor of the House which would designate the day before Thanksgiving "Complaint Free Wednesday." His heart was probably in the right place, but honestly. The economy's in the tank, Wall Street seems to have gotten away scot free with most of its own wealth while making all of ours disappear, political civility is at an all-time low, the unemployment rate is through the roof and still climbing, and one of the guys tasked (in part) with preventing this kind of thing from happening wants us to stop complaining?

Besides, there are better ways to deal with the human propensity for constant griping. Consider the Helsinki Complaints Choir, the brainchild of Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen...



My personal favorite part of this is the complaint about cell phone ringtones, sung to the tune of that ubiquitous Nokia ringtone. See there, Congressman? There's good to be found everywhere - even in perpetual whining.

I'm not a witch, I'm your wife

(Yes, cinephiles, that is indeed a "Princess Bride" reference)

While Sam and the Orchestra have been occupied with the Composer Institute this week, I've been preoccupied with Humperdinck...well, actually, this Humperdinck.

I'm always surprised how well-known Hansel and Gretel is - not because of the piece itself, which is beautiful - but because of the exposure many seem to have had as children (it is, after all, a "fairytale opera"). It's a funny matter of personal experience, I suppose - for many, H&G is their first contact with opera; for me, it was Samson et Dalila, but I guess that makes sense for a 7-year-old obsessed with Placido Domingo (I don't think Humperdinck is really his bag). In the interim decades, I've heard H&G quite a few times but never studied it (except for the omnipresent Prelude and Dream Pantomime, both of which I've done over a half-dozen times).

So, as I hadn't been around for any of the previous iterations of this production with the Orchestra, my first real involvement with the complete work came this past summer, when I initially delved into the score.

One of the most fascinating discoveries I've made in the score is how unsympathetic a character the Mother is (yes, yes, I've pondered musical stuff too - don't get me started about use of percussion in the Witch's Ride and how triplets in the tambourine intimate magical/evil). But, wow, this woman is painted as such an unsympathetic character; her first entrance is marked with hysterics; she knocks over the jug of milk herself and takes it out on Hansel and Gretel; then in a typically manic-depressive switch she has suicidal thoughts while falling asleep at the kitchen table after she chases the kids out of the house; she has no idea how dangerous the woods are or that there's a hungry ogress or that witches ride broomsticks (why does Father know all these things??); and in the happy reunion at the end she merely has a single line ("Children, dear") while Father has quite a few lines - and the kids, quite tellingly, call him first ("Father, Mother!" - although maybe I'm simply reading too much into that?).

Our "Mother", Lola Watson, and I shared a few laughs at our first rehearsal about how mentally unbalanced the character seems, and the possibility (as some have interpreted) that the Mother is the Witch. While that seems a little far-fetched in context of the opera, I wonder what a feminist fairytale scholar's take on that notion would be? A tantalizing alternative to ponder as I peruse the score this morning for the umpteenth time.

In any case, I'm delighted to be taking a break from operaland to attend the Future Classics concert tonight - the next 6 days holds nearly 23 hours of staging/orchestra/sitzprobe/full-run rehearsals for H&G!

The Art of Self-Destruction

Okay, so there's this dancer/performance artist in the UK who is planning to purposefully induce in herself an epilectic seizure in front of a paying audience. Not only that, the Arts Council of England has apparently endorsed this seemingly insane bit of art to the tune of £14,000. (If you happen to have been looking for a good shock-and-awe way of describing to a friend the difference between federal arts funding in Europe and America, you're welcome.)

Now, I don't know a whole lot about epilepsy beyond the fact that, back in seventh grade, my friend Joe Holland got hauled off to the principal's office, for bonking me over the head with a Life Sciences textbook, by a teacher who was claiming loudly that he'd probably just given me said condition. But I do have the general impression that it is one of those things that, once you Have It, you pretty much need to Medicate It. Forever. So this particular bit of performance art would seem to be ill-advised, no matter how many write-ups it gets you in advance of said performance.

Still, there are a lot of performers out there willing to put themselves at some degree of risk for the sake of art, or fame, or whatever. I can't say as I've personally ever been a part of such a show - I did once play a piece of music in which the composer strongly suggested that the conductor have a heart attack and die during the performance, though I'm fairly certain he was kidding - but I know that they're out there.

So my question to you is, what's the nuttiest/bravest/most self-destructive thing you've ever seen an artist, musician, or other performer do in the name of entertaining you? If anyone can top Epilepsy Girl, I'll be mightily impressed...

Fightin' Words

UPDATE, 11/18: Composer Institute participant Spencer Topel's latest blog entry is up over at NewMusicBox. This time around, Spencer's pondering just how far composers will travel to hear the music they've written, and how that ties into Americans' sense of distance...

--------------------------

Over at ArtsJournal, composer/critic Greg Sandow is celebrating the Chicago Symphony's announcement that Mason Bates and Anna Clyne (a Composer Institute alum!) will be the CSO's composers in residence next season. And Greg's excitement boils down to what he sees as a possible evolution of the flavor of living composer that major American orchestras choose to showcase. Notably, he sees Bates and Clyne as part of a new generation of young composers who mix genres, drop in pop references, and most importantly, write music that your average concertgoer will enjoy listening to...

"For years, the Big Five orchestras -- New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Philly, Boston -- featured modernist new music. Boulez, Matthias Pintscher, Birtwistle (a Cleveland favorite), Magnus Lindberg currently in New York, Carter and Babbitt currently in Boston. Along with a welcome dose of John Adams, but the emphasis was modernist. Or, in other words, on music that hardly anyone likes (whatever its virtues might be), music the normal audience can't respond to, and which also has no base (for instance among artists in other fields, or younger people) outside the classical audience. It's music like this, I think, which leads orchestras to conclude that new music doesn't -- no matter what many people might expect -- attract a young audience."

Now, this is a controversial paragraph, because fans of certain Modernist composers have never really been willing to acknowledge that Modernist music sounds like indecipherable noise to most listeners. (And to be fair, a lot of those who think Modernism was ill-conceived and hurt classical music badly also don't do a very good job of separating that judgment from the clear reality that Carter, Birtwhistle, Boulez, et al are brilliant men who deserve respect.) But if you ask me, Milton Babbitt's notorious screed, "Who Cares If You Listen?" (originally published in 1958,) tells us that Modernist music established itself as contemptuous of the audience at a very early stage, and I really don't think that's a debatable point.

So why is it that Modernist composers didn't fall out of fashion with orchestras and the people who lead them the moment an alternative style of composition was available? Composers have been writing far more ear-friendly (and yet unquestionably serious) music for decades now, and yet music directors like James Levine in Boston (not picking on him in particular, he's just the highest-profile example going at the moment) continue to insist on packing concert programs full of Carter and Wuorinen, despite audible dissatisfaction from the audience.

I've had any number of theories about Modernism's death grip on orchestras over the years. I used to think it was a peculiarity of the Northeast's overly academic personality. (That one dissolved when I started traveling more, and realized that geography didn't seem as relevant as I'd suspected.)

Then I decided that it might have to do with a simple intellectual disconnect: if you've spent a lot of time studying Modernist music, as many musicians do in the course of learning to be musicians, it does start to make more sense to you, and it can be hard to remember that your average concertgoer did not spend four years listening to Babbitt and Stockhausen as preparation for attending your concert.

I still think that second theory has potential, as does the possibility that the musicians who continue to promote Modernism truly do believe that one day, we'll all wake up and it'll sound as normal to us as Stravinsky. (This is an absurd idea, and maybe someday I'll go into the many, many reasons why.)

I'm all for challenging audiences, and I'm not for a moment suggesting that we should just give up on "serious" new music and start considering John Williams and Mark O'Connor to be the new Copland and Dvorak. But I'm with Sandow on the undeniably positive nature of an orchestra with Chicago's pedigree embracing a generation of composers who, frankly, have been getting way too little respect from the orchestral establishment and the press that covers it.

Monday time-waster

You've gotta try this out; it's a web widget that allows you to type in a sentence which is then played back using those same words culled from a library of popular songs. Perfect 2-minute break on a manic Monday.

Readying For The Composer Invasion

Our annual Composer Institute starts up again next week, and since Sarah and I have blogged about it quite a bit in past years, I won't rehash the basics. But I wanted to quickly draw attention to NewMusicBox, the much-respected online resource for composers and fans of new music, which has once again convinced one of the participating composers in our Institute to keep a running blog of the goings-on.

His first post is up already, and since NewMusicBox doesn't seem to have a tag that will take you to all CI-related content, I'll try to remember to link to his future posts as well. But in case I miss one, just bookmark the site's front page - they usually do a good job of really featuring the Institute during the week it's going on.

By the way, nearly all this year's participating composers have personal web sites with extensive audio clips. So if you'd like to get to know their work before next Saturday's FutureClassics concert wraps up the Institute, check them out here...

Angel Lam
Hong Kong

Spencer Topel
Hanover, NH

Roger Zare
Sarasota, FL

Fernando Buide
Santiago, Spain

Kathryn Salfelder
Boston, MA

Carl Schimmel
Grinnell, IA

Geoff Knorr
Baltimore, MD

Orchestra hero?

Yes, please! (and do take a listen to the soundclip towards the end of the article...)

Marylou.

This has already been a year of far too many final goodbyes, and this week, news came of another awful loss for the music world. One of my first violin teachers, and one of the very small circle of people who I credit with setting me on the firm and irrevocable path to becoming a musician, passed away quietly at her home in Boston this week. Marylou Speaker Churchill was the principal second violin of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 23 years (she played in the BSO for 30 years all told,) and that's quite something. But it's nothing compared to the legacy she left behind as the kind of teacher who truly changes lives every single day.

I was 9 years old - just one year into my time as the youngest and least advanced student in Marylou's studio - when she invited me to spend an entire week with her at Tanglewood, the idyllic summer home of the BSO. Tanglewood is the Shangri-La of classical music, a near-perfect campus of rolling lawns and concert halls, tucked away in the gorgeous Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts. Music lovers from all over New England flock to Tanglewood every summer, and the best chamber musicians and soloists in the world consider Tanglewood an essential stop on their itineraries. When you attend a concert there, and lie back on the lawn outside the main shed, with the grass tickling your scalp and the sound of a Beethoven slow movement in your ears, you never want it to end.

And that summer when I was nine - pulling into the musicians-only parking lot every morning in the passenger seat of my teacher's ancient VW Beetle convertible; attending closed rehearsals in which real live Professional Musicians slogged their way through symphonies they'd played a hundred times, and made fun of the guest conductor behind his back; and playing Frisbee on the lawn with the BSO's new young concertmaster, Malcolm Lowe - I knew exactly what I wanted to do for a living.

Beyond possessing the simple generosity of spirit that could lead a teacher to present a hyperactive 9-year-old with such a gift, Marylou was the kind of teacher who demanded (and got) 100% effort from her students. Less than a year after I began taking lessons with her, she realized that I tended to practice hard for a day or two after each lesson, then get lazy and arrive at the next week's lesson dramatically underprepared. A lot of teachers just throw up their hands at that kind of student. Marylou's response was to offer to teach me twice a week, so that I never went more than three days without a lesson.

When my family moved away from Boston in 1986, I was devastated to be losing Marylou, and I suspect that the wonderful teacher who succeeded her as my primary mentor in Pennsylvania would tell you that my sulking over the move didn't make his job any easier. I saw her once more about a year later, when she happened to be in Philadelphia for a concert and gave me a lesson in her hotel room for old time's sake, and then, incredibly, I didn't see her for nearly 20 years. I kept tabs on her career, of course, and was overjoyed when I heard that she and her husband, Mark (who is one of the legends of Boston's incredible youth music scene) had decided to adopt twin girls back in the mid-1990s.

Those girls are now 12 years old, and in one of the not-quite-coincidences that makes the music world such a wonderful place to live, they have been attending the summer music camp I teach at for three years now. They're incredible kids, full of energy, talent, and kindness, and this past summer, thanks to them, I had the chance to come full circle in my relationship with Marylou.

As it happened, I was coaching one of the girls in a string quartet that I knew from the beginning had the potential to deliver a knockout performance that would stand in each of their memories. And on the night of the concert, I found myself (by total coincidence, I swear) sitting right next to proud mother Marylou, on the fringes of the packed concert barn. We exchanged pleasantries, as we had every recent summer, and I told her what a pleasure her daughter was to work with, just as I would to nearly any parent. And then, the group walked out to play the first movement of Dvorak's American quartet.

I'd love to say that the main thing I remember about their performance is how good it was. (And it was very, very good.) But the truth is that the image seared into my memory is of Marylou's daughter, Julia. She strode to her place before picking up her violin, and made a point of finding her mother in the crowd, and smiling broadly at her. She did the same thing again as soon as the performance ended and the crowd erupted in cheers. Marylou matched her, grin for grin.

As the applause finally died down, I turned to my old teacher, and said, "You know, I don't think I've ever seen that happen. Dozens of kids walk out to play concerts in this barn every summer, and they all make a concerted effort to look anywhere but at their parents." Marylou nodded, and smiled ever so slightly, and then said, "Children do these wonderful things. And they never have any idea just how much these little things mean to us."

If you ask me, that's a pretty good summation of what great teachers do, as well.

Back on the Islands...

More bad, but not unexpected, news; the Honolulu Symphony is filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy and has canceled concerts through the end of the calendar year.

I am heartsore. Honolulu is my home town, and the Symphony holds many memories for me - I played my first concerto with them (Mozart K. 271, I think) as a preteen. They saw their heyday in the 80's under Donald Johanos, who raised artistic standards and introduced new repertoire, including an ambitious recording project with composer Dan Welcher (who coincidentally composed "Haleakala" on my parents upright Yamaha). Since the labor dispute and strike in 1993, the Symphony seems never to have regained it's footing, and the last few seasons in particularly have been disastrous from a fiscal standpoint - during the 08-09 season, musicians worked for months without pay.

I'll let someone else dissect what went wrong with the symphony. What was most upsetting to me was not so much what has happened, but reaction to it. The advent of online print media and that ever-present "comment" button means that everyone has an easy way to weigh in immediately, and as I scrolled through the responses, I realized that a vast majority expressed a similar sentiment: "Who cares? We don't need a symphony." A selection below:

It is said if a city doesn't have a symphony then it is not a Big City. Bull. If a symphony doesn't get 100 percent of its operating capital from ticket sales then it is just a failed business and should fold. Symphonys are just play toys for the rich. Honolulu will do fine with or without a symphony. The rich will just have to find another place where they can dress up in their finest and go to show off how rich they are. If symphonys were so great they would be packed to the rafters with both the rich and the average folk.

Yikes..their business plans says that only 30% of their revenue came from ticket sales and 70% from donations. It should have gone the other way around. No wonder they fail to balance their budget each year. Yes, close these dolts down.

109 yrs old, and unable to support yourself, time to die already.

The culture and traditions of the European elite are what have brought this planet to the brink of disaster.
No thank you. You can keep the music of dead white European composers. Good riddance to the symphony.

We are all sick of the fiscal mismanagement of this mediocre symphony. Please close it. We need to discuss more important groups. The economy is in a disaster.

I wish the musicians well, but symphonies are a relic of another time.

Get rid of the strings and form a Jazz band. More appealing. Maybe have a guest violinist from time to time.
Symphony = zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzz
The symphony is just a way for the rich to dress up and act rich.

Why is it that we hear from month to month and year to year how bad they are doing? How is it that they are constantly getting all this free press? I guess they are failing because !) they suck 2) noone care about them 3) they have done a miserable job of promotion...bottom line is that it is not my problem...or anyone elses but theirs.

All of these touch on the PR problems that all orchestras face - the perception that orchestras are elite bastions of the rich (and therefore not for "the people"); that orchestras are sadly out of touch with current cultural trends (and care only about "dead white European composers"); that orchestras ticket sales should represent a far higher percentage of their actual budgets.

As with anyone in this industry, I can refute (to a certain degree) all three, but the important take-away from this is not discrediting criticism but rather grasping the perception of those in the community who do NOT have a relationship with their local orchestra. And the level of local vitriol directed towards the Honolulu Symphony in all of the articles that have come out in the last week is deeply disheartening. Because it's not like the Symphony didn't have educational initiatives or community concerts or programs to reach out to the larger public; it's that these activities could not alter or overcome the more powerful notions of what the Symphony represents.

It presents a tremendous PR/branding conundrum for orchestras. On one hand, you want to celebrate your artistic triumphs abroad or your critically-acclaimed recordings. But in the end, the success of any arts organizations lies in the connections it has forged and the loyalty it has built in the community it serves.

I hope the Honolulu Symphony will be able to regroup - it's certainly possible for an orchestra to rise out these ashes (others have). From my own perspective, the Symphony was such a fundamental part of my childhood; I don't think I would be where I am now without them and can't imagine home without them. And for the Island community as a whole, what a loss, what a loss - the Symphony brought so much joy to so many, from their Waikiki Shell summer shows to their educational concerts to presenting world-class soloists at Blaisdell... I await better news with both anxiety and hope.

Pushing The Limits

Last week, the Minnesota Orchestra played what will probably stand as the most difficult and exhausting program we'll perform in this entire season. There were four major works to be gotten through, each one hugely challenging in its own way, and for a lot of us, it was our first time playing three of the four.

One of the dirty little secrets of professional orchestras is that the reason we're able to crank out reasonably good performances of an ever-changing array of repertoire (think about it - do you know of a theater company or string quartet that mounts 50-70 completely different programs every year, with just three or four rehearsals for each?) is that we already know most of it pretty well. Sure, it might take a few minutes for the particular intricacies of Brahms or Stravinsky to slip back under your fingers, but it's the same notes you played the last time that particular piece crossed your stand, and after a few years in the profession, you've got a pretty good handle on 75-80% of the core repertoire you'll be playing for the rest of your career.

So if muscle memory and simple musical recall are an orchestra musician's best friends, then a program full of world premieres and obscure works from the past would seem to be our worst enemy. But for most of us, that's not the case at all. Yes, there are musicians who would rather just slog through the same old familiar warhorses and pick up their paycheck while putting in as little effort as possible, but for most of us, new challenges keep the work fresh, and the chance to attack a score we've never seen before is deeply satisfying, assuming that the music in question is quality stuff.

The world premiere we played last week was by a composer we've gotten to know well during Osmo's time in Minnesota, and whenever we see his name on the schedule, we know we'll all need to sign out our parts weeks in advance of the first rehearsal. Kalevi Aho's music is rich and distinctive, well-constructed and obviously composed with a deep understanding of the orchestra and its various components, but it is also invariably at the absolute outer edge of playability for nearly every instrument. In the days leading up to an Aho week, musicians are constantly wandering up to each other backstage, saying things like, "I mean, have you looked at page 14? The hell am I supposed to do with that?"

Still, the satisfaction I get from practicing new music that pushes me to my limits has always been one of the things that thrills me most about playing music for a living. Back in my college days, the Contemporary Music Ensemble was the group that all the best players wanted to be in, not because most of us believed that the music was somehow better than Beethoven or Brahms, but because once you can play Stockhausen, or Carter, or Wuorinen, you know you can play anything. And that's a powerful realization.

Last Friday night, I was asked to speak to a group of the orchestra's most loyal supporters before the concert, and give a bit of a preview of the music they'd be hearing that evening. Mr. Aho was present for this event, and in the course of describing the piece we'd been working on, I took the chance to address the composer directly. I told him that the first piece of his I'd ever played was his Insect Symphony, and that, at the time, it was the most difficult thing I'd ever played in an orchestra. "That was four years ago," I said. "Now, that symphony isn't even in my top five, and those other five are also all yours."

The incredible thing about Aho, though, is that music that is so fiendishly difficult for those of us on stage can sound so natural and comprehensible out in the audience. There are a lot of composers today writing music that's so difficult that it can barely be played. Most of them do it on purpose, hoping that, by stressing out the performers, they'll create a sense of urgency and chaotic panic in the music that the audience will instantly be able to sense.

Aho, on the other hand, reminds me more of Stravinsky - he must know that the music he's writing will fall beyond the capabilities of all but the finest musicians of his era, but he's not necessarily writing just for us. The musicians who first played some of Stravinsky's now-famous ballet scores called them unplayable, but I've been playing them with no great discomfort or stress since my college days. I fully expect (and I'm guessing Aho does, too) that the musicians of the late 21st century will find Aho's symphonies no more challenging than I find The Rite of Spring. I only wish I could be around to hear them...

Music We Only Think We Know

Hip-hop might just beat out classical music as the most misunderstood and unfairly maligned musical genre in existence today. When I tell other classical musicians that I'm a hip-hop fan, the reaction tends to range from blank stares to outright revulsion. Only once or twice have I ever gotten a positive reaction of any kind. And that's a real shame, because the creativity that's out there in the rap world at the moment is truly staggering, and compared with genres like pop, rock, and country, the level of musical complexity and lyrical elegance that hip-hop employs is extremely high.

So why do so many people think rap is nothing more than violent, misogynistic garbage aimed at getting suburban white kids to dress and act like gang members from South Central LA? Well, let me turn that question around for a moment. Why do so many people think that classical music is nothing more than repetitive waltzes and elevator music played for snoozing rich people? The answer in both cases is, "Because that's the only part of the genre that gets on TV on a regular basis."

If you're not already a fan of classical music and don't know where to find the good stuff, Andre Rieu and whatever other garbage PBS airs during their endless begging sessions might be the only classical music you hear in a given month. Similarly, if you go to BET looking for hip-hop music, yes, you will find a parade of offensively talentless rappers who buy their backing beats from other people, treat women like their pets, and embrace the whole Thug Life thing. And here's the important part: real hip-hop musicians feel the same way about the rappers on BET that you and I feel about Andre Rieu. These are musical hacks who have found a comfortable niche that makes them a lot of money. Which is fine - not everyone has to be edgy and daring - but they are not to be confused with shining examples of the genre they purport to represent.

Now, I'm not one of those sorts that believes that the election of Barack Obama was some sort of magical healing balm that is going to eventually allow Americans to put all our racial baggage behind us, but I do take a certain amount of hope from the fact that he has made a point of bringing quality art and music back to the White House, and that he seems to understand that hip-hop owes as much of its legacy to slam poetry and civil rights as it does to the Sugarhill Gang. I mean, honestly: Alexander Hamilton?


(Hat tip to Bob Collins at MPR's NewsCut blog...)

But it works, doesn't it? And it comes off as passionate and real, not preachy and uptight, the way a song in any other musical genre would if it were about the same subject. By the way, that's Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Tony Award-winning actor/writer responsible for the hit Broadway show In The Heights, which makes liberal use of hip-hop, as well as a range of other genres.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that we tend to brand unfamiliar music genres in our mind as somehow being reflective not of the artistry of the people making the music, but of the stereotypes we associate with the audience for that genre. Classical music goes in the "stuffy and elitist" bin not because it is, but because we have an image seared into our brain of stuffy elitist people listening to classical music. Hip-hop goes in the "violent and angry" bin not because it is, but because we have an image of gangbangers and wannabes listening to hip-hop.

Maybe hip-hop just isn't your thing, and that's perfectly fine. Bruckner leaves a lot of people cold, too. I'll personally never be a big fan of Motown, though I can recognize that it's quality stuff. But I'm always amazed at the number of musically sophisticated people who've never really even given rap a chance to impress them. If you're one of them, and want to rectify that, Minnesota's actually an excellent place to start...

Come towards the light

We've successfully navigated through our first Inside the Classics concerts, which is a huge relief. We had the added pressure of creating a show that was radio-friendly (which meant, among other things, no sight gags and minimizing dead air, which changes the tempo of what we do), so it was a stressful week.

I've been saying for a while now that one of the more unusual features of my new position as Principal Conductor, Pops and Presentations (did I officially mention that on the blog? Can't remember...) is that I conduct a huge spectrum of repertoire (much more than in your average pops conducting position) - "everything from Beethoven to Ben Folds" has been my line. Well, last week was where the idea of that sound bite came from, and it certainly was a dramatic switch between Friday night's ItC MPR live broadcast to Saturday's concert featuringBen Folds.

The fact that the show happened to land on Halloween added to what was already a huge event - the Hall was beyond sold out, and tickets for standing room disappeared in an instant. There was definitely a different feel in the house - I don't think I've ever heard an audience make so much noise as a guest artist walked onstage - and much of the crowd was in the Halloween spirit, decked out in elaborate costumes.

Orchestra concerts generally tend to be fairly serious affairs, so it was interesting to see how our players would react to a concert that was outside the norm - and I think it's a credit to our musicians that they decided to join in on the fun. We had a variety of bewigged and costumed players onstage; we also handed out Folds-esque glasses for a subtle costuming touch (we had about 20 players with them on, and I donned them for the first half). A video sampling of backstage shenanigans (including an explanation from Ben about how to figure out if pants will fit you):





I met Ben over a year ago at when we did a show at the Mann Center in Philadelphia, and we've been working together on and off ever since. I love collaborating with him; aside from being a great songwriter and performer, he's really a consummate musician (and his classical training background comes in handy when working with an orchestra!). I mean, who else discusses the Lydian mode as part of their mid-concert schtick?

For the second half of the show we did a hasty outfit change, pulled on wigs and re-emerged as Sonny and Cher (I was apparently so unrecognizable that several members of the Orchestra were wondering "Who's that woman?" when I walked onstage):



(We're singing "I got you babe". Good times.)

I'm all for formality and seriousness where it's warranted (and part of me really loves the sense of decorum and ritual that is a large part of the usual classical concert process). But I do love a regular foray into the lighter side of things. Because life (and music, for that matter) is that much better with a sense of humor.

Adams's Earbox

I don't know why it surprised me to discover that composer John Adams, whose music we half-seriously tied to Beethoven last week at Orchestra Hall, is, in addition to being a terrific composer, a hilarious and entertaining writer, but it did. Adams has always been known as a dynamite interview, and he recently started his own blog, with the ominous title of Hell Mouth, on his personal web site.

So far, the posts seem to be a mix of self-promotion, serious rumination, and lighthearted side banter on the music world, which officially makes Adams one of the few classical types who really seems to get what blogging is good for. Consider this description of one of the various types of disruptive concertgoers that we've all encountered far too often...

"This person is just too scattered to be at a concert. She checks her Blackberry between movements, causing a pale fluorescent glow to emerge from beneath her seat. She adjusts her body sixty-seven times before finding a comfortable position. She’s put on way too much cologne—“Down South” it’s called, the one that comes in that phallic salad-dressing bottle and is guaranteed to cause anyone in the same zip code to double over in anaphylactic shock... You can’t really blame this person, but you wish she’d just take it outside into the lobby."

Heh. That's clearly prose written by a man who's spent some time listening to audiences audibly hating his latest world premiere. I don't have anything profound to say about Adams's blog - I just wanted to point out that it's there if you need it, and would definitely be added to the ItC blogroll, if we had a blogroll, which we don't. (Not sure why that is.) Oh, and also, the blog allows comments, so if you've ever wanted to ask the master of minimalism-plus a question or just enjoy talking back to composers, the opportunity awaits...

Why We Ask

Because the Inside the Classics series is meant to be something of an incubator for new ideas, we tend to do an awful lot of audience research, and we spend a lot of time discussing things like how to attract newbies to Orchestra Hall, how to be responsive to audience concerns without completely turning the series over to the tyranny of public opinion, and how to balance the needs of one concertgoing demographic against another.

Orchestras (or at least, the staff and managers who run the off-stage part of the operation) have these discussions all the time, but as a musician, it's been a new experience for me to be involved in that side of the business. At first, I found it somewhat off-putting, not because of the occasional negative comments I had to read about what Sarah and I were doing, but because I just didn't understand the point of constantly asking audience members about every little aspect of the concertgoing experience, when all we really needed to know (or so I thought) was whether they'd had a good enough time to buy a ticket to the next show.

What I was missing, of course, was that, despite the fact that symphony orchestras are the ocean liners of the arts world (massive, unwieldy, and glacially slow at changing direction,) you can make a big difference in the quality of experience you give your customers without making massive, systemic changes. Little improvements can have a big impact, but only if you know which little improvements people want. And you won't know if you don't ask.

Still, it can be difficult to parse the data we get when we do ask. For instance, every time we do an ItC concert, we always get a few comments that go beyond simple dissatisfaction and border on quivering rage at the talk/play format of the concerts, or the purposefully casual tone we've cultivated for the first half. And while those commenters are entitled to their point of view, there's really not a lot that we can do for people who just hated everything about the experience, other than to point out that the Minnesota Orchestra plays close to 200 concerts every year during which I don't say a word. (I'll admit, I find it a little bit funny that some people manage to get so worked up about a series that takes up approximately 3% of our annual concert schedule.)

Other times, we'll get comments about aspects of the experience that we literally have no control over. Probably the most frequent one of these is people who find parking in downtown Minneapolis to be inconvenient and expensive. Since we don't own, operate, or control any parking ramps, and the city of Minneapolis doesn't care about our opinion on such things, all we can really do is sympathize, and point out that certain concert subscription packages come with parking vouchers. (And actually, I'll toss in an extra tip: the underground lot at the Hilton hotel on 11th Street, right across from Orchestra Hall, will run you about half the cost of all the city-owned lots during evening hours...)

But even if we have to wade through a raft of comments that aren't terribly helpful to us in planning the next concert, we usually happen upon quite a few that are. And from my perspective, individual comments tell me less than the trends that emerge across all our audience feedback. For instance, every time I interview a member of the orchestra on stage during an ItC show, a bunch of people tell us it was their favorite part of the evening, which is why you're seeing it more often now than you did in our first season.

And when a whole lot of you told us after season one that you wanted more contextual music and less of the featured work on the first half, we made a point of trying to do that. (Though judging by some of the comments we got last weekend, we're still not quite nailing that balance - rest assured, we'll keep working on it.)

All of which is to say, thanks for allowing us to pick your brains after all our concerts, and for understanding that we can't possibly respond to every suggestion we get. (Quite frankly, a lot of your opinions cancel each other out.) The constant tweaking and adjusting that we do in this series is one of the really fun parts of putting it together every year, and we hope that it keeps the experience fresh for you as well.