Cross-(Genre)-Pollination

I've written before about the various apprehensions that orchestral musicians feel about playing pops music, and I've also written about the need for orchestras to expand their range of concert offerings (including encouraging the development of good pops music) if we want to remain a vital cultural force. My feelings on the subject have generally boiled down to two fundamental truths: 1) Classical musicians, on the whole, need to get over the notion that we're too good/serious/important to play popular music, and 2) Bad pops arrangements (which are the vast majority of them) need to be replaced with scores that actually give the orchestra something substantial to do, if we ever want fans of popular music to embrace the orchestra as a concept.

But coming off our most pops-intensive month of the season (we haven't actually played a standard classical concert since mid-November, and won't again until the third week of January,) I've been finding reasons to be encouraged. And that encouragement comes largely from the presence on our podium of pops leaders who understand the difference between "popular" and "pandering."

One of the things that made me strongly supportive of the Minnesota Orchestra's decision to appoint Sarah Hicks as our new Principal Pops Conductor was the fact that she demonstrably understands the orchestra's proper role in a really good pops show. We don't need to be center stage all the time, especially if we've paid some famous guest artist or other a lot of money to sit in front of us and be the focal point of the show. But if all we're doing is sitting back on our heels and droning an unending series of whole notes, it's a terrible waste of resources. Sarah gets that, and she's already made a noticeable effort to find (or create) arrangements and original pieces that utilize the orchestra in a way that would be familiar to someone who's actually heard a Beethoven symphony before. (By the way, if you missed Sarah on MPR's Midmorning program last week, go back and have a listen. She was the very picture of unflappable accessibility...)

Moreover, I was reminded last weekend, as I am every year, of just how impressive musicians outside the classical realm can be, when Doc Severinsen blew back into town for his annual Jingle Bell Doc show. Make no mistake: Doc is every bit the over-the-top, flashy, leather-and-sequin-obsessed character that he was for all those years on Carson. But lurking behind that larger-than-life persona is a musical talent, drive, and ambition that put most of us in the orchestra business to shame.

Doc's always been known for bringing some of the very best orchestral arrangements in the business to the stage with him, courtesy of his long partnerships with killer musician/arrangers like Tommy Newsom and Dick Lieb. But his commitment to what he does goes way beyond that, and, I'd venture to say, well beyond nearly any other musician within 20 years of his age.

I happened to be hanging out at Orchestra Hall a few hours before our Saturday night performance with Doc at the helm. We'd had our lone rehearsal for this concert the day before, and Saturday afternoon, Sarah had led most of the orchestra in the final performance of this year's "Scandinavian Christmas" run. I had a lesson to teach, so rather than go home between shows, I stuck around, practiced a bit, and generally killed some time.

It was somewhere between 5 and 6pm when Doc showed up backstage, hustled to his practice room, and began to work. I choose that word deliberately. I was in an adjoining practice room, and he wasn't playing - he was working. Every musician knows the difference between mindless warm-up and serious practicing, and this was decidedly the latter. I actually stopped teaching my student for a moment to point out the obvious concentration that this famous 83-year-old trumpeter, with nothing to prove to anyone in the world, was putting into his preparation for a Christmas show he's led dozens of times before.

It's things like this that separate the great musicians from the merely talented, and classical music has no kind of lock on that sort of passion and commitment. I don't know how many more years I'll have the good fortune to work with Doc, but I know for a fact that he's set the bar for what it means to have a full, meaningful career in this business. And from my side of the classical/pops divide, that means everything.