Wow

A Japanese ELEMENTARY SCHOOL BAND at a band competition. Enormously impressive, more so because they are playing with the music memorized (note that the teacher/conductor is the only one with a score!).

I'm constantly reminded of the undeniable fact that kids can do extraordinary things, given the right guidance, opportunity and discipline. Inspiring stuff!

After Hours: Thursday Edition

Your turn, Thursday audience! Chime in down in the comments to tell us what you thought of tonight's performance, and what you'd like to hear more or less of at future concerts. As always, your feedback helps us shape future seasons of the series - in fact, these Debussy concerts were designed and written to address comments we'd gotten from past shows requesting more music and information that places the featured work(s) in context, and fewer first-half examples that would be repeated on the second half. Let us know if we hit the mark on that one.

As always, thanks so much for your attendance, and your enthusiasm. It's truly a pleasure to be on stage in front of a crowd that's really engaged and excited about what you're doing, and y'all never disappoint. I hope we'll see you all again six weeks from now, when we wind up our ItC season with a mix-'n-match program of music all about the seasons...

(P.S. If you'd like more information on some of the side topics we covered during the first half of the show, check out our Cutting Room Floor post just below Wednesday's After Hours post...)

After Hours: Wednesday Edition

If you were with us at Orchestra Hall tonight for the first of our Inside the Classics concerts featuring music of Debussy, here's the place for you to let us know what you thought of the show! We covered an awful lot of ground in the first half (largely in response to feedback we've gotten at previous concerts requesting more contextual music and information, and a little less of the featured piece,) so tell us whether that approach worked for you, or whether it just made your head spin after a while. Also, we're always interested in hearing your reaction to the video component of the performance - it's not something we do very often, but we hope it made it easier for you to follow all the twists and turns of Debussy's wildly complex music!

Anyway, thanks to everyone who showed up - now have at that Comment button...

(P.S. If you'd like more information on some of the side topics we covered during the first half of the show, check out our Cutting Room Floor post just below this one...)

Cutting Room Floor: More Debussy Than You Can Shake A Baton At

In past seasons, Sarah and I have written a series of Cutting Room Floor blog posts in the weeks leading up to each of our Inside the Classics shows, highlighting extra material that we didn't have time to include in the concert. This year, we're tweaking that idea a bit, and putting all the extra material in a single post. Mostly, what you'll find below are links to other sites with more in-depth information on some of the topics we'll be touching on all too briefly on stage.

When it comes to Debussy, the tidal wave of available biographical and musical information is almost overwhelming, and it took us a while to figure out just where we wanted to focus our ItC script. Eventually, we decided that we'd spend most of our time on Debussy's unique "layering" effects and how that distinctive style of composition contrasts with other composers, both in Debussy's time and other eras. But if you're listening closely, you'll hear references to a lot of other fascinating stuff about the man and his music. If any of those references made you want to learn more, click away below...

-- Debussy had a deep affection for Japanese landscape painting, and asked his publisher to print a copy of a painting of a huge wave by Katsushika Hokusai on the cover of the score to La Mer. Hokusai, for his part, had also taken much inspiration from the landscape painters of France and Holland. Learn more about this iconic artist here...

-- Speaking of art, Debussy's music is often called Impressionistic, after the visual art movement of the same name. But Debussy rejected the label, and Sarah and I think his music actually had much more in common with another style of art that gained currency in France in the 19th century - pointillism, which is primarily associated with its creator, Georges Seurat. Seurat's masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grand Jatte, which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, actually inspired another composer to compose an entire Broadway musical about him. Stephen Sondheim's Sunday In The Park With George was a heartbreakingly beautiful (but fictional) account of the painter's life, and the lives of his 20th-century descendants.



-- Toru Takemitsu, a profoundly influential Japanese composer who died in 1996, had a deep fondness for Debussy's music, and La Mer in particular. During our concerts, we highlighted a brief section of Takemitsu's Quotations of Dream, which quotes Debussy's masterpiece directly. Bringing him into our evening was entirely Sarah's idea, because, as she wrote during the planning process, "Takemitsu's serious concert music is sadly underrepresented in the States. I think part of it might be the dreamlike quality and the transparency of textures and utterly Eastern instinct for time and space that is so far removed from our particular Western aesthetic. It's such a shame, as I know of few composers of the late 20th century who create such a distinctive sound world and speak with such an intensely individual musical voice."

-- More Takemitsu: The BBC did a short documentary on him a while back, which you can see here. Also, here's a section of another documentary on his work in film, containing a fascinating discussion of "ma", one of those nearly untranslatable words that captures the essence of his music. As it happens, Takemitsu is also the composer of one of my favorite works for solo viola, A Bird Came Down The Walk. And last but not least, Sarah herself was once featured as the narrator in a Takemitsu piece commissioned by the New York Philharmonic.

-- From the "in case you were wondering" file: that overly cliched "Sea Symphony" that the orchestra played near the top of the show (the one that ended with a big foghorn blast from the tuba) was composed by Sarah. And if you thought you heard a familiar melodic snippet floating around in the violin area, you were right. It's from Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, also known as Fingal's Cave.

-- Towards the end of the first half, I mentioned an ugly incident in Debussy's personal life which caused Parisian audiences to feel quite uncharitable towards him around the time that La Mer was premiered there in 1905. Debussy had always been a bit of a carouser - he was known to have had at least two simultaneous affairs in the 1890s, and one of his mistresses tried to shoot herself when she found out about the other one. Later, Debussy married a woman named Lilly Texier in 1899, but left her in 1904 for a married woman named Emma Bardac. Lilly, hugely distraught, did manage to shoot herself, though not fatally. Even before the advent of the celebrity-soaked culture we live in today, this was the kind of gossip that got whole cities buzzing, and Debussy was widely reviled in polite society for his actions.

-- Finally, because we always seem to get questions from people wondering where to find some work that we excerpted on the first half of these ItC programs, here's a complete playlist of everything we played, either in whole or in part, on this week's show:

DEBUSSY Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
DEBUSSY La Mer (The Sea)
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Scheherezade
HICKS A Sea Symphony of Sorts (not actually available outside of these concerts)
RAVEL Finale (The Enchanted Garden) from Ma Mere L'Oye (Mother Goose Suite)
DEBUSSY Claire de Lune
TAKEMITSU Quotations of Dream
STRAUSS Don Juan

And now for something completely different...

...a man with two noses.

(It's been a Monty Python kind of afternoon.)

The phrase came to mind as I was flying back to Minneapolis last night (and in a decidedly non-Pythonian context) - I was putting Post-Its on my La Mer score to mark excerpts for our Inside the Classics concerts this week (fun arts and crafts!):



I've just finished a subscription week with the North Carolina Symphony (my "other" orchestra) and baritone (and dear friend) Randy Scarlata, a program of Liszt, Mahler and Dvorak. It's an interesting mental leap to go from a very standard concert format playing some great warhorses - with 4 rehearsals, to boot! - to an unconventional format where I'm worried about timing my music theory portion and making a smooth transition between talking and conducting and marking excerpts correctly...and making it all happen on a single rehearsal.

But the very challenge is what makes it fun, and I remind myself that one of the reasons I do the things I do is that I love the different-ness of it all.

Of Cough Drops & Futility

I'm sitting on my couch in a semi-comatose state right now, which is a position that has become all too familiar to me this season. I think, prior to this past fall, I had missed a grand total of four concerts due to illness in my ten years with the Minnesota Orchestra. Today, I'm missing my fourth since October. (Granted, the other three were all in a single, awful, piggy-flu week, but still.)

I probably shouldn't have played last night's concert in St. Paul, either, given the likelihood of exposing everyone around me to whatever crud I seem to have picked up, but as previously mentioned, I absolutely hate calling in sick if there's any way I might be able to perform, so I slogged my way over to the Ordway, tried not to touch or breath on anyone, and made a go of it. All things considered, I think I played fairly well, considering that I was having to dive into the pocket of my tux for a wad of tissues every time we had a rest of more than two bars.

But I'm not the only one suffering in our viola section right now. Our two front-desk players, Tom Turner and Richard Marshall, have both been battling a nasty cold for weeks now, with the result that, while they are both healthy enough to work at this point, they are also both prone to sudden, random spasms of coughing at any moment, which is not a terribly helpful condition in our line of work. Especially when you're playing, as we have been this weekend, the complete ballet score to Stravinsky's Firebird, which consists primarily of long stretches of incredibly quiet music during which a coughing fit in the viola section would not go unnoticed.

So last night, Tom, Richard, and I (all sitting tightly grouped at the front of the section) made up a hilariously unhealthy triangle, and midway through Firebird, as I was wiping my nose for the 723rd time since we'd come on stage, Tom started to cough. Richard had already been emitting occasional grunts and soft ahems, but when Tom made a quiet strangling sound, it was clear that he was holding back a big hackfest.

Now, ordinarily, when we're playing at Orchestra Hall, anyone who's sick makes a point of grabbing a few cough drops from a big cup we keep just inside the door to the wings, and stores them on a little shelf just underneath his/her music stand, in case of emergency. Tom and Richard have had about two dozen Halls sitting on their shelf for the last couple of weeks. But at the Ordway, there is no cup of cough drops, and even if there were, the music stands there don't have the little shelf, so you'd have to find somewhere else less convenient to keep them. The upshot of this last night was that, when Tom started to cough, he had no cough drop to help him out.

My stand partner, however, did. Ken Freed is pretty much never without a cough drop, or an extra set of strings, or any number of other emergency items, and as I wiped my nose and Richard grunted and Tom started turning bright red with the strain of not coughing, Ken fished in his pocket and came up with a single cough drop. But here's where it gets complicated: keep in mind that we're in the middle of a performance of a hugely dramatic but extremely soft score, and that we're all sitting right under the conductor's nose, more or less exactly where the eyes of the majority of the audience are probably focused. Also, Ken was sitting to my right, meaning that he was too far from Tom to be able to alert him to the fact that a cough drop was available.

What happened next was possibly the world's most elaborate and yet unsuccessful attempt at cough drop transference in human history. As Ken pulled out the drop and looked at me to see if I understood what he was trying to do, I nodded but also immediately pointed my bow at our stand to signal that we were about to have to play again. Ken quickly handed me the drop, and having only a few seconds to spare before our entrance, I placed it on the leg of my tux pants and got my bow up to the string just in time. Unfortunately, tux pants are extremely slippery, and the drop almost immediately began to slide towards my knee.

We were at literally the softest moment of the piece when the drop fell off my leg and headed for the stage. In desperation, I clamped my shoes together, and somehow managed to catch the drop soundlessly. But now we were into a stretch of Firebird where we would be playing continuously for several minutes without so much as a bar of rest. Meanwhile, Tom was still fighting the cough and my nose was running again.

About five minutes later, we finally had a quick rest, so I let the drop slide off my shoe and, catching Tom's eye, pushed it towards him with my bow. He corralled it with his foot just in time for us to begin playing another unbroken stretch of music. Unbroken, in fact, to the extent that we wouldn't have another rest until the end of the piece. The drop remained sitting on the floor by Tom's chair straight through to the finale. Great success.

I'm relating this story only because I've occasionally been asked by audience members about some odd musician dance that they saw occurring during a performance, and it's usually something like this. Anyone else got any good stories of in-concert damage control shenanigans?

Insta-hit

So, to keep up with the levity here lately, have all of you been following the whole "Pants on the ground" phenomenon?

If not, in a nutshell; last week on American Idol, contestant Larry Platt busted out with this incongruously catchy ditty:



Note that Simon says, "I have a horrible feeling that song could be a hit". Prescient words...

Of course, it went viral. Everyone's talking/writing about it; YouTube is filled with remixes.

A sure sign that you've gone totally mainstream? You're being covered by...Brett Favre:



Further proof that you've become a cultural phenomenon; being covered in the style of someone else (in this case, by Jimmy Fallon as Neil Young - one of the most dead-on impressions I have ever, ever heard):



On one level, this kind of thing simply feeds into our (collectively) short attention span, and it's certainly a fantastic distraction (hey, focusing on the latest YouTube hit sure does keep our mind off of real news).

But in a larger sense, maybe it's just the simple human desire to have something to discuss around the water cooler, to have something we can have a laugh over and gather around together.

My question is, how does this happen? How do people/events/tunes/videos/whatever capture public attention? What makes something go viral?

As If There's Any Such Thing As A "Common" Violist...

And speaking of viola jokes, here's a little something I've been meaning to get on tape for quite a while now. Our viola section is notorious for always being up to something, and we frequently reduce each other to hysterics (as Sarah can attest) at inappropriate moments mid-rehearsal. But rarely do we feel any need to let the rest of the band in on the joke. (Quite frankly, your average violinist or bassoonist just doesn't have as highly developed a sense of humor as we do.)

But every once in a while, we enjoy sharing our, um, eccentricities with the world, and earlier this afternoon, we got the chance, at a thank-you lunch the musicians of the orchestra put on for our tireless and hardworking staff...



Mm-hm. Tell me that doesn't make you forget completely about the original! I really don't know why all fanfares aren't written for viola choir...

In all seriousness, credit where it's due: this particular arrangement is mine, but the idea came way back in my college days from native Minnesotan Kate Holzemer, now a violist to the stars, occasional ItC commenter, and avid hockey blogger based in Buffalo. Kate's version of the fanfare (which, if memory serves, included full percussion and a conductor) was first performed at Oberlin Conservatory, at a much-loved annual gathering known as Mock Students, in 1997 1996. She also played in the first performance of my version at Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music a couple of summers back. Thanks, Kate!

Viola-Matic!

Things have been getting pretty heavy around here lately (it's the winter doldrums - I swear I'll stop going off on rants once the sun comes out,) so it's definitely time for a mental health break. This oughta be just the ticket - it's a crazy dweebish video that's been making the rounds of the music world this past week, and it stars, as all great dweebish music-related videos should, the viola...



Okay, quick explanation for those of you who haven't played a stringed instrument for a while, or ever. As you are no doubt aware, our instruments are traditionally made out of wood, and we make an absolutely absurd deal about what kind of wood it is, and how it was harvested, and whether it ever spent several decades floating in the Mediterranean Sea, and on and on. (Personally, my viola's made out of a Canadian barn that came crashing down a few decades back, and I've decided that this is way cool.)

But a while back, this fabulous light-weight-but-indestructible substance called carbon fiber was invented, and wouldn't you know, someone came up with the idea to start making stringed instruments out of it. It was a brilliant idea - not that carbon fiber violins sound anywhere near as good as a quality wood version, because they don't. But professional musicians frequently have to play a lot of gigs in what you might call less than ideal climatological conditions. Outdoor weddings, Fourth of July concerts - these are not necessarily the places you want to be toting your 1678 Amati. (Please don't write a snooty comment telling me that Amati wasn't making violins in 1678. I don't care and I couldn't be bothered to check. He's old and Italian, and old Italians were making great violins in 1678.)

So carbon fiber violins, violas, and cellos started to pop up in the hands of various gigging musicians, as a sort of backup to their main instruments. (Did I mention that carbon fiber is cheap?) I've never considered getting one myself, just because, well - did I mention that my viola is made out of a barn? I just assume it considers the outdoors to be its natural habitat. But they do seem to be a positive development in the lives of musicians whose primary instruments cost more than their homes. And if they can slice... er, dice... um, mash the living hell out of a tomato too, well then, bonus, right?

Labor Showdown, 21st Century-Style

If you follow the classical music business closely, you've likely read already that the vaunted Cleveland Orchestra, which many consider to be America's best symphony, is on the verge of going on strike. The musicians have been working without a contract for six months, and have decided that continuing to "play and talk" will not result in any change in their managers' insistence on a hefty pay cut, so they're willing to risk the drastic and always publicly unpopular step of refusing to perform.

Sarah and I have generally avoided commenting on specific orchestral labor actions here, and this one, if it comes to pass (and everyone is hoping it doesn't,) will be no different. Obviously, as a musician (and one who was trained in large part by a Cleveland Orchestra player,) I have a dog in this fight, but a blog hosted on the official website of my orchestra isn't the place for me to be advocating or accusing.

However, as the rhetoric in Cleveland has heated up, it's worth noting how different such situations have become in the Internet Age. In past eras, musicians considering a work stoppage were up against very long odds in terms of getting their message out. The orchestra management would have the use of its professional PR department to make its voice heard, and the existing relationships between local journalists and that office would likely trump any feeble attempt by the musicians (who, as a group, do not tend to be terribly PR-savvy) to argue their case before the court of public opinion.

Now, though, everything's changed, and the Cleveland musicians have been availing themselves of everything from social networking sites to YouTube videos to make themselves heard very, very loudly, not only in Cleveland, but around the music world. A Facebook page has been set up and has already garnered over 1000 fans. And just this afternoon, the musicians posted a very professional-looking video to YouTube, asking very directly whether their orchestra's management still believes in the core values outlined in the organization's mission statement. The video concludes with a tagline about the difference between "having an orchestra in Cleveland, and having The Cleveland Orchestra." It's a powerful statement, made possible only by the easy access to technology that didn't even exist ten years ago, and that we take for granted today.



The impact of such high-tech efforts on an orchestral labor dispute won't be known for a while, simply because this is the first time in the Facebook/YouTube/Twitter era that one of America's top five orchestras (always a highly subjective list, of course, but I don't know anyone who wouldn't have Cleveland on it) might be walking the picket line. It's possible that the tide of public opinion will be as anti-union as it almost always seems to be during strikes in America, and it's also possible that such PR efforts don't really have a lot to do with how most work stoppages are eventually resolved.

But the opposite is possible, too. And I've written before that I've never seen a decidedly blue-collar, hardscrabble, dressed-down city take more pride in a local arts institution than Cleveland takes in its orchestra. That kind of popular interest in what ordinary folks see as an institution their community cannot do without can sometimes lead to remarkable groundswells. And in 2010, those groundswells are as likely as not to begin online.

As I said at the top, if the worst happens in Cleveland this week (and people I've talked to seem to think it will,) I'll be holding my tongue here on the blog. But you can probably guess which side I'll be rooting for.

Late addendum, added January 19: The Cleveland Orchestra went on strike Monday morning, but by this afternoon, media sources were reporting that a tentative settlement had been reached. "Tentative" in the orchestra business means that the musicians' negotiating team has agreed to recommend that the entire membership vote to approve the deal on the table. It would be very, very unusual for the orchestra to reject a deal that its elected negotiators are recommending, so this likely is the end of the work stoppage.

Although Monday was technically a day off for the orchestra, the strike did lead to the postponement of a weeklong residency at Indiana University. However, Cleveland's upcoming three-week residency in Miami, which has been a major cash cow for the orchestra in recent years, will reportedly go on as scheduled, pending the ratification of the new contract.

Further update: The full orchestra has now ratified the new contract, which runs through the 2011-12 season.

Ask An Expert: Downbeats and hand waving

A question posed in the "Ask an Expert" feature on our site. Bethany Holt wonders:

"How does the orchestra conductor keep the tempo? Perhaps its because I'm used to high school band, but I see no downbeat--just a lot of hand waving that miraculously guides the musicians."

First of all, Bethany, sorry it took me two months to get to this question!

Second of all, excellent question, and one that, in many different guises, gets asked frequently. The simple answer is that all conductors give some sort of tempo indication (including downbeats), just in very different ways, and depending on the circumstance.

With a highschool band, you're talking about a group of young musicians who are at the very beginning of their ensemble playing experience; in this situation, clarity of beat (downbeat is ...HERE!) is of primary importance, and simply keeping tempo/ensemble is probably the primary function of a conductor.

When dealing with a professional orchestra of the level of, say, the Minnesota Orchestra, while establishing tempo and aiding ensemble is important, it's rarely the singular focus of whoever's on the podium. In fact, as Sam and any other member of the Orchestra will tell you, there are large swaths of music during any performance where the musicians don't really need a conductor acting as a metronome. At that point, the conductor's job becomes more about indicating articulation or dynamic motion or phrase direction or overall mood. And when you're trying to do that, indicating tempo in a very vertical way (ie, with big downbeats) can get in the way.

The more complex answer is that this all depends on the conductor as well. There are those who are very insistent on beat patterns (or large beats); there are those who rely less on points in a beat and more on velocity of movement to communicate tempo; there are those with a completely ambiguous physical vocabulary that still somehow get their point across. It's all a matter of intent, as well as every conductor's individual way of relaying that intent. And it always amazes me how orchestras can adjust, week to week, (or occasionally day to day) to different conductors.

So, yes, Bethany, I guess, in the end, there's actually something pretty miraculous about it!

Ideals vs. Reality

It usually doesn't take long for a major recession to stop inspiring empathy for one's fellow human beings, and just start getting on everyone's nerves. If you work in an affected industry (and honestly, whose industry hasn't been affected by the last two years of economic turmoil?) you've undoubtedly got co-workers whose morale has plummeted and whose attitude at work has taken a turn for the nasty, even if they started off the downturn determined to do whatever it took to help pull everyone through. The bottom line is that we all seem to have a limited supply of good will before we start looking around for someone to blame for our situation.

Those of us in the arts are no exception to this rule, and increasingly, it seems like the journalists who cover the arts are getting decidedly antsy as well. Early on in the recession, you could sense a certain amount of sympathy from the press for arts groups trapped between a fiscal rock and hard place, which wasn't surprising, given what a precarious state newspapers themselves are in. But the new year seems to be bringing a change in the winds, and I've started to notice more writers penning screeds against the cuts to artistic product being made by many of the nation's orchestras and opera companies, crippling once-in-a-lifetime-recession be damned.

What troubles me about this shift in journalistic focus isn't that writers are calling on big-budget performing arts groups to remember their artistic mandates - that is, after all, one of the more important roles of the press. But I must admit that I resent it when writers hide behind big platitudes while failing to take an interest in the nitty-gritty of their subject. Too often, arts writers implore the largest local performing arts groups to take more and bigger chances at the riskiest possible times, without acknowledging what a suicidal leap of faith it could be.

Much as I would love to live in a world where taking unpopular but principled stands is predictably rewarded by public acclaim, we all know that isn't the world we live in. Put another way: do I like that my orchestra and many others are checking every last artistic decision we make against the bottom line right now? (And then re-checking and re-re-checking it just to see if we can squeeze a few more drops of blood out of the stone?) No. I hate it. And so does everyone else in the business.

But at the risk of coming across like an apologist for the front office of a floundering baseball team, I just don't think it's responsible to expect organizations that survive on the generosity of our donors to celebrate a crippling recession by making demonstrably risky artistic decisions and then demanding even more money to fund them. And the truth is, if we did start making a habit of that, the same journalists who are now decrying a lack of originality in our programming would be lining up to demand accountability on the fiscal side.

One of the occasionally unpleasant side effects of being an arts group that caters to hundreds of thousands of paying customers per year is that you don't have the luxury of squeezing yourself into a niche market very often. Full-size orchestras employ close to 100 musicians alone, without even counting staff, and opera companies employ far more. No nonprofit theater company or dance troupe even comes close to that kind of overhead. To stay afloat, we've got to fill a 2,500-seat concert hall on an alarmingly regular basis, and that's a lot different than an organization that needs to sell 300 tickets a night.

Furthermore, much as we might like to imagine that it's possible to completely separate artistic decisions from financial ones, I've just never seen any evidence that that's a workable reality in any but the most outrageously wealthy of arts organizations. And it strikes me as odd that, at a time when much of the news media is still asking the question of how much of our previously inflated American lifestyle is still affordable post-meltdown, so many arts writers seem to be indignantly demanding an immediate return to 2007-era thinking.

P.S. You'll notice that I didn't link to any particular offending article or commentary before beginning this little rant. It's a bit gutless, I know, but I basically didn't want to seem like I was singling out any one journalist and/or risk getting into a debate over the merits of that one piece. (Besides, if you browse the music headlines on ArtsJournal on a regular basis, you could likely make your own list of such commentaries.)

And I though "Engelbert Humperdinck" was funny...

...what about this fellow:



(Via pianist Stephen Hough's blog)

Public Service Announcemet

...to all you composers (or friends of composers) out there:

Applications for the 2010 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute are available; the deadline is March 1.

Dorothy Gale, Meet Catch-22

This past Thursday, we played the first concert in our Sounds of Cinema festival, which consists primarily of the orchestra playing complete classic film scores while the films play on a huge screen behind us and the audience (hopefully) marvels at the power of live music when applied to a prerecorded movie.

But that opening concert, which featured The Wizard of Oz, earned us a decided pan from Star Tribune critic Graydon Royce, and his review brings up a broader issue that I want to get into. Before I do, though, I want to say from the outset that I found Graydon's review to be a near-perfect model of how to criticize a performance without being a jerk about it. His assessment was specific in its critique, consistent in its focus, and notable for its lack of a single ounce of vitriol or smugness. He thought the concert was a noble experiment that partially failed, and he said so, which is his job. I've got no complaints.

So, what was it that Graydon thought didn't work about our collaboration with Judy Garland and the Munchkins? Well, here's the money 'graf...

"The film often sounded horrible -- as though the voices were forced through a tin megaphone. Also, the orchestra overwhelmed sweet moments that define the film, such as Dorothy's goodbye to her three companions; and iconic signatures were somehow lost. How, for example, can you have the witch's guards marching about without hearing them sing "oh-ee-yah; ee-OH-ah?" Was this just a problem Thursday night, or a function of the process that split instrumental from vocal? Yikes."

This is a perfect example of the challenge that symphony orchestras face when trying to present innovative concerts that blend 21st century technology with our decidedly 19th-century way of performing. Orchestras are built to perform without amplification, in concert halls designed specifically for that purpose. Stick us in the Xcel Energy Center, and you'll never hear a note we play, because those spaces are designed for amplified sound. Similarly, suddenly adding amplification to a concert hall can result in ear-splitting or unintelligible sound, even if you have extremely competent people running the sound board (and believe me, we do.)

The toughest challenge of all is blending amplified and unamplified sound in a space designed for the latter. This is a nightmare that our chief sound guy, Terry Tilley, lives on a regular basis. The sad fact is that, as good as Terry is at his job, budget constraints force him to regularly attempt seriously high-tech production tricks using sound equipment that would get laughed out of venues like First Avenue.

So, the obvious question is, why don't symphony orchestras, which are massive organizations by arts standards, invest in cutting-edge sound and video equipment that would make shows like our Wizard of Oz less of a risk? After all, the technology does exist to make amplified sound at least somewhat workable in a space like ours, so why don't we have it?

The answer is complicated, but it basically boils down to priorities and how you manage them. The primary mission of a symphony orchestra is to present unamplified performances of great concert music, and most musicians (myself included) believe that it will remain so for the foreseeable future. And since money is always extremely tight (yes, orchestras have big budgets, but we also have far and away the highest overhead of any type of arts group,) large expenditures for anything that falls outside that core mission tend to be a tough sell.

Musicians, in particular, are incredibly sensitive to any large-scale organizational plan that seems to be pushing us away from a concert music-based business model, and towards a model in which classical music is secondary to pops, or film music, or whatever. And since a first-rate amplification system (not to mention a permanent in-house digital video capability) for a venue like Orchestra Hall would cost millions to purchase, install, and calibrate, and since that system would be literally idle during the majority of our performances, it's tough to convince musicians that this would be money well spent, especially when we're seeing our benefits and pensions slashed, our contracts cut back, and our friends on the staff side laid off to save a few thousand dollars in the worst economy of our lifetimes.

This may well be a no-win situation. If we spend the money to bring Orchestra Hall up to 21st century A/V standards, we're open to legitimate criticism that we're not properly focusing on the core mission of a symphony orchestra and wasting the money of donors who prefer Beethoven to bells and whistles. If we stick with the technology we have, and make a point of never mounting any performances that push the limits of those capabilities, we're essentially condemning ourselves to being the kind of organization that willfully ignores modernity and eventually renders itself irrelevant.

And if we try to split the difference, mounting ambitious programs that may not be up to the considerable technological standard that many consumers have come to expect in the age of HDTV and digital surround sound, the Graydon Royces of the world are going to feel rightly compelled to point out that our capability doesn't always match our ambition.

Whenever I write a post about the challenges of the orchestra business, I try to at least throw out a few potential solutions. But try as I might, I haven't been able to come up with a solution to this problem that doesn't involve me winning the Powerball. So I'm punting this one to the readership: what would you do? The comments section eagerly awaits your creativity...

We Are So Hollywood

So, apparently, those of you attending the orchestra's Sounds of Cinema festival this weekend or next will be getting an intermission faceful of all that video we were shooting during last October's Inside the Classics concerts, wrapped up in classic Tinseltown movie trailer format...



Heh. Nothing like getting a high-definition look at yourself on stage - I'm still decidedly unused to to that part of my role in this series, and the anxiety I feel whenever something like this is in the works has made me understand why people who work on camera for a living are so obsessed with cosmetic surgery. (Sarah, of course, looks fabulous as always. Maybe I need to stand further away from her so as not to invite the comparison - St. Cloud, say.)

Interestingly, the tagline that the unseen voice intones at the beginning of the trailer - "Don't think of it as a concert, think of it as a show about a concert" - was taken from a bunch of meaningless backstage banter that our video crew taped as Sarah and I were getting ready to go on stage for the first ItC show of the year. You just never know where you're going to find your next advertising slogan.

And speaking of video, we've got a whole mess of raw and edited footage taken from those same October concerts over at the new and improved Video section of the website. In addition to the introductory videos Sarah and I shoot for the series each season, you'll now find extensive clips of the first half of the Beethoven Pastoral show, as well as a bunch of videos of our favorite audience members talking about what exactly we do up there. Thanks to anyone and everyone who jumped in front of a camera for us - y'all say it better than we ever could...

(P.S. Extra credit to anyone who can pick out which audience member featured in the above trailer is related to me...)

Tweet tweet

Yet another article/blog about arts organizations and their forays into online social media, this one focusing on Twitter.

While in a broad sense I agree with author Anne Midgette's assertion that "the classical music field’s attempts to be hip and draw in a younger audience are a little embarrassing, or stilted", she lost me at "I’m not sure just how many core classical fans use Twitter". I thought the whole purpose of arts organizations using these types of media was to reach people who would NOT consider themselves core classical fans?

As an outreach vehicle, it makes sense to tweet. But the problem is, many organizations assume that simply disseminating information in a tech-savvy way (and to a different demographic) will lead directly to the holy grail, bringing in "the young people"/increased ticket sales.

That erroneous assumption is apparent in the way many arts organizations tweet - "Enjoy the sounds of Mozart & Mahler 2nite @xyzsymphony". This is not going to garner you any new patrons, I assure you. Because the purpose of many of these online social engines is not "We're cool too, buy tickets!". It's more about fostering connections and developing relationships without the expectation of a tangible outcome or goal.

I tweet regularly (a couple of times a day, usually) and follow about 100 individuals/organizations, from Artsbeat (news and views from New York Times critics and arts reporters) and Tim Lefebvre (frequent bassist of Chris Botti's band) to Serious Eats (for my foodie side) and UniformProject (because I love fashion and this is just a fascinating idea, for a good cause).

I follow several dozen conductors/composers/soloists as well, and those who I most look forward to hearing from provide not information about their upcoming album release, but musings about life on the road or the fantastic wine they had yesterday or finding time to practice while their children are napping. Ironically, having a 140-character insight into people on an everyday basis (often about mundane things - "Today's lemon curd came out REALLY well") makes me feel connected to them. And when you feel privy to someone's inner thoughts, and you find those thoughts interesting/funny/thought-provoking, you might be more inclined to check out their show when they swing through town.

When it boils down to it, I look forward to logging into Twitter at the end of the day to check out what the motley assortment of people I follow have been up to/thinking/trying to do that day, and there is definitely a sense of self-created community there. Because in the end, that's the whole purpose of online social sites - supporting an exchange of ideas and fostering a sense of connectedness.

So why should arts organizations be a part of this? First, because lots of people spend their time hanging out online, and it's dangerous to not be a part of the larger conversation - and non-participation just feeds into the notion that classical music/classical art is stodgy and behind the times. Second, and more importantly, because it's simply very, very important to share ideas and forge relationships. Not just on a basic humanity level (not that I'm knocking that...), but also because when you have warm, fuzzy feelings towards someone/something, you're more likely to have a high opinion of them, feel like you relate on a personal level with them, support them in an emergency, speak well of them in public, and contribute to a positive buzz.

Positive image, accessibility, personal connection. The possibility of all this fantastic self-generated PR on a free platform. What's not to love?

Opera, popera

A Green Day musical? Seems about as logical as, say, an opera about Anna Nicole Smith.

Oh, wait...

Lessons From A Legend

On Monday night's PBS Newshour, correspondent Jeffrey Brown put together an excellent piece on an American dance legend - Judith Jamison, who just announced that she'll step down from her post at the head of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 2011. Ailey has long been America's leading African American dance troupe, and both its namesake and Jamison have been widely celebrated for embracing a staggeringly wide variety of dance styles and traditions.

My favorite part of the interview with Jamison came when Brown asked about modern dance, and how some people often come away feeling like they don't "get it." Her response, uttered with a broad, easy smile: "That's okay! That's just fine! All we want you to do is just get in the theater, [because] there's just nothing like live performance. And you have to remember: there's no test at the end of it... There's nobody strapping you in your seat and saying, you've got to get this!"

So true, and so applicable to music as well. Because so many of our entertainment choices these days are commodities that we know well before we ever walk in the door, it's possible that we've lost some of our willingness to take a chance on the unfamiliar, and by extension, some of our patience for new works that fail to fully connect with our hearts and minds.

Jamison's dead right, though - there's nothing like live performance. Here's one of the many she's created over the decades...

New Year's Weekend: A Retrospective

New Year's Eve at the Dakota with Irvin Mayfield, Artistic Director of Jazz at Orchestra Hall. Great tunes, great band (Vincent Gardner!) and some fantastically funny commentary from Irvin. The show was broadcast live on "Toast of the Nation" on NPR, and Irvin opens with, "Everybody who's out there listening on National Public Radio, we're all butt-nekkid right now at the Dakota, make some noise!!" (No-one was, I assure you - it was -5F outside!!).


New Year's Day at Sam's, a gathering to watch the Winter Classic (oh, Flyers, why do you disappoint me so?). Not pictured; the ridiculously delicious (and gut-stretching) poutine that Sam made. Pictured; Eagles Jenga (I'm not kidding. A shout out to the Philadelphia in-laws for a most creative stocking-stuffer).

And speaking of football...

January 3rd at the Metrodome, watching my first live Vikings game. Had a fantastic time, and particularly enjoyed singing the Vikings fight song half a dozen times. I'm thinking of reharmonizing and resetting the tune, maybe in the style of Schütz. Or perhaps Krenek. (I know, my inner music nerd emerges at the weirdest times...).

Also, check out my Twin Cities entertainment picks for 2010.

When In Doubt, Shoot The Rich

There's nothing like a great big mess of fuzzy populist logic to get my blood boiling on a Monday morning, and thanks to outgoing St. Paul Pioneer Press arts critic extraordinaire, Dominic Papatola, I've just been reading an 1800-word rant of cosmically fuzzy and populist proportions by none other than rock star David Byrne, who maintains an impressively extensive blog on his website.

It's always dangerous to try and summarize an argument that you vehemently disagree with, but since I'm assuming that most of you aren't actually going to go and read the whole blasted thing, I'll do my best to be fair up front. Basically Byrne has noted from local LA news reports that the LA Opera is currently in severe fiscal distress, and is seeking (and has since received) some $14 million from the city/county government to keep it from collapsing before the end of the current season. Byrne has also noted that the very same LA Opera is undertaking a truly massive (even by Hollywood standards) production of Wagner's Ring cycle, at an estimated cost of $32 million. "What makes this situation notable is not the amount of money," says Byrne, "but the fact that the audience will be so small, and that the state is footing part of the bill."

Leaving aside the question of how we're defining "small," Byrne's obviously got a point here. It's wildly awkward, to say the least, to be asking for a massive government bailout at the same time that you're continuing work on the operatic equivalent of Avatar.

Of course, bailing on a project as big as the Ring when you've already committed significant resources to it might not make fiscal sense, either, so my guess is that LA Opera has found itself in a damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't situation, and is trying to make the best of it. But whatever - Byrne's not dealing in such minutiae. He has bigger fish to fry.

His next target is museums and other cultural institutions around the US which, inspired by huge projects like the Bilbao Guggenheim, decided that a splashy new building (or piece of a building) designed by one of the four or five "starchitects" whose names are actually known to the wider public would be enough to generate new revenue streams and public devotion for ever and ever, amen. Once again, that's not exactly what happened, but Byrne again has a serious point to make, and it's one that's been made by many who analyze the arts world for a living.

But that's where Byrne stops dealing in reality, and makes his stunning leap from a defensible idea - that large arts institutions (much like banks, Fortune 500 companies, and families across America) spent much of the last 20 years thinking too much about expansion and consumption and too little about long-term fiscal security - to an absolutely absurd one...

"However this mess ends up, my thoughts are that maybe it’s time to rethink all this museum, opera and symphony funding — and I refer mainly to state funding. A bunch of LA museums just got a bailout from LA real estate king Eli Broad, and that’s great, but I suspect there will be county money involved there somewhere too. I think maybe it’s time to stop, or more reasonably, curtail somewhat, state investment in the past — in a bunch of dead guys (and they are mostly guys, and mostly dead, when we look at opera halls) — and invest in our future. Take that money, that $14 million from the city, for example, let some of those palaces, ring cycles and temples close — forgo some of those $32M operas — and fund music and art in our schools. Support ongoing creativity in the arts, and not the ongoing glorification and rehashing of the work of those dead guys."

Now, look. I'm all for getting America's commitment to arts education back up to a civilized level, but this argument has honestly become the last refuge of the damned in the cultural sphere. It boils down to "I don't personally enjoy or attend the specific performance/museum/concert that recently received money from my city/county/state, and therefore I believe that said money was entirely wasted, and probably should have gone to the schools instead. Won't someone please think of the children?!" It's the arts equivalent of me saying to you: Minnesota spends a huge amount of money to give out food stamps that I never use and that are no good to me. Wouldn't that money be better spent giving poor kids an education so that they won't grow up to need food stamps?

Moreover, in the rush to decry and demonize government assistance of any kind to any private institution in the wake of the massive bank bailouts of recent years, I've noticed that Americans on both ends of the political spectrum have gotten exceedingly good at spotting which of their political/cultural enemies receive some level of public funding. But those same people often seem willfully blind to public funding that goes to causes or organizations that they personally value. People working in the arts or education blast huge state subsidies to build a baseball stadium for a billionaire MLB owner, but conveniently ignore (or defend) the subsidies that helped build the Guthrie Theater. Others toss around words like "socialism" when government wants to provide equal access to health care using public funds, but ignore (or defend) the enormous earmark their city/county/state received to fund a new hospital and create a few hundred jobs.

Back to Byrne, though, because he's not remotely done throwing around baseless assertions and drawing bizarre conclusions from them...

"The problem of course, as far as private funding goes, is that what billionaire wants to fund school education?"

Um, well, tons of them, actually. Your average hour of public radio contains half a dozen underwriting credits for education-based foundations funded by America's wealthy. But I'm sorry, I interrupted - you were saying...?

"Where’s the glamour in that? You don’t get your name etched in marble on the outside of a hall for that, or get invited to amazing galas, so what’s the point? That’s why I’m focusing on public and state funding — let the private funders bankroll the opry halls, if that’s where they want to hang out."

Ah, yes, that old canard. Rich people, you see, don't actually fund arts and culture because they like it or think it's important. They fund it to see their name on a building and have a private box where everyone in the hall can gaze upon them in their fur coats and other frippery. In other news, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett recently grew moustaches like the guy on the cover of the Monopoly box, started charging exorbitant rent on Park Place and Marvin Gardens, and used the proceeds to build a secret volcano lair from which to control their impending plan for planetary domina...

...oh. No. Wait. My mistake. That's what rich guys in cartoons and James Bond movies do. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are too busy funding education and trying to cure AIDS for that volcano stuff.

At it's core, Byrne's argument boils down to this: it's not fair that so much money goes to cultural institutions that celebrate the classics when modern-day artists, musicians, and writers have to struggle for recognition and subsistence-level funding. Moreover, "it’s more important to encourage creativity than to imply that good work can only be made by professionals — your betters."

Hard to argue with that. But Byrne doesn't actually offer any solution to the problem: he just whines about imagined elitism amongst the cognoscenti, and then, like a toddler throwing a tantrum, takes his dissatisfaction with the status quo to its most illogical end: let's just blow the whole thing up! And coming from a musician who actually produces thought-provoking work on a consistent basis, that's worse than fuzzy logic. It's an attempt to start a war that will inevitably claim you as a casualty.