Science Confirms: 12-Tone Music Confusing

From the Was This Study Really Necessary? department:

"A new book on how the human brain interprets music has revealed that listeners rely upon finding patterns within the sounds they receive in order to make sense of it and interpret it as a musical composition."

You don't say. Go on...

"While traditional classical music follows strict patterns and formula that allow the brain to make sense of the sound, modern symphonies by composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern simply confuse listeners' brains."

Okay, well, first of all, both of those composers died six decades ago, so they hardly qualify as "modern." What the authors actually mean is "modernist," which was a movement that burned brightly with composers (and considerably less brightly with audiences) in the mid-20th century. These days, the number of prominent composers still working who persist in writing modernist music can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

But I'm sorry, I interrupted. You were saying...

"In the early twentieth century, however, composers led by Schoenberg began to rally against the traditional conventions of music to produce compositions which lack tonal centres, known as atonal music."

Now, there again, Schoenberg did not write "atonal" music. He created a new and complex system of tones and chord structures known as "12-tone" music. It involved all kinds of grids and math and chromatic doodads and such, but it is not, strictly speaking, atonal. Atonal means that you can just throw any combination of notes together and call it music.

Yes, I'm a nerd. But my point is that Schoenberg's music is actually more strictly organized, from a pattern standpoint, than a lot of traditional tonal music. So theoretically, our pattern-seeking brains should eventually be able to detect those patterns and relax, once we've been conditioned to hear that kind of music. And as those of us who've spent a lot of time with modernist music will tell you, that does, indeed, happen, up to a point. Your brain will never mistake Webern or Berg for Mozart, but you do eventually get a bit of an aural handle on what's going on.

"Research has shown that listening to music is a major cognitive task that requires considerable processing resources to unpick harmony, rhythm and melody."

Uh-huh. Which is why listening to a Mahler symphony is mentally exhausting (but exhilirating,) while listening to a Lady Gaga song (or, for that matter, a Strauss waltz) is the mental equivalent of eating cotton candy. But this all seems pretty common sensical. Was there some actual, y'know, science in this scientific study?

"Using brain scanning equipment Professor Kraus, who presented her findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego on Saturday, said the brainwaves recorded from volunteers listening to music could be converted back to sound.

"In one example where volunteers listened to Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water, when the brainwaves were played back the song was clearly recognisable."

Oh, for the love of... yah. Great. Can we assume that the double-blind study confirming that Wagner had a thing for tubas is on its way?

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Or, as we'd say on this side of the Atlantic, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Throughout my conducting career I've faced the dreaded "How is it being a woman in a male-dominated field?" question, and my customary reply is that 1) I choose not to make a big deal of it and 2) musicians are fine with anyone on the podium as long as they are prepared and competent.

My reasoning lies in my belief that we largely create our own realities; if I choose to ignore the potential minefield of the woman-as-authority-figure model, and assume that others will as well, that's the way it will be. If I act like it's no big deal, everyone else feels like it's no big deal. Classic group psychology.

On the other hand, if I ever became hyper-conscious of long-held assumptions about gender and leadership, it would probably cause me some anxiety, which would then affect both my work and relationship with the ensemble or organization in question.

In terms of the inroads women have made in the conducting field, to paraphrase - we've come a long way, baby. But as far as we've come, there are constant reminders of the underlying discomforts that still exist.

Case in point; the recent firing or conductor/Baroque specialist Emmanuelle Haïm. Slated to conduct a run of Mozart's Idomeneo at the Opéra de Paris, she was dismissed and replaced by Philippe Hui two days before opening night. What ensued was a she-said/they-said unusual in the music world in that the Orchestra made a public statement in response to Haïm's declaration. Haïm claimed that the musicians were unwilling to work with her to achieve a different (Baroque) aesthetic. The orchestra countered that they were disappointed in the lack of precision in both musical ideas and in conducting style/gestures, and that all they care for is the quality of a performance.

A vote of no confidence from an orchestra is rather extraordinary. In her defense, neither a contracted rehearsal period nor musicians unaccustomed to the very particular technical and musical needs of historically informed performance is conducive to an amicable work environment. In the orchestra's defense, Haïm is a self-taught conductor who, while generally highly regarded for her musical expertise in the Baroque repertoire, is admittedly not a technically adept conductor.

The situation is fully outlined in this article from Le Monde; for the non-Francophones, a translation of most of the article here.

What struck me about this commotion is the inclusion of an obvious fact that the author of the article decided to add at the end of a paragraph (I'm using Charles T. Downey's translation from Ionarts):

The orchestra, "called out" by Mme Haïm, broke its customary silence -- a very rare thing -- by the means of the commission elected by the musicians, which declared on January 22: "The musicians were delighted to try a Baroque approach, [but] there was great disappointment in the lack of precision as well of musical ideas in the conducting style." In other words, the orchestra, which wanted only "to guarantee the excellence of the performances," denounced a lack of competence, for this production, of one of the few woman conductors in the world. (emphasis mine)

We don't need to be reminded that there are not a whole lot of female conductors in the world. Anyone not living under a rock is aware of this. So, assuming that the goal was not simply an unnecessary statement of the obvious, I can only infer that this phrase was added as some sort of snide insinuation.

Yes, I'll admit, I'm probably more sensitive to gender slights than your average male conductor. It's simply a matter of experience; I've been on the receiving end of backhanded commentary and dealt with interactions fraught with undercurrents of chauvinism countless times. Again, as I said earlier, my response is to completely ignore it, and when one ignores it, one at least has the possibility of neutralizing an unfriendly environment.

But when publicly presented in international media, it seems gratuitously provocative (a conductor declared incompetent - and she's a WOMAN!). And let me be clear here; it's the author of the article that rankles me. I know nothing about the actual situation and can only assume a conductor would be ousted only because a production was in serious jeopardy and was artistically compromised.

I strive to dispel any notion that my gender marks my work. In fact, most of the time I pay it no heed (yes, even in the four-inch heels). And, again, when one endeavors to disregard traditional societal norms, with enough time one can establish new norms. Media insinuations like this one merely do a disservice to the very real work we've undertaken to eradicate those boundaries and assumptions.

Just when you think we've made progress, all you need to do is scratch the surface to discover the underlying bias. Plus ça change... (and do read down through all the comments; the vitriol is extraordinary.)

And you thought our Symphony Magazine cover photo was awesome...

...check out this very stylish poster by the Berlin Philharmonic:



Or even better, take a look at each individual portrait that makes up the poster - "128 Soloists".

The (Meaningless) Sound Of English

Anyone who listens to a lot of opera is probably used to listening to words sung in a language you don't understand. It takes some getting used to, yeah, but after awhile, you just get accustomed to the distinctive flow of, say, Italian or German, and even though you don't comprehend the words, the audible sound of the language becomes familiar.

So have you ever wondered what English-speakers (Americans, in particular,) sound like to foreigners who are constantly bombarded with American pop music, but don't actually understand English? Well, wonder no more: an Italian singer put together this video to demonstrate. It's an original song sung with American English diction, but the lyrics are nonsense.

It sounds surprisingly familiar, doesn't it? You feel like you ought to understand it (especially when the occasional "Baby!" or "All right!" jumps out at you,) but you don't. This is actually more or less what I feel like whenever I'm in Amsterdam. Dutch sounds basically like a blend of American-accented English and German (which I'm conversational in,) so I'm constantly on the verge of understanding what I'm hearing without actually achieving any real comprehension.

Still, I admit I'm surprised that English doesn't sound coarser than that to non-English speakers. It's certainly unique-sounding - no wonder Europeans are so good at picking the Americans out of a crowd...

Conquering the Great Fugue

Buried somewhere in the raft of comments appended to my last post, WB Stahl made a request for more details on last week's concerts:

"So tell us more about playing the Grosse Fuge. I thought it was fascinating..."

Happy to oblige, though I'm hardly an expert on the piece. This was actually my first time playing it, believe it or not, in either the original quartet form or Michael Steinberg's electrifying orchestral version. And that gave last week's rehearsals and performances a real sense of immediacy for me, which is something that's hard to duplicate in a performance where you've played the rep a dozen times or more.

To begin with, the Grosse Fuge is a bear of a piece to wrestle with as a performer, whether you're one of four or one in a sea of string players. And it can also be a maddeningly complex thing to listen to or study - Alex Ross of The New Yorker calls it "a musicological Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications. It is the most radical work by the most formidable composer in history, and, for composers who had to follow in Beethoven’s wake, it became a kind of political object. Arnold Schoenberg heard it as a premonition of atonality, a call for freedom from convention... Benjamin Britten, who took pride in tailoring his music to the needs of particular performers and places, was heard to complain that Beethoven’s late works were at times willfully bizarre, prophetic of avant-garde, obscurantist tendencies."

That mind sound over the top - after all, it's just an oversized fugue, right? - but I understand the strong reactions the piece provokes. For one thing, the main fugue subject, which goes like this...

(click to enlarge)

...is almost entirely overwhelmed by Beethoven's subsequent counter-subjects after that initial unison blast from the performers. In a strange way, the subject is actually the least interesting element of the piece. The primary line our ears want to follow is a fast-leaping, snap-rhythm counter-subject that starts in the first violins as the violas insistently hammer away at the subject to no avail. The seconds and cellos (and basses, in Steinberg's version) jump in undaunted, and you're off on one of the strangest and most violent trips in all of Beethoven's output. In fact, the dynamic marking stays at forte or louder for every instrument for the next four pages of music. (That's four pages of a single-line part; it's probably more than ten in the score.)

So essentially what you have is four equal lines, all blasting away at maximum volume at the composer's instruction for 5 or 6 minutes at a clip, during a piece that is based on one of the most complex compositional techniques ever devised. It's totally crazy, it's the antithesis of good fugue writing, there's absolutely no way it should be anything but an ungodly mess...

...and yet, somehow, it isn't. I'm still not sure how that can be true, even after a week of performing the thing. In particular, I'm thinking of a passage midway through that first extended forte gallop, in which each section in turn switches abruptly from playing the snap-rhythm counter-subject to playing a furious run of triplets that leap from register to register and seriously threaten to derail the rhythmic stability of every player who hasn't made the transition yet. It's a train wreck waiting to happen, and yet, it didn't happen. And I was never seriously worried that it would.

Of course, having a conductor helps, and in the original version, that train wreck spot is a much bigger risk, since there's no one individual in charge of keeping everyone together. And that, I think, is the real fun of playing the orchestral version of the Grosse Fuge (beyond the simple pleasure of being able to make a lot more noise, of course.) With Osmo insuring that the overall pulse of the beastly thing wasn't going anywhere unexpected, we were free to just attack our individual parts with all the ferocity we could muster, and see where we ended up.

I actually found myself out of breath at the end of our first performance of the week, just from the effort and exhilaration of it all. I don't know whether the audience got as much out of it as we did, since there's no question that this is one of those pieces that is even more challenging to listen to than it is to play, but personally, I had a blast. (And I can't wait to play it on the stage of Carnegie Hall next Monday...)

More $$ For Less Music? Think Again.

For the past few days, we've been performing one of the more difficult and exhausting concerts of our season: a string orchestra arrangement of Beethoven's massive Grosse Fuge, Chopin's 2nd Piano Concerto (with the amazing Garrick Ohlsson,) and Mozart's 40th Symphony. There are a lot of different things that can make a concert seem difficult, and this particular rep covers most of them.

In fact, the moment our first concert of the week (a Thursday morning matinee) was over, my stand partner turned to me and said, "Wow. This feels like a really long program." I agreed. Though, in fact, the concert was right around our usual two hours from start to finish, it felt like a marathon. My shoulder ached, and I saw a number of other musicians massaging sore limbs as well.

So you can imagine how surprised a number of us in the orchestra were to read this paragraph at the end of the Star Tribune's otherwise positive review of the concert:

"It is distressing to note that this program contained barely an hour of music. For people paying top price, that works out to more than a dollar an [sic] minute. This increasing brevity is a disturbing trend."

Now, first off, I don't know what trend he's talking about. A local trend? A national one? I haven't done any research on this, but in the ten years I've been in the orchestra, it seems like the vast majority of our subscription concerts have hovered around the two hour mark, including a 20-minute intermission. Add in the time it takes the orchestra to tune before each piece, the audience to clap before and after each, and the stage crew to reset the stage between pieces, and you're generally talking about something like 90 minutes of actual music per show, give or take.

Second, and more importantly, the reviewer (who I don't actually know personally, but he's a respected music writer of long standing in this town) is just flat wrong about the length of the music on this particular concert. I know because the paragraph above so shocked me that I timed each piece the next night. Here was the breakdown:

Beethoven - 18 minutes

Chopin - 32 minutes

Various encores by Ohlsson: 5-7 minutes

Mozart - 33 minutes

So not counting intermission, stage moves, applause time, tuning, or the entertaining five-minute speech violist Mike Adams gave at the top of each show to introduce the Grosse Fuge, that's 88 minutes of music. In fact, when all the extraneous stuff was factored in, all the concerts but Thursday morning ended north of the two-hour mark. Thursday (the concert the Strib reviewed) ended just under two hours, because Garrick didn't play an encore that day. (Our Coffee Concert crowds tend to be considerably older and less demonstrative than our evening crowds, and they rarely clap long enough to draw an encore from visiting soloists.)

So what was the critic thinking? A glance at our program book explains part of it - we print estimated performance times next to each piece, and this week, there was a typo: the Mozart was listed at 22 minutes instead of 32. (Update: our publications editor informs me that the error was not, technically, a typo, but a reprinting of an error in a source publication we use for such things.) And all three estimates were at least a minute under our actual times, so if you went by the book, it did look like we had only programmed 69 minutes of music. Still, I find it hard to believe that anyone who was actually present at the concert could have come away finding it to be a short enough program to be worthy of comment.

But that's where the nature of deadline writing likely comes into play. A critic attending our concert has only a few hours (at most) to get his review filed for publication, so most experienced writers write a few paragraphs in advance - the basic background information on the music and the performers that won't be affected by the quality of the performance. I'm guessing that Mr. Beard also pre-wrote his objection to the program's length based on the misinformation in our book, then didn't think to revise or remove it after the actual concert.

Understandable, yes, but sheesh. Way to make us seem like we're nickel-and-diming the paying public out of their rightful amount of music...

Traversing La Mer

"Immerse yourself in classical music aboard a luxury Caribbean cruise". Symphonic Voyages is planning a 12-night cruise in January of '11, departing from Baltimore and visiting St. Croix, Antigua, etc. On the agenda:

Join a community of music lovers and world-class artists on a unique vacation experience. Attend daily performances by a full symphony orchestra, chamber music concerts, and solo recitals by the artists in residence. Enjoy opportunities to socialize with the professional musicians who will be your fellow passengers.

I'm curious as to who members of the orchestra will be, as well as what the clientele is like...

Treat Your Audience Well

There's been a bit of an industry kerfuffle going on in Orchestra World lately over a new marketing campaign launched by the Philadelphia Orchestra. I'm not going to get into it, partly because I have a number of good friends in that orchestra and it's the band I grew up listening to, so I'm hardly objective; and partly because I think it's silly to get so worked up over a slogan.

But one of my favorite ArtsJournal bloggers, Molly Sheridan, wrote a post earlier this week that went beyond the trashing of a slogan to address the larger issue that some American orchestras still aren't very good at making the audience feel welcome. That Molly makes the point by relating a personal experience in which she was made to feel welcome makes the post all the more effective:

"I think being open to and engaged in hearing much of the orchestral repertoire in 2010 hinges on fostering that connection between the mass of performers on stage and the audience members out in the dark of the hall. Without it, the most transcendental musical experience has an uphill fight on its hands."

It really can't be said much more succinctly than that. Times change, and though the music we're playing might be timeless (I said might,) the social trappings and crowd etiquette that go along with any public event evolve from generation to generation, and orchestras tend to be horrifically bad at noticing this. My pet theory is that this is because orchestras (especially major ones with venerable histories) prize Tradition so highly, and are therefore slow to accept any change, for fear that even a small adjustment in the proceedings will snowball into a wholesale devaluing of that Tradition.

That's why I'm not surprised that the orchestra that gave Molly such an unexpectedly pleasant night out was the Baltimore Symphony. The BSO is a major-league band, to be sure, but in the hierarchy of big-time American ensembles, Baltimore, like Minnesota, fits comfortably into what I think of as the "upstart" category.

Upstarts generally perform at a level comparable to more famous orchestras like New York and Philadelphia, but toil in unglamorous mid-sized cities that the New Yorkers who write the rule book of cultural fame tend to overlook. This can be annoying if you're an upstart band trying to find a permanent place on the mythical list of Great American Orchestras, but it's never going to change, so it's best just to accept it.

Besides, the upside to being an upstart is that you're probably less shackled to the whole Tradition thing than the hidebound ensembles at the top of the meaningless GAO list, so innovation is easier to achieve. And because residents of midsized American cities tend to be less likely than your average jaded New Yorker to interpret friendliness as a sign of weakness or stupidity, you can buy an awful lot of goodwill from the public just by smiling a lot and telling concertgoers how much you appreciate them coming out to the show.

Of course, I rarely experience an orchestra concert as a customer, so my view of things may be somewhat skewed. So I'm throwing this one open to all of you who buy tickets and slog through the winter snows to hear us play: give me your best/worst customer service experiences with an orchestra. Who does the little things right, and what is "right" to you? And most importantly, what's the one thing an orchestra can do, other than playing great music well, to make you want to come back?

In defense of relevance

I've said it many times and I'll say it again (I'm sure Sam has grown weary of this) - one of my favorite catchphrases - "If you don't like change, you'll like irrelevance even less."

I was thinking about the whole notion of relevance over the weekend, particularly of the naysayers who claim that "classical"/concert music (can't we come up with a better term for it??) has no place in contemporary culture. How is it possibly relevant to the 21st century? Who listens to an orchestra?

My riposte: Are you kidding me? Are you watching the Olympics?

First of all, did you notice the group of musicians that participated throughout the opening ceremonies? Uh-huh. Not a rock band; members of the Vancouver Symphony (although there was the requisite kerfluffle over live vs. Memorex).

And speaking of the opening ceremonies, yes, of course we had Sarah McLachlan and k.d. lang, but we also had Canadian opera singer Measha Brueggergosman, singing the all-important Olympic hymn.

Now, the medal ceremonies. National anthems; empty fauxchestra MIDI recordings? No way. All recorded by a very much real Vancouver Symphony:



And it goes beyond the Games themselves. I'm always fascinated by music choices for TV ads, and two GE ads stood out to me immediately. This one clearly banks on the universality of Beethoven:



And another ad by GE, this one using the slow movement of the Ravel Piano Concerto. Call me a sucker for sentimentalism, but it pulls at my heartstrings every time I've seen it (nearly a dozen viewings at this point). And it's very much the choice of music that creates the poignancy of this ad:



And of course, we can't discuss classical music in popular culture without talking about figure skating - here's a link to what I thought was the better of the two Scheherazade compilations heard in pairs finals. The orchestral music/figure skating pairing is very logical; symphonic music provides the kind of variety of moods, shifting colors, grandeur and drama that make a great skating program. Sure, sometimes you get slightly odd mishmashes of selections, but the fact remains that it still exposes a broader audience (who isn't glued to the Olympics right now?) to concert music. I think it's a good thing.

Of course, then you get the purists who make snide remarks about how dumbed-down the music is - here's a bit of barely-contained snarkiness about how ignorant skaters are about the classical music often used for their programs. Which I think is misdirected, in a way, because I don't think they're concerned about "musical integrity" in the way one would be if one were, say, presenting a concert of the same music just as music, without the spectacle of the skating which is, after all, the main focus in a skating competition. So what if they chop up musical selections or go from Mendelssohn to Chopin? And who's to say what's "tacky" in this context?

This kind of commentary/critique bothers me because it does everything to confirm the perceived snobbery and elitism of those of us in the classical biz (critics and bloggers included). I don't expect a seamless, logical, historically informed performance of symphonic music in a skating program any more that I expect the average orchestral musician to know about a triple Lutz or the byzantine judging system. But I'm happy that music and skating intersect, that a larger audience hears and appreciates it, and that a few might even be interested enough to look up Scheherazade, or whatever. It's all about exposure, keeping in the public eye and ear, participating in contemporary culture. Because the world is an ever-progressing, ever-changing place. And who likes irrelevance?

May Auld Antagonism Be Forgot...

There was an interesting concert review in the New York Times over the weekend, interesting partly because you don't often see newly formed new music ensembles that play in Greenwich Village clubs getting full-length reviews in the Gray Lady, and partly because of the direction critic Anthony Tommasini chose to meander in the later paragraphs. Early on, Tommasini notes that, "Though the performances were brilliant, it was the irreverent mixing of works that excited me,"and he goes on to detail a widely varied program ranging from thorny Modernism to pop-influenced music by ultra-trendy 20-somethings.

The lesson we're meant to draw is one I've written about before, that the new generation of young performers and composers "could not care less about the stubborn ideology that divided the camps long ago." This is hardly a new notion, of course. Many of us in the music world have been writing about this long-overdue evolution for years, and ArtsJournal even hosts a music blog whose tagline declares, "No Genre Is The New Genre." But Tommasini notes an exception to the new egalitarian rule:

"Still, the program was not all embracing. The works played here were either by complex modernists (Stockhausen, Babbitt, Berio), or younger freewheeling composers of a post-modernist bent, what the critic Greg Sandow calls the “alternative classical” music of today. Missing from the roster was anything by composers of, for want of a better word, the middle ground, what John Harbison has wryly referred to as “us notes-and-rhythms composers,” meaning those who more or less write pieces for conventional instruments, largely eschewing electronics, composers more concerned with thematic development than with instrumental atmospherics and sound collages."

Now, that's a very interesting observation to me, because, for those of us who play in symphony orchestras for a living, those "notes-and-rhythms" composers are almost all the new music we see! Orchestras, which by definition have to draw huge audiences to survive, rarely program the kind of aggressively modernist works that sent audiences scurrying for the exits in the 1960s and '70s, but we also rarely play works by those hip young experimenters so beloved in the New York club scene. (This isn't because we don't like them, by the way - it's because most of them aren't writing music for orchestras yet. Stress on yet - those who like to see every new musical trend as yet another sign that orchestras are dying love to claim that every new generation of composers has abandoned the large-scale orchestra, when the reality is always that there's simply no point writing an orchestral piece until you know there's an orchestra waiting to play it.)

What we do play is music by those more "mainstream" composers that Tommasini worries about - John Harbison, Aaron Jay Kernis, John Corigliano. (Does Kalevi Aho fit in that group? Not sure...) And while I think the Times is right to point out that there's still a wide gulf between the music that is held in high esteem in academic circles and that which large swaths of the public are likely to embrace, it's not something I think of as a serious problem. Academia is always operating on a different (and less market-driven) plane from the rest of society - it's why academics prefer to stay in the academy, while the rest of us couldn't wait to escape it.

As Tommasini says in his final paragraph, "The important news is that the end of dogma is indisputable. Empowered American musicians and composers from the new generation have it in them to foster pluralism and save classical music from itself." To which I can only add: ...and it's about [redacted by request] time.

Musical Chairs

This week, we're playing a richly varied program of music by Sibelius, Grieg, and Mozart - meat and potatoes repertoire - and I'm sitting at the back of the section with Sifei Cheng, who was my very first stand partner when I joined the Minnesota Orchestra. And for some reason, that's got me thinking about the benefits and drawbacks of the way we section string players drift around the stage from week to week.

Back when I first arrived in Minneapolis, in February 2000 (yup, my 10th anniversary with the orchestra comes up next Monday!), every member of the string section had a designated chair where we sat every day, every rehearsal, every concert, unless someone ahead of us was absent for some reason. Technically, all "non-titled" section players were equals, but there was no chance to move closer to the front of the section until someone ahead of you left the orchestra. In some sections, a vacancy would be filled by moving all the existing players up to fill in the gap, then placing the newest member at the back, but in other sections, any existing player wishing to move up would have to actually re-audition. Some members of our violin section actually auditioned 5 or more times over the course of their careers, just to get a better, but still non-titled, chair!

My chair was on the inside of the fourth desk of violas, with Sifei just to my left. It's not a bad chair, actually, despite being nearer the back of the stage than the front. You can usually see both the conductor and the principal viola pretty clearly; you're surrounded by other violists; and on a good day, you can even see the concertmaster, which is a bonus for any string player.

Also, as stand partners go, it probably doesn't get any better than Sifei. (His name is pronounced SEE-fee, by the way - I've heard some amazing butchery of that name over the years.) He's one of the calmest and friendliest people I've ever met, he plays absolutely effortlessly, and almost nothing fazes him. When you're a 23-year-old kid less than two years removed from college and jumping into the first really big job of your professional life, that's exactly the kind of player you want next to you. (It also didn't hurt that we're both obsessive sports fans. You've gotta have something to talk about when the guest conductor's horrible and the music is easy.)

I'd been in the orchestra for a little over three years when everything changed, and we voted to scrap our fixed-chair tradition for a mildly complicated system of revolving seating for section players. It was strictly voluntary for existing members of the orchestra (so as to protect those players who really had spent years painstakingly working their way up through the ranks,) but mandatory for anyone joining up after the system was enacted. The rationale for revolving is simple: sitting up front is better in almost every way. You can hear more accurately, see more clearly, and generally feel far more important to the ensemble blend than you do sitting thirty feet back on last desk.

Then, there's the undeniable fact that not everyone in a fixed seating system gets along as well as Sifei and I did. In my first professional orchestra, the old-timers loved to tell the story of the two bass players who sat together for decades without speaking, each with a single earplug stuffed into the ear that was turned towards the other. So the chance to switch seats every couple of weeks can be a lifesaver.

On the other hand, weeks like this one remind me of just how comfortable I used to feel with Sifei always on my left. It wasn't just that he was (and is) a monster player; it's that the permanence of a single stand partner allows you to build chemistry over time, the same way that members of a string quartet do. When you know instinctively how the person you're sitting with reacts to any musical situation, there's a comfort level, or at least a heightened awareness, that comes over your playing. Basically, it feels more like a partnership, at least when things are going well.

So while I don't quite miss the days when my career as a violist began and ended at "fourth stand inside," I feel lucky that I got a chance to try out both systems. It's still better at the front, but it's nice having a slightly deeper musical partnership that you get to revisit every now and then. Best of both worlds, if you ask me...

Music for a bad trip

During a little online research for a preconcert lecture Friday, I came across this article on Mozart and Haydn which concluded with the following paragraph:

Some years ago, I was discussing music with two friends, one of them a distinguished contemporary composer. We were chewing over the following peculiar question, peculiar especially since it concerned an experience none of us had had in approximately three decades: If you had taken LSD and suddenly realized your trip was heading seriously south, what music would you put on the stereo to restore your emotional equilibrium and silence your demons? All three of us agreed without hesitation: a Haydn quartet. Almost any Haydn quartet.

Which got me to thinking, taking aside the LSD, what music do you turn to "to restore your emotional equilibrium and silence your demons"? I'm not talking music to sooth or relax to, I'm talking about the stuff that fundamentally grounds you and gives you that deep and firm understanding of the rightness of living and your place in the world. For me, Bach Well Tempered Clavier puts molecules back in order when the universe is going astray. You?

Concert-filled weekend

The Superbowl was great (the last quarter made it a truly exciting game, and I'm so happy for the city of New Orleans!), but what really made my weekend was a pair of concerts, both in Orchestra Hall, both of which reminded me why I love what I do, and why it is so important.

Saturday night found me at the Hall taking in the last of the subscription concerts this week, featuring Minnesota Orchestra Conductor Laureate Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and principal second violin Gina DiBello. Gina's Mozart 3 was fantastic; direct, unfussy, with a keen ear for phrasing and a gorgeous tone quality. And the second movement of that concerto - well, it's one of those sublime Mozart slow movements that's absolutely transporting.

After intermission came Brahms' Third Symphony, which I was looking forward to - Stan is known for this repertoire. And the performance certainly didn't disappoint. It's astonishing how different an orchestra can sound under different conductors, and I've noted in the past how Stan elicits a lush, über-romantic string sound that's a distinct contrast to the more direct, lean sound that Osmo favors. And Stan's take on Brahms was very much reflective in his approach to sound; generous tempos, ample rubato, a much more wide-arc vision of the symphony. If Osmo turns corners at breakneck speed, Stan slows down and takes the outer lane.

And I love both. Because it's up to the individual to make dots and dashes on a page come to life, and every individual is different. And every performance is different. And it can mean different things to different people at different times...and really, isn't that what we do this for?

Sunday took me back to the Hall (this was a really, really unusual weekend for me - no concerts, no travel, something I experience only a handful of times a year!) for performances by the Minnesota Youth Symphonies.

Watching 4 ensembles of nearly 300 students to a Hall packed with family and friends giving standing ovation after standing ovation - pretty cool. You could see the seriousness of intent on every performers face, and the excitement was buzzing backstage. And some really serious music was played; Minnesota Orchestra principal trumpet and Minnesota Youth Symphony co-director Manny Laureano led the senior ensemble through Strauss' Rosenkavalier Suite, and challenge for any orchestra. I'm always impressed with what kids can accomplish given the right structure and leadership, and it's obvious that Manny and his colleagues at MYS provide that in spades.

And it reminded me of one of the important lessons we learn in playing in an ensemble; a concerted group effort produces results that are impossible to come by individually. As a culture we place such emphasis on individual goals and achievements, I sometimes wonder if we skew too far towards the cult of self-determination (although, as a woman in what is still very much a man's world, I'm not knocking the importance of self-determination). It's just that we sometimes forget that some of the more extraordinary things in life are accomplished by working in unity with others towards an agreed-upon goal - and those students yesterday, moving together onstage, were a shining example. Food for thought.

Want Ad Fail

This turned out to be one of those relatively rare years when the actual Super Bowl was better than the much-anticipated Super Bowl ads. (And Vikings fans - didn't it take away a little bit of the sting when you watched Peyton Manning throw essentially the exact same late-4th-quarter interception that Brett Favre threw in the NFC championship game?) But I couldn't help but notice one particular ad that resulted in a virtual blizzard of Facebook and Twitter updates from pretty much every musician I know...



Now, I'll be the first to admit: that's a cute ad. Who doesn't love a good fiddling beaver/rags to riches story? Just one problem, and this is what got everyone a-twittering the moment the ad aired last night: Monster.com doesn't actually have ads for violinists. Or for any other instrument. Seriously, they don't - go look. (You'd think they would have at least keyed that particular search term to redirect to a video of the beaver ad, wouldn't you?)

Of course, since the ad also winds up with the beaver relaxing with his fiddle and a bikini-clad babe in a hot tub in the bed of a pickup truck (if only the gig that results in that level of celebrity existed...) perhaps accuracy was not the #1 concern. Or maybe, just maybe, as my friend Jo suggested, Monster had a whole bunch of ads for violinists, but the beavers got to 'em all before the rest of us could jump online. Stupid beavers.

Music As Brain Food

In the last few years, it seems like there's been a surge of interest in music and the human brain. Renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks jump-started the conversation with his remarkable 2007 book, Musicophilia, which was part scientific examination of how our brains process and react to music, and part deeply personal memoir of the author's own lifelong love of classical music.

Sacks also showed up on an episode of WNYC's radio show/podcast Radiolab (which I can't recommend highly enough, by the way) to talk about a British man with "the most severe case of amnesia ever documented." Remarkably, while the man had forgotten nearly every detail of his life, down to the names of his children, and could barely speak coherently, he could remember how to read music, sing, and even conduct a choir!

I've been fascinated by the way the brain processes music since the summer when I was 15 years old. I was attending a summer music camp at which we were encouraged, on Sunday mornings, to walk down the hill into the tiny town the camp was in, and become the summer choir at the village church. I loved to sing, and loved the people who attended the church, so I never missed a Sunday, even though I had little interest in the actual service.

But that summer, the church had just lost its pastor to a larger church in another part of the state, so an interim pastor had been appointed while a permanent replacement was sought. The fill-in was named Jed, as I recall, and he seemed like a wonderful and caring man, but he had a terrible stutter that nearly prevented him from being able to speak complete sentences. His condition was ameliorated by an electronic device, but it still made his sermons a challenge for everyone involved.

But the very first week I attended one of Jed's services, I was dumbstruck to see him open a hymnal and sing along with the choir, in full, unstuttering voice. So long as the words were married to a melody, he never missed a beat. A few weeks later, I worked up the nerve to ask him about it, and he explained that, because music is processed by a different part of the brain than language, people with his condition could frequently leave their stutter behind when singing. Remarkable.

Late last year, a new scientific paper was published that really gets into the nitty-gritty of how we hear various kinds of music, and why, evolutionarily, we even bother with the stuff at all. You can get the full paper here, but unless you're actually a scientist, you may have better luck with this excellent summary by science writer Jonah Lehrer. Here's the money graf:

"There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality.

The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of 'low-probability notes'. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty - we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns - that's exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance."

All of which could help explain why fans of one kind of music have trouble understanding or liking another, or why someone who listens to a lot of Stravinsky and Bartok might have an easier time deciphering Schoenberg than someone who listens to a lot of Mozart and Haydn. The real bottom line seems to be that our brains are designed to be exercised, and respond best when regularly challenged. And yes, I'm already trying to work out a way to insert this whole concept into next season's ItC concerts...

All together now

Marin Alsop conceived of and presented some unusual concerts this week, featuring nearly 600 amateur musicians playing alongside the professionals in the Baltimore Symphony in a program called "Rusty Musicians with the BSO". The requirements? Simply to be over the age of 25, play an orchestral instrument and be able to read music.

In terms of community-building, I don't think it gets much better than this. I keep harping on the fact that people crave experiences in which they feel involved in the process, and this kind of thing is a fantastic example of how orchestras can be inclusive of their audiences (current and potential). The logistics of this particular program sound daunting - 600 amateur musicians signed up - but instead of a single mammoth concert, the amateurs were broken up in groups over several days. It's some good outside-the-box thinking.

Although a Washington Post article claims that only the Pittsburgh Symphony has tried anything similar, many smaller orchestras (mostly regionals) have experimented with these types of concerts (for instance, one of my ex-orchestras, the Richmond Symphony, has been doing one for several years). It's always fascinating for me to see how the higher-profile orchestras often pick up on projects that smaller orchestras produce, and also how mainstream media rarely give credit to those smaller organizations. The regional and small per-service groups that make up the backbone of the network of American orchestras most often work in relative anonymity, but they are where much of the creative thinking in our field comes from.

What I particularly love about the whole amateurs-playing-with-pros idea is that it touches on the fact that most people who play an instrument in their youth don't then go on to become professional musicians. But that's not to say they ever lose the enjoyment of playing an instrument; in fact, I would venture to say that it's probably more "fun" for amateurs to play, at whatever level, because their livelihood and sense of self aren't bound up in it.

In a not-so-distant past, people gathering for impromptu amateur chamber music parties was a regular occurrence; even in my childhood, I remember how much fun it was to gather around the piano to sing songs (admittedly, my family was a little...old-fashioned). But how wonderful to maintain a childhood hobby into adulthood, and then be able to share the stage with a top American orchestra! It's empirically and good thing...and it doesn't hurt an orchestra's PR either.

Building For The Future

This is going to be a delicately written post, for a lot of reasons. Anytime politics and the arts start to get mixed up with each other, there seems to be a better than even chance that someone is going to start shouting at someone else, and the last thing we want is for that to happen here. But I wanted to draw your attention to a major project that the Minnesota Orchestra is preparing to undertake, and offer up some ways you could help us out if you felt like it.

If you follow the Twin Cities' arts scene closely, you've probably read something about a proposed renovation of Orchestra Hall that's been in the works for years now. You may even remember when the (decidedly preliminary) plan was for this to be a truly gargantuan, $100-million undertaking, and people were excitedly throwing out ambitious ideas from a full-scale restaurant in the lobby to a condo tower on top of the hall.

That, of course, was in the days when the American economy looked unstoppable, and huge cultural construction projects were popping up all over the Twin Cities, and for that matter, across the country. Today, as everyone knows all too well, things are very, very different, and the folks in charge of our organization have known for some time that we would need to significantly scale back our plans for the venue that houses our orchestra, our patrons, and our staff if we wanted the dream of a better Orchestra Hall to come to fruition.

Everyone involved knew immediately that, when we began to talk about what absolutely has to change to make Orchestra Hall a truly functional and welcoming 21st-century venue, we would have to focus primarily on the spaces that we musicians are almost never in. To put a finer point on it: our concert hall seats 2,450 people. Our lobby, on the other hand, can comfortably hold about 800. That's not a good situation for anyone trying to find a bathroom, buy a drink at intermission, or even just have a nice conversation before or after the show.

Secondly, as much as we all love the interior of our acoustically superior hall, it was built in the early 1970s, and technology has come a long way since then, to put it mildly. We have one of the very best stage crews in the business, but they are frustrated every day by how difficult it is to stage the simplest of events (especially Young People's Concerts, which tend to involve elaborate staging and amplification) with the sound, light, and audio/video equipment we have available. And speaking of education, the concerts we play for kids have become a hugely important part of our mission as an orchestra, and the renovation plans include the addition of more flexible and welcoming spaces for children to experience live music. As someone who spends a lot of hours playing the award-winning WAMSO Kinder Konzerts for the pre-K set, I can't wait for the day when we can give those kids a truly first-class place to visit.

Now, over the next few weeks, you're likely going to be seeing news about our plans start popping up again in the local press, because the legislature is about to open its session, and begin considering what capital projects to include in this year's bonding bill. For cultural organizations, a bonding request is not something you approach lightly. No one wants to be seen asking the public to foot the cost of a project that doesn't already have significant measurable public support. And no one needs to be told that money is tight everywhere right now.

Still, with construction costs going nowhere but up, and nearly 2/3 of the cost of our scaled-back renovation already pledged from private individuals and corporate supporters, we're taking our case to the legislature and Governor Pawlenty this session, in an effort not only to better serve the hundreds of thousands who come through our doors every season, but also to create hundreds of construction jobs at a time when our state desperately needs them. The amount we're asking for isn't small, but it is, I believe, responsible, and promises a huge return on investment.

Here's where you come in. If this is something that interests you, and you'd like to help us out by showing your support for the Orchestra Hall renovation project, we've created a special corner of our web site which contains a lot more information, answers to a lot of questions about what we're planning and why we're planning it now, and even an e-mail list you can join to get updates on the bonding process. Essentially, this is a way for you to let those who will hold the fate of this project in their hands know that you care about the Minnesota Orchestra and its continued vitality.

Make no mistake: the folks at the legislature and in the governor's office are going to have to make a lot of very tough decisions in the 2010 session. And when you ask people in government how they make calls like these, they tell you that, first and foremost, they try to find out how their constituents feel, and where their priorities lie.

We know for a fact (in fact, those of us in the orchestra brag about it regularly to our friends who work in other US cities) that the people of Minneapolis-St. Paul are second to none in their passionate support for the arts and for live music in particular. Our audiences are among the most enthusiastic and diverse that you'll find anywhere, and I love the fact that, on any given night, I can look out into the crowd at Orchestra Hall and see a middle-aged guy in a suit seated next to a college student who looks like he's going duck hunting. It's that kind of engagement from all corners of the community that makes Minnesota such an incredible place to live and work. I wouldn't trade it for anything, and I'm guessing that most of you wouldn't, either.

So if you'd like to help support our Building For The Future project, please take a moment to click over to the site and sign up to be an advocate for Orchestra Hall. We need all the help we can get, and hopefully, we'll be able to return the favor several times over in the next few years...

Ask An Expert: Music That Won't Let Go

On the heels of last week's ItC concerts that featured music of Claude Debussy, we got this excellent Ask An Expert question from Pat O'Regan...

Q: When I leave the concert, almost invariably... I am born away by the music. Walking to the car, phrases of the evening’s performance resound in my mind. The feeling can be summed up as “Oh, the music!” Very often, this continues through the rest of the evening. Even waking in the morning, shaking off sleep, my first thought is, “Oh, yes, it was the music. What a wonderful evening.”

But Debussy was another matter altogether. I found the pieces strangely captivating, but I was not moved by them. (I am not talking about the Orchestra here, but about Mr. Debussy.) Leaving the concert, I could think of nothing to remember, and being “born away” was reduced to “well, that was interesting.” Isn’t this a demerit to Mr. Debussy? Doesn’t the failure to stir the soul – at least this one – make him a lesser composer than those other guys? Do you hum Debussy from time to time? Am I wrong to think that he is not in the same league as, say, Mozart, and might this lack of impact on the listener be the reason? Or is there no lack, and it just takes a fine musical mind to appreciate this music – in which case, my case is hopeless. What I am asking is: Does the man stir you as much as those other guys?

Well, first of all, musical taste is obviously highly subjective, so this is not so much an Ask An Expert situation as it is Ask Another Random Human Being Who Likes Music. In other words, I would never denigrate someone else's musical taste simply because a composer I like doesn't do much for him/her. There are undeniably great composers whose music does very little for me, even as I can recognize their skill.

That having been said, my short answer to Pat's core question would be that yes, Debussy stirs me every bit as much (and in fact, more than) most of your standard-issue classic and romantic era German composers. However, I would steer firmly away from the notion that this is because I have a "fine musical mind" and Pat somehow doesn't. Personal taste issues aside, I've long theorized that the most important variable shaping our taste in music is when we were first exposed to it, and how often.

Now, I grew up playing a lot of chamber music, and was lucky enough to be introduced to the Debussy string quartet while I was a teenager. It blew me away (and still does - just tonight, I slogged through the snow to watch some friends playing it at the Southern Theater, and it's as viscerally exciting a piece for me now as it was when I was 15,) and set in motion a larger interest in this decidedly un-German style of music. It didn't make me appreciate Beethoven and Brahms any less - it just made the universe a little bigger for me.

On the other hand, I did not play a lot of orchestral music while I was a teen, so I wasn't being directly exposed to a lot of stuff that other young musicians my age were. As a result, when I got to college and started playing in orchestra every day, I found that my tastes were a lot more conservative than most. The Rite of Spring, which everyone assured me was a mind-blowingly great piece, did quite literally nothing for me for years, and the massive symphonies of Gustav Mahler and the great tone poems of Richard Strauss felt similarly unaffecting. It wasn't that I questioned their greatness - I just didn't personally derive much pleasure from playing or hearing them.

Eventually, the light bulb went on for me regarding Mahler, Stravinsky, and Strauss, but it took many years, and a lot of performances. And I'm sure that, had my first serious, prolonged exposure to those titans of the orchestra world come earlier in my life, it wouldn't have taken nearly so long for me to feel personally attached to them. We form connections so easily as kids, and as adults, it can be frustratingly difficult to take the same pleasure in new experiences that we take for granted when we're young.

Of course, some composers (and authors, and painters, and foods) we never learn to like, no matter how many other people are obsessed with them. And that's fine, of course - if Debussy isn't your thing, at least you know to avoid him in the future. But you never know: if you'd asked 20-year-old me if I thought I'd ever become a fan of Stravinsky, you'd have gotten a pretty confident, and utterly wrong, reply. So Pat, it might be worth your time to give Debussy a few more chances to move you...