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...)

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!

I'm seeing colors

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

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



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

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

Other cultures have very different systems:



Japanese Shakuhachi music.



Russian Znamenny chant.

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

Mashing Up Ludwig

One of the great things about living in the digital age is the easy availability of incredible pockets of creativity that simply wouldn't have found any distribution channel before the era of the internet and user-generated content. YouTube, in particular, has become a way for talented people to share the kind of wildly creative but commercially non-viable projects that would otherwise likely never have existed.

I suspect that no musical genre has benefited from this phenomenon more than hip-hop. (And no genre has benefited less than classical, for a number of frustrating reasons that I'll leave for another day.) As a style that has always specialized in piggybacking on other genres through sampling and other techniques, hip-hop is uniquely positioned to take advantage of technologies like "autotuning," which allows the user to manipulate the pitch of voices and sounds. In other words, what would seem gimmicky and trite in, say, jazz, just comes off as fun and creative in hip-hop.

But gimmickry can be fun, too, and I've spotted a number of truly impressive efforts lately that make silly but impressive use of autotuning. For instance, you know that awful infomercial that seems to be on every half-hour or so lately? Wouldn't it be a lot more tolerable if that smirky little Vince character had a beat you could dance to?



Even better, wouldn't hot-button issues like gay marriage and climate change be a whole lot easier for everyone to deal with if the talking heads on TV sounded like this...?



I bring all this up because we're playing Beethoven's 7th this week, and along with being one of my favorite pieces in the world to play, it's a symphony that a good friend of mine once did something similarly creative with. If you've ever watched South Park, you know that there's a wheelchair-bound character named Timmy who can only say his own name. He says it a lot, and with great enthusiasm every time. In fact, his energy level is so high that my friend thought it could just about match the energy he'd heard that week at Orchestra Hall, where we'd been playing Beethoven's 7th. And it wasn't long before I was handed a homemade CD featuring this brilliant mash-up. (Listener advisory: it starts off pretty subtly - definitely listen all the way through to get the full impact...)



The credit for that little bit of genius goes to Mr. Benjamin Johnson of St. Paul, Minnesota. Benjamin's a former dancer with James Sewell Ballet, and these days makes his living as a massage therapist in Northeast Minneapolis. He also went to a heck of a lot of trouble to dig up this file when it became clear that everyone else he or I had ever given it to had lost it. Somebody buy that boy an auto-tuner...

Take Me Out (Symphonic Remix)

It's Opening Day for baseball fans across North America, and that makes it one of those days that I'm very glad to have a job where I work weekends and get Mondays off. Sarah and I sport a fair amount of allegiance to the Phillies, having both spent good chunks of our lives in the ironically nicknamed City of Brotherly Love, but I've also been a Twins fan since my grandfather showed me how to dial in Herb Carneal on his kitchen radio, so I'll be swinging by the MetroDome plaza later today to check out the madness and dream of open-air baseball, one short year away.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to think of a good musical parallel to draw to the season opener, and bemoaning the fact that, while everyone wants to write poems, odes, tributes, and even symphonies to the glamour teams (Cubs, Dodgers, Yankees, Sawx, etc.) those of us who root for outlier teams (even World Champion outlier teams - sorry, couldn't resist one last gloat) generally have to make do with horribly cheesy, if locally beloved, anthems.




Worse, some teams on the cusp of greatness try to stir fan emotion by commissioning new fight songs in whatever hideous musical vernacular is popular in TV ads at the time...



Seriously, that song existed. I remember hearing it and cringing during the '91 Series. And really, the problem here is that these embarrassing attempts at commercially manufactured musical excitement lack the timeless quality of Take Me Out To The Ballgame or Casey At The Bat.

So here's my thinking: there's nothing more timeless than a lot of the music we play on stage every week at Orchestra Hall, right? Furthermore, silly electric guitar riffs and hyper-vibrated pop star renditions of the national anthem aside, there's really nothing more musically powerful than a symphony orchestra in full cry. So why don't more teams make use of our kind of pump-up-the-volume moments? Just imagine, the hush falling over the crowd as the anthems are over on Opening Night, and this plays underneath the obligatory gauzy video about the coming of spring, the reawakening of grass and infield dirt...



...then transitioning to this as highlights of the previous year begin to play on the big screen...



...and finally, as the players take the field, the sound system erupts with...



...okay, yeah, you're right, this is Minnesota, and that might be a bit ostentatious. Let's just dial that back a notch...



Now, tell me you don't want to see Justin Morneau, Denard Span, and the boys taking their places to that. 'Cause I do.

Home Stretch

Just a few touring odds and ends to report as we prepare for the final concert of the run here in beautiful Vienna, Austria:

1) The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg appears, from our very limited time there, to be a somewhat strange place. The concert hall (which is awfully good, by the way) is in what looks like a 5-mile long office park on the outskirts of the city. Said office park is bisected neatly by a 6-lane highway called John F. Kennedy Avenue. There is one daily newspaper, which contains some stories in French and some in German, with no immediately available explanation as to how it is determined which stories merit what language. An advance article about our concert in said paper was headlined (translation mine,) "105 Years & Seven Music Directors," despite the undeniable facts that a) the Minnesota Orchestra has had ten music directors, and b) all ten were accurately listed in the article.

2) While we were warming up on stage before the concert, watching the extremely well-behaved denizens of Luxembourg stream to their seats, fellow violist Ben Ullery and I got into a discussion of what such folk are called. Luxembourgers? Luxembourgians? Luxembourgish? Ben eventually decided, based on their stoic manner and eerily synchronized movements, that they are, in fact, The LuxemBORG. This pretty much insured a steady stream of entertainment for the rest of the evening. Resistance was futile.

3) There is this thing that happens now and again just before the beginning of an orchestra concert, and it's always fascinating when it does. As you know, American orchestras gather on stage before the concert to warm up, and the audience generally enters the hall to a low level of musical cacophony emanating from the front which only quiets when the lights dim and the concertmaster emerges from the wings.

But have you ever wondered what would happen if the whole orchestra just happened to take a break from warming up at the same time? This is what we refer to as the dreaded "Awkward Silence," in which it is clearly not yet time for the concert to begin, and yet we have all, for one reason or another, ceased making noise, which has caused the audience to cease talking, and everyone just sort of sits there looking at each other, wondering what's going on. Most of the time, it happens because the concert start is being held up for one reason or another, and it's thrown off our internal sense of timing with our individual warm-up routines. But sometimes, it just happens because we're fatigued, or bored, or because we've been playing the same repertoire on the road for two weeks and no longer have to scramble to be sure we've gone over every difficult lick in our parts.

And so it was that the Awkward Silence descended on the concert hall in Luxembourg Tuesday night. Sometimes, when you hear the Awkward Silence coming, you and a couple of friends can forestall it by immediately beginning to play something, anything, and hope that others take the hint. But on this night, the transition from chaos to silence took place in a matter of mere seconds, and suddenly, there we were in Awkwardbourg. At this point, there's nothing anyone can really do, because no one wants to be That Guy who starts loudly playing his/her instrument just to break the silence, and besides, the audience has noticed us now, and we weren't ready for that, and it's all just, well, awkward.

It's especially awkward if the silence descends more than 20 or 30 seconds before the house lights were due to dim anyway. And in this case, as it turned out, we had settled into quiet time a full four minutes beforehand. It was, needless to say, a very long four minutes, during which The Borg stared quizzically at us, and we did our best to look as if we had no idea what they were staring quizzically at, we do this all the time, it's an American tradition to meditate quietly for a few minutes before concerts, and blah blah blah. The Borg did not appear to be fooled in the least.

A note from the desert

Many thanks to Sam for picking up my blogging slack this week. I'm indeed in Reno for a music director search week, and apart from keeping a very busy schedule (packed with board lunches, radio interviews, staff meetings and donor dinners), I'm suffering the indignity of paying for internet service (is it me, or is $13.99 for 12 hours of internet just really galling? Or am I just full of internet entitlement?). But, couldn't resist forever, so here I am.

Just a thought about a combination of pieces that I'm doing here that I've been pleased with - the second half of my program is centered around the 1919 "Firebird" Suite by Stravinsky, which is prefaced by the "Bluebird" Pas de Deux from Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty", reorchestrated by Stravinsky. The reorchestration is really just a resetting for theater-sized orchestra that totally retains the charm of Tchaikovsky's original. What I like about the combination of these two pieces is on several different levels. First and foremost, I love the notion that "Sleeping Beauty" was premiered in 1890, "Firebird" in 1910 - a mere 20 years apart - and I can't imagine two pieces more divergent. Tchaikovsky has all the oom-pah-pah-ness of conventional ballet music; the contrast with "Firebird", with all that atmospheric creepiness in the opening, could not be greater. Then there is, of course, the odd connection in Stravinsky's reorchestration of "Bluebird". And then, the very surface connection (but connection nonetheless!) that both pieces are about birds.

But they work together in an odd way, "Bluebird" a charming miniature of four short dances (pas de deux, two variations and coda), and "Firebird" a monumental piece of morphing harmonies, modal melodies and an aura of exoticism. It's always fun to discover that two pieces that you like individually make an utterly new impression when taken together.

Takin' It One Concerto At A Time...

Back when I worked as an editor at ArtsJournal.com, my boss and I used to have occasional friendly debates over whether sports analogies used in the service of explaining parts of the arts world were a) a useful tool, or b) a plague on literate humanity. I'll grant that such analogies are way overused in all areas, but sports are so omnipresent in our society, for better or worse, that a writer or speaker attempting to acquaint an unfamiliar audience with, say, the culture of orchestras, can at least assume that a sports analogy will not go over the heads of most of those on the receiving end.

For some reason, a lot of musicians I've known have been extremely attached to the idea that what we do onstage is heavily relatable to what professional athletes do. And in truth, there are some distinct similarities: the relationship between a music director and his/her musicians is much like the relationship of a head coach to his players, and when the partnership goes south in either situation, it tends to be both ugly and public. On another front, just as a football team tends to be only as good as the worst players on its offensive line, orchestras are full of unsung and virtually anonymous players without whom whole performances would collapse.

But of course, the analogy breaks down after a point. The glaring difference between the Minnesota Orchestra and the Minnesota Wild is that we don't have an opposing team on stage with us, doing everything they can to stop us from performing Beethoven's 7th. (Insert your own viola-section-as-opposition joke here.) Additionally, we don't do our jobs with anywhere near the constant media glare that athletes do - the vast bulk of the press coverage we receive is positive, and reporters who really dig for the seamy underbelly of the business (and yes, there is one) are few and far between.

Still, I love the analogies, myself, and lately I've found myself compiling a list of my favorite quotes from athletes real and fictional, and wondering how they would translate into my professional world, were the media ever to start forcing us to hold post-concert press conferences...

Original quote: "My game is like the Pythagorean Theorem! There is no answer for it! (pause while he thinks this over...) Well, okay, there is an answer for it. But by the time you figure it out, I've got 20 points and ten boards." -Shaquille O'Neal

Orchestral version: Our trumpet section is like the Second Viennese School! There is no solution to it! (pause...) Well, all right, there might be, but by the time you work out the tone clusters and retrograde inversions, we've played the scherzo and started in on our post-concert beers.

Original: "You don't need a quadraphonic Blaupunkt, you need a curveball!" -Crash Davis, fictional catcher portrayed by Kevin Costner in the greatest baseball movie ever made

Orchestral: You don't need a $5000 tux and a Grammy award, you need to learn to play in rhythm!

Original: "American football is just Rugby after a visit from a Health and Safety inspector." -Anonymous

Orchestral: Mahler is just Brahms after a good working-over by six bipolar musicologists and an alcoholic philosopher.

Original: "A coach's main job is to reawaken a spirit in which the players can blend together effortlessly." -Phil Jackson

Orchestral: A conductor's job is reawaken a spirit in which the players can blend together without ever realizing that they're following orders.

Original: "Swing hard, in case they throw the ball where you're swinging." -Duke Snider

Orchestral: Play hard, in case the notes on your page turn out to be the important ones.

Original: "You got to be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too." -Roy Campanella

Orchestral: Maturity's important if you're gonna make your living in an orchestra. But you'd better not forget what it felt like when you were 16 and slammed your way through a Mahler symphony for the first time.

Original: "The harder I practice, the luckier I get." -Gary Player

Orchestral: The harder I practice, the luckier I get.

Pushing The Limits

The Composer Institute is in full swing now, with the participants going through daily seminars with musicians from different instrument groups of the orchestra, each of whom pick apart the scores mercilessly, pointing out any register problems, notation vagaries, and other issues that will make the parts either difficult or impossible to play. I've led some of these seminars in the past, and with very few exceptions, I've been deeply impressed with the humility of the composers as their work is critiqued, and their openness to new ideas, even when they don't entirely agree with what's being said.

One of our blogging composers, Ted Hearne, discussed this difficult process today, and brought up an issue that seems to come up more and more as composers push the envelope of what musicians can do on stage:

One of the composers called for the timpanist to hit the copper bell of the drum, and there was massive resistance to this idea from the percussionists. "I didn't do it for John Corigliano, I'm not going to do it for you," the timpanist was relayed as having said. I understand this mentality, given the price of the drum you're asking a professional to play in an unconventional, potentially damaging way. However, some string players don't like to play col legno [hitting the string with the stick of the bow] and some piano technicians won't let you prepare the piano or touch the strings either... The question is: as a composer, where do you draw the line?

Now, this is a tricky problem. The reason our timpanist doesn't want to hit the bell of the drum is that timpani are a) hugely expensive and b) more fragile than you might imagine. The drum wasn't designed to be struck anywhere except the head, and even a small dent in the kettle can affect the quality of sound. But Ted's also right that musicians can be awfully whiny about unconventional methods of playing their instruments, and some musicians are more squirrelly than others, so it's nearly impossible for a composer to find that imaginary line when dealing with an ensemble as large as a symphony orchestra.

Just for instance, a few weeks ago, on the program Sarah conducted, the Shchedrin piece called for some of the string players to rap the sticks of our bows on the edge of our music stands (which are made of either metal or hard plastic) in a fast rhythmic pattern for about 15 seconds. I knew immediately that I couldn't do this. My primary bow, which I purchased from MN Orch violist Myrna Rian when she retired a couple of years back, is worth over $16,000 (more than my viola, actually,) and is my most prized possession. (I also haven't finished paying it off yet.) It's made of rare Brazilian pernambuco wood, which is uniquely stiff yet flexible, but still as fragile as you would expect a thin dowel of hardwood to be. When Myrna owned it, she never even played col legno with it. I do (gently,) but I draw the line at thwacking it repeatedly against a sharp edge.

Ordinarily, I might have switched to one of my backup bows for the piece (I have two others, one of which I might be willing to risk against the stand,) but the Shchedrin is a fairly tricky piece, and I wasn't comfortable trying to perform it on a less than stellar piece of equipment. So instead, I armed myself with a sturdy pencil, and knocked that against my stand in the performances instead. (Since pencils are shorter than bows, this also made my rhythm much more accurate, too.) I would say that more than half the viola section did the same.

Still, my refusal to execute the passage exactly as the composer wrote it doesn't mean that I think he shouldn't have written it. These things tend to be situational, and most of the time, if a musician balks at a direction in the score, a suitable compromise can be found. So I generally think that composers are better off asking for exactly what they want, but being prepared to negotiate later if necessary.

Constructing vacation

We've just begun our two weeks off between the end of the regular season and the beginning of the summer season (we have a week of outdoor concerts - Symphony for the Cities - before a month of Sommerfest). Sam's spending his vacation playing and coaching at Apple Hill. Mine was going to be a working vacation as well, but the set of concerts I was scheduled to guest conduct this week were scrubbed because the hosting orchestra very unfortunately had to cancel its summer season.

So, I find myself with an unscheduled week (unheard of!), which I guess I could spend sleeping in, eating takeout and playing XBox...or maybe learning Ariadne auf Naxos...but I'm really trying to get away from working/studying all the time - the brain needs to be stimulated in different ways, after all...

So, I've undertaken a construction project; begun yesterday and to continue through the next several days - I'm building a new shower in our master bathroom (and not by myself, fortunately; my husband Paul actually built said master bathroom from scratch 2 years ago, from wiring to plumbing to construction to toilet installation, so you could say he's pretty handy!). Here's the progress from yesterday:



The framing is done and the first few bits of cementboard are up. It's pretty time intensive work in close quarters, and a very long 10-hour day. What helps us while away the time (besides arguing whether the studs are plumb or not) is listening to our iPods on shuffle; we started yesterday with Paul's machine and its 3207 tracks.

I'm always curious what music people listen to, and the shuffle option on an iPod is perhaps the best way to get a cross section of someone's musical choices. So, here is the first in a series of musical musings on select iPod tracks (to accompany my construction photos.)

Day 1: Mahler 4, 3rd movement (which, incidentally, was preceded by Public Enemy's "Burn, Hollywood, burn")

Let me begin by saying I'm one of those people who love Mahler. Sam's written about people of my ilk and those who wouldn't think of sitting through a Mahler Symphony.

So, let me set the scene; we are drilling in cement board, and Mahler comes on. It's a quiet opening, barely audible over the screeching of the electric drill, but the tune was unmistakeable, the long-spinning string melody, and I had to stop construction and listen to the whole thing (it clocks in around 20 minutes - my husband was none too happy to be left alone with the cement board for so long). I remember how in college I would put on recordings of Mahler symphonies and absolutely wallow in them, in the true sense of the word - there is something immediately visceral about Mahler which compels me to emotionally wade into his music and which precludes participation in any other activity.

I have a theory that there are Mahler people and Bruckner people. I am absolutely not a Bruckner person (in fact, he's probably one of the few composers I really cannot conduct.) Both composer tend to be long-winded and grandiose. But for me, Bruckner, with his "cathedral of sound" and four-square phrasing, is too above earthly concerns, inhabiting an elevated spiritual space which seems utterly removed from the complexities of real life. Mahler, in contrast, seems obsessed (and often, manically depressed) by temporal matters in a way that speaks directly to my sense of our impenetrable and untidy existence. Bruckner gives us the metaphysical uplift; Mahler gives us the physical world, but in such a transcendent way.

My husband, the horn player, admits to enjoy playing Bruckner - but given a choice, he would listen to Mahler. I wonder if there are others who make this distinction?

More leisure suits

As Sam mentions in his previous post, we hosted/emceed the Orchestra's annual fundraiser, the Symphony Ball, which was a memorable night, not least for its ABBA-licious 70's-ness.

Osmo was in full regalia as well, here's a candid shot captured right after the show (he's such a good sport - please note the green-glitter platform shoes):

Leisure Suits And Long Nights

So, last night was the Minnesota Orchestra's annual Symphony Ball, our biggest gala fundraiser of the year. It's a massive undertaking, usually combining a mini-concert by the orchestra, a black-tie dinner, live and silent auctions, speeches, dancing, and all manner of drunken revelry. To be honest, it's not usually something I participate in beyond my orchestral duties. But this year, Sarah and I were asked to emcee the whole evening, so I was present from start to finish for the first time. It's a whirlwind evening, and you find yourself somewhat amazed that everything actually goes off as planned, although given how much time our development department and volunteer organizers spend nailing down every last detail, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised.

Anyway, the one somewhat unfortunate side effect of hosting this particular event was, um... how do I put this? Hm. Well, okay. It was this...

Fellow violist Matt Young helpfully snapped that shot with his cell phone in the men's locker room at Orchestra Hall, shortly after I finished changing into the green polyester leisure suit and ultra-paisley polyester shirt in which I would spend the next couple of hours. See, the theme of the evening was the music of Swedish supergroup ABBA, and the orchestra was playing backup to an incredible a cappella band from Finland called Rajaton, and Sarah and I had decided to get into the spirit of things with some rented disco-era costumes. Let's just say that one of us looked a lot better than the other...

Unfortunately clad hosts aside, the show was awfully fun to watch. Rajaton is a very high-energy bunch, and their voices are perfect for the ABBA hits. But back home in Finland, they're actually better known for their own a cappella material, some of which is positively shiver-inducing.



They're coming back to Minneapolis this fall to do a pops show with the orchestra, this time featuring the music of Queen. It ought to be a blast - there may be a lot that can be said against the pop music of the '70s, but it does seem to work unusually well with a full orchestra backing it. I know that, as a classical musician, I'm supposed to consider all pops work demeaning and beneath my dignity as an artist, but honestly, I love this stuff. How often does a violist get to rock out on an electric guitar riff that he grew up listening to on the radio? Sure, ABBA may not have Brahms's pedigree, but they knew how to work a serious hook...



Late update: Sarah has chimed in with more pics of our personal evening of That 70's Show. And like I said, some animals are more equal than others...

If Mario Had A Marimba...

As most readers probably know, we're winding up a three-week Percussion Festival this week at Orchestra Hall, and the offerings have ranged from slightly humorous to decidedly populist to deeply intellectual. Percussionists tend to come in for a lot of flak in the business (What do you call an anti-social alcoholic who hangs out with musicians?), but there really isn't much in life and music more fun than watching a bunch of folks wailing away at things with sticks. To that end, here's one of my current favorite clips floating around the series of tubes - the tunes in this medley should be comfortingly familiar to anyone who (like Sarah and me) grew up in the Age of Nintendo...

The Rilling Diagram

The orchestra is working under the baton of Helmuth Rilling this week, (notice that I did not say "we" - the strings have been reduced for this concert, and since my current position in our seating rotation has me in the last chair, I've been cut for the week,) which is always a good time. Rilling, while not a household name in America, is a legend in the business and an old friend of the Minnesota Orchestra. (He once showed up at a rehearsal we were playing on tour in Stuttgart, Germany, where he lives, just to say hi and welcome us to his hometown.) He's a deeply serious musician with a definite point of view, and probably the foremost Bach conductor working today. (He helms the Oregon Bach Festival each summer, and a number of MN Orch musicians are regulars there as well.) He also, as I discovered the first time I played under him, uses what may be the world's most unique beat pattern.

Anyone who's ever played in an orchestra or a band knows what a beat pattern is, of course, and Sarah demonstrated a few different ones during our Copland concerts a couple of weeks back. But in case I've lost anyone at this point, it's fairly standard for a conductor to move his/her hands in a specific pattern for a specific meter. If the music is in four, the usual beat pattern will look like this.

Conductors can and do deviate from this, of course, and as long as the rhythm isn't too horribly difficult, we don't actually need each beat spelled out for us to stay on target. But generally, we expect beat one to be a downward slash, beat four is the opposite, and beats two and three need to be left and right motions of some sort.

Rilling is having none of this. His personal beat pattern for music in four is perfectly consistent, and surprisingly easy to follow, but it is a bit on the unconventional side...

No kidding. That's exactly what it looks like - the usual downward slash for one, followed by a light bounce and curlicue at the bottom for two, then an upward left sweep for three, and a final bounce up and to the right for four. When I was new in the orchestra, my stand partner at the time, Kerri Ryan, and I spent an entire week determined to diagram the Rilling beat pattern, and that's what we came up with. We were, in fact, so taken with our diagram that we began writing it in our music (without the numbers I've included above) wherever we would normally have written "In 4." (This will doubtless cause much confusion for other violists in future performances, but I think this is balanced out by the distinct possibility that, since Rilling frequently has us use his personal set of orchestral parts, the next person to see the diagram will also be playing the piece under Rilling, and might, after a few minutes, actually figure out what the squiggle is supposed to represent.)

Rilling is hardly the only conductor with his own beat pattern. Our former Sommerfest director, Jeffrey Tate, used to bob his head upwards on beat four and downwards on beat one, as if watching his own rising and falling baton. Our last music director, Eiji Oue, would occasionally forgo the baton completely during comical passages and keep the beat by throwing his hips from side to side, a move I dubbed the "Hip Check." (Eiji actually had a whole litany of entertaining podium moves, some of which were variously referred to as the "Safe at Home," the "Tiger Woods," and my personal favorite, the "Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em.")

Eiji Oue In Action

Definitely not Eiji Oue

People often accuse orchestra musicians of not watching our conductors, not realizing that we're constantly looking at them peripherally, while watching our music and our principal players simultaneously. The reality is that we tend to know a conductor's moves so well that we would likely recognize their beat patterns and podium mannerisms even if we couldn't see their faces. Especially Helmuth Rilling. I'd know his hands anywhere...

Preparation throes

As Sam is furiously reworking the script for next week's "Inside the Classics" concerts, I've been busying myself with revisiting "Appalachian Spring". Conductors end up performing much of the standard repertoire dozens of times in their careers, and I, even as a (relatively!) young conductor have certain pieces that I've repeated often. The Copland is one of those pieces; I've done the original chamber version twice and the full version twice. So it's a very familiar piece (and one of the dozen or so I've performed memorized, without a score).

That's not to say preparation is any easier, because "App. Spring" is one of those pieces that will knock you off the podium if you aren't absolutely sure of everything there. Particularly unforgiving is the amount of rhythmic variety in this piece; Copland will present a theme one way and then repeat it with a slightly altered rhythm in it's next iteration, so if you haven't really carefully studied, one is prone to make stupid mistakes. There's also that middle section (starting at rehearsal 35, if you're interested) that presents a mixed-meter extravaganza, where the time signature changes nearly every measure. There's really no time to get lost for a split second in the midst of the excitement of performance.

There are a lot of ways to learn complex meter changes, the most obvious being counting it out over and over, then conducting and counting over and over. But I find that what helps me (and every conductor is different - there are those with alleged photographic memory, for instance, who have only to look at something once to have it permanently imprinted on the brain!) is to create a "graphic" representation of a piece, how its sections are laid out and how its meter groupings work together. Below is an example of a few sections of the Copland:



In my personal "notation", each graph square represents a measure. Meter changes are indicated, as are rehearsal numbers. Longer lines indicate phrase divisions (I also occasionally show micro-divisions within larger phrases) and notations above remind me of an important dynamic, instrumental entrance/melody, structural feature or tempo change. I don't do this for every piece, but I definitely find that it helps me develop an more in-depth understanding of how the music is put together, to see it laid out like this on graph paper. It might look oddly sparse - when I do this with pieces I don't know as well, I'm more prone to notate actual melodies to remind me what they are - but I have most of this piece in my head anyway, and I simply need a mental organizational aid.

When I was a kid I was obsessed with a Bernstein/LA Phil recording that I listened to so much that I can pretty much just "turn it on" and listen to it in my mind's ear. I try to avoid recordings because I find that if you listen to them more than once or twice they start influencing the way you hear a piece of music - not a problem if you're just listening for the pleasure of it, but a huge problem if you're preparing a score for you own performance.

I'm pretty conscientious about putting in adequate time to score preparation, regardless of the concert. Conductors get a bad rap for over-extending themselves and showing up to the first rehearsal only marginally familiar with new repertoire, and over the years I've occasionally watched rehearsals where this was achingly obvious. When conducting a subscription run, one usually has the luxury of multiple rehearsals so that there's a built-in "learning period", albeit on the podium. But when you're allowed a single rehearsal, as we have for Inside the Classics, Pops, outdoor and Young People's concerts - the bulk of my work with the Orchestra - you have to be completely on the ball from the first downbeat, which means I'm concert-ready even before that first rehearsal. Stressful, yes, but it has definitely reaffirmed the good habit of always being prepared!

Ensign Hicks To The Bridge!

In case anyone was in doubt about the lengths to which Sarah will go in fulfilling the duties of her assistant conductorship with our orchestra, the following cell phone photo, which I took backstage tonight during our pops concert, should serve as verification...


Yes, that is Sarah, wearing a Starfleet uniform, holding a tribble in her baton hand, and making the international sign for "I am a dweeby nerd." And yes: she was wearing this on stage, during the show, in full view of 2,450 people.

The best part, though, was when I stopped by her dressing room at intermission, as she had just finished changing into the Enterprise garb. At the sight of my raised eyebrow, she asked, "What? Does it look dorky?"

I just don't know how to even begin to answer that one...

Down to the Wire

Okay, so I have a confession to make. I'm still working on the show.

...yes, tonight's show. The show we're doing tonight. That show. Still working on it.

This is not an ideal position for me (or the show) to be in. In a perfect world, everything would have been cut and dried and etched in stone two weeks ago, and Sarah and I could have spent the last several days relaxing in front of a roaring fire and exchanging witty bon mots about Leopold Auer and Eduard Hanslick while sipping hot buttered rum and pretending that we'd never heard of wind chill.

This is not a perfect world. It's fifteen below zero. And I am still. working. on. the show.

At this point, the work is largely cosmetic, since any major changes would have needed to be made before Tuesday morning's rehearsal with the orchestra. I can't cut any of our demonstration excerpts, or change their order, or write a whole new draft of the script or anything. This is a great relief, since I've been doing all of these things more or less constantly for three weeks now.

But even after the bulk of the work is done, there always seems to be more to do. Tuesday night, after an hour-long discussion that took place entirely inside my own head, I determined that it would look strange for me to have my full script on a music stand in front of me during the show (because, see, Peter's going to be standing where I normally stand during these concerts, which creates a bit of a logjam at the front of the stage, and if I have a stand, I'll be stationary right in front of the first stand of first violins, which seems wrong somehow, and blah blah blah) and ran off to buy a pack of 4x6 index cards (with which to create a fully portable, handheld script) before my local Target closed. (Side note: Target really shouldn't ever close. There should be a law. If I need reasonably priced jeans, a furnace filter, and PEZ dispensers in bulk at 2am, I should be able to get them.)

Then there's the need for special versions of the script to be prepared and double-checked for accuracy. Some of these versions go to our long-suffering stage crew, who need to know what doors need to be opened and closed, when exactly we want special lighting cues to happen, which microphones need to be hot at what times, and when we need all the mics shut down so that they don't start picking up bits of the orchestra and amplifying them to the entire hall. Any member of the orchestra who is participating in the show in some way other than by playing his/her instrument (think David Wright's turn as the Kastchei in November's Firebird concerts) needs what I call a "scriptlet," which isolates their moment in the sun and tells them how to know it's coming and what to do when it does. Finally, there's a last-minute insert to be stuffed in every orchestra musician's folder, reminding them of a certain cue that they'll be getting late in the show which could bring the whole production to a grinding halt if it's missed.

The last few bits of prep actually won't take place until this afternoon, mere hours before we take the stage. After we finish playing two performances of the Young People's Concert that Sarah wrote about yesterday, I'll dash off to a local costume shop to pick up a couple of rentals that we need for tonight. Later in the afternoon, I'll gather the few props we're using for the show and distribute them to the people who need them along with any final instructions.

Around dinner time, I'll give every copy of the script that's still in my possession one last read-through to be sure that my computer hasn't accidentally deleted a page or substituted an earlier draft for the final one. At some point during this process, during which I'll likely be pacing around backstage at Orchestra Hall like some sort of deranged freak, Sarah will appear, looking completely composed and fabulous, and instruct me to calm the hell down. Since I always do what Sarah tells me to, I will.

And that's really the key to this whole thing, I think. We spend an ungodly amount of time and energy getting these shows ready for prime time, but the reality is that whether a given performance sinks or swims is less dependent on absolutely everything going exactly as we planned than it is on all of us having a good time while we're doing it. And neurotic as I may sound right now, less than twelve hours before we drop the puck, I know that I'm going to have a great time with this show.

I hope all of you do, too. See you at the Hall...

Unreasonable Demands

In last week's podcast, Peter McGuire and I talked a bit about the challenge he'll be facing when he takes the stage as a soloist in this week's Inside the Classics concerts. For an orchestral player to step into a solo role is more difficult than you might imagine, and on top of simply playing the Tchaikovsky concerto, Peter will also be a full participant in the first half of the program, playing excerpts from the piece and talking about the strange and ultimately triumphant backstory behind it. To be perfectly honest, I'm feeling more than a little bit guilty about it all, since Peter honestly had no real idea of what would be expected of him in this show when he agreed to play the concerto more than a year ago. But Peter is one of those guys who would probably smile and nod agreeably if you asked him to play the Bach Chaconne while walking barefoot across a bed of hot coals, so if he's at all worried about the unusual nature of these performances, he hasn't let on.

These unusual demands on a soloist's skills, however, did put me in mind of another challenging performance of a Tchaikovsky concerto that I once saw, courtesy of the boys from Monty Python...

2007 Highlight Reel, Part Three

Wrapping up my favorite concerts of the year, two in particular stood out this past fall...

9. Shostakovich Violin Concerto w/Lisa Batiashvili - October 6, Orchestra Hall
Orchestra musicians and soloists have an interesting relationship. More accurately, we generally have a complete lack of a relationship. We (orchestra players) are always in the same place, the same city, playing on the same stage with the same people. They (soloists) are nomads, wandering the Earth and performing with nearly any orchestra that will have them. We usually see them for only an hour or two of rehearsal before the performance, and unless one of us grew up with the soloist du jour, there isn't a lot of personal contact backstage - they stay in their dressing rooms, we in our musicians' lounge.

So when a soloist's performance causes an orchestra to buzz for days on end, it's an event. And Lisa Batiashvili's debut with the Minnesota Orchestra this fall was one of those times. Her Shostakovich was brilliant, yes, but more than that, her overall musicianship and stunning technique had many members of the orchestra excitedly telling each other, "We ought to get her back to play [ridiculously difficult and exciting concerto x] next time!" From the reaction of the critics and audience members in attendance (and at least one reader of this blog,) it was evident that everyone was in agreement. I suspect we'll be seeing Lisa again as soon as she has an open date in her schedule.

10. Mendelssohn Symphony No. 4 (Italian) - November 21, Orchestra Hall
I really don't know why we bother having concerts the week of Thanksgiving. Very few people come to them, and having to play the night before and night after the holiday merely insures that none of us ever get to travel to spend the holiday with family out of state. Furthermore, there have been years in which the programming seems directly at odds with the festive spirit of Thanksgiving week (the year in which we engaged Oliver Knussen to conduct a concert of his own highly complex and difficult music stands out in particular.)

But this year, Thanksgiving week saw us playing an up-tempo program culminating with one of my favorite symphonies, led by the conductor who always leads the field whenever Minnesota Orchestra musicians are polled on the subject of who we should consider hiring as a principal guest conductor. I've blogged about Gilbert Varga before, and I've honestly never heard a musician say a bad word about him, which is pretty rare for a conductor. The level of respect that we have for him is so high that, early in the week, when he didn't like the way we were playing the first movement of the Mendelssohn, not a single person appeared to take any offense at all when he snapped, "You're too good an orchestra to be playing it like that!" It wasn't an attack, it was a statement of fact wrapped up in a backhanded compliment, and because we know and respect Varga, we all took it as exactly that.

Largely because of Varga's uncompromising insistence on quick tempos and intense drive, the Mendelssohn had an unmistakable intensity and brilliant shine to it, and I had a fantastic time playing it all week. Even in the hands of good orchestras, the first and last movements of the piece are too often sloppy and rhythmically lazy, and a turkey hangover could have made things even worse, but Varga's enthusiasm is decidedly infectious, and prevented any such pitfalls. I don't think we've ever played a better Thanksgiving concert in my time here.

So that's my list, and you're all welcome to chime in with your own favorites (or busts) of '07 in the comments. The orchestra reconvenes next week, when we'll spend five days making the last recording in our cycle of Beethoven symphonies before starting up the concerts again. The coming month will feature a two-week mini-festival of great film music (culminating with a full performance of Shostakovich's score for Battleship Potemkin with the film playing on a giant screen behind us); a pops show hosted by Star Trek star George Takei; a children's concert focusing on Scheherezade; and of course, our next Inside the Classics concert, featuring Peter McGuire on the Tchaikovsky violin concerto on January 30 & 31. Hopefully, we'll see you all there!

2007 Highlight Reel, Part Two

Continuing with the top ten list of my favorite concerts of the year, we've made it to summer...

6. All-Nordic Program, Macy's Day of Music - July 13, Orchestra Hall
If you've never been to the Day of Music, you're missing out. Officially, it was created several years ago as the kickoff to our four-week Sommerfest concert series. Unofficially, the orchestra concert that's at the event's heart has become just a small piece of the greatest single showcase of the local music scene the Cities has going: 24 straight hours of live music, all genres (almost - we're sadly lacking in the hip-hop department), on five or six different stages, inside and out of our downtown concert hall. Best of all, the whole thing is completely free of charge, which has assured us of huge crowds every year, despite the fact that we're nearly always competing directly with either the Basilica Block Party or that corporate monstrosity of a concert the Aquatennial puts on in a parking lot on Washington Ave.

There are years where I've actually stuck around for all 24 hours of the Day of Music, just drinking in the atmosphere, and loving the sight of such a diverse crowd at our hall. Our concert, which comes mid-evening on the main indoor stage, always has a distinctly raucous atmosphere (comparatively speaking,) and the crowd, which waits in line for an hour or more to get a spot in the audience, is far more vocal and upbeat than at any other concert we play. It's basically a huge party, and I hope we never quit doing it.

7. Brahms - Clarinet Quintet - July 20, Orchestra Hall
Chamber music is something musicians love to play, because it challenges us in ways that orchestral and solo work doesn't, and because, musically speaking, it's the ultimate team sport. And over the last few years, the chamber music series we present at Sommerfest has suddenly become wildly popular. I don't know what combination of marketing strategy and musical quality has prompted the huge increase in attendance, but one thing that I know doesn't hurt is when Osmo is performing. Our music director is also a talented clarinetist, who played for several years as principal of the Helsinki Philharmonic before becoming a conductor, and after some prodding, he took up performing regularly with members of the orchestra on these concerts. This concert was my first chance to play with him, and the fact that it was on the Brahms quintet (widely considered by musicians to be the greatest piece of small-ensemble music ever written,) made the experience even more memorable.

As it turns out, Osmo is very easy to work with when he doesn't have a stick in his hand, and the other members of the group (violinists Jorja Fleezanis and Helen Chang, and cellist Jim Jacobson) were some of my favorite colleagues to play with as well. Together we pulled off what I thought was a rich, dark interpretation of the piece, and Osmo's work on the gypsy-tinged cadenzas of the difficult slow movement was deeply impressive.

8. Mendelssohn - Octet for Strings - August 26, Greenwood Music Camp; Cummington, Massachusetts
Okay, this is a slight cheat, because I didn't actually perform on this concert, but I don't care. Greenwood is a small chamber music camp squirreled away in the Berkshire hilltowns of Western Massachusetts, and I've been coming here since I was ten years old. It's the kind of place where kids discover everything they love about life and music, and tear up throughout the year whenever they think of it. The idea at this camp isn't to grow prodigies - it's to show a bunch of incredible kids a great time, with music as a key part of the action. No one spends six hours slaving away in a practice room at Greenwood. No one has to listen to a teacher lecture about what a disappointment they are, and how much harder they need to work to become a Great Musician. Kids there spend as much time playing soccer and dodgeball as they do playing Mozart. The result of the low-pressure environment is not just a well-balanced camp, but a higher level of music-making than you can possibly imagine.

The kids at Greenwood stun me every year with their dedication and their ability to rise to the level of expectation. But this year, I was assigned to coach a group of the camp's top young players on a piece that we normally never even attempt with kids under age of 13 - the rollicking, pounding finale of Mendelssohn's Octet for Strings. It's a perfect piece for teenagers - Mendelssohn was only 15 when he wrote it, and it's chock full of teen angst and wild emotion. It's also wickedly difficult to play, with eight players arrayed across the stage, trying desperately to stay together and in rhythm when they can barely hear each other. As I say, it's not something one generally attempts with young kids, but we had the feeling that this group might be able to pull it off.

The truth is, it was close. We rehearsed twice as much as the average Greenwood group does, and my coaching style (which I normally think of as friendly and collaborative) took a decided turn for the authoritarian as the week went on. I found myself stomping the floor to keep the beat, and begging individual players not to rush when they reached an easy section. One of the violinists, who had been placed in the group even though we feared that the part might be way over his head, was struggling mightily to remember where to begin his crucial solo 2/3 of the way through the piece. For the first time in my two decades at Greenwood, I was actually afraid that one of my groups might not be able to pull off what had been given to them.

The day of the concert, my first violinist came running up to me outside the concert barn, and whined that she was nervous. I told her she'd be great, that she had her part down cold, and hoped that I was telling the truth. When their turn came up on the program, dead last on a 3-hour concert (nothing, but nothing, can follow the Octet, so it's always last,) I slipped out of my seat and walked to the back of the barn, where none of the players would be able to see me. I knew how tense I was likely to be, and didn't want any of my fear transferring to the kids.

I shouldn't have worried. From the first snarling entrance of the cellos, the piece jumped off the page like it always does. The violas and then the violins joined the fray one by one, in perfect time, and the rushing drive to the first big cadence was packed with the kind of frenetic energy only kids ever seem to truly have. From there, it was an 8-minute roller coaster ride to the end, and my first violinist had clearly overcome her nerves, because when she led the final chord, she did it with such vigor that her arm left the string in an arc, yanking her bow into the air in an action pose that could have made the pages of Sports Illustrated. The kids and parents in the audience went berserk as they always do for this piece, as anyone would really have to do for this piece. Standing in the very back of the room, I had to turn away so that no one would see the tears in my eyes. Just as they do every summer, a collection of kids playing barefoot in a barn in the middle of nowhere had reminded me of why I love what I do for a living.

I'll finish out my top ten list on Wednesday, with my favorite two shows of this past fall, one of which may be a surprise. Happy New Year, all...