Where You Least Expect It

I'm spending today and tomorrow making the long drive back to Minneapolis from the East Coast, and at the moment, I've stopped for coffee and a nostalgic look around at my old college town of Oberlin, Ohio. From what I've seen so far, not much has changed, although the downtown storefronts look like they could use a lick of paint, and the hummus plate at the coffee shop at the corner of Main and College Streets has gone severely downhill since my time.

I didn't actually intend to write a blog post here, but driving in from Cleveland, I had one of those fun, unexpected on-the-road experiences, and thought I'd share. Back in the day, when I was an idealistic college student obsessed with radio in all forms, I was a secret fan of a talk radio host at Cleveland's WTAM-AM named Mike Trivisonno. Triv wasn't exactly the most erudite guy on Ohio's air - in fact, he pretty much reveled in being the least, filling the familiar talk radio role of championing the uneducated, blue collar white guy (for you Minnesotans, think of an aggressively Italian version of Joe Soucheray.) But he was damned entertaining, for the most part, and captured the spirit of the decaying but scrappy Cleveland perfectly, to my mind.

Anyway. There I am, earlier today, cruising by downtown Cleveland on Interstate 90, when I realized that it was just about the time of day that Triv used to come on the air. Out of pure curiosity, I tuned in AM1100, assuming that his slot was probably no longer his, and that I'd shortly be listening to Sean Hannity, or some other syndicated loudmouth. But there was Triv, right on schedule, and sounding like he was still doing more or less the exact same show he did when I was in college - two parts sour old coot, one part stand-up comic, and about eight parts professional contrarian. Nothing you'd want to listen to for hours on end, but I was happy to stay tuned for a bit.

And then, without warning, it happened. Coming back from a commercial break. Triv told one of his interns to turn on his mic and introduce himself. The kid, who sounded about 19, did, and Triv then asked him to describe what he'd done the previous evening. "Oh!" said the intern. "I was down at Public Square, watching the Cleveland Orchestra!"

I cringed. I've heard hard-boiled talk radio types bring up classical music before, and while it's not always a guarantee that they're about to go on a populist rant against snobbery and boredom, it's a surefire thing that they aren't going to have the slightest clue what they're talking about. So I was shocked to hear Triv immediately come back with, "Now, I heard they had about 80,000 people out there, which is just awesome, 'cause you know, that orchestra of ours, they say it's one of the best in the world!" (Which it is.) He went on to ask the intern about the racial and economic makeup of the crowd, and was audibly pleased to hear that it wasn't "the kind of snobby ties and suits crowd you might probably see when they're playing at Severance Hall."

At this point, one of the producers jumped in to point out that, actually, the crowd at Severance tends to be pretty diverse and casual, as well, and the intern confirmed it. I figured this would be the end of the conversation, but instead, Triv wanted to know when the intern had gotten into listening to classical music, and what he liked about it. This went on for ten minutes, an eternity in drive-time talk radio, as the self-professed "dumb Italian guy" of Cleveland radio extolled the virtues of, arguably, America's greatest symphony orchestra. And the fact that he went right back to talking about his poker weekend in Vegas and the local idiots who think Travis Hafner has been taking steroids after the next break just made the whole thing more satisfying.

One of the toughest things about selling classical music as a general interest entertainment these days is getting past the fact that it's just not even on the cultural radar screen for a large percentage of the public anymore, at least not in the way that movies, pop music, and Christie Brinkley's divorce are. (Many orchestra subscribers would probably prefer that it remain that way, too, which is one of the major reasons that it does.) And while I don't want to imply that ten minutes of relatively lightly informed music talk on a news/talk station equates to progress, it makes me happy.

And, hopefully, it's awakened me enough that I've got another few hours of driving in me before this day is over. Have a good holiday weekend, all, and if you don't have plans for the 4th, you might consider catching Sarah and the orchestra just before the fireworks on the shore of Lake Minnetonka out in Excelsior tomorrow night...

Beyond lip service

I've been trying to catch up on my reading - it's no small task to get through a dozen blog sites and peruse the arts sections of major papers, and I've gotten a little lax in my weeks off! Here's an article from May about a new educational initiative in Baltimore.

Venezuela's El Sistema has been the talk of the music world for the last few years, spurred on by Gustavo Dudamel's appointment to the music directorship of the LA Philharmonic last spring and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra's triumphant North American tour last fall; the pursuant national conversation surrounding the possibility of adapting the El Sistema "system" in the US has been endlessly fascinating.

"Music education is important" has been one of those sound bites that we as conductors continually drag out whenever we are asked about the place of classical/orchestral music in contemporary culture. Yes, studies have shown that kids in music tend to have better test scores, etc etc etc. But I so often feel like that it is only so much lip service; we in the orchestra business sometimes seem more bent on using the "music education" umbrella in creating a new generation of music consumers more than anything else ("audience cultivation" from a young age, as it were). And I can't tell you how many times I've heard a conductor talk about the significance of some educational initiative while in the meantime they themselves haven't conducted a children's concert or participated in an outreach event for years.

The difference with El Sistema, and now OrchKids in Balitmore, is the notion that music education is not just a tool for test-score improvement, or an added bonus for the most privileged of kids, but that it can be, in itself, a catalyst for social change. Which is a tremendous assertion, if you think about it. By taking some of the least privileged children in the country, systematically teaching them an instrument, providing them a safe haven after school, giving them a strong sense of community and self-worth and imparting the discipline and passion that help one succeed at anything in life, El Sistema has employed a "bottom-up" approach to music education. And in the process, it has provided a stabilizing force in the lives of its students, their families, and their communities at large.

It may all sound a bit idealistic, but it's not so far-fetched (after all, it's already been done in Venezuela!), and I was thrilled to see an El Sistema-inspired program get off the ground. What was even more thrilling was to see how it happened. Marin Alsop, the Baltimore Symphony's music director, received a MacArthur "Genius" Grant in 2005, to the tune of $500,000. To get OrchKids off the ground, Alsop donated the last $100,000 installment (as a 4-1 challenge grant). Which is a tremendous show of commitment to the possibilities of change, and a refreshing display of putting your money where your mouth is; Alsop is clearly paying more than lip service.

Embracing the Generation Gap

One of the challenges of coaching chamber music at Apple Hill is that, unlike most summer music programs, the campers we're working with, or "participants," in the local dialect, can range in age from 13 up to 95. There's no age limit on participating in a session here, and amateur adult musicians are allowed - no, encouraged - to keep coming back year after year. (Apple Hill is all about diversity in general - the camp t-shirts list dozens of countries from which participants have come over the years, and the racial and ethnic makeup is far more wide-ranging than any professional orchestra I've ever seen.) The adults aren't separated from the kids, either - it's perfectly normal to have a string quartet in which the membership features a 50-year age gap.

On the one hand, this is a wonderful idea. Adults playing music together for fun is an entertainment that seems to have nearly died out over the last century, with the rise of recorded music, and I'm all for including anyone as passionate as most of the adult participants here seem to be. Furthermore, having teenagers interacting with people two, three, even five times their age on a common level seems to do everyone a lot of good - the adults (particularly the oldest ones) seem positively rejuvenated by the experience, and the kids get a chance to see grown-ups at play, which makes adulthood seem a lot more interesting than it generally does when you're 16.

The flip side of the coin, however, is that coaching a chamber ensemble with both kids and adults in it is really, really difficult, for the simple reason that our brains are wired differently. Kids, of course, are continuously growing and developing the neural pathways in their brains that allow them to learn, which is why they pick up new skills so quickly. But the older we get, the more generally set our brains become, and the harder it is to form new pathways, and therefore, to learn new tricks. As adults, we compensate by using our lifetime of experience and sense of perspective to make up for our relative slowness in picking up new concepts and actions. It doesn't mean that kids are smarter than adults, of course - simply that we learn and respond to the world differently.

So, consider a string quartet in which two members are in their early teens, and two are north of 60. I've got one of those this week. I've also got one with three high school kids and one 30-something woman who teaches music at a high school. (I'm in awe of this teacher, by the way - imagine being someone who gives orders to kids for a living, and then volunteering to sit among them and take orders for a week!) And, just to round things out, I have a quintet made up entirely of young musicians under 25. (I call it my Control Group.)

The coaching experiences with these groups couldn't be more different, and even though it's occasionally frustrating trying to balance the needs of the two types of brain energy I'm working with, I feel like I learn a lot about human interaction just by trying. The main challenge is to remember that what works for one player won't necessarily work for another. Sure, the kids might end up bored for a few minutes as I slog through the seemingly endless repetitions needed to get a fresh fingering well and truly lodged in an adult's fingers, and the adults might sometimes marvel at a kid's conviction that he can get away with just showing up unprepared for a rehearsal and winging it. But for the most part, they all work remarkably well together, with a level of patience and good humor that I would never have expected.

I'm someone who has generally enjoyed being whatever age I am, and hasn't spent a lot of time mourning my lost youth or worrying about getting old. (College was fun, sure, but I don't really want to do it again, and as for aging, I just know too many elderly people who continue to be balls of energy to worry that there's a mandatory cutoff for enjoying life.) But I must admit that I spend nearly all of my free time hanging out with other people roughly my age, so it's great to get a chance to spend a length of time in close quarters with such a diverse group of musicians.

With very few exceptions, these people will never play music professionally, but it doesn't matter. Regardless of age, most of them aren't here to become the next Joshua Bell, or even the next Sam Bergman. They're here because they have an intellectual and musical curiosity about the world around them, and whether they're 16 or 60, they're here to have fun. I can get behind that.