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...