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.

New Year's Weekend: A Retrospective

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


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

And speaking of football...

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

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

Back on the Islands...

More bad, but not unexpected, news; the Honolulu Symphony is filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy and has canceled concerts through the end of the calendar year.

I am heartsore. Honolulu is my home town, and the Symphony holds many memories for me - I played my first concerto with them (Mozart K. 271, I think) as a preteen. They saw their heyday in the 80's under Donald Johanos, who raised artistic standards and introduced new repertoire, including an ambitious recording project with composer Dan Welcher (who coincidentally composed "Haleakala" on my parents upright Yamaha). Since the labor dispute and strike in 1993, the Symphony seems never to have regained it's footing, and the last few seasons in particularly have been disastrous from a fiscal standpoint - during the 08-09 season, musicians worked for months without pay.

I'll let someone else dissect what went wrong with the symphony. What was most upsetting to me was not so much what has happened, but reaction to it. The advent of online print media and that ever-present "comment" button means that everyone has an easy way to weigh in immediately, and as I scrolled through the responses, I realized that a vast majority expressed a similar sentiment: "Who cares? We don't need a symphony." A selection below:

It is said if a city doesn't have a symphony then it is not a Big City. Bull. If a symphony doesn't get 100 percent of its operating capital from ticket sales then it is just a failed business and should fold. Symphonys are just play toys for the rich. Honolulu will do fine with or without a symphony. The rich will just have to find another place where they can dress up in their finest and go to show off how rich they are. If symphonys were so great they would be packed to the rafters with both the rich and the average folk.

Yikes..their business plans says that only 30% of their revenue came from ticket sales and 70% from donations. It should have gone the other way around. No wonder they fail to balance their budget each year. Yes, close these dolts down.

109 yrs old, and unable to support yourself, time to die already.

The culture and traditions of the European elite are what have brought this planet to the brink of disaster.
No thank you. You can keep the music of dead white European composers. Good riddance to the symphony.

We are all sick of the fiscal mismanagement of this mediocre symphony. Please close it. We need to discuss more important groups. The economy is in a disaster.

I wish the musicians well, but symphonies are a relic of another time.

Get rid of the strings and form a Jazz band. More appealing. Maybe have a guest violinist from time to time.
Symphony = zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzz
The symphony is just a way for the rich to dress up and act rich.

Why is it that we hear from month to month and year to year how bad they are doing? How is it that they are constantly getting all this free press? I guess they are failing because !) they suck 2) noone care about them 3) they have done a miserable job of promotion...bottom line is that it is not my problem...or anyone elses but theirs.

All of these touch on the PR problems that all orchestras face - the perception that orchestras are elite bastions of the rich (and therefore not for "the people"); that orchestras are sadly out of touch with current cultural trends (and care only about "dead white European composers"); that orchestras ticket sales should represent a far higher percentage of their actual budgets.

As with anyone in this industry, I can refute (to a certain degree) all three, but the important take-away from this is not discrediting criticism but rather grasping the perception of those in the community who do NOT have a relationship with their local orchestra. And the level of local vitriol directed towards the Honolulu Symphony in all of the articles that have come out in the last week is deeply disheartening. Because it's not like the Symphony didn't have educational initiatives or community concerts or programs to reach out to the larger public; it's that these activities could not alter or overcome the more powerful notions of what the Symphony represents.

It presents a tremendous PR/branding conundrum for orchestras. On one hand, you want to celebrate your artistic triumphs abroad or your critically-acclaimed recordings. But in the end, the success of any arts organizations lies in the connections it has forged and the loyalty it has built in the community it serves.

I hope the Honolulu Symphony will be able to regroup - it's certainly possible for an orchestra to rise out these ashes (others have). From my own perspective, the Symphony was such a fundamental part of my childhood; I don't think I would be where I am now without them and can't imagine home without them. And for the Island community as a whole, what a loss, what a loss - the Symphony brought so much joy to so many, from their Waikiki Shell summer shows to their educational concerts to presenting world-class soloists at Blaisdell... I await better news with both anxiety and hope.

Riemenschmackdown!

Well, it was really only a matter of time before this issue hit the local press, and here it is now, courtesy of the Star Tribune's fine rock critic, Chris Riemenschneider. Ever since our orchestra unveiled our much-scaled-back $40m renovation plan for Orchestra Hall, I've been waiting for someone in the media to point out that the Day of Music, our wildly popular 8-year-old event showcasing all sides of Minnesota's diverse local music scene, was canceled for lack of sponsorship just weeks before the renovation announce. Riemenschneider obliges, and further points out just how relatively small the cost of putting on the free daylong festival was compared with a $40m outlay for a lobby expansion.

Now, as commentators tend to do, Riemenschneider chose to oversimplify and distort some important stuff for the purposes of making his point. Just for instance, his decision to blithely dismiss our PR staff's assertion that the renovation money wouldn't have been available to fund the Day of Music (or anything else program-related, for that matter) is typical of the willful ignorance arts journalists tend to apply when writing about the business side of the cultural world. His bizarre claim that our entire week of annual (and free) July 4th concerts in towns like Excelsior and Hudson somehow don't count as free concerts played in the Twin Cities metro is also a head-scratcher.

But Riemenschneider's larger point about the importance of events like the Day of Music is unquestionably solid. Yes, the Day really wasn't particularly focused on classical music (though the orchestra's centerpiece concert has always been packed to the gills with a thrillingly diverse audience,) and you could make an argument that, in times as fiscally terrifying as these, we have no business putting on expensive shows that have little to do with our core mission. But the reality is that, in a city with the kind of music scene that Minneapolis/St. Paul proudly sports, no presenting organization can pretend that we don't have a responsibility to reach out to anyone and everyone who supports live music in our community.

Riemenschneider sums things up fairly, if pointedly:

"Let the rich philanthropists putting up most of the renovation money get their cushier seats; that's fine. But at least a small fraction of that money would be better spent on more free or inexpensive programming, as would a good chunk of whatever the state puts up (which has yet to be decided by the Legislature and presidential cand, er, governor)

"Without the Day of Music and events like it -- which bring in the young and diverse crowds sorely missing at Orchestra Hall -- those cushier seats might not have anybody in them in decades to come."

Or to put it another way, our orchestra garners the level of support it does not just because there's a large contingent of Beethoven fans in Minnesota. It's because Minnesotans support arts, culture, and music of all kinds at a level that puts most larger American cities to shame. And while we might be the biggest arts gorilla in town, our long-term fate is inextricably bound up with the health of that vital cultural scene that so many here have been supporting all their lives.

Let me be clear: I understand fully why the Day of Music got canceled this year, and I actually believe it was the right call. Corporate support for the event went from generous to nonexistent at the exact same moment that we (and every other orchestra in the US) were hit by a tsunami of financial woe. The #1 goal has to be to stop the bleeding and stabilize the organization, and that means some tough calls have to be made, and those calls are going to make some people upset.

But I hope that, when the dust finally clears and the economy stops shifting under our collective feet every few minutes, people like Chris Riemenschneider are still there to remind us that we owe one to Minnesota's music scene, and that it's time to pay up.

Ask an Expert: New Leaders and Weekly Paychecks

Two timely questions dropped into our inbox this weekend. One has an easy answer, and the other is more complicated. To start with the easy one, Jean wants to know...

Q: When will we hear who is going to be the new concertmaster? Have there been any try-outs yet? Can the existing violin players apply?

There has, in fact, been an audition, just a few weeks ago, which included both internal candidates and violinists from outside the orchestra. However, unlike with most auditions, concertmasters are almost never hired without first spending a few weeks playing with the orchestra. So at this point, we have two excellent finalists for the job, both of whom will be playing as guest concertmasters in the coming months, after which a final decision will be made. I've been asked not to name the finalists at this time (which is sort of weird, since everyone will see them on stage next fall, but whatever, not my call,) but I can tell you that both of them are dazzling violinists and wonderful individuals besides (I happen to know both of them.) I can also tell you that neither is currently a member of the Minnesota Orchestra. Stay tuned...

Moving on to a question I'm surprised we haven't been asked before, Liz is wondering...

Q: How much does someone in a professional orchestra typically earn in a year?

Liz, you simply would not believe how much it can vary, depending on everything from the prominence of your orchestra to the number of weeks in your season to the fundraising capability of your board, and even to the country you make your living in! (For instance, musicians in the very best orchestras in America, Germany, and Austria can expect to earn a comfortable living, while musicians in orchestras of similar quality in the UK and Holland earn shockingly little money.) Also, orchestras have payment structures for things like recording and broadcasting that can differ wildly, and some orchestras have set salary numbers for principal players while others allow each titled player to negotiate his/her own contract, so even putting a baseline number on a musician's salary can be tricky.

But to give you a general idea, I'm looking at a wage chart put out annually by the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians, which comprises the 52 largest orchestras (by budget size) in America. The most recent chart I have is from the 2007-08 season, and the base annual salary of a rank-and-file musician that year ranged from $25,162 (Virginia Symphony) to $122,720 (Boston Symphony). And even that's misleading, because only the very largest orchestras pay their musicians year-round. (There are also hundreds of smaller regional orchestras around the country, which pay even less than Virginia. The Shreveport Symphony, in Louisiana, recently slashed the base pay of its musicians to less than $10,000 per season.)

The Minnesota Orchestra's base salary for that season was $93,002. That made us America's 11th-highest paying orchestra at the time, just behind the Detroit Symphony, and just ahead of the Cincinnati Symphony. Those rankings have shuffled a bit since then, because not every orchestra negotiates their contracts at the same time. Also, as you've probably read, a lot of orchestras, battered by the effect of the stock market collapse on their endowments and the overall dismal economy, have been asking musicians to reopen contracts and take pretty hefty pay cuts to stabilize their organizations, and musicians are, by and large, doing just that. So no one is quite sure what the "new normal" will look like when it's all said and done.

All in all, the answer to your question is that music is no way to make a good living, except when it is. If you make it to the very top of the profession, you'll be doing about as well as a college professor at a major school, and that's plenty good for most people - none of us got into this line of work because we wanted to be millionaires. But the vast majority of professional orchestra players will never earn anything like a substantial paycheck, and that's without even considering all the musicians who never manage to win a full-time orchestra job, and cobble together a living on the freelance scene, subbing with an orchestra one night and playing a wedding or two the next. And no one knows coming out of music school where they're going to wind up on that continuum...

One Man's Energy Is Another Man's Interpretive Watusi

Sarah's written recently about the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in the playing styles of various orchestras, and about how ingrained the performance culture of a single orchestra can become in each of that ensemble's musicians. Since most of us spend nearly all our time playing as part of only one group, we come to think of our way of playing music as How One Plays Music. Even when a major shift in leadership occurs, such as a new music director or concertmaster, the collective musical memory of the ensemble is always a major factor in shaping the sound.

Audiences and critics, too, get used to the local style that they hear week in and week out, and they tend to filter everything they hear through that familiar prism. This is why a conductor like Christoph Eschenbach, who everyone seems to agree is a brilliant man and fine musician, can be hailed as an orchestral savior in Houston, and then be greeted with what amounted to a community-wide shrug when he become music director in Philadelphia. It's not necessarily that there's anything wrong with Eschenbach, or with the Philadelphia Orchestra. It's just that the communal playing style of the orchestra didn't turn out to be a great match with the personal style of the conductor.

Another case in point that will hit a little closer to home: Osmo's down in Chicago this week, conducting the Chicago Symphony in a program of (what else?) Beethoven and Sibelius. I have it on good authority that he's been having a fine time in his debut with the Chicagoans, and the critics have said some nice things as well. But one passage from Andrew Patner's otherwise positive review in the Chicago Sun-Times struck me odd:

"[Vänskä] is clearly an individual with his own ideas. It must be difficult even for seasoned players to know what those ideas are, since he communicates in a bizarre fashion, offering a sort of interpretive Watusi with a beat that seems wrong when it is discernible."

Now, along with being pretty unnecessarily snippy, that sounds nothing like the Osmo I know (and I'm also a bit taken aback to think that there's a music critic in a major American city who doesn't seem to realize that a conductor's ideas are largely communicated in rehearsal, not through some magic twirling of the baton during the concert.) While there's no denying his physicality as a conductor (using his body to channel and direct the energy of the orchestra is one of Osmo's signatures, and he's hardly alone in this style,) I've never found it to be difficult to discern what he wants us to do, even in his first appearance with us back in 2000.

So what would seem so different to an observer in Chicago? Presumably, Patner has no prior axe to grind with Osmo, and was only passing along what he thought he saw during a performance about which he actually said many nice things. The first thing that occurs to me is that the CSO is an orchestra steeped in the highest European classical traditions, and their music directors and principal guest conductors over the decades have generally reflected that legacy. From Daniel Barenboim to Pierre Boulez to the incoming Riccardo Muti, the orchestra has usually played under conductors who, while not without flair, prefer to maintain a relatively refined podium demeanor. The music should speak for itself, says this philosophy, and the musicians (conductor included) are doing the composer a disservice if they call attention to themselves in any visual way.

So it's only natural that Osmo, who throws himself as physically into every performance as he asks his musicians to, would cut an unusual figure on Chicago's podium, and to a jaded critic who's not used to such visual stimulus, I can see how it could even seem off-putting. But I'd be very curious to know what the CSO players thought of their week with our boss (not least because they so recently let out a public cry of disappointment when the LA Philharmonic snapped up the young Venezuelan wunderkind Gustavo Dudamel, an over-the-top physical stick-waver if ever there was one, as their next music director before Chicago could offer him the job.) It's always possible that what seemed jarring to a regular concertgoer could have felt like a refreshing change to those on stage.

Or not. It's a mysterious thing, chemistry, and the audience's willingness to come along for an unfamiliar ride is probably an element of the equation that we don't consider often or carefully enough.

Damn The Recession, Full Speed Ahead

As we settle back into our normal routine post-tour, I've been catching up on some of what we missed while we were overseas. (That Top Chef finale on my DVR isn't gonna watch itself, after all.) And last Friday's Wall Street Journal carried a review of one of Minnesota's other classical music organizations that is well worth a read. What makes the story newsworthy is that it's about an organization bucking the tried-and-true strategy of arts groups getting hyper-conservative in their programming the moment things turn ugly financially. Apparently, the leaders over at Minnesota Opera see a different way...

"[Minnesota Opera] has launched a $5.5 million initiative intended to infuse the operatic repertoire with new works. Spanning seven seasons, the project, called Minnesota OperaWorks, involves three commissions, three revivals of neglected works, and the co-production of a new opera... Minnesota Opera deserves enormous credit for continuing to devote resources to the future of the art form, especially now."

Now, there's a bit of hyperbole involved here, because MN Opera had undoubtedly planned this project before the global crisis really took hold. But at the same time, this is exactly the sort of project that orchestras and opera companies tend to take an axe to when times get tough (we almost lost our own hugely successful Composers' Institute to a round of budget cuts several years back,) and the Opera folks obviously have no intention of backing off their ambitious plans. For an art form that tends to be even more hidebound and artistically conservative than the orchestral world, this dedication to bringing new works to the fore could represent a major step forward, and will likely have resonance at companies around North America.

Now, wouldn't it be nice to see a few orchestras step up and announce a major commissioning project to keep a few composers off the welfare rolls in these troubled times?

A Song For America

One of the things that people who don't work in the music business probably don't have a firm grasp on is the sheer number of musicians a major symphony orchestra employs. And I'm not talking only about the 95-100 musicians you see on stage when we're performing, although we're certainly an intimidatingly large bunch. Orchestras our size typically employ close to 100 non-performers as well, and you'd be amazed at how many of them also play (or used to play) music seriously, if not professionally.

Just taking a glance through our artistic staff roster (the people directly involved with the day-to-day artistic administration of the orchestra, as differentiated from the folks in, say, payroll or HR,) I see an operations manager who sings in the Minnesota Chorale, an education director who plays viola in the Minnesota Opera Orchestra, and a personnel manager who used to be a professional violinist. Our former CEO, Tony Woodcock, who now runs New England Conservatory, is an avid amateur violinist. Brian Newhouse, who hosts our weekly live broadcasts on Minnesota Public Radio, used to sing semi-professionally. And Kari Marshall, the orchestra's Artistic Administrator and one of the unseen hands guiding Inside the Classics, is a lifelong flautist.

And then, there's Kellie Nitz. Kellie works in our personnel department, dealing with all the whiny musician complaints and scheduling snafus that most of us never think about when we're practicing for the next concert. I've known Kellie since she started working for us a number of years back, and it never occurred to me to ask whether she played an instrument herself, until a couple of summers ago, when I was wandering Peavey Plaza during the Day of Music, and found myself looking up at her as she stood on one of the outdoor stages, thwapping a bass and wailing into a microphone.

As it turns out, Kellie spends her off hours as a member of a truly awesome Minneapolis rock band called Mighty Fairly. They've already got one full-length album to their credit, and they'll be throwing a release party for their second one next month at Bunker's, in the Warehouse District. And this fall, they entered a songwriting contest sponsored by Rift magazine, in which bands were challenged to write a song completing a sentence that begins, "My America..."

According to Kellie, Mighty Fairly banged out their submission in less than two days. And they won. (Told you they were awesome.) After realizing they might have a hit on their hands, they created a video to go with the song, featuring a wide variety of Minnesotans completing the My America sentence themselves. Parts of the video nearly made me tear up, and the chorus of the song has been stuck in my head all week. (And I'm not tired of it yet.) So as the country steams towards next Tuesday's date with the ballot box, here's a song to sing while you're waiting in line...

Digging The Scene

It was somewhere around the middle of my time at Greenwood this August that I found myself sitting in the middle of a crowd of around 150 people squeezed into a tiny church on a lonesome dirt road in the little town of Whately, Massachusetts. I'd been brought by a longtime friend, with whom I often trade favorite songs and artists, to hear a rare performance by a quartet of singer-songwriters who call themselves Redbird. To call the foursome a band would be a reach - they only play together once or twice a year, they quite clearly don't spend a lot of time rehearsing together before they take the stage as a group, and they each have solo careers that consume the bulk of their time and energy.

But they're also all amazing artists who obviously love working together, and the show I saw that night in the hills of Western Massachusetts (made all the more engaging by the space, a room so small that the performers weren't miked at all) immediately ranked among my favorite live music experiences of all time. What's more, it brought home a reality that should have been obvious to me a long time ago: my deep and abiding affection for rural New England, where I've spent at least a few weeks of just about every year of my life, is based almost entirely on the incredible diversity and quality of musical life I've enjoyed there.

I know. This sort of thing shouldn't qualify as a revelation coming from someone who makes his living playing music and evangelizing from the stage about it. But for whatever reason, it wasn't something I'd ever really thought about before. I've always been someone who goes looking for the characteristics that make a town, city, or state unique, and the best way to get me started on a foam-at-the-mouth rant is to bring up suburban sprawl, with its attendant homogenization of local American culture. So my assumption, I guess, had always been that the places I've loved to live, work and play have earned my affection through characteristics that go well beyond music.

But as I sat listening to Redbird, it occurred to me that I can pretty much divide the US (and the world, I suppose,) into areas that I care deeply about, and others I don't, and in every instance, the ones I love are the ones that have introduced me to a unique musical culture. And the places I've lived, even for long periods of time, that didn't inspire me musically are the places I don't tend to think a lot about after I've left, regardless of what other positive qualities they boasted.

Birmingham, Alabama may be a redneck joke to most Americans, but to me, it's where I learned to really understand both bluegrass and gospel music, and where I had the honor of being a part of a life-altering MLK Day concert at the famous 16th Street Baptist Church where four little girls were tragically murdered by the KKK in 1963.

Helsinki, Finland will always have a special place in my heart, not just because of the famous Finnish love for classical music, but because of the almost unbelievable diversity and enthusiasm of the city's buskers and street musicians. Cologne, Germany had me hooked for life after I heard the children's choir sing a Catholic mass at the looming cathedral that dominates the city center, and then surprised me again during Karneval with polka bands so good that they almost made me like polkas.

It was a local music scene, too, that convinced me to stop taking orchestra auditions once I landed in Minneapolis. There are many things I like about Minnesota living, but the fact that, on any given night of any given week, I can have my pick of ten or twenty great local bands playing in bars, clubs, and concert venues across the Cities goes right at the top of the list. It's not just that there is a local music scene - it's that there's a damn good music scene that is immediately identifiable as Minnesotan to anyone who's spent time in it.

Western Massachusetts may seem like a collection of hippie-infested colleges and small, cloistered hilltowns to those who pass through on their way to New York or Boston, but I know it as the only place in America where, over the course of a single week, I can hear the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra play Kurt Weill, the boys of Kronos play an utterly stunning new work for string quartet and tape by a young woman from Serbia, a brilliant 19-year-old cellist (who I guarantee will be familiar to you within a decade) playing a solo Kodaly sonata for 50 wide-eyed 12-year-olds, a coloratura soprano premiering a set of three new songs written as payment for a landscape painting, and, of course, Redbird, and all the other musicians who make up Western Mass's enviable acoustic music scene.

I don't really have a larger point in any of this, I don't think, and you may still be rolling your eyes at the absurdity of a musician having a revelation that music is important to him. But I've found myself wondering, since that night in Whately, whether music is this big a tug on everyone's affections for a given place. Can you be happy living in a city or town without a decent live music scene? In the age of the iPod, do you still need a diverse, thriving collection of clubs and concert halls to make you happy? These aren't rhetorical questions - the comment button awaits you...

Best Day of the Year. (No, Really.)

As you probably know if you're reading this blog, we're kicking off the Minnesota Orchestra's Sommerfest this weekend, beginning as usual with the massive, day-and-night-long Day of Music. Considering how many thousands of people this event draws every year, it's difficult to imagine that anyone who regularly attends the orchestra hasn't been yet, but if you haven't, for some reason: for God's sake, get yourself down to Peavey Plaza tomorrow! Yes, all the performances are still 100% free, and yes, that means first come, first seated for the indoor shows, and yes, that does mean you have to get there super early if you want to see us play Tchaikovsky's 5th at 8pm, but honestly, even if you don't make it into Orchestra Hall at all, the rest of the acts should keep you more than satisfied. (Unless, of course, it thunderstorms, which I'm told is a possibility. If it does, I think we can all assume that it's Paul Douglas's nefarious revenge on his former employer and our Day of Music media partner.)

When a couple of our management types, now long gone from the organization, conceived the Day of Music back in the early part of this decade, I'm not sure they had any notion that it would become the local music phenomenon that it has. The acts that have played on our stages over the years run the gamut from electronica to roots rock to hip-hop to world beat to old-time folk, always with a healthy dose of the kind of straight-ahead club rock that Minneapolis is known for. I've loved it from the start, and more than once, I stayed at the hall all night after we finished (one year, I even got to introduce Gary Louris of the Jayhawks and Adam Levy of the Honeydogs to a screaming crowd at a midnight show,) finally heading home when the children's music started up on Saturday morning.

Oh, and the orchestra plays as well. And that's actually one of the great ironies of the whole enterprise: supposedly the centerpiece of the whole event, the orchestra actually winds up being just another performance in the massive slate. Much of what gets written by local rock critics about the Day of Music doesn't even mention that our staff are the ones who book, coordinate, and organize the entire operation. It's a counter-intuitive way of marketing yourself as an orchestra, but I love that someone had the guts to try it, because it makes the whole day seem like Minneapolis's event, not the Minnesota Orchestra offering a supporting role to a few bands. And despite the enormous expense (in both money and time) of putting on a free event of this magnitude, I know that it's worth it, because the people who fill the hall for our 8pm concert are always the most enthusiastic crowd we see all year long, and a fair number of them have told me they've never been to see us before, and that they're definitely coming back.

Anyway, like I say, if you've never been, you need to come. The Day of Music kicks off Friday at noon, and runs through Saturday at 3pm. (They'll take an overnight break this year from 1am-9am, which makes me a little bit sad, but is probably a good idea, since the years I stayed all night, the spectators tended to be outnumbered by the musicians and staff by 3am .) If you're looking for a few great acts worth seeing, Star Tribune pop critic Chris Riemenscheider's got you covered. I like his list, and I'd throw in the Honeydogs (8pm on the Peavey Plaza south stage,) the Spaghetti Western String Company (10pm over on WCCO-TV's plaza stage,) and the Charles Lazarus Group (4pm on Peavey north) as well. See you there...

Postscript, 10.49pm: Okay, fine, so everything outdoors got rained out before 10pm. Whatever. We had fun inside. And it's actually sort of amazing that we got through seven full years of this event without a rainout, so I guess we were due. (I'm still blaming Paul Douglas, though. His known pal Don Shelby was walking all too casually around the plaza about three hours before the deluge, and I'm guessing he was doing an elaborate slow-motion rain dance on Doug's behalf...)

It All Depends On Where You're Sitting

We're now just over two weeks away from our final Inside the Classics concerts of the season, and that means I'm spending most of my time writing, researching, revising, and mercilessly cutting down the material to fit within a reasonable length of time. As usual, there's a lot that we want to cover in depth, but that we'll only have time to touch on briefly. (I'm planning to use the blog to get more deeply into some of the stuff that won't be in the show over the coming weeks.) One of the themes we'll definitely be zeroing in on throughout the show, though, is the idea of Copland as the quintessential "American composer," and of his music as the embodiment of a vague but immediately recognizable concept known as the "American sound."

Because I'm spending so much time on this, I've found that much of the day-to-day news and comment in the wider classical music world is getting filtered through the Copland discussion in my brain, and as a result, I've started to realize just how different the view of almost everything music-related is in America as opposed to the UK or continental Europe. (I'm sure it's just as widely varying in Asia, Australia, South America, and Antarctica, but my sources of music news aren't as strong there.) Especially when it comes to determining which composers and specific pieces rise above others, our criteria and assessments of import seem to be wildly divergent on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Copland, for instance, is often seen in the UK as an interesting if limited composer who wrote the same piece over and over again while pandering to American audiences incapable of engaging more intellectual music. This, of course, more or less describes the way many American scholars and audiences view Elgar, whom the British revere as one of their national treasures. The Germans and Austrians tend to dismiss both of them as artists of relatively slight consequence, but then, it's easy to dismiss the musical titans of other countries when your own gets to claim Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, Mahler, etc.

Two recent examples of this parting of the musical ways caught my attention this past week. One had to do with New Yorker critic Alex Ross's book tour, which has generally resulted in fawning press from American music critics thrilled to finally have a devastatingly intelligent, yet eminently readable, tome on the subject of 20th century music to endorse. But appearing on a BBC radio talk program, Ross found himself the target of some fellow writers who felt that his book represented a viewpoint severely limited by Ross's nationality. Specifically, they weren't happy with the large number of pages devoted to (surprise!) Copland. Also, the Brits thought that another of their local heroes, Ralph Vaughan Williams, got short shrift, and that Ross's supposition that 20th century American musical innovation overwhelmed a more conservative and emotion-free compositional approach in Germany and Austria (see also Stockhausen) was both naive and insulting. (New York composer and blogger Kyle Gann wrote an excellent rebuttal of this argument shortly after the interview aired.)

The second noticeable transatlantic disconnect I spotted concerns the Argentinian-born, American-educated Osvaldo Golijov, whom many American musicians and critics consider to be the preeminent composer of our time. In fact, the love of Golijov's music runs so deep in American new music circles at the moment that it is almost startling to discover that the Brits and Euros are, on the whole, not terribly impressed with him. Some even slap his music with the dreaded "crossover" label, and see his embrace of folk themes and eclectic influences as a threat to "serious" composition.

(To me, this seems like an odd criticism, since European musical heavyweights from Brahms to Bartok used folk music in their work to great effect, and it's not as if Golijov is sampling Miley Cyrus choruses or anything. In fact, since many of the folk elements Golijov employs are Jewish in origin, a cynic might even wonder whether there is a more sinister undercurrent to some of the criticism from central Europe. But that's not a path I'm particularly interested in walking down.)

To be fair, Golijov's European critics fault him less for using material that isn't strictly classical than they do for supposedly failing to bring the influences into a wider musical context. To some, this might seem a largely semantic argument, but it's the type of thing that scholars can quite literally discuss for days. If you care about that sort of thing, it's fascinating stuff. But most people would rather just listen to the music and decide whether it sounds good to them.

I don't really see any need to take a side in either of these debates (although it's probably evident that I do tend to enjoy Copland and Golijov more than Vaughan Williams and Stockhausen,) except to note that a lot of people in the music world hold very strong opinions, and that we tend to present those opinions as if they are objectively formed, rather than shaped by our particular musical upbringings.

All politics is local, Tip O'Neill used to say, and I'm convinced that much of music is the same way. The issues might seem global, but the answers you get to the questions you ask will often come down to a decidedly provincial mindset of one type or another. That's as true in New York or London as it is in Minneapolis or Bucharest, and I don't see that it really matters whether we ever achieve a global (or even semi-global) consensus. The fun is in the arguing... and, of course, the listening.