Cutting Room Floor: Mozartian Myths

One of the things we're going to be getting into briefly in this week's concerts is the wealth of misinformation that's been floating around about our featured composer ever since a movie called Amadeus came out back in 1984. I was 8 years old at the time, and good little violin-playing nerd that I was, I went to see the film on its first weekend in the theaters. (It should also be noted that I nearly left in tears after the opening scene, in which a decrepit and evil-looking Antonio Salieri attempts a grisly suicide. I didn't know who Salieri was, I only knew that this was a helluva lot more intense than the next-most-intense movie I'd seen at that point, The Fox & The Hound.)

Like a lot of other moviegoers, I erroneously assumed that, in writing and adapting Amadeus, playwright Peter Shaffer's motivation had been to tell Mozart's fascinating life story to a modern audience. This was not remotely the case: Shaffer, who also wrote the disturbing psycho-drama Equus, in which a naked Harry Potter blinds six horses on Broadway, had seen in Mozart the bare bones of a fascinating character, and created a world around him that, while based on a thin layer of history, was mainly fictional. Mozart's excesses, while legendary, probably never approached the garish and off-putting level of Shaffer's character. And despite the guilt-racked protestations of Shaffer's Salieri, there's little to no evidence that the composer had a hand in the real Mozart's premature death at age 35.

While Salieri was certainly a professional rival of Mozart's, there's not much evidence that he even harbored much resentment toward the young phenom, which is only natural, since the two composers achieved roughly equal success in their lifetimes. (Salieri has since faded from historical view, but he was as much a presence in 18th-century musical society as was Mozart, and the free conservatory he founded in Vienna counted Beethoven and Schubert among its alumni.)

Interestingly, the idea that Salieri was responsible for Mozart's death (most scholars guess that rheumatic fever was the real culprit) did not begin with Shaffer, and like so many conspiracy theories, it includes a grain of true history. Rumors that Mozart had been poisoned actually began shortly after the wunderkind's death in 1791, sparked by witness accounts that the body was swollen and bloated. And only five years after Salieri's death in 1825, the Russian literary giant Alexander Pushkin published a longform poem accusing the Italian of having killed off his Austrian rival, and composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov later used the poem as the libretto for an opera. Shaffer was playing off Pushkin as well when he wrote Amadeus, although he never went as far with the murder plot as did the original.

Mozart has always seemed to be a figure ripe for the taking of dramatic license, and plenty of authors have used the outlines of his biography as fodder for their own melodramatic ideas. One such novel, Dark Melody, imagines a heroine who time-travels back to Mozart's final year of life, and has a whirlwind affair with the dying genius. Another recasts Mozart as the leader of a coven of vampires. And no less an august author than Anthony Burgess (author of A Clockwork Orange, among many, many others) penned a hilarious and touching tribute to Mozart, set in Heaven, in which such notables as Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Wagner argue about Wolfgang's life, legacy, and music.

With all this Mozartian fantasy floating around, it's no wonder that we sometimes want to believe more than was true of such an outsized personality. Truth be told, there were a couple of points in my preparations for this week's show when I wrote something I believed to be true into the script, only to find out later that it was part of the myth. If only truth really were stranger than fiction...

Feedback Day

Having just spent the day rehearsing the seven pieces that will make up our FutureClassics concert tomorrow night, I can now confidently say that the audience (which you're planning to be a part of, right? I mean, c'mon, the tickets are ten bucks...) will be in for quite an array of styles and sounds.

Composer Aaron Jay Kernis, who runs the Composer Institute along with MN Orch staffer Beth Cowart, seems to make a point of selecting participants who come from very different backgrounds and musical points of view. So this year, we've got a minimalist, a couple of hardcore atonalists, one fan of electronica, one storyteller, and a couple others that I can't begin to categorize. I'd be lying if I said I loved all the pieces, but that's exactly the point of a concert like this. We all listen with different ears, and a work that leaves me cold might just make your night. (And for the record, there were a couple of pieces that so impressed me that I'm hoping we get a chance to play them on a subscription concert in the near future.)

Part of the rehearsal process for this concert that differs from our normal routine is that each member of the orchestra is given a feedback form for each composer, and we're asked to comment on everything from the overall feel of the piece, to how the writing works (or doesn't) for our individual instruments, to whether the parts we're working off of are laid out well. I always struggle a bit with these forms, because I'm sure the composers get a lot of contradictory advice - musicians aren't known for our group-think abilities - and I don't want to add to any confusion or frustration they may have on reading our reactions to their work.

So I try to make my comments as specific as possible. If I don't think a piece works, I try to figure out exactly what would need to change to make it work. (Much of the time, my advice tends to be, "Thin out the orchestration!" Composers used to writing for small ensembles frequently try to do too much at once with a full orchestra, which is when you wind up with a cacophony. 98 musicians make a lot of noise in full cry.) Today, I advised one composer to change the register of some high pizzicatti in the viola part (they were so high up the fingerboard that they sounded like pitchless clunks,) suggested that another reformat the parts to make some of his rhythmic figures easier to understand on the fly, and wondered whether some orchestrational choices had caused a third piece to be more difficult than necessary to hold together rhythmically.

The harshest thing I wrote was this: "There is nothing inherently wrong with atonality, but you can't just use it as a weapon against your listeners. When you give the audience nothing at all to grab on to aurally, they'll simply shut down in defense, and won't bother coming along to wherever you're trying to take them." Tough, yes, but I wouldn't have bothered if I didn't think the composer on the receiving end was an obviously intelligent individual, capable of writing great music.

The bottom line is that we should have quite a show tomorrow night, with each of the composers appearing on stage to talk about their work before we perform it. And if you really can't make it out to Orchestra Hall (seriously, people - ten bucks), the concert will be broadcast live on the classical stations of Minnesota Public Radio (99.5 KSJN in the Cities,) and streamed live on MPR's website.

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.

Language Barrier

In yesterday's post, I talked a bit about conductors and arrangers who "speak the language" of orchestra musicians, and how important that can be to the success of a non-classical orchestra performance. And that got me thinking back to an uncomfortable experience I had several years ago, during one of the early years of our Composers' Institute.

The folks who run the Institute make a point of trying to select as widely varied a group of young composers as they can to participate in the week of seminars, rehearsals, and performances, which means that we in the orchestra get the chance to engage with a lot of different schools of musical thought in a single concert. Some of the composers we see are ultra-serious types, whose music reflects a deep commitment to academic rigor and complex multi-layered composition. Others are more outward looking, if no less serious about their craft, and it's not at all unusual to dive into a piece that looks technically daunting, only to find that you're playing a deconstructed riff from a '70s funk band, or some such. And a select few of our visiting composers come at the work using an entirely different musical vocabulary than the one we're used to.

It was one of this last group that I encountered several years ago, when I'd been asked, along with violinist Stephanie Arado, to lead a seminar for the institute composers on upper string writing. The idea was for us to go through each participant's composition line by line, ask them questions about why they chose to write certain passages in a certain way, and help (if we could) in making their music clearer and more idiomatic for the musicians who would be playing it.

The seminar was going fine - I'm always amazed by how open most composers are to constructive criticism, and how eager they are to engage with musicians, qualities which are not always reciprocated by performers - until we turned to a work that had baffled me when I first looked at it. This was a jazz composition, scored for orchestra, but written almost entirely in the musical language of jazz.

This was a problem. Classical musicians, string players in particular, are almost never conversant in jazz, partly because we usually don't need to be, but mostly because, unlike rock music or country or showtunes, all of which are fairly simple for an experienced musician of any kind to grasp and play, jazz is hugely complicated and difficult to play, just like classical music. Unless you've spent a serious amount of time studying it, you're just not going to be very good at playing it. (I studied jazz on the side for a couple of years in college, and I'd still be considered below beginner level in my understanding and ability.)

There are, of course, ways to work around this gulf if you really want to hear an orchestra play jazz. Duke Ellington did it very successfully, by writing out jazz scores in purely classical-style notation, and all but removing improvisation from the mix. And countless composers use elements of jazz in their orchestral music. But what never changes is that, in order for the orchestra to play it the way you want it, you pretty much have to write it out exactly as you want the sounds to come out of the instruments. When you have a combo of 3-5 jazz musicians playing a tune, improvisation and spontaneous creativity are a natural thing. When you have 16 first violins who all have to play in unison to avoid complete aural chaos, you just can't have folks wandering off on their own.

The composer in our seminar wasn't having any of this, though. When Stephanie and I queried him as to what he was actually after in writing his score in a manner that classical musicians would have great difficulty reading (some chunks, in which he had simply written in chord changes, were completely outside our ability to interpret,) he began an extended rant on the narrowness of the classical music education system, and said that it was the responsibility of orchestra musicians to diversify their knowledge.

I quickly agreed with him, and I believe Stephanie did, as well. Conservatories don't offer nearly enough diversity of instruction, and I've always thought that orchestras in general would have a far stronger sense of rhythm and ensemble if every music student was required to study jazz. But this was neither here nor there, we said to our apoplectic composer, when you've written a piece of music that you want to be performed by an existing orchestra, today, under today's conditions. You know for a fact that they can't really execute what you're asking them to with the notation you've chosen to use, so why not look for a way to say what you want to say, using the orchestra's language?

He was furious, insisting that it wasn't his job to limit himself as a creator of music simply because musicians were too lazy to look beyond their comfort zone. I tried to calm the situation by asking whether he meant for the orchestra to fail, whether the meta-statement he wanted to make with the music was, "I have given you a piece that you can't play because you lack context, and this should make you curious about what else might exist in the world that you don't know about." No, he insisted, that wasn't it at all. He wanted the piece played as written, and he saw no reason other than stubborn disinterest that it couldn't be done.

I wish I could say that we resolved this - Aaron Kernis, our new music advisor who runs much of the Institute, made some valiant attempts to bridge the gap and achieve some small changes in the scoring that would at least give the orchestra a toehold to cling to. But in the end, we were in a stalemate. It was as if I had walked into one of the better taquerias down on Lake Street and complained loudly that few of the employees there seemed to speak English. In the larger scheme of things, immigrants to America will probably be better off learning English, yes, but that's irrelevant to my immediate quest to order lunch, which even my non-Spanish speaking self would be perfectly capable of doing under the circumstances.

In the end, the orchestra read the piece (this was thankfully before the era in which we began holding a public performance at the end of the Institute) as written. And we more or less failed utterly to play it correctly, sabotaged as we were by our own limited knowledge, and the immovable ideology of the composer. Pity.

How To Make Your Orchestra Rock

A while back, we were talking about pops concerts, and why musicians frequently seem to have a bad attitude about playing them. Basically, it comes down to the high percentage of such shows that seem like they'd be better without the orchestra. When you sit down to play a concert with some famous pop singer, and the charts on your music stand consist of a bunch of long sustained tones and an occasional flourish at the beginning or end of a song, it's dispiriting. You feel like you're not contributing anything to the show, and in truth, you aren't.

But this weekend, we're doing a pops show that couldn't be more engaging, or fun, or make better use of the orchestra. The stars of the show will be the amazing Finnish vocal group, Rajaton, who you may have seen singing ABBA tunes with us in the past. This time, they're taking on the music of Queen, and regardless of how you feel about '70s music, there's no question that, like the ABBA show, this concert was designed with an orchestra in mind. And I can prove it. Exhibit A: It's a rare thing to get to a pops rehearsal and see this many notes on your stand...

(click the image to see it full size)

And that's a fairly typical page in this show. There are about 20 more just like it. It's actually fairly challenging to play, something that I'm not sure I've ever said about a pops show before. There are even a few viola solos! The entire band is really involved in what's going on musically, and there's a lot going on.

So who's responsible for these Rajaton shows being musically better than nearly any other pops concert I've ever been a part of? Well, when we played the ABBA concert, Osmo did some of the arrangements himself, and that made a huge difference. Not only is Osmo a reasonably good orchestrator, but he knows how an orchestra works. You'd be amazed at how many composers and arrangers don't. Only a musician who's really spent time in and around orchestras is going to know, for instance, that inner strings can do a lot to create interesting textures in the sound, or that there's no point in having the strings do a bunch of impressive-sounding passagework if you're going to have the entire brass section playing full force at the same time.

For the Queen concert, the arranger is Jaakko Kuusisto, who just happens to be the concertmaster of Osmo's "other" orchestra, Finland's Lahti Symphony. (If memory serves, Jaakko also did some of the ABBA arrangements.) He's also conducting the show, which he's done many, many times before in other cities. So right there, two important plusses: an arranger who knows as much about how to use the orchestra as it's possible to know, and a conductor who knows the material cold, and how best to take the orchestra through it in a short amount of time. (We only get one rehearsal for pops shows.)

That one rehearsal for the Queen show was this afternoon, and while we didn't technically get to hear Rajaton's part of the performance (long story, tell you later,) I'm blown away by the quality of the music. Jaakko even drops a few inside jokes into his arrangements - my sharp-eared stand partner, Megan Tam, noticed that, towards the end of We Are The Champions, the horns suddenly started playing the famous tune from the last movement of Sibelius's 5th Symphony! (Those Finns, honestly.) And because he's an orchestra musician himself, rehearsing with Jaakko on the podium felt like we were rehearsing a standard classical program. He speaks our language, and made sure that our parts spoke it, too.

Now, the obvious question: How soon can we get Jaakko to churn out a Spinal Tap pops show?

Kagel's Finale

Over the weekend, some sad news hit the arts pages - Argentinian-born composer Mauricio Kagel has died, aged 76. In all likelihood, you've never heard of Kagel, since he was the very model of the anti-establishment, avant-garde composer, and as such, his music never achieved wide fame among the general public.

While I'm a big evangelist for new music in general, I must confess that a lot of what goes on on the fringes of the music world doesn't really hold much interest for me. I always thought John Cage was somewhat overrated, I never thought much of "chance music," and I'll always believe that the academic world of composition is ill-served by allowing avant-garde types to belittle the efforts of young composers who seek to write music that a majority of people would enjoy listening to.

But Kagel, in addition to being a supremely talented composer, had a quality that many hyper-intellectual music types lack: a great sense of humor. From the Washington Post's obituary: "[Kagel's] pieces include a string quartet to be played by gloved musicians using knitting needles; a lecture on avant-garde music that is interrupted by music and mime; and an orchestral piece in which the conductor tries to get through a performance while negotiating with hostage-takers."

Oberlin percussionists performing Kagel's Dressur

Back when I was a student at Ohio's Oberlin Conservatory, I got to take part in one of Kagel's more, shall we say, theatrical works. The piece was called Finale, which is an odd title for a one-movement work. But the meaning becomes clear roughly two-thirds of the way through the performance, when the conductor begins clutching his chest and stumbling at the podium, eventually having a full-fledged heart attack and "dying" on stage. (Our conductor, who was not even thirty years old and in great physical shape, had a tough time pulling this off realistically, but it was probably for the best. Had the septuagenarian who led our larger orchestras been conducting, someone in the crowd would undoubtedly have called 911 when he fell...)

Once the conductor has collapsed, Kagel's score calls for the orchestra to immediately stop playing and leap to their leader's aid. The concertmaster takes his pulse, and sadly shakes his head at the other players. All slowly return to their seats, where, conductorless, the whole ensemble plays the Dies Irae, at which point, presumably, the audience gets the joke. The piece winds up this way, and if I'm remembering correctly, Kagel dictates that the conductor is not allowed to pop back up and bow at the end. Either he may lie "dead" on the stage until the whole audience has left, or, according to Kagel, he may actually have died, in which case the problem will sort itself out.

Finale, to me, perfectly represents Kagel's outlook on music and life. It's a serious piece, albeit one with a dark joke buried in it. The composer himself put it best: "What most interests me is the laugh that stops in your throat, because you realize that laughter is the wrong reaction."

More construction

Progress has been made!!



As you can see, all the cement board is now up and the seams are sealed.

Musically, today, we switched to my iPod, which yielded, around hour 2:37 (during cement board measuring):

Day 2: Minoru Miki, Danses Concertantes I

Miki is the Japanese composer who has probably done most to seamlesly meld traditional instruments (such as the koto and shakuhachi) with a Western neo-classical idiom. One of his most notable works was commissioned by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1981, Kyu-no Kyoku - "Symphony for Two Worlds". It's a piece that I'm quite familiar with as I was present for all performances of the piece during its American premiere with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur.

Actually, I was acting as coordinator and translator during a North American tour by Pro Musica Nipponia, a traditional instrument ensemble founded by Miki in 1964, and our first stop was NYC. Part of the Philharmonic gig included a couple of Young People's concerts, where I was onstage, ostensibly to translate for the Japanese musicians - they were doing instrument demos and I was translating to English for the young audience. A funny moment, though, during an orchestra demonstration for "Peter and the Wolf" - Masur insisted on talking during the demos, and his heavily-inflected English made the word "duck" (the oboe solo in "Peter") sound remarkably liked "dog", much to the confusion and consternation of both audience and orchestra. I eventually jumped in and ad libbed a little discussion of how the timbre of the oboe was similar to the nasal quack of a duck - the orchestra looked at me with relief, the kids got it, but Masur looked at me as if to say "But that's what I just said!".

Miki is less-known outside of Japan; when we think of Japanese composers certainly the first who comes to mind is Toru Takemitsu, both for his concert music and his movie and TV soundtracks. And I have another personal connection here; I was narrator for a world premiere of a Takemitsu piece, Family Tree (conducted by Leonard Slatkin, who years later has become a mentor). Unfortunately Takemitsu, a composer I've revered for years, was too ill to attend the premiere, and I never got to meet him. But certainly a memorable week, yet again onstage with the New York Philharmonic, in front of a microphone.

So, for those of you who have asked me how I got to be so comfortable chatting onstage during our Inside the Classics shows, now you know - I've been doing it for years!

Future music

We're inordinately proud at the announcement this past Monday of a BMI foundation "Outstanding Musical Citizen Award" that went to our very own Beth Cowart and Aaron Kernis for their work as co-directors of the Minnesota Orchestra Composers Institute.

The Minnesota Orchestra’s Composers Institute is a program unique in the orchestra world; each year 7-9 composers are given the opportunity to have their works performed by the Orchestra in our FutureClassics! Concert following an intense week with the Orchestra, Aaron Kernis (our composer-in-residence) and Osmo. For the 2008 incarnation of the Composers Institute we received over 150 applications, a huge stack of scores by anyone’s standard. Of course winnowing this down to the lucky 8 or so composers is an arduous process, one which required a 12-hour day for the panel of judges which, this year, included me.

Conductors tend to have an abundance of new scores pass their desks; often composers send their music unsolicited in an effort to get their works out and seen. In addition, my position at the Curtis Institute requires me to work on a consistent basis with young composers (students and graduates) from Curtis as well as the University of Pennsylvania. And a few weeks back, during an epic day at the American Music Center in New York, I perused over 70 scores of composers ranging in age from 18 to 55.

Apart from the excitement of deciding on those winning scores, the experience was fascinating in that I was able to pore over new scores with some esteemed colleagues and discuss what we saw. All of the panelists remarked on a trend; pieces that relied on skilled and colorful orchestration that sometimes revealed a paucity of actual musical ideas. Writing a symphonic score requires expertise in two distinct areas; compositional skill (the ability to put together nuanced musical ideas within a coherent structure) and mastery of instrumentation (a facility in distributing the aforementioned musical material amongst the different instruments of the orchestra). Ideally, both skills are interconnected and equal, but if this group of composers is any indication, the current tendency is to highlight well-developed orchestration skills over complex musical content.

I’m not sure to what we can attribute this trend, although I have my theory about the influence of culture and technology.

First, the technology. Most composers eventually input their music for engraving via programs like Finale or Sibelius. These programs provide instant playback of an input score, allowing the composer to hear a reasonable representation of what they have written. While this is a fantastic tool, I have observed some composers writing directly via these programs, ie, doing without initial thematic/harmonic sketches or even overarching structural ideas. Because these programs are so convenient to use, perhaps there is the temptation to do without the significant step of working and reworking thematic ideas in the mind's ear and via written sketch, which I've always found to help truly internalize something that you're working on. It's easy enough to move around a slew of notes on a computer screen, push playback and see if it sounds pretty; I've done it myself. But does this ease of execution perhaps allow us a little intellectual laziness?

The cultural impact I've observed is the tremendous influence of film music (which many of my composer friends are keenly interested in, as it can be quite lucrative!). The best symphonic film music naturally uses orchestral colors to full advantage, and this has certainly worked its way into our collective consciousness. And it's gotten to the point where we can point at a young composer's score and say, "Hey, look, a Williams moment", where a sweep of harp and percussion, decorative high woodwind figures and a brass chord voicing are an unmistakable (and perhaps not entirely conscious) mimicking of the great film composer John Williams (whose music, incidentally, I've loved since I first heard his score to "Star Wars" as a kid.)

Or perhaps it just happened to be this batch of scores I saw. But while I certainly don't want to make sweeping generalizations, it seems to me that while in the past one would have to develop substantial compositional chops before attempting a large scale orchestra piece, it has, via technology and the ready availability of recorded music, become plausible for composers to take a shot at such a piece much earlier in their development.

I pondered composition at one point - I did my BA in composition at Harvard - but I found it wasn't for me. I felt uneasy creating something and then giving it away to a performer to bring to life, even if, ironically, I was the performer, conducting my own work. For me it created too much of a disconnect; and, besides, I always liked it much better the way it sounded in my mind's ear (does that make sense to anyone but me?). And I found composition to be such difficult work; it's too easy to become self-consciously avant garde, or to rely on a saccharine tonality, or to flounder around with minimalist techniques. It takes far more to actually find your own unique voice.

I'm happy to report that there were indeed some very unique and personal voices in that pile of scores, and I look forward to hearing them brought to life by the Minnesota Orchestra next fall!

The Mahler Problem

We're playing Mahler's ginormous 9th Symphony this week with one of my favorite guest conductors, Mark Wigglesworth. Which is interesting, because it's entirely possible that you could be a regular visitor to the Minnesota Orchestra web site, could even be planning to attend this concert, and be unaware that there's any Mahler on the program.

The headline on the website for this concert is "Schubert's Unfinished Symphony," which is, to be fair, also on the program. The same description appears on the concert tickets themselves. The thing is, the Schubert, lovely though it is, is a 20-minute appetizer, while the Mahler is a 90-minute magnum opus, so it might seem a bit odd for our marketing department to be highlighting what is unquestionably the less significant work. But there's a reason that they do it, and it's one that musicians often avoid talking about: the concertgoing public just doesn't seem to like Mahler.

I should qualify that right off the bat by saying that, clearly, many people do like Mahler, and several thousand people will be joining us for the concerts this week to prove it. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if our overall ticket sales this week are among our lowest totals of the season. Past experiences with Mahler, in fact, almost guarantee it. And this isn't just a Minnesota problem - audiences across America are decidedly less enthusiastic about Mahler than we musicians are.

So what's the problem here? Mahler's symphonies have been a part of the standard orchestral repertoire for the better part of a century now, so it can hardly be a lack of familiarity that keeps audiences at bay. If anything, I get the sense that our audiences know exactly what a Mahler symphony is, and that it's that knowledge that keeps them away. A couple of years back, our piccolo player and I were talking about Mahler's 5th symphony at a Hallowe'en party (yes, we're huge dorks,) and her husband disgustedly broke into the conversation to explain, in great detail, that only musicians like Mahler, and that people who have to listen to it (rather than playing it) generally hate the experience.

And the thing is, he may not be wrong about that. There's no question that Mahler is generally a lot of fun to play, especially if you're lucky enough to play it with a really good orchestra, under a really great conductor. The music is hugely challenging for every instrument in the orchestra, contains plenty of melodic content for everyone, fits together like the world's most complex jigsaw puzzle, and is just incredibly visceral and raw in it's style. If playing Mozart is like baseball, all clean lines and perfect structure, playing Mahler is like rugby. It's brutal and draining and everyone seems to be piling onto everyone else at exactly the same time, but damn, it's exciting.

Of course, Mahler is brutal and draining for audiences as well. And on top of that, Mahler symphonies are loooooooooong. The one we're playing this week is 90 minutes, which isn't at all unusual for him. I think his shortest symphony is an hour, which is as long as Beethoven's longest. And when you consider that, in most Mahler symphonies, the drama, the pathos, the agony, and the navel-gazing start right off the top and almost never ratchet down, it's asking a lot of an audience. Most people aren't in the mood for that sort of thing very often, and a fair number of people never are. It's like asking people how they feel about Ulysses. Most will allow that it's a great work of literature, but they're not going to make an attempt to read it very often, because who has that kind of energy?

I strongly suspect that a lot of concertgoers get turned off to Mahler after wandering into a performance of one of his bigger works (the 5th, the 6th, the 9th, etc.) unaware of what they were in for. Mahler isn't a composer you want catching you off guard. If you're just looking for a nice, relaxing evening out, and you suddenly find yourself being assaulted by all the personal demons of a 150-year-old manic depressive Austrian in musical form, you're not in for a good night. It'd be like intending to spend a quiet night at the movies and wandering into Letters From Iwo Jima. Even though you recognize that it's an impressive work of art, it's not even remotely what you were looking for.

The reality is, too, that a number of Mahler's symphonies are arguably longer and more over-the-top than they needed to be. It's almost impossible to have a reasonable conversation about this, however, because the people who love Mahler really love Mahler. And in the same way that people who love, say, Lord of the Rings, are not willing to hear a single word said against it, Mahlerians are prone to fly into fits of righteousness if anyone so much as suggests that, really, the first movement of the 9th does drag on a bit. So there again, we run the risk of alienating audiences who, encountering a passionate fan of Mahler, are made to feel as if they are just too dumb or impatient to understand the attraction.

All that having been said, a lot of Mahler's music is great stuff, and we're really not going to stop playing it anytime soon, much as our marketing department might like us to. So I'm curious to hear from our readers on the subject. Do you like Mahler? Hate him? Feel confused by him? Does seeing his name on a concert program make you less likely to buy a ticket? And if so, how did that aversion get started? Enquiring musicians (and marketers) worldwide want to know...

Cutting Room Floor: Validation & Legacy

Some musical works that we think of as masterpieces today were given a decidedly rocky reception on their first performance. (As we demonstrated in dramatic fashion at our January Inside the Classics concerts, Tchaikovsky's violin concerto was one such piece.) But Copland's Appalachian Spring was not only an instant hit on the concert stage, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1945. Which got me wondering what else had won the Pulitzer during the musically tumultuous 20th century.

The music Pulitzer was awarded for the first time only two years before Copland won it, and William Schumann was the first recipient. (Schumann's music is not frequently performed these days, but he was extremely popular with orchestral audiences in the mid-20th century.) In 1944, it was Howard Hanson (another too frequently forgotten composer) taking the prize for his fourth symphony. (Hanson's best known symphony was his second, which the Minnesota Orchestra will coincidentally be performing next season.) Other familiar names capturing honors in the Pulitzer's first decade included Charles Ives, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Walter Piston.

If the initial ten or fifteen winners have anything in common, it's that the majority of them fell outside the musical avant garde that was fast overtaking concert music at the time. Germany's Arnold Schoenberg, whom we'll be discussing at next week's Inside the Classics concerts, had thrown down the atonal gantlet with his system of 12-tone composition decades before, and by the 1950s, composers had well and truly splintered into multiple movements, some of which clung to traditional models of tonality even as others disdained anything that average audience members might actually enjoy listening to.

The avant garde may have been fighting their way to the fore of the compositional profession as early as the 1940s (or even earlier, if you count such luminaries as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Berg as members,) but it took the Pulitzers a while to catch up. The first significant work of seriously atonal music that I see on the list is from 1960, when Elliott Carter won for his second string quartet. (In general, I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the atonal music that was written mid-century, but Carter's string quartets, like Bartok's, are truly masterworks, and did a lot to advance both composition and performance of chamber music.) Interestingly, the 1962 award went to Robert Ward, who rejected 12-tone and atonal music as "boring," for his operatic version of The Crucible, which is still regularly performed by companies the world over. And while the Pulitzer committee toyed with the avant garde a bit in the '60s (Leslie Barrett won in 1967, George Crumb in '68,) it stayed largely away from the most "out there" compositions of the era.

But then, in 1970, the committee decided to jump headfirst into the new, and gave the award to Charles Wuorinen, for his synthesizer symphony, Time's Encomium. There are those in the music business who will tell you that this was the moment when concert music in America truly went off the rails and lost popular audiences forever. (I may not disagree - I generally despise Wuorinen's music, and most of what he stands for as a composer.) There are others who would insist that it was only when Wuorinen was legitimized in the eyes of the musical establishment that those of us in the hidebound, old-fashioned orchestra world finally began paying attention to the important changes underway in our profession.

For most of the 1970s, the Pulitzer would go to an avant garde composer; not a surprise, given what was going on in America's larger culture during that decade of experimentation and rebellion. (One of the exceptions to the rule was Minnesota's own Dominick Argento, a staunch melodist who won in 1975 for From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, a song cycle premiered at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis.) But in the '80s, things throttled back a bit as composers began to emerge from decades of intense pressure to reject any idea that reeked of the past. By 1987, when John Harbison won the Pulitzer for The Flight Into Egypt, it seemed that tonality and atonality were on their way to a reconciliation.

The last couple of decades have firmed up that idea, at least as far as the Pulitzers are concerned. A new generation of American composers, from Aaron Jay Kernis to John Corigliano, won the award for compositions that embraced traditional melody and harmony without sacrificing intellectual content. Some composers who had never gone away during the decades of experimentation (John Adams, for instance, who won in 2003 for a symphony inspired by the 9/11 attacks) experienced career resurgences. And in 2007, there was an even more positive sign: a jazz score, Ornette Coleman's Sound Grammar, won the Pulitzer for the very first time. (Jazz legend Wynton Marsalis had won the award in 1997, but it was for a classical composition.)

A lot gets made these days about the collapse of traditional barriers between musical genres, and certainly, embracing jazz in 2007 doesn't exactly make the Pulitzer committee a risk-taking bunch. But just as orchestras (the biggest, costliest, and most unwieldy ensembles of the music world) are generally an important bellwether of which trends are truly here to stay in the classical world, the Pulitzers tell us a lot about which composers may (and I stress may) stand the test of time. The full list of winners is here if you want to peruse it yourself, and I'd love to hear about any winners that leapt out at you, or any you find incomprehensible...

Cutting Room Floor: Behind Every Great Composer...

The music world is full of behind-the-scenes figures without whom none of us on stage would have a prayer of making a living at what we do. These devoted music fans contribute the money that keeps us going, and some of them contribute countless hours of their time, as well. Some are board members of orchestras big and small; some devote their free time to helping keep organizations like Minnesota's Schubert Club aloft; and a select few go their own way, commissioning new works, finding and paying musicians to play them, and generally carving out a small niche in the music world that would otherwise not exist.

Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was one of this last group. Born in Chicago in 1864, she would become one of the most influential figures in the then-developing American music scene, and while her name wouldn't ring a bell with the vast majority of musicians and music fans today, composers and musicians across the 20th century musical landscape (including Aaron Copland) owe her a debt of gratitude.

That such a prominent patron of the arts in the early 20th century could have been a woman might seem surprising, given the societal restrictions of the period. But a quick glance back through Western musical history reveals that an inordinately large number of patrons of the arts have been women, and this remains the case today. (Just off the top of my head, I could name nine or ten women who are major powers on the Minnesota Orchestra's board. I'm refraining because many of them are famously averse to public recognition for their charitable works, wanting only the music and an occasional conversation with Osmo in return for their tireless efforts.)

Sprague Coolidge's contributions to music were many, but she may be best remembered for having started the rural summer festival in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts that would later become known as Tanglewood. The Boston Symphony's idyllic summer home, to which listeners from around the world flock each July and August to hear grand symphonies while lying on a vast lawn sipping wine, began as an outgrowth of Sprague Coolidge's Berkshire Music Festival.

She was most passionate about chamber music, that connoisseur's genre so often ignored by the general public, and in her adult life, she commissioned some of the great works of the era: Bartok's 5th string quartet, Anton Webern's lone quartet, two quartets by Arnold Schoenberg, and (you knew this was coming) Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. (While our Inside the Classics concerts next week will be focusing on the orchestral version of Copland's masterpiece, remember that it began its life as a ballet score, to be played by just 13 musicians in an orchestra pit. At it's core, Appalachian Spring is a work of chamber music.)

Sprague Coolidge's role as a patron of the arts was a delicate one at times. In 1919, she famously held a competition for composers to create a new sonata for the viola, one of her favorite instruments (and mine, obviously.) Several prominent composers entered works, and eventually, the jury deadlocked between two distinctive pieces. One was by the eminent Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch (his Grand Suite for viola,); the other was by Sprague Coolidge's neighbor, a British-born composer and violist named Rebecca Clarke. Aching for her friend, but mindful of the necessity of not allowing her competition to be sullied by accusations of favoritism, Sprague Coolidge broke the tie in Bloch's favor. (Both the Clarke sonata and the Bloch suite have since become standard repertoire for violists.)

Many of those responsible for music's creation and preservation toil in obscurity, and as I said, many of them wouldn't have it any other way. (To be honest, it's likely I'd never have heard of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge were it not for the fact that my connections to Western Massachusetts run particularly deep.) So it's somewhat apropos that you won't be hearing anything about the woman who commissioned Aaron Copland to write a ballet for Martha Graham in our concerts next week. Her name doesn't appear on the score, and even hardcore Copland fans frequently assume that it was Graham herself who paid for Appalachian Spring to be written.

But without her, 20th century music would have been quite different. She understood the importance of encouraging innovation, even if she didn't always like what she heard. Her perspective on the importance of new music is one that all of us in the music world would do well to remember: "My plea for modern music is not that we should like it, nor necessarily that we should even understand it, but that we should exhibit it as a significant human document."

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.

Glass

Part of the trailer for "Glass: A Portrait of Philip Glass in Twelve Parts", a new film by Scott Hicks (no relation) premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last September. I was struck by the expression on his face in this clip - he looks alternately gleeful and terrified on the Cyclone, like a ten year old boy, which is just delightful.

Thought for the day

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

~ John Cage

To Be Certain Of The Music

We're back in the recording studio this week, (actually, that's not entirely accurate - we make our recordings on the stage of Orchestra Hall, with our production team squirreled away with all their equipment in a backstage rehearsal room,) but the project we're working on couldn't be more different than the Beethoven symphony cycle that we've spent the last five seasons completing. This week, we're teamed up with a massive choir of adults and children, four vocal soloists, and an authentic Jewish cantor to record Stephen Paulus's gripping oratorio, To Be Certain of the Dawn.

Stephen is a well-known composer around these parts, and he's developed quite a reputation nationally, as well. (I've actually spent a large number of mornings this season playing another piece of his, written for the orchestra's Kinder Konzerts series, aimed at pre-school and kindergarten students.) This particular project had its genesis more than three years ago, when the rector of Minneapolis's Basilica of St. Mary commissioned Stephen and poet Michael Dennis Browne to create a new oratorio on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps in which millions of Jews lost their lives. The oratorio was to be a gift from the Catholic Church to Minneapolis's Temple Israel (the city's largest synagogue) and the Jewish community of the Twin Cities. We premiered it at the Basilica in 2005, with Temple Israel's outstanding cantor, Barry Abelson, intoning the opening and closing blessings, to packed houses and a positive critical reaction.

The piece is unusual in several respects. First, while it does not lack for chilling moments and angry climaxes, as you would expect from an oratorio focused on the Holocaust, the overall effect of the music and poetry is quite uplifting. To this end, Browne and Paulus took as inspiration a set of photographs of European Jews just going through the motions of daily life in the 1930s, before their world was turned upside down by the Nazi government. (The photos are projected on screens during the performance.) One photo shows two little girls shyly posing for the camera; another shows a young boy standing under a tree, while a much older man with a long beard leans back against the trunk.

From these photos, Browne created lyrics for the soloists that imagined the lives and thoughts of the people in the photos. The lyrics are simple and descriptive, and the music that goes along with them is light and airy. But somewhere in the middle of each of these snapshots of ordinary life, the chorus breaks in with vicious murmuring declarations: "Jews may not keep animals. Jews may not attend school. Jews may not imagine. Jews may not dream." It's a startling effect. There is no overt suggestion of violence in these lines, but there is that unmistakable quality of menace that every Jew living in Germany must have felt for years before it became fully clear just what exactly their government had in mind. Juxtaposed against the innocent imaginings of the lives of the ordinary people in the photos, these lines are devastating to listen to.

If the chorus is occasionally called upon to represent the evils of genocide and bigotry, the children's choir, which plays a major role in the oratorio, represents the opposite: simple human hope and goodness. Four times, the children sing a traditional Hebrew blessing, each repetition more forceful and determined than the last. Late in the piece, after the adult choir has sung of the terror of Kristallnacht, the children and adults join together with the soprano soloist to sing a Hymn to the Eternal Flame: "Every breath is in you / every cry / Every longing in you / every singing / Every hope, every healing / Woven into fire." And at the tail end of the piece, the final gut punch comes from the voice of a Holocaust survivor, as the mezzo-soprano soloist sings, "I have lived in a world with no children. I would never live in a world of no children again." As she finishes the line, and the combined choruses implore the audience in Hebrew to "love your neighbor as yourself," one final photo is projected onto the screen: a sea of children, staring innocently into the lens.

I'm not terribly well-connected to the world of modern composers, but I know enough to be fairly certain that there are composers and musicians who would consider Paulus's oratorio to be something less than serious music. His works tend to be accessible to anyone who hears them, and from what I've played and heard of his stuff, it seems clear that he is far more interested in connecting with audiences than in impressing colleagues with how smart he is. There are no tone rows, no endless cycling of minimalist progressions, just clean, simple lines and undeniably provocative harmonies.

For much of the last century, this approach has been a great way to get yourself shunned by the new music cognoscenti, as the avant-garde seized and held control of the internal taste mechanisms of the industry. But lately, composers who value such old-fashioned ideas as melody and emotional impact have been making a major comeback, and the exclusionary worldview of the modernists has finally started to lose its grip on performers and audiences. To my mind, this is a positive development, and as I watched countless members of the audience at last night's concert tear up as the final chorus swelled in Paulus's oratorio, I was as certain as I've ever been that this is what music is supposed to be.

I guess we're all the same...

Check out this interesting, if slightly baffling, MSN.com article on careers with fast-growing salaries. According to these statistics, salaries of "music directors and composers" are growing by 5.6% every year. Which is all fine and well (hey, we're doing better than film and video editors!).

What I'm a little baffled about is the combination of music director and composer - it seems positively...18th or 19th century. I can't think of very many people who fit this bill these days (Boulez? ) unless we're talking more about the entertainment industry. Or maybe composers and conductors are so difficult to differentiate for the non-classical fan that it makes sense to lump us all into one category (and conductors are just serving the composers' visions anyway, right?).

Geburtstag

This is how I want to spend my 99th birthday: in a recent NY Times article Daniel J. Wakin writes, “Now here’s a way to celebrate your birthday: Gather hundreds of affectionate fans in a theater, sit as they watch a rare performance of your only opera, and bathe in their applause. So it was for the composer Elliott Carter, who turned 99 on Tuesday. He was attending the final showing in a run of his opera, ‘What Next?,’ at the Miller Theater. The work was being staged for the first time in New York. The first half of the concert consisted of chamber music by Mr. Carter, followed by the opera after the intermission. During the break a stream of people came up to him. Many wished him a happy birthday. He signed a CD of his music. He accepted an organic chocolate bar from a female admirer, and took a bite. After the opera performance and bows by the cast members, they joined with the audience in round of ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”

Copyright Conundrums

What’s been interesting as we prepare for this first Inside the Classics concert is that although we refer to Firebird as if it were a single piece, there are actually 4 discrete versions of it – 1910, 1911, 1919 and 1945. The original (1910) is by far the longest, a 50-minute ballet in two scenes, and is scored for the largest orchestra (3 harps!!). The other three versions are “concert suites”, with selected portions of the full ballet, and for a much smaller band.

It can get a little confusing from a pure learning-the-music perspective – the 1910 version has the most music, the middle two version the least, and the 1945 reinstates some of the music from the original, but under different titles and with the order switched around. Each one is orchestrated a bit differently, so although it sounds familiar, different instruments are playing in different combinations. It’s enough to make your head spin, particularly when you have them all laid out in front of you.

To further complicate matters, there is the copyright issue; the 1910, 1911 and 1919 are public domain and can be played for free, while 1945 is still under copyright and must be rented. At this point one runs into a budgeting issue. To perform a lovely section of music that’s called “The Firebird’s Supplication” or ”Pas de deux” (depending on which version you’re looking at), the question is, does one do the version that most orchestras own (1910) and hire a bunch of extra players (this is the one requiring an enormous orchestra) or does one pay to rent the music (1945 version) while saving on the extra musicians (smaller orchestration)?

Musicians are often reluctant to discuss the constant conflict between artistic content and fiscal feasibility – it raises the uncomfortable truth that although we are part of non-profit organizations we need to foster our art responsibly, acknowledging the existence of a bottom line (a topic sure to be revisited at length at some other time!). But that’s not to say that there’s no way of maintaining some sort of equilibrium, or that it’s not possible to produce great art and be financially savvy, which takes me back to Stravinsky, ever the shrewd businessman, who actually created this copyright conundrum. He became an American citizen in 1945, and realizing that citizenship gave him copyright protection (he was not receiving royalty payments for his music up to that point), he was keen on revising and reissuing his early works, to his great financial benefit. Who says artists can’t be practical?

This way there be dragons...

Bernard Holland had a column in Sunday's New York Times that really grabbed my attention. It was about the role of composers in the concert experience, and it expressed, in words far more organized and eloquent than I could come up with, much of what I believe to be true about late 20th-century music and those who wrote it.

The column starts out by repeating a question every critic has either been asked or asked himself: namely, how one should prepare for a world premiere, when there's no score to study and no recording to consult for perspective. With so much new music layered in complexity, how can even an educated listener hope to be ready to offer an assessment of a completely new work after one hearing?

Holland doesn't like the implications of the question: "Haven’t we got things backward? Shouldn’t composers be preparing for me rather than me for them?" That may seem flip, but it expresses the beginnings of the frustration that those of us in this business hear year after year from members of our audience. I can't count the number of times that some intelligent friend of mine has looked pleadingly at me after a concert featuring a work by a contemporary composer and whimpered, "Did you like that piece?" It's as if they can't allow themselves to believe their own distaste without having it confirmed by a professional.

This just shouldn't be the way things work. Composers (especially those in the business of writing dense, academic scores that sound more like aural representations of calculus equations than music) have spent a lot of time over the past several decades blasting away at symphony orchestras for not playing more new music, while conveniently ignoring the undeniable fact that the programming of new music didn't decline precipitously until virtually the entire music world fell under the spell of a generation of composers seemingly dedicated to the deliberate alienation of the listener. (see also rows, tone) Not only did these composers and their advocates in the press delight in the discomfort and hostility of the average concertgoer, they viciously attacked or studiously ignored any composer impudent enough to continue making use of such supposedly passé concepts as tonality or emotion.

This era is mercifully over, and has been for at least 15 years (although certain modernist bigwigs with friends in high places are still inexplicably held up as shining examples of what composers should be in certain academic and musical circles.) Most of today's best composers are writing music that, while certainly challenging in comparison to much of what you can hear on the radio, is accessible enough to the average listener that it won't trigger an immediate fight-or-flight reflex. More importantly, young composers seem to be granted greater freedom than in decades past to experiment with different styles and find their own voice rather than being pressured to adhere to a rigid ideology that equates impenetrable complexity with intelligent artistry.

To me, the great tragedy of the era in which new music was used as an intellectual cudgel with which audiences could be beaten is that even in 2007, when my orchestra is preparing to premiere a new work that I know for a fact they'll be able to absorb and enjoy on first hearing, I look out into the crowd before the first downbeat, and see hundreds of tense and worried faces attached to intelligent, open-minded people who are steeling themselves for the worst. Listeners have become so used to being confused and taken advantage of by the composers of the past that they can't help but assume that they're going to hate what's coming from a composer of today. And that's a damn shame.

The good news is that it doesn't seem to take much to break down those fears. Bear with me for a story: A few years back, the Minnesota Orchestra was premiering a brand new work by a composer of some international renown, as we do on a somewhat regular basis. We'd been rehearsing it all week with varying degrees of success, and as the concert loomed, we found out that the composer would not be able to attend, due to ill health. This was a shame, because we had been hoping that he would speak to the audience about the work, which was very complex and dark, before we played it, thus perhaps preparing them for what to expect.

Instead, Osmo took the microphone to speak about the piece, and everyone in the room was amazed by what he said. Right off the bat, he confessed that when he first saw the score, he had thought, "Oh, no." The piece was so esoteric and academic that he feared that neither the orchestra nor the listeners would be able to get their minds around it enough to make the experience of listening worth anything. Osmo further confessed that, even after days of rehearsal, he still wasn't sure whether he liked the piece. But, he added with a laugh, "what does Vänskä know? You will have your own opinions, and if we are playing the piece well, you will be able to hear with your own ears." It was an unexpectedly profound moment, even as the audience laughed at the joke. A conductor had just given a roomful of listeners full permission to hate a piece of music that they had paid to hear. All he asked was that they listen with an open mind.

After that concert, I cornered every audience member I could find, and asked what they'd thought of the piece. (I hated it, myself, but didn't let on.) Lots of them thought it was lousy - a few liked it. But the difference between these listeners and the ones I usually hear from after a tough premiere was that all of them were smiling, even the ones who had no use for the piece. Osmo had given them credit for being intelligent adults, capable of drawing their own conclusions about music, and that made them far more willing to engage with the piece than they would have been otherwise. I've often thought that if Osmo's speech could be replayed before every new or unfamiliar work we play, our listeners would wind up liking a far higher percentage of what we play for them.

Holland sums it all up better than I can: