The new 20 zloty note featuring bicentennial birthday boy and Poland's favorite son, Fryderyk Chopin.
Unfortunately for conductors, the only orchestra music Chopin wrote lies in the piano concertos, which, while containing little actual music for the orchestra, are notoriously difficult to coordinate with the soloist. Fortunately for pianists and music lovers everywhere, he left an remarkable legacy of piano music, particularly in large sets of miniatures (waltzes, etudes, preludes, mazurkas) - all featuring extraordinary harmonic complexity, melodic nuance and variety of mood.
For your enjoyment - famed Chopin interpreter Vladimir Horowitz playing a duo of Mazurkas, including one of my favorite (the modal-sounding A minor one):
For more information on Chopin festivities click here.
"A new book on how the human brain interprets music has revealed that listeners rely upon finding patterns within the sounds they receive in order to make sense of it and interpret it as a musical composition."
You don't say. Go on...
"While traditional classical music follows strict patterns and formula that allow the brain to make sense of the sound, modern symphonies by composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern simply confuse listeners' brains."
Okay, well, first of all, both of those composers died six decades ago, so they hardly qualify as "modern." What the authors actually mean is "modernist," which was a movement that burned brightly with composers (and considerably less brightly with audiences) in the mid-20th century. These days, the number of prominent composers still working who persist in writing modernist music can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
But I'm sorry, I interrupted. You were saying...
"In the early twentieth century, however, composers led by Schoenberg began to rally against the traditional conventions of music to produce compositions which lack tonal centres, known as atonal music."
Now, there again, Schoenberg did not write "atonal" music. He created a new and complex system of tones and chord structures known as "12-tone" music. It involved all kinds of grids and math and chromatic doodads and such, but it is not, strictly speaking, atonal. Atonal means that you can just throw any combination of notes together and call it music.
Yes, I'm a nerd. But my point is that Schoenberg's music is actually more strictly organized, from a pattern standpoint, than a lot of traditional tonal music. So theoretically, our pattern-seeking brains should eventually be able to detect those patterns and relax, once we've been conditioned to hear that kind of music. And as those of us who've spent a lot of time with modernist music will tell you, that does, indeed, happen, up to a point. Your brain will never mistake Webern or Berg for Mozart, but you do eventually get a bit of an aural handle on what's going on.
"Research has shown that listening to music is a major cognitive task that requires considerable processing resources to unpick harmony, rhythm and melody."
Uh-huh. Which is why listening to a Mahler symphony is mentally exhausting (but exhilirating,) while listening to a Lady Gaga song (or, for that matter, a Strauss waltz) is the mental equivalent of eating cotton candy. But this all seems pretty common sensical. Was there some actual, y'know, science in this scientific study?
"Using brain scanning equipment Professor Kraus, who presented her findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego on Saturday, said the brainwaves recorded from volunteers listening to music could be converted back to sound.
"In one example where volunteers listened to Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water, when the brainwaves were played back the song was clearly recognisable."
Oh, for the love of... yah. Great. Can we assume that the double-blind study confirming that Wagner had a thing for tubas is on its way?
Buried somewhere in the raft of comments appended to my last post, WB Stahl made a request for more details on last week's concerts:
"So tell us more about playing the Grosse Fuge. I thought it was fascinating..."
Happy to oblige, though I'm hardly an expert on the piece. This was actually my first time playing it, believe it or not, in either the original quartet form or Michael Steinberg's electrifying orchestral version. And that gave last week's rehearsals and performances a real sense of immediacy for me, which is something that's hard to duplicate in a performance where you've played the rep a dozen times or more.
To begin with, the Grosse Fuge is a bear of a piece to wrestle with as a performer, whether you're one of four or one in a sea of string players. And it can also be a maddeningly complex thing to listen to or study - Alex Ross of The New Yorker calls it "a musicological Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications. It is the most radical work by the most formidable composer in history, and, for composers who had to follow in Beethoven’s wake, it became a kind of political object. Arnold Schoenberg heard it as a premonition of atonality, a call for freedom from convention... Benjamin Britten, who took pride in tailoring his music to the needs of particular performers and places, was heard to complain that Beethoven’s late works were at times willfully bizarre, prophetic of avant-garde, obscurantist tendencies."
That mind sound over the top - after all, it's just an oversized fugue, right? - but I understand the strong reactions the piece provokes. For one thing, the main fugue subject, which goes like this...
(click to enlarge)
...is almost entirely overwhelmed by Beethoven's subsequent counter-subjects after that initial unison blast from the performers. In a strange way, the subject is actually the least interesting element of the piece. The primary line our ears want to follow is a fast-leaping, snap-rhythm counter-subject that starts in the first violins as the violas insistently hammer away at the subject to no avail. The seconds and cellos (and basses, in Steinberg's version) jump in undaunted, and you're off on one of the strangest and most violent trips in all of Beethoven's output. In fact, the dynamic marking stays at forte or louder for every instrument for the next four pages of music. (That's four pages of a single-line part; it's probably more than ten in the score.)
So essentially what you have is four equal lines, all blasting away at maximum volume at the composer's instruction for 5 or 6 minutes at a clip, during a piece that is based on one of the most complex compositional techniques ever devised. It's totally crazy, it's the antithesis of good fugue writing, there's absolutely no way it should be anything but an ungodly mess...
...and yet, somehow, it isn't. I'm still not sure how that can be true, even after a week of performing the thing. In particular, I'm thinking of a passage midway through that first extended forte gallop, in which each section in turn switches abruptly from playing the snap-rhythm counter-subject to playing a furious run of triplets that leap from register to register and seriously threaten to derail the rhythmic stability of every player who hasn't made the transition yet. It's a train wreck waiting to happen, and yet, it didn't happen. And I was never seriously worried that it would.
Of course, having a conductor helps, and in the original version, that train wreck spot is a much bigger risk, since there's no one individual in charge of keeping everyone together. And that, I think, is the real fun of playing the orchestral version of the Grosse Fuge (beyond the simple pleasure of being able to make a lot more noise, of course.) With Osmo insuring that the overall pulse of the beastly thing wasn't going anywhere unexpected, we were free to just attack our individual parts with all the ferocity we could muster, and see where we ended up.
I actually found myself out of breath at the end of our first performance of the week, just from the effort and exhilaration of it all. I don't know whether the audience got as much out of it as we did, since there's no question that this is one of those pieces that is even more challenging to listen to than it is to play, but personally, I had a blast. (And I can't wait to play it on the stage of Carnegie Hall next Monday...)
There was an interesting concert review in the New York Times over the weekend, interesting partly because you don't often see newly formed new music ensembles that play in Greenwich Village clubs getting full-length reviews in the Gray Lady, and partly because of the direction critic Anthony Tommasini chose to meander in the later paragraphs. Early on, Tommasini notes that, "Though the performances were brilliant, it was the irreverent mixing of works that excited me,"and he goes on to detail a widely varied program ranging from thorny Modernism to pop-influenced music by ultra-trendy 20-somethings.
The lesson we're meant to draw is one I've written about before, that the new generation of young performers and composers "could not care less about the stubborn ideology that divided the camps long ago." This is hardly a new notion, of course. Many of us in the music world have been writing about this long-overdue evolution for years, and ArtsJournal even hosts a music blog whose tagline declares, "No Genre Is The New Genre." But Tommasini notes an exception to the new egalitarian rule:
"Still, the program was not all embracing. The works played here were either by complex modernists (Stockhausen, Babbitt, Berio), or younger freewheeling composers of a post-modernist bent, what the critic Greg Sandow calls the “alternative classical” music of today. Missing from the roster was anything by composers of, for want of a better word, the middle ground, what John Harbison has wryly referred to as “us notes-and-rhythms composers,” meaning those who more or less write pieces for conventional instruments, largely eschewing electronics, composers more concerned with thematic development than with instrumental atmospherics and sound collages."
Now, that's a very interesting observation to me, because, for those of us who play in symphony orchestras for a living, those "notes-and-rhythms" composers are almost all the new music we see! Orchestras, which by definition have to draw huge audiences to survive, rarely program the kind of aggressively modernist works that sent audiences scurrying for the exits in the 1960s and '70s, but we also rarely play works by those hip young experimenters so beloved in the New York club scene. (This isn't because we don't like them, by the way - it's because most of them aren't writing music for orchestras yet. Stress on yet - those who like to see every new musical trend as yet another sign that orchestras are dying love to claim that every new generation of composers has abandoned the large-scale orchestra, when the reality is always that there's simply no point writing an orchestral piece until you know there's an orchestra waiting to play it.)
What we do play is music by those more "mainstream" composers that Tommasini worries about - John Harbison, Aaron Jay Kernis, John Corigliano. (Does Kalevi Aho fit in that group? Not sure...) And while I think the Times is right to point out that there's still a wide gulf between the music that is held in high esteem in academic circles and that which large swaths of the public are likely to embrace, it's not something I think of as a serious problem. Academia is always operating on a different (and less market-driven) plane from the rest of society - it's why academics prefer to stay in the academy, while the rest of us couldn't wait to escape it.
As Tommasini says in his final paragraph, "The important news is that the end of dogma is indisputable. Empowered American musicians and composers from the new generation have it in them to foster pluralism and save classical music from itself." To which I can only add: ...and it's about [redacted by request] time.
On the heels of last week's ItC concerts that featured music of Claude Debussy, we got this excellent Ask An Expert question from Pat O'Regan...
Q: When I leave the concert, almost invariably... I am born away by the music. Walking to the car, phrases of the evening’s performance resound in my mind. The feeling can be summed up as “Oh, the music!” Very often, this continues through the rest of the evening. Even waking in the morning, shaking off sleep, my first thought is, “Oh, yes, it was the music. What a wonderful evening.”
But Debussy was another matter altogether. I found the pieces strangely captivating, but I was not moved by them. (I am not talking about the Orchestra here, but about Mr. Debussy.) Leaving the concert, I could think of nothing to remember, and being “born away” was reduced to “well, that was interesting.” Isn’t this a demerit to Mr. Debussy? Doesn’t the failure to stir the soul – at least this one – make him a lesser composer than those other guys? Do you hum Debussy from time to time? Am I wrong to think that he is not in the same league as, say, Mozart, and might this lack of impact on the listener be the reason? Or is there no lack, and it just takes a fine musical mind to appreciate this music – in which case, my case is hopeless. What I am asking is: Does the man stir you as much as those other guys?
Well, first of all, musical taste is obviously highly subjective, so this is not so much an Ask An Expert situation as it is Ask Another Random Human Being Who Likes Music. In other words, I would never denigrate someone else's musical taste simply because a composer I like doesn't do much for him/her. There are undeniably great composers whose music does very little for me, even as I can recognize their skill.
That having been said, my short answer to Pat's core question would be that yes, Debussy stirs me every bit as much (and in fact, more than) most of your standard-issue classic and romantic era German composers. However, I would steer firmly away from the notion that this is because I have a "fine musical mind" and Pat somehow doesn't. Personal taste issues aside, I've long theorized that the most important variable shaping our taste in music is when we were first exposed to it, and how often.
Now, I grew up playing a lot of chamber music, and was lucky enough to be introduced to the Debussy string quartet while I was a teenager. It blew me away (and still does - just tonight, I slogged through the snow to watch some friends playing it at the Southern Theater, and it's as viscerally exciting a piece for me now as it was when I was 15,) and set in motion a larger interest in this decidedly un-German style of music. It didn't make me appreciate Beethoven and Brahms any less - it just made the universe a little bigger for me.
On the other hand, I did not play a lot of orchestral music while I was a teen, so I wasn't being directly exposed to a lot of stuff that other young musicians my age were. As a result, when I got to college and started playing in orchestra every day, I found that my tastes were a lot more conservative than most. The Rite of Spring, which everyone assured me was a mind-blowingly great piece, did quite literally nothing for me for years, and the massive symphonies of Gustav Mahler and the great tone poems of Richard Strauss felt similarly unaffecting. It wasn't that I questioned their greatness - I just didn't personally derive much pleasure from playing or hearing them.
Eventually, the light bulb went on for me regarding Mahler, Stravinsky, and Strauss, but it took many years, and a lot of performances. And I'm sure that, had my first serious, prolonged exposure to those titans of the orchestra world come earlier in my life, it wouldn't have taken nearly so long for me to feel personally attached to them. We form connections so easily as kids, and as adults, it can be frustratingly difficult to take the same pleasure in new experiences that we take for granted when we're young.
Of course, some composers (and authors, and painters, and foods) we never learn to like, no matter how many other people are obsessed with them. And that's fine, of course - if Debussy isn't your thing, at least you know to avoid him in the future. But you never know: if you'd asked 20-year-old me if I thought I'd ever become a fan of Stravinsky, you'd have gotten a pretty confident, and utterly wrong, reply. So Pat, it might be worth your time to give Debussy a few more chances to move you...
Cutting Room Floor: More Debussy Than You Can Shake A Baton At
In past seasons, Sarah and I have written a series of Cutting Room Floor blog posts in the weeks leading up to each of our Inside the Classics shows, highlighting extra material that we didn't have time to include in the concert. This year, we're tweaking that idea a bit, and putting all the extra material in a single post. Mostly, what you'll find below are links to other sites with more in-depth information on some of the topics we'll be touching on all too briefly on stage.
When it comes to Debussy, the tidal wave of available biographical and musical information is almost overwhelming, and it took us a while to figure out just where we wanted to focus our ItC script. Eventually, we decided that we'd spend most of our time on Debussy's unique "layering" effects and how that distinctive style of composition contrasts with other composers, both in Debussy's time and other eras. But if you're listening closely, you'll hear references to a lot of other fascinating stuff about the man and his music. If any of those references made you want to learn more, click away below...
-- Debussy had a deep affection for Japanese landscape painting, and asked his publisher to print a copy of a painting of a huge wave by Katsushika Hokusai on the cover of the score to La Mer. Hokusai, for his part, had also taken much inspiration from the landscape painters of France and Holland. Learn more about this iconic artist here...
-- Speaking of art, Debussy's music is often called Impressionistic, after the visual art movement of the same name. But Debussy rejected the label, and Sarah and I think his music actually had much more in common with another style of art that gained currency in France in the 19th century - pointillism, which is primarily associated with its creator, Georges Seurat. Seurat's masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grand Jatte, which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, actually inspired another composer to compose an entire Broadway musical about him. Stephen Sondheim's Sunday In The Park With George was a heartbreakingly beautiful (but fictional) account of the painter's life, and the lives of his 20th-century descendants.
-- Toru Takemitsu, a profoundly influential Japanese composer who died in 1996, had a deep fondness for Debussy's music, and La Mer in particular. During our concerts, we highlighted a brief section of Takemitsu's Quotations of Dream, which quotes Debussy's masterpiece directly. Bringing him into our evening was entirely Sarah's idea, because, as she wrote during the planning process, "Takemitsu's serious concert music is sadly underrepresented in the States. I think part of it might be the dreamlike quality and the transparency of textures and utterly Eastern instinct for time and space that is so far removed from our particular Western aesthetic. It's such a shame, as I know of few composers of the late 20th century who create such a distinctive sound world and speak with such an intensely individual musical voice."
-- More Takemitsu: The BBC did a short documentary on him a while back, which you can see here. Also, here's a section of another documentary on his work in film, containing a fascinating discussion of "ma", one of those nearly untranslatable words that captures the essence of his music. As it happens, Takemitsu is also the composer of one of my favorite works for solo viola, A Bird Came Down The Walk. And last but not least, Sarah herself was once featured as the narrator in a Takemitsu piece commissioned by the New York Philharmonic.
-- From the "in case you were wondering" file: that overly cliched "Sea Symphony" that the orchestra played near the top of the show (the one that ended with a big foghorn blast from the tuba) was composed by Sarah. And if you thought you heard a familiar melodic snippet floating around in the violin area, you were right. It's from Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, also known as Fingal's Cave.
-- Towards the end of the first half, I mentioned an ugly incident in Debussy's personal life which caused Parisian audiences to feel quite uncharitable towards him around the time that La Mer was premiered there in 1905. Debussy had always been a bit of a carouser - he was known to have had at least two simultaneous affairs in the 1890s, and one of his mistresses tried to shoot herself when she found out about the other one. Later, Debussy married a woman named Lilly Texier in 1899, but left her in 1904 for a married woman named Emma Bardac. Lilly, hugely distraught, did manage to shoot herself, though not fatally. Even before the advent of the celebrity-soaked culture we live in today, this was the kind of gossip that got whole cities buzzing, and Debussy was widely reviled in polite society for his actions.
-- Finally, because we always seem to get questions from people wondering where to find some work that we excerpted on the first half of these ItC programs, here's a complete playlist of everything we played, either in whole or in part, on this week's show:
DEBUSSY Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun DEBUSSY La Mer (The Sea) RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Scheherezade HICKS A Sea Symphony of Sorts (not actually available outside of these concerts) RAVEL Finale (The Enchanted Garden) from Ma Mere L'Oye (Mother Goose Suite) DEBUSSY Claire de Lune TAKEMITSU Quotations of Dream STRAUSS Don Juan
Rested and refreshed from my week off (really, truly, an entire week! I have to remember how good this feels...).
To get back into the swing of things (blogging included), "rest and refreshment" in a very different context:
September 22, 1802
Gentlemen,
It was a most pleasant surprise to receive such a flattering letter from a part of the world where I could never have imagined that the products of my poor talents were known. But when I see that not only is my name familiar to you, but my compositions are performed by you with approval and satisfaction, the warmest wishes of my heart are fulfilled: to be considered a not wholly unworthy priest of this sacred art by every nation where my works are known. You reassure me on this point as regards your fatherland, but even more, you happily persuade me -- and this cannot fail to be a real source of consolation to me in my declining years -- that I am often the enviable means by which you, and so many other families sensible of heartfelt emotion, derive, in their homely circle, their pleasure -- their enjoyment. How reassuring this thought is to me! Often, when struggling against the obstacles of every sort which oppose my labors; often, when the powers of mind and body weakened, and it was difficult for me to continue in the course I had entered on;-- a secret voice whispered to me, "There are so few happy and contented people here below; grief and sorrow are always their lot; perhaps your labors will once be a source from which the care-worn, or the man burdened with affairs, can derive a few moments' rest and refreshment." This was indeed a powerful motive to press onwards, and this is why I now look back with cheerful satisfaction on the labors expended on this art, to which I have devoted so many long years of uninterrupted effort and exertion...
This year's edition of the Composer Institute is now a week behind us, but those of you who missed the FutureClassics concert and want to hear some of the music that we were blogging about can now hear it online, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio. The main audio player on this page has the entire concert in one continuous track, but if you want to listen to individual pieces, look for the list of repertoire in the center column.
Classical MPR announcer (and onetime professional flutist) Alison Young hosted the concert and interviewed each composer onstage just before his/her piece was performed. We've found that having a live host serves two important purposes: 1) giving the audience a chance to get some background on what to expect, as the pieces that make up the concert are usually quite diverse, and 2) giving the percussion section the time they need to change over their entire area of the stage, since massive percussion setups seem to be the new black with today's composers.
Nearly everyone I talked with (both in the orchestra and in the audience) agreed that the level of skill displayed by this year's Institute participants was the highest it's ever been, and that's saying something. The music ranged from effervescent to soaring to overwhelming, and I strongly suspect that more than one of them will be showing up on a Minnesota Orchestra program in the not-too-distant future...
UPDATE, 11/18: Composer Institute participant Spencer Topel's latest blog entry is up over at NewMusicBox. This time around, Spencer's pondering just how far composers will travel to hear the music they've written, and how that ties into Americans' sense of distance...
--------------------------
Over at ArtsJournal, composer/critic Greg Sandow is celebrating the Chicago Symphony's announcement that Mason Bates and Anna Clyne (a Composer Institute alum!) will be the CSO's composers in residence next season. And Greg's excitement boils down to what he sees as a possible evolution of the flavor of living composer that major American orchestras choose to showcase. Notably, he sees Bates and Clyne as part of a new generation of young composers who mix genres, drop in pop references, and most importantly, write music that your average concertgoer will enjoy listening to...
"For years, the Big Five orchestras -- New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Philly, Boston -- featured modernist new music. Boulez, Matthias Pintscher, Birtwistle (a Cleveland favorite), Magnus Lindberg currently in New York, Carter and Babbitt currently in Boston. Along with a welcome dose of John Adams, but the emphasis was modernist. Or, in other words, on music that hardly anyone likes (whatever its virtues might be), music the normal audience can't respond to, and which also has no base (for instance among artists in other fields, or younger people) outside the classical audience. It's music like this, I think, which leads orchestras to conclude that new music doesn't -- no matter what many people might expect -- attract a young audience."
Now, this is a controversial paragraph, because fans of certain Modernist composers have never really been willing to acknowledge that Modernist music sounds like indecipherable noise to most listeners. (And to be fair, a lot of those who think Modernism was ill-conceived and hurt classical music badly also don't do a very good job of separating that judgment from the clear reality that Carter, Birtwhistle, Boulez, et al are brilliant men who deserve respect.) But if you ask me, Milton Babbitt's notorious screed, "Who Cares If You Listen?" (originally published in 1958,) tells us that Modernist music established itself as contemptuous of the audience at a very early stage, and I really don't think that's a debatable point.
So why is it that Modernist composers didn't fall out of fashion with orchestras and the people who lead them the moment an alternative style of composition was available? Composers have been writing far more ear-friendly (and yet unquestionably serious) music for decades now, and yet music directors like James Levine in Boston (not picking on him in particular, he's just the highest-profile example going at the moment) continue to insist on packing concert programs full of Carter and Wuorinen, despite audible dissatisfaction from the audience.
I've had any number of theories about Modernism's death grip on orchestras over the years. I used to think it was a peculiarity of the Northeast's overly academic personality. (That one dissolved when I started traveling more, and realized that geography didn't seem as relevant as I'd suspected.)
Then I decided that it might have to do with a simple intellectual disconnect: if you've spent a lot of time studying Modernist music, as many musicians do in the course of learning to be musicians, it does start to make more sense to you, and it can be hard to remember that your average concertgoer did not spend four years listening to Babbitt and Stockhausen as preparation for attending your concert.
I still think that second theory has potential, as does the possibility that the musicians who continue to promote Modernism truly do believe that one day, we'll all wake up and it'll sound as normal to us as Stravinsky. (This is an absurd idea, and maybe someday I'll go into the many, many reasons why.)
I'm all for challenging audiences, and I'm not for a moment suggesting that we should just give up on "serious" new music and start considering John Williams and Mark O'Connor to be the new Copland and Dvorak. But I'm with Sandow on the undeniably positive nature of an orchestra with Chicago's pedigree embracing a generation of composers who, frankly, have been getting way too little respect from the orchestral establishment and the press that covers it.
Our annual Composer Institute starts up again next week, and since Sarah and I have blogged about it quitea bit in past years, I won't rehash the basics. But I wanted to quickly draw attention to NewMusicBox, the much-respected online resource for composers and fans of new music, which has once again convinced one of the participating composers in our Institute to keep a running blog of the goings-on. His first post is up already, and since NewMusicBox doesn't seem to have a tag that will take you to all CI-related content, I'll try to remember to link to his future posts as well. But in case I miss one, just bookmark the site's front page - they usually do a good job of really featuring the Institute during the week it's going on.
By the way, nearly all this year's participating composers have personal web sites with extensive audio clips. So if you'd like to get to know their work before next Saturday's FutureClassics concert wraps up the Institute, check them out here...
Last week, the Minnesota Orchestra played what will probably stand as the most difficult and exhausting program we'll perform in this entire season. There were four major works to be gotten through, each one hugely challenging in its own way, and for a lot of us, it was our first time playing three of the four.
One of the dirty little secrets of professional orchestras is that the reason we're able to crank out reasonably good performances of an ever-changing array of repertoire (think about it - do you know of a theater company or string quartet that mounts 50-70 completely different programs every year, with just three or four rehearsals for each?) is that we already know most of it pretty well. Sure, it might take a few minutes for the particular intricacies of Brahms or Stravinsky to slip back under your fingers, but it's the same notes you played the last time that particular piece crossed your stand, and after a few years in the profession, you've got a pretty good handle on 75-80% of the core repertoire you'll be playing for the rest of your career.
So if muscle memory and simple musical recall are an orchestra musician's best friends, then a program full of world premieres and obscure works from the past would seem to be our worst enemy. But for most of us, that's not the case at all. Yes, there are musicians who would rather just slog through the same old familiar warhorses and pick up their paycheck while putting in as little effort as possible, but for most of us, new challenges keep the work fresh, and the chance to attack a score we've never seen before is deeply satisfying, assuming that the music in question is quality stuff.
The world premiere we played last week was by a composer we've gotten to know well during Osmo's time in Minnesota, and whenever we see his name on the schedule, we know we'll all need to sign out our parts weeks in advance of the first rehearsal. Kalevi Aho's music is rich and distinctive, well-constructed and obviously composed with a deep understanding of the orchestra and its various components, but it is also invariably at the absolute outer edge of playability for nearly every instrument. In the days leading up to an Aho week, musicians are constantly wandering up to each other backstage, saying things like, "I mean, have you looked at page 14? The hell am I supposed to do with that?"
Still, the satisfaction I get from practicing new music that pushes me to my limits has always been one of the things that thrills me most about playing music for a living. Back in my college days, the Contemporary Music Ensemble was the group that all the best players wanted to be in, not because most of us believed that the music was somehow better than Beethoven or Brahms, but because once you can play Stockhausen, or Carter, or Wuorinen, you know you can play anything. And that's a powerful realization.
Last Friday night, I was asked to speak to a group of the orchestra's most loyal supporters before the concert, and give a bit of a preview of the music they'd be hearing that evening. Mr. Aho was present for this event, and in the course of describing the piece we'd been working on, I took the chance to address the composer directly. I told him that the first piece of his I'd ever played was his Insect Symphony, and that, at the time, it was the most difficult thing I'd ever played in an orchestra. "That was four years ago," I said. "Now, that symphony isn't even in my top five, and those other five are also all yours."
The incredible thing about Aho, though, is that music that is so fiendishly difficult for those of us on stage can sound so natural and comprehensible out in the audience. There are a lot of composers today writing music that's so difficult that it can barely be played. Most of them do it on purpose, hoping that, by stressing out the performers, they'll create a sense of urgency and chaotic panic in the music that the audience will instantly be able to sense.
Aho, on the other hand, reminds me more of Stravinsky - he must know that the music he's writing will fall beyond the capabilities of all but the finest musicians of his era, but he's not necessarily writing just for us. The musicians who first played some of Stravinsky's now-famous ballet scores called them unplayable, but I've been playing them with no great discomfort or stress since my college days. I fully expect (and I'm guessing Aho does, too) that the musicians of the late 21st century will find Aho's symphonies no more challenging than I find The Rite of Spring. I only wish I could be around to hear them...
I don't know why it surprised me to discover that composer John Adams, whose music we half-seriously tied to Beethoven last week at Orchestra Hall, is, in addition to being a terrific composer, a hilarious and entertaining writer, but it did. Adams has always been known as a dynamite interview, and he recently started his own blog, with the ominous title of Hell Mouth, on his personal web site.
So far, the posts seem to be a mix of self-promotion, serious rumination, and lighthearted side banter on the music world, which officially makes Adams one of the few classical types who really seems to get what blogging is good for. Consider this description of one of the various types of disruptive concertgoers that we've all encountered far too often...
"This person is just too scattered to be at a concert. She checks her Blackberry between movements, causing a pale fluorescent glow to emerge from beneath her seat. She adjusts her body sixty-seven times before finding a comfortable position. She’s put on way too much cologne—“Down South” it’s called, the one that comes in that phallic salad-dressing bottle and is guaranteed to cause anyone in the same zip code to double over in anaphylactic shock... You can’t really blame this person, but you wish she’d just take it outside into the lobby."
Heh. That's clearly prose written by a man who's spent some time listening to audiences audibly hating his latest world premiere. I don't have anything profound to say about Adams's blog - I just wanted to point out that it's there if you need it, and would definitely be added to the ItC blogroll, if we had a blogroll, which we don't. (Not sure why that is.) Oh, and also, the blog allows comments, so if you've ever wanted to ask the master of minimalism-plus a question or just enjoy talking back to composers, the opportunity awaits...
Roger Connolly sent in a question that I was somewhat surprised to realize I might know the answer to:
Q: Was there a popular song based on Tchaikovskys 5th Symphony, 2nd movement, other than Moon Love by Glenn Miller? I am looking for the lyrics "questions and answers" or something like that. This has been bugging me for 50 years.
Hmmm. I actually had to look up Moon Love, but you're right that Miller did base it on Tchaikovsky's famous theme, which, by the way, goes like this...
And here's Glenn Miller and his orchestra...
Now, I don't know of any particular song that uses that theme along with a lyric about questions and answers, but the most famous pop version that I know came courtesy of Mr. John Denver...
Personally, I'll take Tchaikovsky's or Miller's version over Denver's, but Annie's Song was definitely a favorite of a whole generation of listeners. I'm not 100% sure that this is the song Roger's looking for (especially since it wasn't written 50 years ago,) but in poking around, I haven't been able to find reference to any songs based on that theme other than these two. If anyone else knows different, chime in down in the comments...
Who says social networking is just a way to waste time when we should all be working? Atlanta music critic Pierre Ruhe noticed a fascinating exchange on composer John Mackey's Facebook page the other day...
"Mackey, a fine composer who writes high-energy music for wind ensemble and lives in Austin, Texas, is writing a trombone concerto. He's got the New York Philharmonic's Joseph Alessi as soloist and a New Jersey concert band for the premiere, but he wants to give the concerto a shelf life. Deadline is November. Already several weeks into it, he's been posting updates to his Facebook friends.
Early this afternoon, he posted a new status update:
John Mackey can't decide whether to put saxes in the Trombone Concerto. Was going to score it for "orchestral winds," but I'm missing the sax section in the quiet sections."
Now, as it happens, I'm Facebook friends with Mackey (he wrote a fantastic bluegrass-inspired piece for string trio that I've played,) so I noticed the status, too. It didn't occur to me to offer an opinion on the sax or no sax issue, but apparently, plenty of others did, and the "conversation" that ensued actually seems to have helped John make a decision. So clearly some people are actually using Facebook for productive purposes! Just, um, not me.
I know I've been posting a lot of videos lately, but this one is too good to pass up (this via Minnesota Orchestra Vice President and GM Bob Neu):
It's really kind of a fantastic idea, and musically it holds together with thematic threads (the closing few shots are actually repeats of the opening ones, so it gives it a nice sense of coming full circle). I particularly like the sudden harmonic shifts (appropriately coordinated with the...uh...soloist). I wonder, was the solo part notated? Or was this done purely with visual cues? In any case, a charming piece (kudos to composer/conductor Mindaugas Piecaitis) and a wonderfully innovative idea. With video screens, no less...
One of the few pleasures of travel these days is that the endless flight delays at least afford me the luxury of catching up on my reading. At the top of the stack this afternoon is the most current edition of Harvard Magazine (insert Ivy League joke here), which includes an article on John Adams' recent autobiography, Hallelujah Junction (which will soon be at the top of my reading stack!).
Although certainly one of the most respected and recognized composers of his generation, Adams has often taken a critical bashing. A minimalist aesthetic isn’t for everyone, I know (though it would be unfair to say that Adams is simply a minimalist - it’s merely a jumping-off point for him); but it’s hard to deny that, beneath the surface gloss, there is a distinct and direct musical voice at work.
Adams frequently cites his early musical influences - Rodgers and Hammerstein, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin – influences not just from a stylistic standpoint but from a pedagogic one as well: “I made more progress in my command of harmonic practice by reproducing these pop songs [by the Doors, the Beach Boys, and others] from memory at the piano than I ever did by my forced marches through the figured bass treatises.”
But, as Adams himself says, “I am not a vernacular composer”; rather, he’s a classical composer with multiple points of reference. To him this is an important distinction, as he finds that much contemporary classical music is “complex and self-referential. For me, though, inspiration comes from trying to connect with an audience. Music is fundamentally the art of feeling.”
Which, for those espousing a more European/avante garde aesthetic, might be a radical statement. Emotion in music should be an obvious given, but it’s a complex premise for both composers and performers. From a composer’s perspective, the question might be, should one simply try to express a personal feeling? Or is the duty of a creative artist to tap into a more universal zeitgeist? How does the expression of a personal emotion translate when put into a performers hands? From the performers viewpoint, does one’s expression of the music need be tied to the (assumed) original emotional intent of the composer? Or does one inject one's own personal sentiment? And how does that all translate to the listener – the emotional intent of a composer filtered through the prism of meticulously organized (and notated) sound and interpreted by yet a separate entity?
In times of emotional crisis, the old adage has it that it’s not as important to know exactly what to do as it is to simply care, and that maxim holds up well in this exchange as well – or, as Harvard Magazine puts it:
One spring night in 1976, Adams was driving his Karmann Ghia convertible through the Sierra foothills and listening to “Dawn” and “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” from Götterdämmerung. “I said out loud, almost without thinking, ‘He cares.’” It was a matter of the sensual and emotional power of harmonic movement; for Adams, it was also a matter of sincerity.
“Caring”, on the surface of it, seems so wide-ranging and ambiguous, particularly from a performer’s perspective. Music-making is certainly a visceral experience, and there are those who throw themselves into it with extreme physicality – a way of showing that one “cares”. Yet for some musicians, this very visible expression of caring smacks of insincere showmanship. Grandstanding is a disservice to the actual music; by the same token, many concertgoers find it engaging from a purely visual standpoint, which then perhaps makes them “care” more about the performance. But is this really the kind of “caring” we want to encourage?
Some artists, however, while equally physically demonstrative, are not so to the detriment of the music; it’s hard to qualify what makes the difference, but for me it goes back to that matter of sincerity. I’ve long admired Yo-Yo Ma for his utter involvement when he plays – there’s something both selfless and intensely personal at the same time. And for me, he’s one of those rare artists who is clearly engaged not just with the music but with everyone else on stage, and with the audience as well. It’s a kind of total immersion in the experience of music that results from sincerely caring.
A sense of caring applies not just to individual artists, but to ensembles as well. I had a recent guest conducting experience where an oboist was playing, during a concert, with legs crossed (a big no-no – it’s kind of an “I couldn’t care less” stance). Needless to say, the playing wasn’t so engaging.
The quality that I love most about my home band, the Minnesota Orchestra, is that it collectively throws itself into every performance, be it the first concert in a subscription run or the last concert in an 6-Young-Peoples-Concerts week. The level of commitment and engagement is always inspiring; it’s absolutely tangible to the listener, and it’s a constant reminder to me that when we care about what we do onstage, the audience mirrors the sentiment right back to us. And that wonderful, wordless communication is why we all chose a life in music.
In case you're wondering about the blog silence over the last several days, it's largely a result of just how busy this particular chunk of the season is for the orchestra. We're in the final weeks of what we oddly call our "winter season" (it's really the whole season minus Sommerfest - insert your own Minnesota winter joke here,) and our artistic planning team backloaded a huge amount of very tough music this year, which is causing no small amount of scrambling on the part of the orchestra.
Last week, we played a brand new (and massively outsized) concerto for violin and full choir by Jennifer Higdon, and then finished out the week with a completely separate jazz program featuring our own Chuck Lazarus on trumpet. (This was no ordinary pops show, either, where the orchestra could afford to just slide into our chairs at the last minute and glide through a bunch of easy half notes and slapped-together arrangements. As a member of the orchestra, Chuck knows exactly what we're capable of, and his orchestrations take full advantage of that knowledge.)
This week, our marketing department is selling our concerts as a chance to watch us make a live recording of a Tchaikovsky piano concerto with the estimable Stephen Hough. And we are, in fact, doing that, and that will certainly be no small task, but I feel fairly confident in saying that it's a virtual guarantee that not a single musician in the orchestra is spending any serious practice time on the Tchaikovsky as we get ready for our first day of rehearsals tomorrow. And the reason that we aren't exactly focused on the concerto is that we're all frantically cramming on the ridiculously difficult piece that will be on the second half of the program: Kalevi Aho's 10th Symphony.
We've played some Aho in the past - he's one of Osmo's favorite living composers, and I quite like what I've heard of his music, too. But this piece, well... let's just say that professional musicians are not easily intimidated by new challenges (you can't really succeed in a business that requires you to practice, rehearse, and perform a new two hours of music every single week without having a fair bit of confidence in your ability to pick things up quickly,) but I started hearing whispers and squawks about the Aho nearly a month ago, when the parts first started trickling into the stacks of folders we pick up to practice for upcoming concerts. The first violins, in particular, have taken to wandering around backstage looking shellshocked, and murmuring to each other, "I mean, have you seen that part on page 26? How do you even play that?"
What makes the Aho so insanely hard from an individual player's point of view (as opposed to the perspective of the full ensemble) is that a) much of it is very, very fast, and b) much of it is very, very high up in the register of each instrument. It's one of those situations where we're pretty well used to playing fast things, and there's really no one in the Minnesota Orchestra who's afraid of a few high notes, but when a composer puts those two things together, and then sets up a lot of the notes in such a way that your brain is tricked into thinking it detects a pattern only to discover that your perception just caused you to play six wrong notes in a second-and-a-half... that gets frustrating.
As if all that weren't enough, a glance at the orchestra's rehearsal schedule tells me that not only have we not added a fifth rehearsal to the week (four is our norm, but we've done five before when the repertoire posed a particular challenge,) the Aho is only scheduled for two of the four rehearsals. 'Cause, y'know, we're recording a piano concerto, too, and there's a Nielsen tone poem that no one's ever heard of on the program as well, so efficiency will have to be the watchword of the week.
The chaotic pace of things doesn't end with this Saturday night's concert, either. To cover the possibility that our recording producers won't have gotten absolutely every take they need of the Tchaikovsky from our three performances, we've got a patch session scheduled for 10:30pm Saturday night, right after the show, which could run anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. We'll repeat the same act next week, when Mr. Hough records a different Tchaikovsky concerto with us. Oh, and did I mention that next week's concerts will open with a 16-minute world premiere by a composer who once participated in our Composers' Institute, and whose music, as I recall, tends to be extremely complicated to prepare? Or that we'll also be spending a day auditioning for new staff conductors on repertoire ranging from Brahms to Stravinsky to Rodgers & Hammerstein? 'Cause we will.
Not complaining, you understand. I love my job. But right now, I need a nap.
Hey, who needs a break from all the doom and gloom that's been dominating the music biz lately? I do, for one, and a comment on a recent post (from a gentleman who believes that new music has been useless and unlistenable roughly since Schönberg came along) got me thinking about the uphill battle we still have to fight to convince today's audiences that most composers got over the whole "noise as music" thing years ago, and a lot of great young composers are writing stuff that's just begging for exposure to a mass audience.
Case in point: my friend Geoff. One of several composers I've commissioned solo viola music from over the years, Geoff has lately been dedicating the lion's share of his time to projects aimed at children. At the moment, he's working on a set of string quartet albums that help young musicians develop their ensemble skills while at the same time allowing them to play "real" pieces of music. And a couple of years back, he actually wrote an entire opera for kids. This wasn't some dumbed-down piece of pop crossover masquerading as opera, either - it was very serious music on a very unserious subject: namely, bugs. The Bug Opera premiered in Massachusetts, and has since been performed by a few professional regional opera companies around the US. There's even been interest from overseas - a company in Stuttgart is awaiting a German version.
The plot of The Bug Opera is pretty simple: the main character is a mosquito who finds the idea of sucking blood disgusting and mean. But of course, if she doesn't suck blood, she'll die, so the opera finds Mosquito embarking on a quest to resolve this primal conflict. On the way, she meets a pack of mindlessly gluttonous caterpillars, a deadly and unrepentant spider, and a paper wasp who becomes sort of her Jiminy Cricket. It's the kind of piece that, when you see it performed, your first thought isn't "My, what intellectually stimulating music, and such a wonderful lesson in the complexity of life!" No, the first thing you think is: "That is just way cool. Why didn't anyone think of this sooner?"
Interestingly, Geoff (and his librettist/wife, Alisa) developed the opera in the same way that they're developing the string quartet project: by holding dozens of workshops and mini-performances with kids around the country while the pieces are still being written. The idea is that, if you write a piece for kids while sequestered in your home, you won't know whether you succeeded until opening night, and if the audience isn't impressed, well, too late. So by giving kids a chance to interact with bits and pieces of the work as it's being put together, Geoff gets instant feedback which he can then use in tweaking and improving what he's doing.
I actually had the chance to be a part of one the workshopping moments for The Bug Opera, at the summer camp I've written about before where Geoff and I both teach. Along with a few other faculty members, I sang the caterpillar's "Eat, Chew, Chew" chorus for the pre-teens at the camp, and Alisa (who is also an accomplished coloratura soprano) sang the spider's creepy come-hither aria. All the while, Geoff had a video camera trained not on the performers, but on the kids, to get a record of their reaction to all sorts of musical and dramatic moments. It's amazing how much a child's face can tell you about whether or not you've captured their imagination.
Geoff's latest project (the string quartet thing) will actually be getting a workshopping of its own this summer at Minneapolis's own MacPhail Center for Music, before moving into its final phase of composition and eventual public performance, which should happen in 2010. It's not the sort of high-profile project that gets a composer labeled The Next Big Thing, but it's one more example of the amazingly diverse place that the music world has become these days, and of the creative approaches musicians, composers, and others are taking to get their work out into the public ear.
[Full disclosure: In addition to being a good friend of Geoff's, I also serve on the board of Hybrid Vigor Music, a small non-profit company that provides support and guidance for both The Bug Opera and the Quartet Project. I have no financial stake in any of it - I just think what Geoff is doing is worth sharing.]
The 2009 Pulitzer Prizes were announced the other day, and fans of minimalist uber-composer Steve Reich are rejoicing that their man has finally been honored. Reich, whose "Clapping Music" was responsible for changing the way a huge number of people thought about concert music (ItC fans who go back to the David Alan Miller days may remember that David featured Clapping Music on his final Casual Classics program back in 2007,) has never slowed down in the 37 years since he wrote that seminal work, and the Pulitzer honors one of his newest works, a Double Sextet commissioned by new music wunderkinds eighth blackbird, who themselves walked away with a Grammy recently.
Now, one of the great things about eighth blackbird is that they produce a LOT of online content, both audio and video, so there's no need to wait for a studio recording of the Double Sextet to hear what so impressed the Pulitzer committee. Here's a clip of the blackbirds taking their first rehearsal crack at the piece...
And here's a behind-the-scenes look at the recording session the group did last year to lay down the "other" sextet part that plays simultaneously with their live performances of the piece...
Lastly, for those of you in Los Angeles (and we know there are a couple of you, at least,) the blackbirds will actually be performing the Double Sextet this very weekend at the Colburn School of Music, as part of a weeklong residency they're doing there. You can check out the group's concert schedule here (but note that they change up their repertoire a lot, so the Reich, which premiered last month, may only be on a few upcoming programs,) and read their own blog post on the Pulitzer announcement here...
To film composer Maurice Jarre. Jarre, a three-time Oscar winner, has scored films from The Man Who Would Be King to A Passage to India (and Ghost!); TV credits include Shogunand the theme for Great Performances on PBS. But perhaps he's best known for his collaboration with director David Lean, which yielded, in my opinion, two of the greatest film scores of all time, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago.
Doctor Zhivago was something of a childhood fixture for me; it was my dad's favorite movie, and the first video purchased after we acquired a Betamax in the early 80's (remember those?) - I think I still have whole swatches of dialogue memorized. And the music? In a word, exquisite:
(As a personal aside, sorry for the prolonged absence from blogging. I'm slowly recovering from wrist and shoulder problems, and typing is still pretty uncomfortable - although I was getting pretty good at the one-handed thing!)
If you were with us at Orchestra Hall tonight for the Jay Greenberg symphony, here's your chance to tell us what you thought of the show. Did you like the video component? Was the balance between interview and our usual format successful on the first half? What did you think of the symphony itself? (Remember, we really do use your feedback to shape future shows.)
Most importantly, we're interested in knowing how you feel about our occasionally programming new music on this series. It's something we'd like to do more of in the future if our audience shows an interest, but we also want to hear if you'd prefer that we just stick to the core orchestral repertoire. Chime in below in the comments, and be as detailed as you'd like...
Sorry for the light blogging this week. We do each have a good excuse - I'm getting ready for two big Mahler concerts on our subscription schedule this week and working overtime in an effort to get the logistics of our final Inside the Classics concerts of the season locked down and ready for our special guest's arrival next Monday evening.
Meanwhile, Sarah is frantically preparing scores for five (count 'em, five) different concerts that she's conducting this week and next. Specifically, she's leading one season preview concert, one full classical concert to be played 50 miles from Orchestra Hall, one set of Young People's Concerts, one pops show featuring two of the three Irish Tenors (one of whom made her drink a shot of whiskey onstage, mid-show, the last time he was here) and, of course, our ItC concerts. For these five shows, all of which contain different music, she has a grand total of four rehearsals with the orchestra. What was that about the glamorous life of a conductor?
Anyway, needless to say, we're very excited about Jay's impending arrival and the show we've built around his 5th Symphony. (I'm assuming you've all got your tickets already, right?) And while we'll be focusing our in-concert discussion with Mr. Greenberg primarily around the specific musical techniques he employs in his symphony, we know that all of you likely have many, many questions for him as well on a wider range of subjects. He'll be joining us for the post-concert Q&A, so you can ask him there in person, but if you can't make the show, or just prefer anonymity, go ahead and submit a question for Jay in the comments below this post, or through the Minnesota Orchestra's newly acquired Twitter account, and we'll do our best to get answers for you. If there's enough interest, we'll do an additional blog post after the concerts next week with Jay's answers...
Posts tagged as Cutting Room Floor are where we put all the material relevant to our Inside the Classics concerts that we know we won't have time to get to in the actual shows. Some of it is serious, some of it is silly, and some of it is just extra information about the featured composer or piece of music that we didn't know what else to do with. Click the tag to see all this extra source material in one place...
Composers who die young, like Mozart and Mendelssohn, almost always leave behind some unpublished work which trickles into the public realm over the years and decades following their passing. But in Mendelssohn's case, the amount of largely unknown material that he composed is truly staggering: musicologists estimate that as many as 270 pieces of music attributable to Felix remain unpublished. (And that number doesn't even take into account the works originally attributed to him that turned out to have been written by his sister Fanny.)
This year being the bicentenary of Mendelssohn's birth, there is understandably greater attention being focused on him than usual, and in New York this week, conductor Stephen Somary is presenting a concert featuring thirteen pieces of chamber music that Somary claims have never been heard in public before.
The reasons behind there being so much missing Mendelssohn are many. Some claim that Mendelssohn's international reputation was damaged when his music (along with that of all other Jewish composers) was banned by the Third Reich, removing him entirely from the repertoire in the heart of classical music's active European centers for years. Then there's the fact that Mendelssohn just wrote a huge amount of music - more than 700 works altogether - and it's only natural that some of it would never have gone to press.
But then there's the issue of what the composer himself wanted published, and that's what makes the reviving of long-lost manuscripts a controversial matter. It's very likely that at least some of Mendelssohn's unpublished music was stuff that he never wanted to see the light of day. The AP article about Somary's concert quotes conductor Leon Botstein as saying that, "If the composer leaves it unfinished or kept it out from publication, you have to respect the composer's wishes." Mendelssohn was known to be hugely critical of his own work, often revising and re-revising works for years after they had been premiered, so Botstein may have a point.
Still, the argument against Botstein's philosophy is that, if we were to go solely with a composer's recorded wishes in all matters, concert music would sound a lot different than it does in many cases. Beethoven's metronome markings, for instance, are notoriously erratic, and the vast majority of orchestras and conductors use them as a vague guide rather than as definitive tempo markings. Mahler famously removed the Blumine movement from his first symphony, but many orchestras today re-insert it. Sibelius wrote several different versions of his 5th symphony, all of which have been performed and recorded in recent years. And Mendelssohn himself was hugely unhappy with the Italian Symphony that we're featuring on next week's ItC concerts (despite nearly universal consensus that it was a masterpiece,) and tried for years to revise it. We make use of none of his revisions today, that I know of.
My own view tends to be that composers do not have an eternal say over the music they wrote. If a manuscript is available and hasn't been played yet, why not play it? It might turn out to be of little interest, in which case it can safely go back in the drawer. But on next week's concerts, we'll be featuring a song by Fanny Mendelssohn so seldom performed that our library had to order the music for it from some random person we found on the internet. It's stunningly beautiful, and I'd hate to think that it might have stayed buried because someone was worried about whether or not Fanny meant for us to hear it.
So, a grey afternoon here in Virginia, where I finally have a few days off to gather my thoughts, learn a truckload of music, wash my concert clothes and get back on the road again - I'm in Burlington, VT next week premiering a piece by my very good friend David Ludwig with the Vermont Symphony, and then back in Minnesota for the second installment of "Inside the Classics" shows of the season.
It's been an exhausting month since mid-December - a pretty unrelenting schedule which has been hitting me physically and psychologically (hey, conductors need breaks, too!). All of which makes it harder to be sitting here in my studio, trying to get some work done. It's nice to have some good distractions, and this is one of my favorite things to listen to when I need a couple minutes to clear my brain (it's got quite a surprising ending - don't let the meandering mood fool you):
György Kurtág's music takes you into a completely different realm, with an intensity and precision and often an altered spatial sense that is transportive. And sometimes you really, really need to get out of your own head - or at least I do, when I'm spending hours poring over dots on a page! Which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Kurtag: "I keep coming back to the realisation that one note is almost enough" - enough, that is, to sum up the essence of a thought, a gesture, a sensation. Or, as in the case of the video, a selection from Játékok, a set of "learning pieces", maybe one technique (the glissando) is almost enough.
A good way to procrastinate for a few minutes. But now, back to work!
As has become the custom around here, we'll devote a few posts in the weeks leading up to our next Inside the Classics concerts to covering some of the things we won't have time to get to in the show. (Click the Cutting Room Floor tag to see all the entries fitting this description.) In the case of Felix Mendelssohn, there's so much available material to choose from that it was initially tough even to know where to focus our energies. And just when I thought I was getting a handle on the man's biography, an article from one of Britain's leading dailies shattered a fair chunk of his squeaky-clean reputation only this past weekend.
At the heart of the posthumous bombshell dropped by London's Royal Academy of Music is an allegation that Mendelssohn may have written a letter to Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, "declaring passionate love for her, begging her to elope with him to America, and threatening suicide if she refused." Lind's husband destroyed the letter to preserve the reputation of his wife, but later swore out an affidavit testifying to the letter's existence, and placed it in the Royal Academy's Mendelssohn archive with orders that it remain sealed for a century. Now, after years of questions from scholars regarding the affidavit's contents, those in the know are speaking about it, just in time for the composer's bicentenary.
Now, the possible romantic link between a 19th-century composer and a woman not his wife might not seem like a very big deal, but in the case of this particular composer, it's causing quite a stir. As The Independent puts it:
"Until now, Mendelssohn has been deemed the happiest of composers... Born into a privileged family, he was a child prodigy, and went on to become a highly successful composer, conductor and educator. He was also gifted in painting and writing, enjoyed a happy marriage, and had five children. It has been thought that the only tragedies he experienced were the death of his sister Fanny in May 1847, followed by his own six months later, aged 38."
The circumstances of Mendelssohn's early death have always seemed a bit, well, storybook. Stroke risk ran in the family: a stroke killed Fanny, and doctors at the time pronounced Felix, too, a victim of "a series of strokes." But the suicide threat, coming shortly after Fanny's demise, would seem to at least suggest the possibility that Mendelssohn made good on his threat. It certainly makes clear that the composer's life was not as charmed as we've been led to believe.
We won't be getting much into Mendelssohn's personal life in our concerts, but in rethinking his reputation, The Independent touches on a theme that, by coincidence, Sarah and I had already decided to use as the centerpiece of our script...
"The nature of Mendelssohn's music could be a giveaway... Its emotional content is high-impact, driven, with deeply romantic sensibilities, but almost always within contained classical forms. But it packs such an intense punch in terms of nervous energy, something probably had to give."
For those who like ruminating on composers and their craft, there's an excellent piece up over at NewMusicBox which asks the question: does the diversity of musical styles in use at the moment really offer composers the creative freedom that many believe? Or, as the article puts it, "is the progress from a common practice to a diverse one truly progress, when it compels us to choose between a reactionary, audience-friendly idiom, an exclusionary avant-garde, or a sober modernism or ironic postmodernism that hovers between these two extremes?"
In other words, back in the 18th and 19th centuries, there was basically one set of rules for how music was written, and while composers regularly pushed the envelope (chords that were considered wildly dissonant in Bach's time, for instance, became commonplace by the time Brahms and Wagner came around,) everyone followed the rules. Then came the 20th century, during which rabble-rousers like Arnold Schönberg, John Cage, and Steve Reich discarded the rule book chapter by chapter, until it seemed that you could put together any combination of notes and silences and call it music.
Of course, there are still rules - it's just that composers have their choice of any number of different rule books, which bear little resemblence to each other. The Modernist rule book is longer and more complicated than the old tonal rule book was, while the Postmodern rule book is more like a single sheet of paper with the sentence, "Don't do anything the modernists do" scrawled across it in crayon. The Neo-Romantics have their own rules, based heavily on the rule book of 100 years ago, and function basically as if the Modernists and Pomos had never existed. And for the composers who place themselves in the New Complexity camp (don't ask,) there are presumably hundreds of rules, but they don't matter because the music will wind up sounding like someone just dropped a piano onto a bagpipe regardless.
So do composers benefit from being able to choose from such a wide array of philosophies? Do audiences? Those who despise dissonant music would probably wish for everyone to go back to writing tonal music with the old rules, but reducing the number of dissonant works wouldn't necessarily mean that the music would be better. Statistically, only a very few composers build a legacy that significantly outlives them, so you're always going to hear more bad or mediocre new works than you will mediocrities from the 19th century. It's not that there weren't plenty of mediocre composers back then - we've just stopped playing their music.
Common sense would seem to dictate that when composers fragment, it takes music as a whole longer to evolve, which could be why we've gotten a bit stuck in the decades since Schönberg started messing around with his twelve tones. Still, it's probably impossible to really assess the impact of philosophies that are still developing, and I know several composers who believe that all the navel gazing should really be left to musicologists and historians, and that composers just ought to write whatever music speaks to them. And with that, we've come full circle...
A belated happy birthday to Olivier Messiaen, who would have turned 100 yesterday. Messiaen's works have been featured by orchestras around the world this season (including the Minnesota Orchestra, a concert which I've blogged about.)
(Coincidentally, Des Canyons aux Étoiles has just popped up on my iTunes shuffle...funny how these things work out!)
In celebration, an excerpt of one of my favorite of his works:
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...
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.
