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...
A stunning video installation in the elevator of the Standard Hotel in NYC by artist/director Marco Brambilla, depicting an eye-popping journey from hell to heaven:
It's positively Boschian (with Brueghelic undertones!), and I love that Stravinsky was chosen as the soundtrack - it's looped and manipulated, of course, but very well done, seamless.
A more hi-def version can be found here for your viewing pleasure, and worth watching to catch the profusion of images - it's ridiculously replete with pop-culture references - see if you can spot Michael Jackson...
That's "We are Klingons!"...in Klingon, of course.
I caught the new "Star Trek" movie last night, and while I enjoyed it immensely (although it was actually Klingon-free), I found Michael Giacchino's soundtrack oddly hollow. The reorchestration of the original TV series theme which accompanied the end credits was particularly under-driven. Maybe it was a conscious effort to avoid the kitsch-factor of the original, but taking away some of the rhythmic impetus (as well as the signature vocal line) made it fall a bit flat. Call me old-school if you like; I'll take it as a compliment.
"Star Trek" in its many incarnation has inspired fervent fandom all over the world, which has occasionally spilled over into the musical realm. The most recent - workshopping a Klingon-language opera. Klingons, in the Star Trek universe, are a wrinkle-headed warrior race. What's fascinating is that an actual language has been created for this fictional race, and that people pursue serious linguistic study of said fictional race with its concocted language.
The proposed Klingon opera, "u", involves not just Klingon language but also enthomusicological research. I'll be interested to what kind of creative notation system, harmonic language and structural methodology will be "discovered", boldly going where no man has gone before.
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!)
Can someone explain to me the reasoning behind using this piece in the 2007 film "There Will Be Blood" (which I enjoyed immensely on DVD two nights ago)? The Johnny Greenwood is great, the Part works really well, but the Brahms seems so incongruous to me. Entertainment Weekly says "Leaps of romantic chordal grandeur from Brahms' Violin Concerto in D Major announce the launch of a fortune-changing oil well down the road from Eli Sunday's church — and then, much later, announce a kind of end of the world", but I don't know if I buy it. Any other thoughts?
As you can see, the tiling is done; all that's left to do is grout, seal and install a door.
Day 3: Dead Milkmen, RC's Mom
Huh? you say. For those of you who aren't from Philadelphia, didn't go to college in the 90's or are not aficionados of the punk rock scene, you probably wouldn't know the Dead Milkmen. Even if you did, you might not remember this track, the second off of 1988's Beezlebubba, which includes the following lyrics:
Gonna beat my wife Look out!
Wife beatin' Mistreatin' Wife slappin' It happens
(Sung in a soul/funk style).
At first, I didn't recognize the song (or who it was by), and was thus a little horrified (I'm not big on domestic violence, to say the least). And I was a bit confused, as I figured it had to be an ironic commentary on something, but I couldn't remember the context. Then I recognized the deconstructed funk groove and the James Brown-esque caterwauling as the creation of the idiosyncratically humorous punksters that are the Dead Milkmen. And I remembered the context; in 1988, Brown was briefly jailed for, yes, beating his wife (this was in his violent PCP phase), so the song is indeed an ironic commentary.
It made me think of how some music is so topical as to be rendered unlistenable unless it's within a specific context. The Dead Milkmen track is odd, derivative and offensive unless you understood when and about whom it was written (and then you might still find it offensive, but that's just a matter of taste!). So, in a way, it doesn't really stand up to the test of time.
Is the test of truly great music whether it can be taken simply as music, out of any existing context? I thought immediately of pieces like Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique; if we detached the music from the narrative of the artist's opium induced haze and obsession with his beloved, does the music stand up? For me, it certainly does; there is a musical progression that's both organic and logical that takes place over the course of the movements, from the yearning of the first two movements to the ominous rumbles at the end of the third that foreshadow the increasingly violent and macabre expression of the fourth and fifth movements. Sure, it's more fun to listen to that last movement imagining witches cackling and skeletons doing a grotesque round dance, but the music would work on its own regardless.
That's narrative context; what about historic context? Do we need to know that Beethoven had conceived of his Eroica Symphony as an homage to Napoleon (or even that he had Republican leanings) to enjoy the music? I think not. And that is, in large part, what makes that music great; it needs no context, because it is empirically powerful and moving.
As a more modern example, I thought of the film scores and event-specific pieces written by John Williams (and if you haven't figured it out over the last 8 months of this blog, I'm a huge Williams fan). His film music is magic in the context of the movie it was written for, but I find them just as inventive and evocative as pure music. And I don't need to know that "Summon the Heroes" was written for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics; it's just a great orchestral fanfare, however you look at it. It's timeless.
Sinatra is timeless, as are the Beatles; I think Billy Joel is timeless, Elvis Costello. I suppose some of this is a matter of taste, but I feel like it goes beyond that; the best music of any genre has a freshness and an immediacy about it that exists regardless of when or for what reasons it was initially created. I'm not a big reggae fan, but I find a lot of Bob Marley to be utterly timeless. I wonder what music others think have stood the test of time?
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!
I'm always curious to see how classical music is referenced in popular culture, particularly movies - Sam and I have both written a couple of posts on the topic.
So imagine my delight last night when I caught a screening of "Ironman" during a scene in which Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges - who for years now I can only think of as the Big Lebowski) sits at a piano, tinkling out an unfamiliar classical-era-sounding bit of music. Or course I had to sit through the closing credits to learn the identity of the piece...which is apparently a tune from a piano concerto by none other than Antonio Salieri. This would be innocuous enough (though a little bit odd), were it not for context.
One of the central relationships in the movie is between Obadiah Stane and Tony Stark/Ironman (Robert Downey Jr., who I adore), partners in a weapons manufacturing company. Stane is the elder statesman, respected in the industry, savvy and mercenary, more business than brilliance. Stark is the younger, maverick genius, an inveterate party boy who nevertheless possesses most of the intellect, inspiration and creative spark of the pair.
(Spoiler alert) There is an underlying jealousy on Stane's part; in fact, it's Stane that sets out to destroy the younger man, setting into motion the entire plot of the film, a scenario that is oddly reminiscent of... "Amadeus". Stark plays Wolfi to Stane's Salieri, which makes it even more fitting that this is the composer being played by Stane in that piano scene. It's the kind of minute detail that's absolutely delightful in its obscure(d) reference, a cleverly hidden allusion.
The other music reference I caught (yes, yes, besides the tune from the 1966 cartoon version of "Ironman" being played in the casino scene) was the moment in which Stane (while doing something that will certainly cause Stark's death - I'll leave out the details, go see the movie!) describes the latest incredible invention of Stark's as "[his] ninth symphony" - a reference to the "ninth symphony curse", a superstition that one will die after the completion of their ninth symphony (usually a magnum opus - prominent examples include Beethoven, Bruckner and Mahler). Again, a reference that assumes a certain amount of historical/musical/cultural sophistication - which I find encouraging in a mainstream film. And fantastic action scenes, to boot! Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours on a free Monday night.
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!
It's snowing heavily in Minneapolis today, which ought to be illegal, because as every baseball fan knows, today is Opening Day. It could be worse, I suppose - our local team still plays in a dome (which will mercifully change in 2010, when the Twins open their beautiful new limestone ballpark in the warehouse district,) so their first game of the year will go on as scheduled. Can't say the same for those cornerstones of the MLB hype machine, the Cubs and Yankees, who are both in extended rain delays as I type this.
(This kind of thing seems to happen a lot more to Opening Day games in recent years than it ever did when I was a kid, and as big a baseball fan as I am (I make and keep my own scorecards, and have since age 15; I obsess over every new issue of Baseball Prospectus as if I got paid to do so; and I actually pay money to read Bill James's latest screeds as soon as they're available,) I can't help thinking that the season would be better served by being a week shorter on both ends.)
Baseball is one of those games that inspires such love and devotion in its fans that it becomes something larger than itself, and transcends sport to become the symbol of an entire specific country. (Hockey, my other favorite pasttime, is the only other sport I know of that has this distinction.) Novels, poems, songs, and even symphonies are written about it, without the slightest hint of irony intended or received. To be honest, a lot of these cultural tributes leave me cold, not only because of their often painfully overwrought tone, but simply because I love the game of baseball more than I love the idea of baseball. I am not bored by pitchers' duels, and I do not find the seventh inning stretch more entertaining than a second inning at-bat in which the #8 hitter fouls off six straight breaking balls. I do not need a 45-page meditation on the smell of freshly oiled leather and the crack of ash against horsehide to remind me of what appeals to me about baseball.
Still, the writers, poets, composers, and songwriters keep churning out the paeans to the game, as well as to athletics in general, and that brings me to the reason for this post. In addition to my hosting and writing duties for Inside the Classics, I also serve as a semi-regular host of our orchestra's Young People's Concerts, and our education department is kind enough to give me a hand in helping to choose repertoire and design the programs I host.
At the moment, we're just starting to plan a show scheduled for spring 2009, and our focus is music's role in sports. After all, what would Monday Night Football be without that famous four-note theme that serves as its audio signature. Up north, Hockey Night in Canada has been using an even more widely known symphonic theme for more than forty years. Our very own Minnesota Wild commissioned a team anthem before ever taking the ice for the first time back in 2000, and it remains a tune that I am physically incapable of not singing along with. John Williams's Olympic March, written for the 1984 Los Angeles Games, is one of his best-loved orchestral works, and the orchestral swell Randy Newman penned to accompany Robert Redford's legendary home run at the end of The Natural is as familiar as any piece of movie music ever written.
So we've got a few ideas for what to do with this show. But I'm always looking for more, so I'm throwing this one open to you guys. Do you have any favorite sports memories that are tied up with specific pieces of music? Any works that you think perfectly encapsulate the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat? I'd love to hear 'em, so while you wait for the snow to stop and the first pitches to be thrown, fire away in the comments...
There was a funny moment at this morning's rehearsal. Osmo thanked us for our work in the Thursday performance (as he always does at the first rehearsal after a concert,) then grinned and noted that, "I have read in today's Star Tribune that the critic thought that we were not always with the movie. He said there was a band on the screen, and we were not playing when they played. This is so. Chaplin believed that his audience did not need to hear a band to see that one was playing, and he assumed that the people would imagine the sound of the band, which is why we don't play there. But perhaps Chaplin overestimated the imagination of critics..."
I've tried to avoid using this space to flog the Minnesota Orchestra's weekly concerts (other than the ones in our Inside the Classics series, of course,) because Sarah and I are very conscious of the potential for an "official" orchestra blog to come across as little more than a crass attempt to sell tickets by pretending to embrace the online world of user-generated content. So in writing about specific concerts that we play, I've generally waited until after they're over to post anything, and I don't think I've ever written anything that sounds like "run out and buy a ticket to this show right now."
That abundance of caution is taking the day off. If you're free tomorrow night, you need to run out and buy a ticket to our concert. (And you need to hurry, because a glance at our online ticketing system tells me that we don't seem to have many seats left.) Because what we're doing this week presents one of those rare chances to see something that you've probably never seen before in your life, and may never get a chance to see again.
Last summer, when I saw on our preliminary 2007-08 schedule that we would be mounting a two-week mini-festival of film music, I must admit that I didn't expect it to be a highlight of the year. Orchestras play movie music all the time these days, and too often, it's just an excuse to slap the "serious music" tag on something that's little more than a glorified pops concert. (I mean, honestly, I liked Pirates of the Caribbean, too, but that score is five minutes of cliched dreck repeated for two hours. And don't get me started on Lord of the Rings.) Seldom do you see an orchestra really make an effort to communicate just what it is about music and cinema that inspires such powerful emotion in us. It's not that we can't do it - it's that it's easier just to play Star Wars again, and the tickets cost the same either way.
But my cynicism proved to be unfounded this time. The centerpiece of our Sounds of Cinema festival (which does, yes, include a pops show hosted by George Takei of Star Trek fame) is a live performance of the complete scores to two classic silent films, as the movies play simultaneously on the big screen behind the orchestra. This week's flick is Charlie Chaplin's classic "Little Tramp" adventure, City Lights, which stands as one of the funniest and most poignant movies of all time, more than 75 years after it was made.
It's a huge undertaking to screen a film with a live orchestra providing the soundtrack, particularly when the score was composed specifically to complement Chaplin's side-splitting physical humor. It's not enough for the right tune to just more or less line up with the right scene - specific notes and phrases have to hit at the exact moment that the Little Tramp jumps in the air, or scratches his head, or tries to cope with a swallowed dog whistle. To that end, the conductor's score for this show (which is a whopping 455 pages, by the way - approximately equivalent to two of Mahler's longest symphonies) is filled not only with the usual staves of music, but with constant verbal cues as to what ought to be going on onscreen during any given measure. While leading us in what should sound like a normal performance, Osmo has to constantly dart his eyes between the score and the video monitor in front of his podium, making sure that his cues to us line up perfectly with instructions like "eyebrow lift," "taxi cab" and "fourth hiccup." If he misses a single cue, or fails to follow the exact tempo indicated for a given section, we'll be out of sync with the movie. Meanwhile, the hardest part for the orchestra is keeping our eyes on our parts and Osmo rather than twisting around to watch the screen.
We did the first performance of City Lights this morning, and judging from the waves of laughter rolling through the audience throughout, I think we hit our marks. Osmo really seems remarkably at ease with the score (although he did admit in rehearsal yesterday that "I have been practicing at home with a DVD, and I know it is the same movie, but this feels like a different version!"), and the music itself, which Chaplin wrote with the help of an orchestrator, is fantastic stuff, dipping and rolling all over the place and changing tempos ever so slightly to indicate when a character is getting tired, or drunk, or whatever.
The movie lasts just under 90 minutes, and with the exception of a 70-second stretch during which recorded sound effects take over for a particular Chaplin gag, the orchestra plays continuously for the entire length of the film. It's exhausting, but man, it's fun, and having watched City Lights several times before, I can honestly say that the live music is vastly superior to the tinny (and, frankly, not very well played) recorded version of Chaplin's score that accompanies the copy of the movie that you can watch at home.
If you really can't make it out to the Friday performance, or if big epic dramas are more your speed, come see us next Saturday, when we'll be rolling five or six Shostakovich symphonies into a massive live soundtrack to Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. I promise you won't regret it.
Having been excused from Friday night's holiday pops show because (get this) there wasn't enough room on the stage for five stands of violas, I took advantage of the evening off to go to a movie I've been waiting to see for some time: Charlie Wilson's War, based on the true story of a hard-drinking Texas congressman who more or less single-handedly dragged the US into intervening in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1980s. (I know, I choose such delightful holiday fare, don't I?)
What makes the story remarkable is not just that Wilson was a little-known, skirt-chasing alcoholic of the highest order; and not even that he was concocting this scheme while facing possible indictment in a sex-'n-drugs scandal stemming from an ill-advised weekend in Las Vegas; but that he managed to engineer a half-billion dollars of covert government funding for an insurgent Afghan resistance without anyone in the press or public taking the slightest notice until years later.
So there I was, happily enjoying the diversion, thinking nothing of my day job, when the movie reached its climactic scene, in which the Afghani fighters finally have the anti-helicopter and anti-tank weaponry they need to fight back against the Russians, and they use it to great effect, and there is much rejoicing... and while all this is going on, what do I hear playing on the soundtrack? Handel's Messiah. I kid you not. To be more specific, it was the choral movement which comes roughly halfway through the First Part of the piece, titled "And He Shall Purify."
Only it wasn't, really. It was what I can only describe as the extended dance remix of "And He Shall Purify," with the lilting choral lines dancing over a decidedly electronic bass drum and other assorted accoutrements. It was an odd choice, and after listening to it for three or four minutes, which is how long the scene lasts, I came to the conclusion that someone involved with the film (my money's on Aaron Sorkin) must have really wanted to use that particular movement of the Messiah, and someone else must have been insistent in pointing out that baroque music was really not going to carry so well over the sounds of automatic weapons and shoulder-fired Stinger missiles. Thus is compromise born in Hollywood, or so I like to believe.
Anyway, it got me thinking about the way Hollywood always loves to break out the classical chestnuts when they're making a war movie. And not for the little character development scenes, either. You're not going to hear Beethoven's Ninth while a couple of grunts pass a doobie around in a foxhole and try to forget where they are and what they're doing. No, when the full orchestra kicks in in a picture about human combat, you know you've reached a scene that will either be glorious or staggeringly awful. Oliver Stone is famous for this, of course, and Wagner would never be the same after Francis Ford Coppola got done with him. In The Sum of All Fears (which, while not strictly a war movie, is a movie about acts of war and their consequences,) the movie's denouement features a full rendition of Nessun Dorma, as all the bad guys are summarily and secretly executed by various secret agents around the world. There's even a whole CD available of classical music that's been used to bolster war movies.
Now, Charlie Wilson's War isn't really a war movie, I suppose. Whereas war movies are epic adventures, concerned with big ideas and the men and women called upon to lay their lives on the line for them, this is a film about politics and personalities, about backroom deals brokered in the service of what everyone involved hopes might turn out to be a greater good. Other than a couple of token scenes meant to remind us of just how brutal the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was (thereby justifying Wilson's somewhat shady dealings,) there isn't much in the way of a battlefield to be seen.
Still, there it was: Handel and the mujahideen, together at last. I suspect I'm never going to hear that movement quite the same way again...
Composer Zhou Tian is in town – the Orchestra had commissioned him to write a piece for the Young Peoples Concerts we’re doing this week – and we had a chance to sit and do coffee after a busy couple of days. Tian and I went to music school together (he went by “Zhou” or “Joe” then, and the name change has been a little confusing), and it was nice to catch up, gossip about mutual friends and talk about Portishead. (You didn’t think we just sat around all day thinking about Mahler, did you??)
We also talked shop, and one of the many topics that we alighted on was how we reacted to music in films. Not “film music” – John Williams, Howard Shore, et al. – but music used in films. Tian’s example was ”Being John Malkovich", which at one point features Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste. He had heard the piece before, of course, but had no feeling of connection to it until he heard it in the film. As he explains it, it’s not that he remembers the movie now when he hears that Bartok, it’s more that it brings back the emotion and engagement he felt while hearing the music in context of the movie. It went from a piece that he didn’t particularly like to one he enjoys immensely.
My example was ”Amadeus”, which I’d seen in the theater as a kid. Before seeing the film, I had never encountered Mozart’s Requiem, and so “Amadeus” was my first exposure to this piece- it had a tremendous impact on me at the time, and my mom will tell you I would run around singing “Confutatis maledictis!” (I must have been a weird child…) I still feel a sense of connection to this piece, particularly because it still evokes the powerful emotions I felt when watching the film. Again, it’s not that I recall the film or any specific imagery – it’s all about the associative emotions.
Of course we all have music that we adore because of associations – the song playing on the radio when you had your first kiss, that piece you played in high school orchestra when the world seemed so full of promise – but Tian’s example struck me particularly. The context of that particular Bartok piece within that movie made him hear the music in a different way. And it makes a lot of sense that in an increasingly visual world, visual impact necessarily influences auditory impact (MTV proved that in the ‘80s – I mean, would Britney Spears be a star without music videos?).
That always raises the question of the visual impact of concert music, which, all things considered, is not tremendous. Yes, there are 90 or so people on stage at any given orchestra concert, which gives a sense of scope, and conductors and soloists are generally interesting to watch, but is that enough? Some orchestras have experimented, with modest success, with video screens mounted above the stage and cameras onstage to give closer views of musicians as they perform - it certainly does something to upgrade the visual impact. Is this something that should concern us in the orchestra industry? Or is it our responsibility to educate people in the much more reflective art of sitting and simply listening to music?
