Cutting Room Floor: Mozart On Wheels

On the heels of our Mozart extravaganza, here's one last piece of related brilliance for you to enjoy. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for finding it...

(That's Mozart's Symphony No. 40, by the way. Dude has excellent rhythm.)

Last push

Wednesday afternoon before the first show on "Inside the Classics" weeks is always a bit of a mad rush to the finish line. The hardest part of it for me is to get a feel for the flow of the show before we actually perform it once - when we rehearse these concerts, we rehearse the musical excerpts and the featured piece, but we never get a chance to do it with the script and whatever shenanigans we're up to. So, my afternoon pre-concert is spent running and re-running the show in my apartment - and if there's no-one else home, I'll do the script out loud.

When my brain gets weary of repeating the same complicated paragraph for the umpteenth time, I entertain myself with random YouTube searches; here's my current obsession:



I know, I know, I've got an odd sense of humor...

One more day

I can't wait until the election is over - it's been an exhausting media blitz in the last few days, and I'm itching to get back into a more regular news cycle - I mean, does anyone know what's been going on in the rest of the world in the last week or so? (A random recap: it's been flooding in Yemen, Panasonic is making Sanyo a subsidiary, and Norway is lending cash-strapped Iceland 500M Euros).

But here's a work of utter musical cleverness, good for a smile, regardless of your political predisposition (the mimicry of vocal cadences is pretty amazing!):




Hoping that everyone is fulfilling their civic duty and casting their ballot today!

Hallowe'en Madness

Almost every year, our principal horn player, Mike Gast, throws an all-orchestra Hallowe'en bash at his Uptown abode, and every time he does, there wind up being some truly excellent costumes. So here, for your All Hallows Eve enjoyment, are some shots I snapped at this year's party, which, since we're working tonight, took place last weekend...

Our gracious host, with bassist Dave Williamson in the duct tape.

Oboist Julie Gramolini, cleverly costumed as herself several years ago in the Air Force.

Outreach/Education staffer Mele Willis channeling her inner Alaska governor.

Flutist Wendy Williams as Cindy McCain. Ah, election year.

Trumpeter Chuck Lazarus doing his best Joe the Plumber. (Be glad this isn't a rear view. Chuck went all out for plumber authenticity, if you know what I mean.)

Violist Megan Tam spent hours sewing this. She's "Undecided." Get it?

Oh, yeah. I was there, too...

A Song For America

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

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

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

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

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

Looking For A New Classic

Last night, the NHL's Minnesota Wild opened their 2008-09 season at home against the Boston Bruins, a fact which was noted in eye-rolling fashion by our principal trombonist, Doug Wright, during the stage-setting break between the first and second works on our Saturday night program, when he walked into the musicians' lounge to find five musicians plus Osmo clustered around the TV, checking the score before we had to rush back onstage for a piano concerto. (Doug, who doesn't play the concerto, had the right to make fun of us. The hockey obsessives in this orchestra do tend to be fanatical, even by sports fan standards, and I noticed that Osmo had one of our personnel managers reporting the score of the game to him as he came offstage for intermission, as well.)

Later, at the end of intermission, principal cellist Tony Ross had to literally drag Osmo out of the lounge by one arm when the "on stage" call was heard, lest he plant himself permanently in front of the game, where the Wild had jumped out to a 4-1 lead. This, of course, is why Osmo doesn't have a TV in his private dressing room.

Meanwhile, up in Canada, a music-related hockey drama has been slowly unfolding over the past several months, ever since the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation somehow managed to lose the rights to the theme music to Hockey Night in Canada.



Let's understand the seriousness of this. Those of us who live south of the 49th parallel and have no connection to our neighbors to the north probably can't really grasp just how famous the Hockey Night theme is. The closest we can probably get is the Monday Night Football theme, but even then, I'd wager to say that a far higher percentage of Canadians can sing you the hockey theme than Americans can sing that pumped up NFL jingle. It's a major cultural touchstone for a proud hockey-loving nation, and it's now gone from the airwaves of the national broadcaster.

(That's not to say it's actually gone completely. The reason CBC lost the rights is that it was outbid for them by commercial broadcaster CTV, which owns TSN, Canada's version of ESPN. TSN broadcasts multiple hockey games to the entire country every week, and the hockey theme now prefaces each of them. But to a lot of Canadians, that's just not the same thing.)

So, CBC was in a spot. Obviously, it wasn't going to cancel Hockey Night in Canada, a Saturday tradition that still draws some of the highest ratings anywhere. So it needed a new theme, and it turned to the public to get it. Culling 15 finalists from over 15,000 entries it received from across the country, the network spent a ridiculous amount of time over the past month or so flogging its viewers to vote for a winner. Last night, they revealed the winner live just as Hockey Night in Canada went on the air...



The winning composer is Colin Oberst from the western province of Alberta (note to Bright Eyes fans - that's Colin Oberst, not Conor - no relation as far as I know,) and I have to say, while his theme isn't the classic that the original theme was, I like it a lot. It's up-tempo, innocent, and a bit old-fashioned, which is just so Canada, and the Celtic pipes that open and close the song are a distinctive nod to Atlantic Canada's roots in the British Isles. And all in all, despite the fact that many will likely never forgive the CBC for letting the original theme get away, the whole contest strikes me as a great way of involving the audience in something they care passionately about...

Fix This Concert

Composer Nico Muhly has been playing a fun and snarky game with violist Nadia Sirota (an old friend of mine, for the record) over at his blog. He calls the game "Fix This Concert," and it was inspired by the New York Philharmonic's season opening program, which Muhly and others have complained was far too unimaginative and lacking any intellectually challenging music. (Orchestras are accused of having no stomach for complex music almost as often as we're accused of assaulting audiences with complex music.)

In Muhly's game, you try to improve the existing program by substituting one or two works for the ones currently on the program, but do so without completely changing the nature of the evening. In other words, despite the fact that I'm pretty sure that Tchaikovsky's overplayed, overwrought 4th symphony wouldn't be Muhly's first choice as a concert anchor, he leaves it where it is on the Phil's opening night program, because he understands the orchestra's need for a warhorse to sell tickets to those who are just looking to hear a big, bombastic piece they don't have to work to understand. But he replaces a similarly overplayed Berlioz overture with a short piece by Jacob Druckman, who is a brilliant composer not enough people know about, and then changes a somewhat treacly Ibert flute concerto to a more forward-thinking concerto by Christopher Rouse. And presto, you've got a better program, at least according to Muhly (and me,) without changing your soloist or your anchor piece.

Now, I'll be the first to defend an orchestra's right to program whatever we think will sell the most tickets (most of the time, anyway.) But I think Muhly makes an excellent point with his game: there's no reason that we can't spruce up our programming without seeming to thumb our nose at more conservative audience members. Half the reason that many in our audience think that they won't like new music is because we're relatively careless in choosing what composers we feature, and under what circumstances. Programmed smartly, a new work frequently garners the most enthusiastic reaction from our crowds, and has the added benefit of making our ticketbuyers more comfortable with the idea of mixing Beethoven with, say, Harbison.

So let's play Fix This Concert, shall we? Below, I'm listing a concert program the Minnesota Orchestra will be presenting this November. It's not a bad program by any stretch (unless you're fundamentally opposed to viola solos,) but it does seem to be a bit "safe." Can you make it better, without completely gutting it? Fire away in the comments, and I'll update this post with my own "fix" in a few days...

The Program:
MOZART Overture to Abduction from the Seraglio
BERLIOZ Harold in Italy
DELIUS "The Walk to the Paradise Garden" from A Village Romeo & Juliet
ELGAR Enigma Variations

Update, 10/11/08: Y'all can feel free to keep chiming in with your own fixes in the comments, but having had a couple of days to think about it, here's my take. Although Harold in Italy is the biggest, longest piece on the program, Enigma is pretty clearly the anchor piece, so it stays. On the viola front, I'm substituting Sofia Gubaidulina's riveting and virtuosic viola concerto for the Berlioz - although a very different kind of piece, I think it pairs well with Elgar's emotional character. The Delius I'm dropping altogether. And as much as I love the Mozart, I'm not sure it fits the character of this program all that well, so I'm substituting Holst's underperformed Brook Green Suite, giving our concert distinctly English bookends, with a challenging but soulful interior work. I'd buy a ticket to that...

Clapping, part III

A few last thoughts on the clapping question.

Also, some Clapping Music. It's utterly hypnotic...

Oh Say Can You Sing

On this, the last day of baseball's regular season (unless you're the White Sox, the Tigers, or the Twins,) let us take a moment to consider the North American practice of singing or playing national anthems before sporting events, a tradition which may cause more cringeworthy moments than any other type of musical performance. Musicians (and non-musicians who can tell the difference between Ashlee Simpson and Deborah Voight) attending ballgames almost always have to look away from each other to avoid giggling or groaning during the anthems, and you need only run a quick Google search to come up with hundreds of embarrassing attempts.

Part of the problem, of course, is that The Star-Spangled Banner is really difficult to sing. It spans more than 1-1/2 octaves, whereas Oh Canada and Take Me Out to the Ballgame require only a single octave's range. If you aren't careful to start on the right note for your particular range, you may find yourself in a world of hurt when the rockets start glaring, as Carl Lewis famously found out one night at a Chicago Bulls game...



Then, there's the fact that a shocking number of Americans seem more than a little fuzzy on just what order the lyrics come in...



The problem isn't helped by the fact that a lot of sports teams seem to view the singing of the anthem not so much as a musical performance, but as a chance to let some ordinary fans on the field. The Minnesota Twins, for example, tend to trot a bunch of elementary school "choirs" (should you really be allowed to call it a choir when everyone is singing in unison?) out onto the MetroDome turf to shriek the anthem while giggling and poking each other, perhaps on the theory that no one is ever going to sound good in a Dome with an antiquated sound system, so why the hell not? The Minnesota Wild, by contrast, have had a succession of professional and semi-professional singers on staff to sing the anthems at each game, but then the Wild have pretty much had a handle on the whole choral music thing from the beginning.



In Canada, they seem to take the whole anthem thing awfully seriously - in Ottawa and Montreal, actual Mounties with voices good enough for the operatic stage are regular anthem singers, and Irish tenor John McDermott frequently stops by to do the honors for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Even at a minor league baseball game I once attended in Winnipeg, the anthems were sung by a shockingly talented barbershop quartet.

But taking pride in our obvious shortcomings seems to be a distinctly American quality, and there's actually something endearing about clearly unqualified vocalists willing to risk public humiliation for a shot to stand on a field with a microphone. There but for the grace of God and all...

Kagel's Finale

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

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

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

Oberlin percussionists performing Kagel's Dressur

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

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

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

Putting words into mouths

In the spirit of orchestral lip-synching and discussions on political speechwriting, I thought it would be an apropos moment to share my favorite example of putting words/sounds into other people's mouths. (This made the rounds on Youtube about a year ago, and it's one that I go back to when I need a laugh!)

Who Knew Nixon Was Such A Softie?

In honor of closing night at the Republican Convention across the river, here's a clip of another (in)famous Republican politician tickling the ivories. (And yes, that's Jack Paar introducing him.) For some reason, the sound cuts out about 40 seconds before the end of the clip, but you'll have the general idea by then...



Judging by the reference to "last November" and the joviality of the question about "future political plans," I'm guessing this was in 1961, after Nixon had lost the presidential race to Jack Kennedy, and not post-Watergate. (Come to think of it, a post-Watergate clip would probably have been in color, too.) Thanks to MN Orch online marketing guru Brian Mangin for pointing me to the clip...

How much for a dozen?

I know, I know, they're talking flowers, but it's such a nice visual viola joke...

Here's another one from a tremendous catalogue:

Why do violists stand for so long outside their houses?
They can't find the key and they don't know when to come in.

And, just to be fair, one more:

A conductor and a violist are standing in the middle of the road. which one do you run over first, and why?
The conductor. Business before pleasure.

Your own favorites welcome as comments.

Air Lang Lang

MN Orch marketing chief Cindy Grzanowski pointed me to this fashion blog post from April, featuring a soon-to-be-released celebrity-branded sneaker, in attractive black and gold, retailing for a fairly reasonable $85. The celeb in question? Um...

Yeah, that's piano superstar Lang Lang, there on the heel, and his signature just next to the third, um, racing stripe(?) on each shoe. Not only that, both the man himself and NY Phil music director designate Alan Gilbert were seen sporting the limited edition sneaks last week at the big Central Park concert. The mind boggles. The new Dudamel Dog in LA and Staccato's long-running Osmo Cosmo are one thing, but this seems like a whole new level of vanity marketing for our sleepy little genre.

So what's next in the brave new world of classical product placement? A Marin Alsop-themed pantsuit? A Joshua Bell line of high-end hair care products? The Nathan Gunn Ab-Master? The world may not be ready...

Not Necessarily The Moonlight Sonata

Most Americans my age or younger probably think of Dudley Moore (if we think of him at all) as the kindly, bumbling alcoholic from the Arthur movies. We may have a vague memory of him playing some piano in that role, but that's likely as far as the association goes.

And that's a great shame, because, in his heyday, Moore was one of the great musical comedians of the 20th century, and remains a legend in British comedy circles for his work with Peter Cook on the BBC in the late 1960s. He was also a gifted musician, interested in both classical and jazz, and even hosted a few serious documentaries on music in his later years.

One of my favorite of Moore's routines is from one of his earliest gigs, the transatlantic satirical smash hit, Beyond the Fringe, which sadly seems to be well out of circulation these days. This was an age when the basics of classical music were still common enough knowledge to be reasonable fodder for satire, and all manner of humorists, from Anna Russell to Victor Borge, were thriving on stage and screen. Moore's crowning achievement in this area is a 4-1/2 minute bit in which he doesn't say a word, just sits down at the keyboard, and creates an entire "Beethoven" sonata, complete with overwrought big finish. It still makes me laugh every time I hear it...



(Hat tip to former MN Orch CEO Tony Woodcock for first making me aware of this bit several years ago...)

Gone fishin'

Yup, it's real, although pretty unbelievable, no matter how many times I see it (Waimanalo beach on Oahu, an hour or so drive from Honolulu, where I grew up.) I'm in Hawaii for the week visiting my mom, so I probably won't be posting until I get back. I fully intend to work on my tan on this hiatus, and although I have some work to do ("Broadway Rocks" show with the Orchestra next week, and a Pink Floyd show next weekend in Philly - more on that later!), I'll be in vacation mode. Hope everyone out there is getting some vacation time this summer...

And It's Root, Root, Root For the Twinkies...

Around this time of year at Orchestra Hall, while Sommerfest audiences are spending their intermission break sipping wine, strolling Peavey Plaza, or conversing on any number of high-minded topics, the best place to find about half our orchestra's musicians is clustered in a corner of our backstage lounge, watching the Minnesota Twins on one of the two TVs we've stacked on top of a filing cabinet there. (We even have cable!)

Why two TVs? Well, we've had one forever, or at least as long as I've been around, and it was fine for baseball season (if a bit small for a whole roomful of people to try to watch,) but during the winter, disputes were known to break out between the hockey crowd and the basketball crowd over which sport should be on, and eventually, our principal cellist used his winnings from our annual NCAA March Madness pool to buy us a brand new set, and our wily stagehands threw a splitter on the cable wire, and voila! No more arguments.

Well, okay, there are arguments. But they tend to be your standard-issue sports talk arguments, which, as everyone knows, are fun, right up until they aren't anymore. And with multiple games playing on multiple sets simultaneously, there can be some very entertaining (and confusing) crosstalk in our little corner...



I recorded that last November, I think, just to hear how much we sound like a bunch of typical morons at a sports bar. Quite a bit, apparently. By the way, the cast list for that little bunch of nonsense, as best I can make out, includes yours truly, bassist Dave Williamson, violist Megan Tam, and violinist Mike Sutton on the hockey talk; cellist Tony Ross, percussionist Kevin Watkins, and horn player Mike Gast talking hoops;and violist Richard Marshall asking questions about a sport I can't identify.

So, anyway, back to the Twins. They're doing awfully well this year, quite a bit better than anyone really expected in what was supposed to be a rebuilding year, which is great for us in the orchestra, because we tend to make a lot of noise in our little sports corner when good things are happening to our teams, and it's always nice to go back on stage with a bit of extra adrenaline. But what's impressed me most about the Twins this summer isn't anything they've accomplished on the field: it's something they dared to do off it, in full view of the public, despite virtual assurance that they'd come off looking more than a little goofy.

If you've watched any Twins games this season, you probably know what I'm talking about. The team, always known for the great TV commercials it produces, got its entire pitching staff together to record a promotional ad in which, for no apparent reason, they stand on chorus risers in the middle of an outdoor diamond and sing about themselves to the tune of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," while pitching coach Rick Anderson conducts them with a miniature bat.



That takes some serious guts, if you ask me. Imagine if someone asked you and everyone you work with to sing a little song for everyone in your city to watch on television for the next six months. (Actually, you don't have to imagine it. There's a reality show on TLC that does exactly that...) And the most amazing thing about it is that, with the notable exception of Matt Guerrier, these guys all seem quite capable of singing on pitch! I mean, none of them is going to be taking gigs away from Nathan Gunn anytime soon, and maybe I'm just imposing a stereotypical view of professional athletes on the situation, but doesn't it seem surprising that the Twins pitchers can (almost) all sing decently?

Just one more reason to love 'em, I guess. Now, if you'll excuse me, SportsCenter's about to start...

Cutting remarks

Some last-minute work before we have to return the tile-cutter to Home Depot (truth be told, I'm wary of anything with spinning blades and happily let Paul do all the cutting). We wanted to retile the floor, too, but doesn't look like we'll be able to get around to that before I leave for Minnesota on Saturday.

Day 5: Tavener, The Bridegroom followed by Public Enemy, He got game

Who says an iPod can't have a sense of humor (and an ironic one at that)?

Listening to Public Enemy took me back to the mid-90's and the East Coast-West Coast hip-hop beef, Biggie vs. Tupac, Bad Boy vs. Death Row, etc. Imagine my delight to discover (with thanks again to Alex Ross) a monster summer jam devoted to calling out the likes of James Levine, the Kronos quartet and eight blackbird from the new-music duo Hybrid Groove Project. Holla!

100% Organic

Well, before getting sidetracked back there by disruptive clappers, I promised a great story about the specific associations orchestras can form with certain pieces of music. Those few of you who've been nosing around this blog since the beginning may already know this one - we talked about it on our first podcast back in November - but it's my favorite MN Orch story ever, and most of you probably didn't make it all the way through that magnum opus of an audio file, so here's the written version...

It happened in the summer of 2000, I believe, although it could have been 2001. It was a summer season concert of light classics - operatic stuff, mostly. On the podium was a conductor of some international reputation. Since I like my job, let's call him Gus.

Anyway. One of the works on the program was the omnipresent Intermezzo from Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. So we're slogging through it in rehearsal, and suddenly, Gus stops us, and snaps, "Where is the organ?" Well, none of us knew that there was an organ part for that piece, and apparently, neither did our keyboardist, because he wasn't even in the building. Gus insisted that there was an organ part doubling the strings in the middle section (the main melody), and that he had to have it, or the show could not go on. So the personnel manager arranged for the keyboardist to come in that afternoon for a special one-on-one rehearsal with the conductor, and we finished the morning rehearsal without incident.



Now, we don't have a real, full-size organ at Orchestra Hall, and the really high-quality electronic one takes quite a long time to set up and takes up a lot of space on stage, so for this brief piece, our keyboardist was using a small, high-end synthesizer pumped through the house sound system. You wouldn't want to use it for anything too important, but it sounds like an organ, so no big deal. But we would later find out that, during the afternoon one-on-one, Gus continually insisted that the organ was not nearly loud enough. Our stage crew tried to explain that it would be much louder that evening, with the board operator controlling the volume level from the back of the hall, but he would have none of it, and was reaching over the keyboard player to turn volume knobs and generally do anything he could to make the little keyboard louder.

None of the rest of us knew any of this, of course, and that night, we arrived at the Intermezzo, and began to play, with the synthesizer stationed near the door at stage right. We in the strings played the introductory segment, took a hefty luftpause, and began to launch into the slow, sweet melody that everyone knows. Immediately, it was clear that many, many, many things were horribly wrong. First of all, the organ, which had joined us in unison as requested, was playing at approximately the volume level of a jet engine, causing about half the audience to jump as if they'd been shot.

But this was not the worst of it. It seems that, in his rage at not being able to get the instrument loud enough in rehearsal, Gus had begun turning knobs more or less at random, and he had unknowingly turned the transposition knob one half-step to the sharp side. We had 60 string players sawing away in F major, and one impossibly loud organ doubling us in F#.

Even worse, the chaos of the moment utterly flustered our keyboardist, who… kept… playing. Gus was so apoplectic that he couldn't even signal a cutoff -- he just stood there on the podium, his arms fluttering and his face turning purple. The keyboardist knew something was wrong, obviously, but he wasn't entirely certain if it was him or not, and he figured that, with the organ turned up so loud, he'd better not just stop dead. So he kept on going. One of our percussionists was turning pages on the organ part, and actually considered pulling the power plug on the synth, but decided he'd better not chance it. Meanwhile, our friendly, supportive Minnesota audience was plastered against the back of their chairs by the dissonant noise.

After a couple of bars, when it became clear that the organ wasn't stopping, those of us with perfect pitch worked out what key it was playing in, and slid on up to join it, in the hope of salvaging something from the piece. But around that time, Gus cut through his near-paralysis with a mighty slash of his baton directed at the keyboardist, who, stunned, stopped playing immediately. So now, we had -- along with a significant decibel loss in the hall -- 30 string players in F, and 30 in F#. It took a full beat for us all to slide back down to the original key. By this time, one second violinist and one cellist were laughing so hard that they had had to stop playing entirely. The rest of us weren't too far behind. Gus was the color of a Minnesota Vikings helmet.

We finished the piece, somehow, and Gus stalked angrily offstage, with most of the audience sitting in stunned silence, and a few hardy Minnesotans offering polite applause. Before the door had even closed behind him, Gus was yelling in German at whatever unfortunate soul happened to have been standing in the wings. The orchestra burst into peals of laughter, except for the poor keyboardist, who had already made his escape from the building. A minute or so later, Gus stalked back out onstage, without a word or a smile or an apology to the audience, and continued the concert as if nothing had happened.

Every orchestra has a favorite train wreck story, but I've never heard a better one than ours. The only sad part is that our library claims not to have recorded the concert, so we don't actually have it on tape. But that's okay, really: to this day, whenever we play the Intermezzo, at least 4 or 5 string players are guaranteed to start the middle section a half-step high in the first rehearsal...

Light Blogging Ahead: This will likely be my last blog post for a couple of weeks, as I'm headed out East tomorrow to play and coach at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in rural New Hampshire. I'll try to post something while I'm there, but the nearest internet access is miles away, so no guarantees. I'll be back in Minneapolis somewhere around the 4th of July...

Lingering Associations

A while back, Sarah was writing about earworms and the havoc they can wreak among musicians, and this week, I'm experiencing what you might call an extracurricular variation on the tune that gets stuck in your head. It's the tune that triggers a memory so sharp that you can't help but think of it every time the tune is played. This happens to orchestra musicians all the time, since we play many pieces of standard repertoire dozens, even hundreds of times over the course of our careers. Sometimes, the memory is highly personal, but in an orchestra, it's more often communal, something specific that happened at a certain moment of a certain performance that everyone will remember for the rest of their lives.

One example from the Minnesota Orchestra's recent history is the end of the Dvorak cello concerto. Back in 2000, when I was new in the orchestra, we played a young people's concert called "Dvorak's Discovery," in which a young boy somehow meets Dvorak and learns about his life. It was a somewhat corny show, though effective, and at one point, as Dvorak (who was played by veteran Twin Cities actor Steve Yoakam) was talking about his own childhood, the orchestra began to play the end of the cello concerto at a murmur underneath the speech. At one particularly peaceful moment in the music, Dvorak mentioned that he worked in his father's sausage factory as a child, then turned to his young friend and asked, "Do you like sausage?" Ever since, we can't make it through a rehearsal of that concerto without at least ten people asking their stand partners if they like sausage.

This week, the memory is visual, and far more recent in vintage, and it comes in the second movement of Scheherezade, which is the featured work on our season finale. Earlier this season (the same week as our second set of Inside the Classics concerts, in fact) we played the entire piece on another young people's program, with dancers from several local companies fleshing out the story behind the music for the kids. The choreography was very kid-friendly and acrobatic, and one move has managed to permanently invade my personal playback of the music. In the middle of the second movement, as the music swirls around in a lilting two-count, the dancers, who had been more or less lining up and moving in unison, suddenly broke free of each other in an instant and began bouncing like rag dolls around the stage, looking for all the world like a bunch of Dr. Seuss characters whose heads had just come unglued from their shoulders. By the last show, a number of us were subtly mimicking the dancers from within the orchestra, and this week, as we approached that same moment in the music, I felt my shoulders involuntarily dip and my head loll, and I heard my friend Jen Strom stifle a giggle behind me. I honestly don't know how I'm going to keep from doing it again in the concerts.

I've got another great story of a musical moment forever sullied and preserved in Minnesota Orchestra history, but it takes a while to tell, so I'll save it for my next post sometime this weekend...

More leisure suits

As Sam mentions in his previous post, we hosted/emceed the Orchestra's annual fundraiser, the Symphony Ball, which was a memorable night, not least for its ABBA-licious 70's-ness.

Osmo was in full regalia as well, here's a candid shot captured right after the show (he's such a good sport - please note the green-glitter platform shoes):

Leisure Suits And Long Nights

So, last night was the Minnesota Orchestra's annual Symphony Ball, our biggest gala fundraiser of the year. It's a massive undertaking, usually combining a mini-concert by the orchestra, a black-tie dinner, live and silent auctions, speeches, dancing, and all manner of drunken revelry. To be honest, it's not usually something I participate in beyond my orchestral duties. But this year, Sarah and I were asked to emcee the whole evening, so I was present from start to finish for the first time. It's a whirlwind evening, and you find yourself somewhat amazed that everything actually goes off as planned, although given how much time our development department and volunteer organizers spend nailing down every last detail, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised.

Anyway, the one somewhat unfortunate side effect of hosting this particular event was, um... how do I put this? Hm. Well, okay. It was this...

Fellow violist Matt Young helpfully snapped that shot with his cell phone in the men's locker room at Orchestra Hall, shortly after I finished changing into the green polyester leisure suit and ultra-paisley polyester shirt in which I would spend the next couple of hours. See, the theme of the evening was the music of Swedish supergroup ABBA, and the orchestra was playing backup to an incredible a cappella band from Finland called Rajaton, and Sarah and I had decided to get into the spirit of things with some rented disco-era costumes. Let's just say that one of us looked a lot better than the other...

Unfortunately clad hosts aside, the show was awfully fun to watch. Rajaton is a very high-energy bunch, and their voices are perfect for the ABBA hits. But back home in Finland, they're actually better known for their own a cappella material, some of which is positively shiver-inducing.



They're coming back to Minneapolis this fall to do a pops show with the orchestra, this time featuring the music of Queen. It ought to be a blast - there may be a lot that can be said against the pop music of the '70s, but it does seem to work unusually well with a full orchestra backing it. I know that, as a classical musician, I'm supposed to consider all pops work demeaning and beneath my dignity as an artist, but honestly, I love this stuff. How often does a violist get to rock out on an electric guitar riff that he grew up listening to on the radio? Sure, ABBA may not have Brahms's pedigree, but they knew how to work a serious hook...



Late update: Sarah has chimed in with more pics of our personal evening of That 70's Show. And like I said, some animals are more equal than others...

If Mario Had A Marimba...

As most readers probably know, we're winding up a three-week Percussion Festival this week at Orchestra Hall, and the offerings have ranged from slightly humorous to decidedly populist to deeply intellectual. Percussionists tend to come in for a lot of flak in the business (What do you call an anti-social alcoholic who hangs out with musicians?), but there really isn't much in life and music more fun than watching a bunch of folks wailing away at things with sticks. To that end, here's one of my current favorite clips floating around the series of tubes - the tunes in this medley should be comfortingly familiar to anyone who (like Sarah and me) grew up in the Age of Nintendo...

Vegetabulous II (or, perhaps more accurately, Fruitabulous)

As promised, another installment in my food/instrument/Japanese madness series.

Slouching Towards Snobbery

All-purpose columnist Joel Stein has a funny piece in the LA Times today in which he endeavors, as part of a larger plan to become "an intolerable old man," to learn the tricks of the trade behind being a classical music snob. In pursuit of this dubious goal, he enlists the aid of a bass player from the LA Philharmonic, who must have been slightly confused by Stein's request, since he seems to have spent a fair amount of time trying to show him how to enjoy classical music, when really, Stein just wanted to know how to become one of the jerks who shushes people and glares at anyone who claps between movements.

The Stein column put me in mind of an essay I wrote a few years back for Drew McManus's Take A Friend To The Orchestra Month at his blog, Adaptistration. Drew's annual TAFTO feature enlists musicians, writers, and listeners to describe how best to approach an orchestra concert for the first time. Some of the entries are quite serious, some are heavily intellectual, and some are aggressively populist. After careful consideration of all of these approaches, I went with "sarcastic and silly" for my contribution. (Shocking, I know...)

How To Be An Elitist Snob In 20 Easy Steps is a pretty lengthy piece, so I won't reprint it here. But you can read it over at Drew's place, if you enjoy jokes about cough drop crinklers being beaten to death with bassoons and the like...

Vegetabulous (or, how some people might have too much time on their hands), Part I

Hmmmmm, another odd food/music thing from the Japanese...

Bach stock

Bach-infused miso (soybean paste, the basis of that sushi restaurant favorite, miso soup). I kid you not. I'm not sure what else to say about this; I'll just let all of you ponder.

The Rilling Diagram

The orchestra is working under the baton of Helmuth Rilling this week, (notice that I did not say "we" - the strings have been reduced for this concert, and since my current position in our seating rotation has me in the last chair, I've been cut for the week,) which is always a good time. Rilling, while not a household name in America, is a legend in the business and an old friend of the Minnesota Orchestra. (He once showed up at a rehearsal we were playing on tour in Stuttgart, Germany, where he lives, just to say hi and welcome us to his hometown.) He's a deeply serious musician with a definite point of view, and probably the foremost Bach conductor working today. (He helms the Oregon Bach Festival each summer, and a number of MN Orch musicians are regulars there as well.) He also, as I discovered the first time I played under him, uses what may be the world's most unique beat pattern.

Anyone who's ever played in an orchestra or a band knows what a beat pattern is, of course, and Sarah demonstrated a few different ones during our Copland concerts a couple of weeks back. But in case I've lost anyone at this point, it's fairly standard for a conductor to move his/her hands in a specific pattern for a specific meter. If the music is in four, the usual beat pattern will look like this.

Conductors can and do deviate from this, of course, and as long as the rhythm isn't too horribly difficult, we don't actually need each beat spelled out for us to stay on target. But generally, we expect beat one to be a downward slash, beat four is the opposite, and beats two and three need to be left and right motions of some sort.

Rilling is having none of this. His personal beat pattern for music in four is perfectly consistent, and surprisingly easy to follow, but it is a bit on the unconventional side...

No kidding. That's exactly what it looks like - the usual downward slash for one, followed by a light bounce and curlicue at the bottom for two, then an upward left sweep for three, and a final bounce up and to the right for four. When I was new in the orchestra, my stand partner at the time, Kerri Ryan, and I spent an entire week determined to diagram the Rilling beat pattern, and that's what we came up with. We were, in fact, so taken with our diagram that we began writing it in our music (without the numbers I've included above) wherever we would normally have written "In 4." (This will doubtless cause much confusion for other violists in future performances, but I think this is balanced out by the distinct possibility that, since Rilling frequently has us use his personal set of orchestral parts, the next person to see the diagram will also be playing the piece under Rilling, and might, after a few minutes, actually figure out what the squiggle is supposed to represent.)

Rilling is hardly the only co