Boredom & Rage In 9/32 Time

Humor and classical music just aren't found together nearly as often as they ought to be, and Philadelphia Orchestra trumpeter Jeff Curnow has been working on doing something about that. He's been producing downright hilarious YouTube videos on various aspects of the music business for some time now (under the guise of selling trumpet mouthpieces,) and now he's about to launch a new series of online videos for Drew McManus's Inside the Arts site under the header, "What's Bothering Jeff?"

Orchestras can be downright infested with gallows humor, both good-natured and not, so I'm always impressed to discover a musician who, while maybe a bit on the cynical side, has obviously found a way to channel the frustrations of the job into something productive and hilarious. Here's my favorite of Jeff's videos to date, detailing the frustrations of having to play certain, shall we say, overly academic (read: pompous & unplayable) works.



The title of the piece alone is enough to make me start giggling, but my favorite parts are the brief shots of the written score. I wish I could say that I've never actually played a piece that featured time signatures like 15/1 and 9/32, but of course, I have. The marking underneath the first part of Excerpt 1 ("slowly at first then with angst") actually reminded me of a very specific American composer who shall remain nameless. And while I can't say that a composer has ever asked me to play a high C while screaming with my mouth closed and hitting my instrument with a hammer, I did once play a piece during which I was supposed to sing in harmony with what I was playing, and another during which the composer wanted me to beat on the back of viola with the metal end of my bow.

At times like that, as the late lamented Molly Ivins once said, you've either gotta laugh or cry, and crying's bad for you.

The Chaos Within

This week, our concerts feature an unusual centerpiece, at least for American audiences: Ralph Vaughan Williams outsized, hourlong extravaganza known as "A Sea Symphony." The piece brings together a full orchestra, a pipe organ, a soprano soloist, a baritone soloist, a full 300-voice choir, and a secondary offstage chamber choir for an amazingly ambitious setting of texts from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Amazingly for a work of such massive scale, it was Vaughan Williams's first attempt at writing a symphony, a fact which shows a bit in his, shall we say, optimistic use of dynamic markings. (Frequently, the full orchestra will be playing a heavily scored passage marked fff while the choir is singing a key line of text. If we actually played it as written, the choir would either need to be heavily amplified, or made up of roughly 3,000 voices.) It has the feel of one of those huge Mahler magnum opuses which sweep you up in a whirlwind of contrasting and conflicting sounds, and then deposit you, many minutes later, at the finish line, where you stand, slightly disoriented, wondering exactly what just happened and why no one warned you it was about to.

And if that's how it feels from the audience, just imagine how a piece like the Sea Symphony sounds and feels from within the orchestra! This is actually one of the biggest challenges of doing what we do for a living - making a large piece of music sound cohesive in the hall when, in truth, each of us playing it on stage can only hear a small percentage of the sounds being produced. Making matters worse for me this particular week is the fact that our revolving system of seating currently has me sitting dead last in the section, way the hell back on sixth stand. From where my stand partner Ben Ullery and I are sitting, we might as well be trying to play the piece via a video hookup from St. Cloud.

Back in 2004, when the orchestra was on our first European tour with Osmo, and I was writing a mini-blog documenting the trip for ArtsJournal.com, I described the challenge of moving from the front to the back of a string section this way...

To anyone who has never spent time playing in an orchestra, this probably sounds strange. After all, the first and last stands of violas are no more than 15 feet apart on the stage, and with the stands so tightly grouped, you might expect the sound to be generally the same throughout the section. It isn’t. In fact, the best way to describe the audible difference between what I heard on Friday night [when I was at the front of the section] and what I heard on Sunday [at the back] is to give you an exercise to do. If you have a really good stereo, put on a recording of a Beethoven symphony (or whatever) and listen to it for a few minutes, standing just off to the left of the left speaker. Done that? Good. Now, play the same recording again, but this time, make the following adjustments:

1) Stand behind the speakers.

2) Move the subwoofer behind you. (This is the bass section, directly over your shoulder.)

3) Get a friend to stand ten feet behind you and off to your right, and have this friend play some loud trumpet solos while the symphony is playing.

Now, since 2004, we've adjusted our seating arrangement slightly, and the piece I was writing about wasn't anywhere near as massive as the Vaughan Williams, so those three adjustments are no longer quite accurate. To approximate my situation this week, let's do this: stay standing behind the speakers, but move that subwoofer about 100 feet to your right, and face it away from you. Turn the treble more or less all the way down (no way are you going to be hearing the first violins with any degree of accuracy,) place a set of earmuffs on your head (earplugs are almost a necessity in a piece like this,) and have that trumpet-playing friend invite six co-conspirators to join him directly behind you (four feet is more like it than ten this week,) armed with trumpets, trombones, and tubas. That should do it.

Faced with a situation like this, a back-bench string player's best bet is to watch your principal like a hawk, and try to match bowstrokes whenever the audio isn't in your favor. But no dice: my principal is completely out of my field of view this week, and the violas are split into two, three, or even four parts much of the time, so I'm not necessarily playing what he's playing in any case. So that leaves Osmo as my last line of defense, and even he's not a sure bet: remember, he's got a lot to keep track of up there, and if he's focusing on keeping the choir on pulse, his motions will likely be of little help to me, and even if he's locked onto the orchestra, I can't presume that all of his cues or corrections are meant to apply to me, specifically.

So there's a fair amount of guesswork involved in a performance this huge, and I'm always somewhat amazed when we pull one off. Of course, given where I'm sitting, I'll probably have no idea whether we have pulled it off this weekend until someone in a more advantageous slot tells me so. So if you're coming to either Friday's or Saturday's show, I'd love to hear your impressions afterward in the comments. Does the thing hang together with the cohesion we hope for? Or do you occasionally get that uneasy feeling that not everyone on stage is exactly on the same page for a moment? Or does it not even matter with a work this involved and over-the-top, since the spectacle is half the attraction? Chime on in as you wish...

Occupational hazards

An interesting article on the hidden perils of our job.

Hearing is the the bedrock of musicianship - without the ability to discern the slightest varieties of intonation, to hear the smallest nuances of tone, any other skill is practically useless. As a conductor, all I really have are my ears; my job is to pick out the tiniest details in the orchestra that need to be adjusted and perfected, and if I have any auditory issues my career is shot. Musicians tend to be very careful about their aural faculty - we're the ones covering out ears when fire trucks go by, and the ones wearing ear plugs when we go clubbing (OK, I actually don't know anyone else who does this, but when I'm out dancing somewhere there's a booming bass, I have my earplugs in!). It's a bit ironic, then, that one of the most dangerous places for our ears is our workplace.

To wit: a normal conversation is between 60-70 dB. OSHA monitoring requirements begin at 90 dB. Pain can begin around 125 dB. A symphony orchestra, at it's peak (and depending on the size and constitution of the ensemble) can reach 137 dB. Now, that's assuming a certain amount of distance from the group in question - but can you imagine being in the middle of it?

And it's not only when we're onstage - practicing has its own hazards. Check out the bottom of this handy list to get an idea of the decibel level of several instruments played in their higher dynamic range. My husband, a horn player, regularly works with a sound level meter and has discovered that he can pump up his own volume to 108 dB. As with any horn player, his bell (where the sound comes out) is under his right ear, and he acknowledges that his hearing is different in that ear than in his left. Given that 90-95 dB is the level of sustained exposure that may cause permanent damage, this is a pretty frightening prospect.

Standing on the podium today during a Holiday Pops show, I was inundated by the sound from a big band plus orchestra and from a trumpet solo in a very high range only a few feet away, and I have to say, sometimes it hurts, and that worries me. I'm very careful with my aural health - any time I use headphones I keep it on a setting below 5/10, the car radio is low enough that people ask me if it's actually on - but this is an area where it is difficult to control what's going into my ears. During louder pops shows you'll see half the orchestra put in bright pink ear plugs from the big boxes backstage. But the thing is, they can do it subtly. How strange would it look if I put in my plugs in the middle of a big band chart??

I'm on ear rest tonight - no iPod, no going anywhere there might be loud traffic (not too much of a problem during the winter in Minneapolis!), and no phonecalls ...well, maybe just a few, but speak softly if you call...

Howl

Quite a few years ago I was driving back to Philadelphia from Maine after a summer at the Pierre Monteux School in my Pontiac LeMans hatchback (I called her “Jezebel” – what a dreadful little car…) packed with suitcases, crates of scores and a sleeping dog in the back. The dog in question was my husband’s (then-boyfriend’s) mutt, Sieglinde (named as only a horn player and Wagner enthusiast would.) I had given her some sedatives for the 10-hour drive back to Philadelphia and had utterly forgotten that she was even there. Many hours into my journey the radio happened to be tuned in to the local classical station, which was playing Brahms’s “Tragic Overture”.

There’s a bit towards the end where the horns play loud and prominent octaves, concert “D” (around measure 320, if you want to check it out), and Sieglinde was always sensitive to that note on the horn – which I knew because when my husband played that note at any dynamic above mezzo forte she would begin to howl. Imagine how startled I was when my canine companion, who, to this point, was drugged to unconsciousness and silently passed out in the hatchback, raised her head woozily and moaned out soft howls to the radio!

We recently discovered that Sieglinde, now nearly 13, is deaf – she hadn’t been responding to our calls for a while, which we wrote off as just part of her obstinate personality compounded by age. The other day, however, my husband was practicing that very same section of “Tragic” with Sieglinde in the room, and she remained curled up in a ball, oblivious. Which made me a little sad, but maybe it's a relief for her, who no longer has to hear daily hour-long warm-ups on the French horn.