Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Or, as we'd say on this side of the Atlantic, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Throughout my conducting career I've faced the dreaded "How is it being a woman in a male-dominated field?" question, and my customary reply is that 1) I choose not to make a big deal of it and 2) musicians are fine with anyone on the podium as long as they are prepared and competent.

My reasoning lies in my belief that we largely create our own realities; if I choose to ignore the potential minefield of the woman-as-authority-figure model, and assume that others will as well, that's the way it will be. If I act like it's no big deal, everyone else feels like it's no big deal. Classic group psychology.

On the other hand, if I ever became hyper-conscious of long-held assumptions about gender and leadership, it would probably cause me some anxiety, which would then affect both my work and relationship with the ensemble or organization in question.

In terms of the inroads women have made in the conducting field, to paraphrase - we've come a long way, baby. But as far as we've come, there are constant reminders of the underlying discomforts that still exist.

Case in point; the recent firing or conductor/Baroque specialist Emmanuelle Haïm. Slated to conduct a run of Mozart's Idomeneo at the Opéra de Paris, she was dismissed and replaced by Philippe Hui two days before opening night. What ensued was a she-said/they-said unusual in the music world in that the Orchestra made a public statement in response to Haïm's declaration. Haïm claimed that the musicians were unwilling to work with her to achieve a different (Baroque) aesthetic. The orchestra countered that they were disappointed in the lack of precision in both musical ideas and in conducting style/gestures, and that all they care for is the quality of a performance.

A vote of no confidence from an orchestra is rather extraordinary. In her defense, neither a contracted rehearsal period nor musicians unaccustomed to the very particular technical and musical needs of historically informed performance is conducive to an amicable work environment. In the orchestra's defense, Haïm is a self-taught conductor who, while generally highly regarded for her musical expertise in the Baroque repertoire, is admittedly not a technically adept conductor.

The situation is fully outlined in this article from Le Monde; for the non-Francophones, a translation of most of the article here.

What struck me about this commotion is the inclusion of an obvious fact that the author of the article decided to add at the end of a paragraph (I'm using Charles T. Downey's translation from Ionarts):

The orchestra, "called out" by Mme Haïm, broke its customary silence -- a very rare thing -- by the means of the commission elected by the musicians, which declared on January 22: "The musicians were delighted to try a Baroque approach, [but] there was great disappointment in the lack of precision as well of musical ideas in the conducting style." In other words, the orchestra, which wanted only "to guarantee the excellence of the performances," denounced a lack of competence, for this production, of one of the few woman conductors in the world. (emphasis mine)

We don't need to be reminded that there are not a whole lot of female conductors in the world. Anyone not living under a rock is aware of this. So, assuming that the goal was not simply an unnecessary statement of the obvious, I can only infer that this phrase was added as some sort of snide insinuation.

Yes, I'll admit, I'm probably more sensitive to gender slights than your average male conductor. It's simply a matter of experience; I've been on the receiving end of backhanded commentary and dealt with interactions fraught with undercurrents of chauvinism countless times. Again, as I said earlier, my response is to completely ignore it, and when one ignores it, one at least has the possibility of neutralizing an unfriendly environment.

But when publicly presented in international media, it seems gratuitously provocative (a conductor declared incompetent - and she's a WOMAN!). And let me be clear here; it's the author of the article that rankles me. I know nothing about the actual situation and can only assume a conductor would be ousted only because a production was in serious jeopardy and was artistically compromised.

I strive to dispel any notion that my gender marks my work. In fact, most of the time I pay it no heed (yes, even in the four-inch heels). And, again, when one endeavors to disregard traditional societal norms, with enough time one can establish new norms. Media insinuations like this one merely do a disservice to the very real work we've undertaken to eradicate those boundaries and assumptions.

Just when you think we've made progress, all you need to do is scratch the surface to discover the underlying bias. Plus ça change... (and do read down through all the comments; the vitriol is extraordinary.)

Music for a bad trip

During a little online research for a preconcert lecture Friday, I came across this article on Mozart and Haydn which concluded with the following paragraph:

Some years ago, I was discussing music with two friends, one of them a distinguished contemporary composer. We were chewing over the following peculiar question, peculiar especially since it concerned an experience none of us had had in approximately three decades: If you had taken LSD and suddenly realized your trip was heading seriously south, what music would you put on the stereo to restore your emotional equilibrium and silence your demons? All three of us agreed without hesitation: a Haydn quartet. Almost any Haydn quartet.

Which got me to thinking, taking aside the LSD, what music do you turn to "to restore your emotional equilibrium and silence your demons"? I'm not talking music to sooth or relax to, I'm talking about the stuff that fundamentally grounds you and gives you that deep and firm understanding of the rightness of living and your place in the world. For me, Bach Well Tempered Clavier puts molecules back in order when the universe is going astray. You?

Music As Brain Food

In the last few years, it seems like there's been a surge of interest in music and the human brain. Renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks jump-started the conversation with his remarkable 2007 book, Musicophilia, which was part scientific examination of how our brains process and react to music, and part deeply personal memoir of the author's own lifelong love of classical music.

Sacks also showed up on an episode of WNYC's radio show/podcast Radiolab (which I can't recommend highly enough, by the way) to talk about a British man with "the most severe case of amnesia ever documented." Remarkably, while the man had forgotten nearly every detail of his life, down to the names of his children, and could barely speak coherently, he could remember how to read music, sing, and even conduct a choir!

I've been fascinated by the way the brain processes music since the summer when I was 15 years old. I was attending a summer music camp at which we were encouraged, on Sunday mornings, to walk down the hill into the tiny town the camp was in, and become the summer choir at the village church. I loved to sing, and loved the people who attended the church, so I never missed a Sunday, even though I had little interest in the actual service.

But that summer, the church had just lost its pastor to a larger church in another part of the state, so an interim pastor had been appointed while a permanent replacement was sought. The fill-in was named Jed, as I recall, and he seemed like a wonderful and caring man, but he had a terrible stutter that nearly prevented him from being able to speak complete sentences. His condition was ameliorated by an electronic device, but it still made his sermons a challenge for everyone involved.

But the very first week I attended one of Jed's services, I was dumbstruck to see him open a hymnal and sing along with the choir, in full, unstuttering voice. So long as the words were married to a melody, he never missed a beat. A few weeks later, I worked up the nerve to ask him about it, and he explained that, because music is processed by a different part of the brain than language, people with his condition could frequently leave their stutter behind when singing. Remarkable.

Late last year, a new scientific paper was published that really gets into the nitty-gritty of how we hear various kinds of music, and why, evolutionarily, we even bother with the stuff at all. You can get the full paper here, but unless you're actually a scientist, you may have better luck with this excellent summary by science writer Jonah Lehrer. Here's the money graf:

"There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality.

The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of 'low-probability notes'. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty - we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns - that's exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance."

All of which could help explain why fans of one kind of music have trouble understanding or liking another, or why someone who listens to a lot of Stravinsky and Bartok might have an easier time deciphering Schoenberg than someone who listens to a lot of Mozart and Haydn. The real bottom line seems to be that our brains are designed to be exercised, and respond best when regularly challenged. And yes, I'm already trying to work out a way to insert this whole concept into next season's ItC concerts...

In the crosshairs

I'm finishing up Michael Pollan's wonderful The Omnivore's Dilemma, which, I have to confess, I started back when the Orchestra was on tour in late February (I have a bad habit of reading up to a dozen books simultaneously, which often results in taking many, many months to finish a single one.) It's a thought-provoking read (who knew how corn permeates so much of what we consume?) describing four meals from four different sources - factory farming, industrialized organic agriculture, self-sustaining polycultural organic farming and hunting/gathering.

A phrase in the hunting/gathering chapter caught my eye; "the hunter's ecstatic purple". Describing his participation in a pig hunt in northern California, Pollan goes on to explain:

It was as if I'd dialed up the gain on all my senses or quieted myself to such an extent that the world itself grew louder and brighter...So much sensory information was coming into my head that it seemed to push out the normal buzz of consciousness. The state felt very much like meditation, though it took no mental effort or exercise to achieve that kind of head-emptying presence. The simple act of looking and listening, tuning my senses to the forest frequencies of Pig, occupied every quadrant of mental space and anchored me to the present.

Reading this was an "aha" moment for me, as I realized that's exactly how I feel while conducting opera.



No, I'm not comparing pig-shooting to Cavaradossi in the crosshairs of the firing squad (I just love that poster). It's more about the feeling of absolute focus on the necessities of the present, which is so all-encompassing that, as Pollan says, one forgets both the passage of time and any physical discomfort.

Opera conducting is an entirely different beast from the orchestral variety. Ostensibly, the biggest difference is the addition of singers, costuming and scenery, but practically this translates into an approach to performance that is completely divergent.

First of all, much more so than in a purely symphonic realm, one has to be acutely aware of the necessity to create a coherent narrative from a musical standpoint; it's a matter of constant attention to dramatic pacing. Which would be hard enough on its own, but the major complication of opera is that you have a bunch of singers running around on stage, and while you may have rehearsed something to perfection in the rehearsal hall, all bets are off when you hit the stage.

Conducting singers is often like herding cats (said with all love and respect for my singing friends and colleagues - but it remains fact that singers rarely have to work under the constraints of communal agreement and consistency that orchestral players do). Combine the artistic license being taken vocally on stage with a prop door that doesn't seem to want to open with a smoke machine that threatens to asphyxiate your first violin section, and you have all the makings of a disaster.

But, oddly (and that very same scenario happened to me several weeks back during the Orchestra's run of Hansel and Gretel), just as those little calamities are piling up, I feel calmer and more focused. After a particularly harrowing act in which a soprano threatened to skip over several lines of music, our principal horn Mike Gast found me backstage and asked, "Geez, doesn't that make you crazy? How do you not panic?"

Call me crazy, but I love that feeling of chaos. When it happens, I utterly understand Pollan's "ecstatic purple"; time slows down, and all those constant bubbles of subconscious thought ("'Did I feed the dogs? Will my house in Richmond ever sell? Should I call my dentist tomorrow?") completely dissipate. My attention is given fully to the task at hand (lassoing the errant soprano, holding a cue until the door can be opened, fanning the violins with a spare hand) and on nothing else. Which for me is incredibly mind-clearing, and thus intensely pleasurable. It's ironic that at those moments when a conductor should feel as if they're caught in the crosshairs, I feel the most relaxed and free - anyone have any comparable experiences in other fields?

Old friends

I'm back in the Twin Cities and settling into my new house - the movers arrived yesterday with several tons of belongings (pianos and scores are very, very heavy), and with the cable installed I finally have internet access! I managed to unpack most of my books today and am in the midst of the arduous process of reordering, recataloging and reshelving several hundred scores.

Often, hearing just a few moments of an old, familiar song on the radio (80's nostalgia, anyone?), we're taken back into a particular moment in life - the summer of a first love, a memorable high school dance - (for me, 50 Cent's "In Da Club" takes me back to a difficult couple of months during the messy dissolution of an orchestra with which I was working, but that's a whole other story...) . I experience something similar when I merely glance at certain scores, because they bring back powerful memories of when I first encountered them.

Dvorak - Symphony #8: the first piece I ever conducted, at 16. My high school orchestra director handed me a baton and took off to take a phone call. I was both utterly enthralled and completely terrified; it's the moment I got totally hooked.

Chausson - Symphony in Bb Major: on the podium at the Monteux School in Maine many years ago, being yelled at by Charles Bruck. One of the very few times I've had to fight back tears on the podium.

Bach - Brandenburg Concerto #1 onstage at the Curtis Institute with an all-star cast of classmates; extraordinary music-making, but more importantly, an extraordinary sense of cameraderie and a unity of purpose that one rarely experiences. The death of one of the performers several years ago only adds to the poignancy of the memory.

Brahms - Symphony #4: a subscription debut with a professional orchestra during my final student years; I had carefully annotated my own parts, and the concertmaster and I came to loggerheads with the bowings for the third movement. "It's backwards!" he said; "But it puts the accent and the long note in the right place!" I replied. I won the argument - after several rehearsals, I finally won the concertmaster's approval.

Strauss - Egyptian March: one of the pieces I conducted on a concert the night after my father died. I've done everything else on the program since then; subsequently, the memory of that awful period has been erased from them. But this is a piece I've not encountered since, and hearing it takes me back to a very dark time.

Stravinsky - Petrouchka: first heard as a young kid on "Dance in America" as part of a tribute to Nijinsky featuring Rudolf Nureyev. I had never been so mesmerized in my (at that point, very short) life, and hearing the whirling exuberance of the opening carnival tableau always reminds me of the sense of thrill and wonder I felt then.

It's been a ridiculously busy couple of weeks moving my household (and husband) half-way across the country, an effort not without it's stresses. But there's a deep reassurance in opening box after box of my old friends, a flitting memory accompanying each, as I ease each volume onto the shelf.

Don't Worry. Be Happy.

Every few years, someone does a study of orchestra musicians, and comes up with the staggering result that many of us are deeply unhappy. Or if not actually unhappy, at least deeply dissatisfied with our work life. These studies are always duly reported by the arts media with the requisite degree of incredulity (How could people who are getting paid to play great music possibly be unhappy? What is wrong with these people?), and there are usually a few backlash commentaries appended in which unhappy people who get paid to write about great music order those of us who get paid to play it to cheer up and grow a sense of perspective.

I've always been fairly skeptical of these studies, partly because I just haven't met all that many unhappy musicians. Cynical, yes; jaded, sure, but not actually unhappy on the whole. Also, I've noticed that a lot of these studies seem to come out of the UK, which makes sense, because while Great Britain boasts some of the world's finest orchestras, those orchestras are, by and large, notorious for low pay and lousy working conditions, as compared with their peer orchestras in the US, Germany, and Austria.

But if there is a kernel of truth in these studies, it can be found in the conclusion that orchestral musicians can grow to feel stifled by the very nature of orchestral life. As an article I read last week put it, "orchestral musicians are, in a sense, the assembly-line workers of the arts world. Like their counterparts on the factory floor, they're asked to execute the exact same task again and again — a method that may be efficient for producing consumer goods, but hardly one that promotes inspired performances."

Now, I would argue that if we're actually being asked to execute the exact same task in the exact same way again and again, someone in charge [looking meaningfully in the direction of the podium] isn't doing his/her job correctly. But the point is well taken - unlike soloists or chamber musicians, or even freelancers who leap from gig to gig, full-time orchestra players have to get used to a lifetime of following orders, and having little to no say in the nuances of any given performance. We don't get to pick the repertoire we perform, we have very little say in who the conductor or the soloist will be, and while over time, our ensemble might develop a certain group style of playing, we're always subject to the whims of whoever is waving the baton.

There's a reason for this, of course, and it's that, when you have nearly 100 musicians on a single stage, someone has to be in charge. Democracy is simply not a viable option for a symphony orchestra. It's barely a viable option for string quartets, many of which spend endless rehearsal hours bickering over everything from bowings to the proper way to play a trill in Haydn. So I've never much minded trading my voice in the process for the simple pleasure of knowing that the rehearsal isn't going to be derailed by two opinionated violinists butting heads. And if I think the conductor is an idiot, I can blow off that particular head of steam over a post-concert beer, and remind myself that he'll be gone next week. (Unless, of course, he's the music director, which is a whole different problem that, thankfully, I don't have at the moment.)

In the end, I think that these orchestral happiness studies tend to get more attention than they really merit. They're interesting to people largely because they shine a bright light on the fact that the orchestral workplace is, after all, a workplace, subject to the same stresses, personality conflicts, and political gamesmanship as any other office. But unless an orchestra is truly being badly mismanaged (and certainly some are,) the vast majority of the musicians tend to be pretty content with our lot, even if we think there's room for improvement. In other words, it's probably a lot like where you work, except that the last few hours of your work week probably don't include formalwear. Lucky you.

Notes and neurons

Early this year I posted about a Bobby McFerrin concert at Orchestra Hall - in the last few paragraphs, I was marveling at the fact that McFerrin got the audience to sing along on a pentatonic scale without a word of explanation or even teaching all the notes in the scale. Which turns out to be a conscious tactic on his part, as we see below:

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Again, I marvel; understanding of the organization of pitches in the pentatonic scale seems instinctive. McFerrin provides the context of the scale through his "descant" above the audience. The audience understands the tonal context both unconsciously and automatically. Another clear-cut example of how our brains are hard-wired for music.

Encouraging Dissent

Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette has an interesting post up on her blog this week about an odd sort of groupthink that frequently seems to permeate the classical music world:

"Why do we all have to like the same composers? I’m sure that we could find movies or books that we disagree about without it seeming quite so heretical. (Actually, my husband doesn’t care for Bruckner, and I love Bruckner, and we manage to continue a happy marriage regardless.) Anyway, I think we need to embrace these disagreements, because they help get classical music off its film-star pedestal and into an arena where we can interact with it, have opinions about it, dare not to like it."

I like the comparison to other art forms, because whereas critics who write about movies, books, and theater spar continuously over the quality (or lack of quality) of what they're reviewing, many classical music critics seem to feel constrained only to review the performance of a piece of music, and rarely discuss the merits of the work itself. And given how passionately many classical fans feel about their favorite composers, I'd probably do the same in their shoes. It's really not worth the trouble you're going to stir up by saying in print that, just for instance, Bruckner's symphonies are overrated, long-winded, and boring.

Midgette has another theory about why critics should be more open about their likes and dislikes, though:

We talk a lot about how to reach new younger audiences: well, they’re not fooled by didactic lectures and hollow praise. I have a host of anecdotes about times I felt I reached someone who was new to classical music by giving them permission not to like it.

Now, this rings very true to me, and I've got an anecdote of my own. A few years back, we were playing the world premiere of a newly commissioned work, and from the opening moments of the first rehearsal, we knew that we were in for a very tough slog through some incredibly dense, modernist stuff that our audiences were just going to hate. It's never fun trying to get through music like that, because we can see the audience visibly hating it, willing it to be over, and nobody wins in that situation. You can always hope that the audience will be so incensed that they'll do something dramatic like refuse to applaud, or even boo the composer, but most American audiences are far too polite to ever consider such acting out.

Now sometimes, when we're playing a new piece, we'll invite the composer to say a few words about it before we play it, which can sometimes have the effect of making the audience more open to what they're about to hear. But in this case, the composer of what I'll call the Noise Concerto wasn't actually going to be at the concerts, so Osmo decided to speak to the audience instead. I couldn't imagine what he was planning to say about a piece that basically everyone agreed was unlistenable. Here's what he said (to the best of my memory - this was several years ago, and I don't have it on tape):

"When I first received the score for this piece by [Composer X], I thought to myself, 'Oh, no.'"

At this, there was a slight gasp and some nervous laughter from the audience. Osmo went on, "It seemed so dark, and so difficult, and with so much happening all over the orchestra, and I didn't know whether anyone would be able to listen to it. But now, as we've been rehearsing and playing it all week, and we have begun to understand some of the composer's ideas, now I think... well, now I think still "Oh, no" in many places."

The audience erupted in laughter. Osmo wasn't done: "But," he said quickly," what does Vänskä know? I am hearing the piece for the first time just as you are, just as we all are, and when we play it, you will have your own conclusions, and those are what matter."

It was a masterful way to introduce the piece. There was no question, once we'd finished the premiere, that the vast majority of those in attendance fell into the "Oh, no" camp, but the amazing thing was that it was clear from the looks on people's faces as we played that, by giving them permission to hate the piece, we had made them more open to giving it a chance. At some of the work's loudest, most headache-inducing moments, I even saw a few people smirking or chuckling, as if to say, "Wow. This must be one of the 'Oh, no' places."

The lesson, I think, is that people who know they're allowed to have their own opinions on what we're doing on stage are far more likely to engage, and to view concerts as something they participate in, rather than as something static that is set in front of them. Midgette sums it up nicely:

"We don’t need boosterism: we need to regain a sense that this field matters, and that there are reasons for everyone to care about it, beyond a dutiful sense of “it is great and we should.” That's the basis of a love of music, an amateurism, that sustains, rather than distant appreciation of isolated, glamorous performances."

Looking For The Flames

I've written before about St. Paul's T.D. Mischke, the former KSTP radio talker who once showed up at Orchestra Hall just to watch a rehearsal and chat excitedly with as many musicians as he could collar. These days, Mischke's taken a new gig over at City Pages, our alternative weekly paper, where he conducts a daily online "radio" show and, even better, writes regularly for the paper and its web site. Not surprisingly, he's instantly become one of the most indispensable columnists in town. The man has a way with words, and when he turns his thoughts to music, well...

"They said God help the artist who doesn't want to rebel. Have mercy on the poor bastard who isn't running away from something pleasant and beelining toward something dangerous. Because that's where the fire flares all night long. And if an artist, a musician, a songwriter, isn't looking for the flames, then he's found himself a deadly little pocket of comfort, as edgy as a new suburban development, as easy as a patio. Then he's no artist at all."

That paragraph ought to be carved in stone at every concert hall, musicians' union local, and music school in the world, if you ask me.

Pure coming and going

In a yoga class the other day, the instructor reminded us that there was no single correct way to execute the triangle pose (trikonasana). I was having a particularly hard time of it - it was one of those days where I was feeling distracted and very out of tune with myself, and the whole breathing-with-movement thing on which yoga is predicated was not coming easily. As I eased down into the extension, she spoke again: "There is no single trikonasana; there are an infinite number because each of us individually is different from each other, and none of us will ever do trikonasana the same way we do today."

This got me thinking about music (OK, I confess, just about anything gets me thinking about music, but that's what musicians do). I've alway wondered about performing a piece multiple times, and how different it feels each time, even if a recording of each iteration might have very little ostensible variance. I end up doing a lot of repetition with the Orchestra when I'm doing Young People's Concerts (which we'll be doing this coming week), and even with the pieces that the Orchestra has performed a billion times ("Ruslan and Ludmilla" Overture comes to mind) it is never the same over two (sometimes back-to-back) performances.

But what if those performances were identical, would two different audiences react to them in the same way? And would the musicians creating those identical performances actually experience them in identical ways, or can you duplicate a musical product while having a disparate personal experience internally?

This reminded me of a post over at "On An Overgrown Path" about the very nature of music. What is a piece of music? Is it the notes on the page? Is it what the composer heard in his head as he was writing down those notes on a page? Is it and aggregate of all the performance ever of that given piece? Or is it the last performance of it that you heard? The conclusion here is that: "The answer must be that the Matthew Passion, or any composition, is simply the music we hear in our head at any one moment in time - whether the source be a score, a live performance, a recording, a memory, or our imagination."

Which I rather like. The post goes on to talk about the impermance of music (with which I also agree) - the delight in music is that it's ephemeral, ungraspable and utterly unquantifiable. Every performance is a coming and going that only exists in that moment, and that's why we savor them.

Patterning

No, this isn't going to be a post about quilting or psychomotor skills, I promise!

I've written about the methodical way I approach score-study, and it came up at a discussion during brunch this morning. A non-musician friend asked how we kept all that sound organized in our brains - how do you remember what's coming next? To which I answered, it's all about pattern recognition. Or more specifically, understanding the particular patterns of pitch, rhythm and emphasis that are initially established in a piece of music, and discovering how these morph (or, occasionally, remain the same) throughout the work. Which might sound a bit clinical, but it's an approach that's useful in that it can be applied to any composer and any style.

Which all made me a bit philosophical, because isn't life all about pattern recognition? Certainly true with all human relationships; we strive to understand the patterns of those individuals around us ("normal behavior"), because a shift in the pattern indicates something has changed. Food for thought.

Maybe I'm thinking of patterns because discussions of the topic have been floating around the blogosphere lately (another "pattern" in itself? Now I'm reading into everything...) For instance, a great post about words that made their inaugural appearance in the latest Inaugural Address. It's a fascinating list of words - I particularly like the sequence "tirelessly - toiled - towards" - and was surprised that, in a post 9/11 world, "firefighter" is making its first appearance. And now I've added a word to my vocabulary (hapax!).

Which reminded me of an exhibit at the Weisman I saw last fall in which artist R. Luke DuBois took State of the Union addresses and arranged words in a kind of "eye chart" according to frequency of use ("Gentlemen" made the most appearances for George Washington, "Terror" for George W. Bush). I actually attended the opening, during which DuBois did a set - he's a composer as well, and I recently discovered that he does some really interesting stuff.

My last pattern observation; when I'm wrapping up a precious few days at home, as I am now, I tend to become a bit more reflective and philosophical.

M-I-C-K-E-Y...

For any of you who attended the Bobby McFerrin/Cantus concert at Orchestra Hall last Friday, you know what I'm talking about (for those of you not fortunate enough to attend, it was a lyric from the audience-sing-along encore).

McFerrin has always been a think-outside-the-box musician, and his concerts never disappoint. There are a few things you can count on (a lump-in-the-throat beautiful version of "Blackbird" and, if you're lucky, a laugh-out-loud funny 7-minute musical condensation of "The Wizard of Oz"), and then there was the new element, the collaboration with Cantus, which yielded moments of utter spontaneity that were surprising to the performers as well as the audience.

Two observations (from my vantage point in the soundbooth in the back of the Hall - where there was a gaggle of standing-room-only audience members taking it all in): first, how utterly relaxed he is onstage. I've certainly seen many other performers with a very comfortable stage presence, but McFerrin's is different - you don't get the fleeting moments of tension or expressions of super-conscious thinking. I'm thinking a lot of it has to do with the fact that what he does on stage is so improvisatory in nature, even if it's planned out. If you're always making it up, it's hard to mess it up. Backstage I asked him if he put a lot of thought into what sounds (consonant and vowel combinations) he used for different registers or patterns. He looked at me quizzically, then told me no, not at all, just what came out at the moment.

It reminded me of the notion of the limitation we classically-trained types are always dogged by, on some level; the fact that what we do is written out, dictated to us, in a way. Yes, there are those few who have incorporated improvisatory skills into classical performance (a skill that used to be commonplace back in the day - and organists still have it as a regular part of their training), and yes, there is of course room for individual turns of phrases that may change night to night, but the fact is that we can't mess with a Brahms Symphony on the spot. We can't even really change a Brahms Intermezzo on the spot - it then ceases to be Brahms. It's a limitation within which we find infinite freedom, but a stricture no less.

It also reminded me of an article I read in a recent Gramophone magazine, an interview with pianists Martha Argerich and Stephen Kovacevich, two artist I admire a great deal, to whom performing is not a relaxing prospect at all:

Argerich: "...one doesn't choose to be a performer...It's not your free choice...Maybe you want to learn and move closer to music, and, yes, to what you love - but that doesn't mean that you enjoy the performing."

Kovacevich: "It's a kind of torture as well, sometimes."

The other post-concert thought was about the amount of audience participation - a lot! - McFerrin had us chiming in for everything from the theme to "The Beverly Hillbillies" to the Bach-Gounod "Ave Maria" (there were some lovely voices in the audience!) and, most notably, one song where he had us accompanying him on a series of pitches. He taught us the pitches by standing at a particular point onstage, singing a pitch, and having us repeat it. He moved over a foot or so, sang a different pitch, had us sing it, etc. He taught us 4 pitches, then proceeded to leap around stage on those four points, and the audience sang the pitch corresponding to the point, as taught.

What was surprising then was the fact that at a certain point, he started moving beyond those four points, up to nearly an octave lower and an octave higher than the original pitch set, and the audience kept in the same mode (and no, it wasn't a major scale). It was completely unconscious, simple, and I unthinkingly sang along.

It wasn't until I left the concert that it even occurred to me that he'd taught us 4 pitches out of a pentatonic scale, and we just went along with it and what came naturally. The music-analysis part of my brain was completely shut off, because I so instinctively knew what he wanted that I didn't need to analyze. And neither did anyone else in the audience - they just sang along, naturally, with what sounded right to their ears.

Which to me goes a long way to show that the natural, unconscious and automatic understanding of the organization of pitch and rhythm that is the basis of music is absolutely instinctive. It's inborn and innate within us. And what's more powerful than that?

Cutting Room Floor: From The Minds of Babes

As we draw within a few days of our first Inside the Classics concerts of the season, Sarah and I are in our usual mode of painstakingly cutting material from the show that we desperately want to get to, but simply won't have the time for. And as we did last season, we'll be using the blog as a way of giving you access to some of these extra bits and pieces. (Click the Cutting Room Floor tag to see all the entries that fall into this category.)

Later this weekend, Sarah will be writing about Mozart's largely ignored sister, who by all accounts was nearly as talented a musician as Wolfgang, but who was expected at a certain point to give up her music and settle down to raise a family. (All three of the "Young Wonders" we're featuring on this year's concerts actually had or have similarly talented siblings, so this is a subject we'll definitely be returning to throughout the year.)

But for today, I thought it would be fun to talk a bit about just what defines a prodigy in the neurobiological sense. What was so different about Mozart's 5-year-old brain as compared with yours or mine at that age, and how do the extraordinary minds among us develop differently than those with more average intellects? To that end, I've sought out an expert in this particular field to help us out - an expert, it should be said, to whom I have a deeply personal connection. Listen in below...

Overheard...

...at tonight's concert, which ends with Messiaen's L'Ascension, a rapturous 29 minutes which, while eminently accessible on some level, is not without its challenges:

(a well-dressed couple pushes up from their seats in Tier 1)

Man: "That was such...dream music, of a dream world, I really liked it."

Woman: "Well, I hated it."

The conversation continued as they exited and walked down the corridor - I tried to follow the thread until they were out of earshot (I didn't feel like stalking them down the stairs!). It struck me that this is one of the best reactions any concert could elicit. As much as I'm a big supporter of concert-as-enjoyable-entertainment, I find satisfaction in the counterbalance of concert-as-challenge. The Messiaen affected this couple enough (albeit in dialectically opposed ways) for them to continue the experience of the concert beyond the confines of the actual performance. Which, to me, is the level of both emotional and intellectual engagement we strive for when we present art.

A small victory - a little bit of light in what has been a pretty rough week!

Maybe We Should Start Painting Our Faces?

A cool new study came out last week, in which researchers asked a wide-ranging sample of music fans to describe aspects of their personality, then used the data to correlate different types of people with the genres of music that best suit them. The study's been getting a fair amount of play in the arts press this weekend, largely because one of the more amusing findings is that classical devotees have a lot in common with heavy metal fans.

There are some hare-brained ideas about why this might be: "Out of all of the main genres of music heavy metal and classical are the ones which require the most discipline to play – they're technically very difficult and involve playing at inhumanly fast speeds," said one fan of both genres in the UK's Independent newspaper. I don't know about that - it seems to me that jazz deserves to be in that conversation as well, and I'm not sure I buy the idea that most metal bands are all that technically accomplished - but I do find plausible the assertion of the study's author that classical and metal fans share a "love of the grandiose." (Think Wagner's Ring cycle as an analogue for your average KISS show - plenty of costumes, pathos, shrieking, and over-the-top emotion in each.)

One interesting part of the survey that isn't getting reported on much is the finding that classical fans, while "creative and at ease with themselves, [are] not outgoing." I wish I could say this surprises me, but it doesn't. 80 years of being told that your favorite music is anachronistic and elitist by the supposed mainstream music press will have that effect on people.

I also wish that we could measure today's most devoted classical listeners with those from 100 years ago, before the culture of recorded sound took hold. There's a huge subset of classical listeners today who rarely if ever bother to venture out to the concert hall, because they find themselves invariably disappointed by Local Orchestra X's failure to reproduce exactly their favorite recording of Great Work Y. It's sad, because I've always felt the same way about classical music that I do about hockey - you're just not really experiencing it unless you're actually there live and in person, and the best parts of both experiences will never be fully translatable on TV, radio, or CD.

And now that I think about it, I'll bet Metallica and Black Sabbath fans feel the same way...

Musical mac and cheese

Stumbling out of an Airbus 330 after an eight-hour red-eye flight from Honolulu to Minneapolis at 5:30 this morning, I was bleary-eyed, comatose and cranky. I'm not a good flier to begin with, but the overnight thing compounds problems because I can't sleep on planes, leaving me completely useless the day I arrive (although I did manage to get through a vocal/choral rehearsal this evening for the Broadway show tomorrow). Exiting the plane, I made my way to the ladies room in the terminal in a miserable mood.

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of frequenting the facilities at MSP, let me say that I always look forward to hearing the music they play in them, which is invariably classical and runs the gamut from Haydn trumpet concertos to Debussy piano pieces. I find it a little odd that it's the only place in the terminal in which continuous classical music is played, but far be it for me to complain - and, besides, it kinda classes up the joint a bit, you know? So, this morning, at 5:40-ish a.m., the selection playing in the ladies room in the G terminal was Dvorak's String Serenade.

More specifically, it was the first movement of the String Serenade, which I find to be one of the more sublime creations on earth, and it's one of those pieces that invariably makes me smile. There's something about the melody that unknots the tension I carry between my shoulder blades, something that lets me breathe a bit easier. It's a piece which, for me, is tremendously comforting, and it did wonders in alleviating by crabby mood this morning.

I imagine we all have "comfort music", music we wrap ourselves with in times of stress or distress, music that we turn to time and again to calm us with its familiarity. For me, Chopin Marzurkas are the musical equivalent of comfort food; I'm almost always in the mood for them, they are somehow filling and deeply satisfying, and they're nice to curl up with on a cold night. When I'm having an existential crisis, the 2nd movement of Brahms's Third Symphony always seems to set me to rights. And for those days I'm feeling particularly gloomy and isolated, anything by Bach does the trick - I'm not quite sure how it works, but when I listen to Bach I no longer feel utterly alone in the world.

Embracing the Generation Gap

One of the challenges of coaching chamber music at Apple Hill is that, unlike most summer music programs, the campers we're working with, or "participants," in the local dialect, can range in age from 13 up to 95. There's no age limit on participating in a session here, and amateur adult musicians are allowed - no, encouraged - to keep coming back year after year. (Apple Hill is all about diversity in general - the camp t-shirts list dozens of countries from which participants have come over the years, and the racial and ethnic makeup is far more wide-ranging than any professional orchestra I've ever seen.) The adults aren't separated from the kids, either - it's perfectly normal to have a string quartet in which the membership features a 50-year age gap.

On the one hand, this is a wonderful idea. Adults playing music together for fun is an entertainment that seems to have nearly died out over the last century, with the rise of recorded music, and I'm all for including anyone as passionate as most of the adult participants here seem to be. Furthermore, having teenagers interacting with people two, three, even five times their age on a common level seems to do everyone a lot of good - the adults (particularly the oldest ones) seem positively rejuvenated by the experience, and the kids get a chance to see grown-ups at play, which makes adulthood seem a lot more interesting than it generally does when you're 16.

The flip side of the coin, however, is that coaching a chamber ensemble with both kids and adults in it is really, really difficult, for the simple reason that our brains are wired differently. Kids, of course, are continuously growing and developing the neural pathways in their brains that allow them to learn, which is why they pick up new skills so quickly. But the older we get, the more generally set our brains become, and the harder it is to form new pathways, and therefore, to learn new tricks. As adults, we compensate by using our lifetime of experience and sense of perspective to make up for our relative slowness in picking up new concepts and actions. It doesn't mean that kids are smarter than adults, of course - simply that we learn and respond to the world differently.

So, consider a string quartet in which two members are in their early teens, and two are north of 60. I've got one of those this week. I've also got one with three high school kids and one 30-something woman who teaches music at a high school. (I'm in awe of this teacher, by the way - imagine being someone who gives orders to kids for a living, and then volunteering to sit among them and take orders for a week!) And, just to round things out, I have a quintet made up entirely of young musicians under 25. (I call it my Control Group.)

The coaching experiences with these groups couldn't be more different, and even though it's occasionally frustrating trying to balance the needs of the two types of brain energy I'm working with, I feel like I learn a lot about human interaction just by trying. The main challenge is to remember that what works for one player won't necessarily work for another. Sure, the kids might end up bored for a few minutes as I slog through the seemingly endless repetitions needed to get a fresh fingering well and truly lodged in an adult's fingers, and the adults might sometimes marvel at a kid's conviction that he can get away with just showing up unprepared for a rehearsal and winging it. But for the most part, they all work remarkably well together, with a level of patience and good humor that I would never have expected.

I'm someone who has generally enjoyed being whatever age I am, and hasn't spent a lot of time mourning my lost youth or worrying about getting old. (College was fun, sure, but I don't really want to do it again, and as for aging, I just know too many elderly people who continue to be balls of energy to worry that there's a mandatory cutoff for enjoying life.) But I must admit that I spend nearly all of my free time hanging out with other people roughly my age, so it's great to get a chance to spend a length of time in close quarters with such a diverse group of musicians.

With very few exceptions, these people will never play music professionally, but it doesn't matter. Regardless of age, most of them aren't here to become the next Joshua Bell, or even the next Sam Bergman. They're here because they have an intellectual and musical curiosity about the world around them, and whether they're 16 or 60, they're here to have fun. I can get behind that.

The Sound Of One Ear Chewing

Sarah has written before about the unmistakable link between musicians and cooking, and this past Sunday, as I was scouring the wires for orchestra news to plug into ArtsJournal's weekend edition, I came across a piece from Paul Horsley, music critic of the Kansas City Star, which really attempts to get at the heart of the matter.

Horsley, I suspect, started out writing this article as one of those humanizing personality pieces in which the arts reporter shows his subject to be just a regular guy, no matter how formal he may look on stage in tux and tails. But in the course of writing about a dinner party among musicians of the Kansas City Symphony, he must have had his interest piqued enough to do some serious research into whether there might actually be a connection between the way our brains process music and food...

"Most musicians agree that their discipline often fosters a highly sophisticated sense of taste... Numerous members of the Kansas City Symphony are so passionate about cuisine, it’s like a second profession."

That's all well and good, and my anecdotal experience would suggest that it is probably true of most orchestra rosters these days. But Horsley's not content with the anecdotal...

"Sensory perception happens in the brain’s cortex, the gray covering of the brain, and each sense activates a different area. For hearing, those areas are on the sides of the brain. Taste and smell are more deeply planted... We do know, however, that eating is a multisensory activity, and thus it involves the orbitofrontal cortex, which responds to enjoyable sensations and works to produce in us our sense of enjoyment when we experience these."

Heavy stuff, and certainly more than I ever think about while spending a rather unreasonable percentage of my downtime baking homemade bread, curing my own Canadian bacon, perfecting pan sauces, and trying desperately to come up with a perfect summer soup that will wow even my brother, a professional cook in Oregon. But I love the idea that there may be more to my and my colleagues' obsession with food than simple gluttony. Who knows, maybe the next major cultural crossover won't be between disparate musical genres, but between the acts of listening and eating...

(Oh, wait. Aaron Kernis and the Italian futurists already took care of that, didn't they?)

Last-minute touches

Well, our final set of "Inside the Classics" concerts start tomorrow evening, and Sam and I are obsessively putting the final touches on the script, timing out sections, rehearsing a complicated mixed-meter schtick and generally getting ready for what promises to be a great show (if I may say so myself!). It's a gratifying process to finally see the result of individual work coming together into a coherent whole that is, we hope, as moving as it is illuminating.

I've been toying for a couple of weeks with the idea of conducting "Appalachian Spring" from memory. I'd mentioned in a previous post that this is one of those pieces that I know well enough to have done memorized in the past, and am theoretically prepared to do so now. In fact, this morning, mid-plane ride, I checked my memory by going through it a couple of times in my mind sans score, making sure I knew every entrance, every tempo shift, every metric change, every dynamic, etc. While I feel pretty confident in my knowledge of this score, I've decided to go the safer route and keep the music on the stand for the shows.

Going scoreless during a concert, although it does have it's nerve-racking qualities, is actually quite liberating. As musicians we constantly refer back to the written note to make sure that we are accurately executing the intention of the composer. Even when I know a piece backwards and forwards, I'll catch myself glancing down at the score more than I need to because I don't want to miss a single detail. When the score is removed, in a way I feel untethered. But by the same token, sometimes it forces me to be more engaged in what's happening in the moment because my focus has been shifted away from what I feel I should be accomplishing.

My final decision to use a score for the concerts stemmed from the fact that we have a single rehearsal to prepare this show. That's just a little over 2 hours to rehearse "Appalachian Spring" in its entirety, as well as the over 20 minutes of musical excerpts we'll be presenting in the first half. It's really not a lot of time to get the work done, and not an optimal amount of time for myself (and the orchestra) to be utterly comfortable with our take on this piece. If we had several hours over the course of a few days (as would happen in preparation for, say, a subscription concert), I think it would make much more sense.

So, for tomorrow, I'll start the second half with an open score on my stand. I do wonder, however, if I'll be turning all of the pages, or going for large swatches without referring to the score.

Performance enhancement?

A blog post by Matthew Guerrieri today (4/18) reminded me of a conversation I had recently regarding musicians and meds, specifically Inderal, the beta blocker most often used for performance anxiety.

It’s safe to say that performance anxiety is an inescapable fact of life for any professional musician - regardless of preparation or experience, everyone feels some surge of adrenaline, some sharpening of the nerves every time they walk onstage. There are those who find a way to channel this energy in a positive and productive way, while others are beset by what can sometimes be crippling stage fright. I’m always surprised by the number of well-known performers who have battled nerves all of their lives – Vladimir Horowitz left the concert stage for a decade because of stage fright; Glenn Gould took Valium; Barbara Streisand stopped giving live performances because of it; the list goes on and on.

Musicians, creative creatures that we are, have found a variety of ways to cope with performance jitters, running the gamut from deep breathing and visualization to a pre-concert cocktail (or two). The irony of it all is that nerves are part of what creates excitement in a performance and gives live music it’s “edge” – and it’s part of what makes it thrilling for those of us on stage as well. The problem lies in when the personal edginess becomes so overwhelming as to become debilitating, or when it prevents you from approaching optimal execution.

The use of Inderal, which is intended for angina, hypertension and migraines, as a musician’s performance aid started quietly in the late ‘70’s and has become fairly commonplace in the business. Studies from as early as the late 80’s show that nearly 22% of musicians polled took beta blockers in one capacity or another; I would venture to guess that this percentage is far higher now, particularly in audition situations.

By blocking adrenaline receptors in various organs, beta blockers slow one’s resting heart rate, lowering both blood pressure and cardiac output. What it can do is allow one to focus on music making by minimizing the physical effects of anxiety; what it cannot do is help you play well if you haven’t adequately prepared or are unable to control your psychological state. There’s a lot of back and forth about it out there on the internet/blogosphere, with passionate opinions in both directions.

I’ve never been able to figure out why this is such a terribly controversial topic and one which musicians are often reticent to discuss (I’ve always been of the “do what you need to do” school of life). Maybe it’s our general societal sensitivity to what might be considered to be a performance enhancing drug. I certainly know colleagues who have found great success in Inderal use for high-pressure situations. By the same token, I’ve had friends who found it to be emotionally detaching and terribly unhelpful. As with anything in life, it's up to each individual to figure out for themselves what works best for them, or, as the French say, chacun a son gout.

Beta blockers are a regular feature of my life; I hate (HATE) flying, and it’s something I have to subject myself to at least 3-4 times a month, if not more. I was initially prescribed Valium for air travel (there was a period of time when simply walking onto a plane was panic-inducing), but Valium's not really a viable option if I have to get off a flight and conduct a rehearsal 2 hours later (which is not so infrequent a situation) – it just make me terribly sleepy and apathetic, neither of which are acceptable to an orchestra. Inderal at least keeps my heart rate from going out of control every time we hit an air pocket and lets my brain calmly reason with itself (“Flying is statistically safer than driving”, etc.). I still have to deal with what’s going on internally, but at least the physical manifestations are suppressed, and that makes it infinitely easier. I don’t think I could really make a living as a conductor if I couldn’t cope with air travel, so in a way beta blockers really do help me career-wise!

Coco's Song

It may seem a bit far afield to kick off my exploration of recent encounters with vocal music by talking about a play, but hear me out. This past weekend, I went with a few friends (Sarah included) to see the newly created "Fishtank" at Minneapolis's Tony award-winning Theatre de la Jeune Lune. I've been a Jeune Lune fan since I first arrived in Minneapolis eight years ago, and the fact that the company is currently experiencing some very trying times has only made me more determined to drag as many people as possible to every one of their productions, lest we lose one of the brightest stars in the Twin Cities cultural scene. (To that end: if you're planning to see Fishtank before it closes in late March, be aware that the following paragraphs contain a few spoilers. On the other hand, since the show doesn't really follow a standard storyline, you may not consider them spoilers.)

Anyway, Fishtank. I'm not going to bother trying to explain what the show is about, because we'd be here all day. (Those of us who attended together have yet to agree on what it was about, anyway.) Plot is really rarely the point at Jeune Lune, because this is a company that believes in creating a stunning visual and aural impact first and foremost, and worrying about such niceties as linear plotlines only when it becomes absolutely necessary. The show was created by the actors during the rehearsal process, which is how Jeune Lune often works. (The program describes the creative process behind Fishtank this way: "Free as cows at pasture, we roamed the rehearsal room looking for a fence so we could wonder what's beyond.")

Fishtank has four characters - Harry, Jim, Jules, and Coco - and they all spend the entire show on stage in front of a giant glass tank, with only a couple of other minor bits of set design to complete the environment. Again, what happens between them isn't as important as what happens to the way they interact. What begins as clearly casual contact between four individuals who know each other but are not obviously close develops over two hours into an almost frantic collaboration between four parts of the same unit, all of whom are desperate to get at the truth of... something. We don't know what. They don't know what. But whereas such a quest might have seemed clichéd and Beckett-like had it been introduced full-force at the beginning of the play, we in the audience are lulled by the pace of the thing into feeling the same eventual urgency that the characters feel as they try desperately to keep their heads above water, metaphorically speaking.

I should mention (by way of not completely derailing my self-imposed theme for the week) that there is singing of one sort or another throughout Fishtank. Jules, Jim, and Harry are prone to using French karaoke to cheer up Coco when she appears distraught or annoyed, which happens a lot. And late in the show, the boys persuade Coco to favor them with her own voice, which they clearly love, and which is, in fact, so aggressively hard to listen to that I almost had to plug my ears. (The fact that Coco is played by the well-known Minneapolis singer and actress Jennifer Baldwin Peden makes Coco's bad singing even more astonishing. Making music badly when you make your living doing it well is extremely hard work.) I don't remember everything Coco tries to sing, as her three cohorts smile beatifically in the background and a boombox nestled in her lap accompanies her, but I know that the world's most uncomfortable version of Musetta's aria from La Boheme was in the mix.

As the show builds to a climax, however, something remarkable happens. While the characters become more and more desperate to discover the meaning of the limited world in which we are seeing them, and the action gets ever more frantic, a recording of the first movement of Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3 begins to play softly in the background. The piece is a seemingly endless slow loop of the same material, layered from ultimate simplicity to ultimate complexity by an ever-expanding string orchestra. It's a deeply emotional thing to listen to for the first time, but since a) I know the piece quite well, and b) I was wrapped up in the action on the stage, I didn't really think anything of the music initially other than to note its presence and try to remember when I'd last played it.

At some point, Coco begins singing along in her tuneless way as the action on stage continues, and her voice provides an unsettling counterpoint to Górecki's smooth textures. But then, as the complexity and pressure of what's been occurring between the characters becomes too much for her exceedingly literal and routine-obsessed mind to handle, she opens her mouth wide and, in an instant, becomes the true operatic singer that the actress playing her really is. As the three men look on in stunned silence, Coco overwhelms the orchestra, singing the top melodic line in full voice with a warm, lush vibrato.

It's meant to be a show-stopping moment, clearly, and it is, as the action on stage literally freezes around the suddenly golden-throated Coco. And here's the thing: I totally saw it coming. Once she was murmuring along with the Górecki, I knew there was at least a chance that we'd be hearing Jennifer Baldwin Peden's actual singing voice at some point during the scene. Furthermore, as I said, I know this piece. No part of its melody will ever be surprising to me. And yet, the moment the first notes of "real singing" burst forth... I choked up. I did. And I had no idea why. It didn't seem to be a sad moment in the show, particularly, nor was Coco expressing any sort of wailing anguish. It was just the simple beauty of the human voice, heard after more than 90 minutes of uncertain speech and halting song, that somehow stopped my brain in its tracks and instructed raw emotion to take over.

"God, I'm glad to hear you say that," said my friend Anne over a couple of beers after the show, as I sheepishly admitted that I'd had to wipe away a tear. "Because the same thing happened to me, and I could not figure out why it was happening!" I doubt we were the only two wondering.

I hate to make assumptions when it comes to music - there's always plenty that we haven't heard yet, and can't imagine hearing until we do - but I've thought about it a lot since that night at Jeune Lune's warehouse home, and I simply can't imagine such a visceral reaction being provoked in me in that same situation by anything but the human voice. Had Coco suddenly begun to play along with the music on a cello, it would have been beautiful and satisfying, but I can't imagine that it would have provided the emotional slap in the face that I got.

I'm not sure why that is, exactly. And since I'm not generally one who chokes up easily at plays and movies and concerts, I'm curious to know what switch in my brain was tripped by that moment. I'll probably never know, but I know this much: I'll be back to see Fishtank again soon, to see whether the moment has the same impact when I know for sure that it's coming.

Self-soundtrack Part Deux

I asked, via email a couple of days ago: "I'm working on a blog post about "self-soundtracks", the music we hear running through our head all the time. What's your mental DJ playing for you this Sunday??"

Colleagues from across the country responded:

Marty (Milwaukee Symphony): "The past few days I keep singing the first few parts of Salome to myself, as we are playing it this week at work. What an amazing piece ! I sing it in falsetto, if that helps."

Paul (Richmond Symphony): "Beck F@*%ing With My Head"

Sam (Minnesota Orchestra): "At the moment, it's the klezmer movement from "The Dreams & Prayers of Isaac the Blind" by Golijov. But that's mainly because I'm performing it tonight, and can't play that movement to my satisfaction yet. I did wake up hearing "Southtown Girls" by The Hold Steady in my head, for some reason. Great song, tons of Mpls references..."

Vito (Fort Worth Symphony): "I try to have my head clear of any music as much as possible, because otherwise it's overload. If I run through something in my head it is something I'm working on so I can practice mentally."

David (conductor): "Well, the stuff running around in my head usually is the most recent thing I've been rehearsing or performing...today, it's bits and pieces of Jennifer Higdon's Concerto for Orchestra which I just did last night and which is running through my brain today like some weird aural shadow...of course, I just enjoyed hearing a choral evensong at St. Thomas Church in NYC and now a lovely bit of plainchant I heard is competing with the Higdon!"

Steve (Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra): "Stravinsky Danses Concertantes and the theme from Sanford & Son (Quincy Jones' 'The Streetbeater')"

Kirsten (Philadelphia Orchestra): "Dvorak Romantic Pieces."

Katherine (Baltimore Symphony): "La ci darem la mano from Don Giovanni. My husband keeps whistling it..."

Amir (conductor): "Lots of Brahms."

Bob (Minnesota Orchestra): "For some reason the music from Fellini's La Strada seems to be going through my head. I guess I should head to Italy and find out why."

Benjy (pianist): "Good question! Last I checked:
Beethoven 4th Piano Concerto and Op. 132 SQ
Radiohead Kid A
Beatles Sexy Sadie and Taxman
Random, isn't it?"

David (composer): "I've been having my own "Kaddish" in my head all weekend since it was performed Friday. Funny how that happens!"

What about you??

Self-soundtrack

A couple of posts ago I wrote about the music presidential hopefuls have been using as the sound palette for their speeches and rallies. While I find the whole idea of choosing the soundtrack of your life's work quite fascinating, there is a whole other side to the idea of the self-sountrack; the music that is actually there, already running through your head.

If you stop to think (and, more importantly, listen), you are more likely than not to be hearing some snippet of repetitive sound. For some, it is verbal - a key phrase or even simply a word that may be hovering in the background of your consciousness like a screensaver on a computer. For others (and, from anecdotal evidence, more commonly), it is a musical tune or phrase that is on endless loop in one's mind. In the 80's the term "earworm" (from the German Ohrwurm) was coined as the name for this phenomenon, and it is really an apt description; the music wiggles its way into your ear and around your mind like it has a life of its own.

In some instances, this is not at all coincidental. If the music in question is from a commercial or a movie soundtrack or the latest Top 40 hit, it is most likely the result of carefully crafted "hook" that is designed to stick in your head. A "hook" is the music industry's way of "catching your ear"; it is a melodic or rhythmic pattern, usually highly repetitive, that is immediately attractive. (What makes it attractive is difficult to pin down or create a formula for - which I find encouraging! - you don't want to take all the magic out of it...) For example, when you think of the song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", you are most likely to first recall the background chorus that is singing "a-weem-o-weh, a-weem-o-weh" - the "hook".

Hooks can be rather insidious because of their very nature; they're meant to winnow their way into your consciousness and stay there on an endless repeat. One "hook-y" song that often finds its way into my mind (and, please, don't laugh...) is a Jennifer Lopez/Ja Rule collaboration from 2001, "I'm Real". I'm not really a fan of Ms. Lopez's breathy vocals, and I find faux-thug Ja Rule to be a DMX wannabe (and I'd much rather listen to, say, Chuck D or Talib Kweli). But there's something about that "hook", the flute-like synth lick that repeats for the whole song, that's just ridiculously catchy, and if it happens to be playing on MTV2 late one night while I'm redoing "Messiah" bowings (yeah, welcome to my glamorous life), the song will be stuck in my head for days.

Hooks are not exclusive to the popular music world; examples abound in classical music as well. One only need listen to the first few seconds of Ravel's Bolero to understand the mesmerizing quality of the snare drum ostinato and the way it burrows itself into your mind (speaking of Bolero, you really must see this version to believe it). One piece that I can't expunge from my head when I start thinking about it is the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 6; there is something about the undulating rhythm and cadential motive that settles into my psyche.

And it is not all just a matter of hooks, as "sticky" as they can be in our subconscious. Many musicians I know tell me that they have a pretty much constant soundtrack in their minds - it can run the gamut from a piece they're working on to a random composition not even for their instrument that they can't recall hearing recently but is nevertheless lodged in their inner ear. Oliver Sacks in his wonderful new book "Musicophilia" describes how he often enjoys mental "replays" of Beethoven's Third and Fourth Piano Concertos - and these are specific performances, recordings of Leon Fleisher from the 60's. I remember a very odd period in college when I had the slow movement of Mahler's Fourth Symphony (BSO/Ozawa) in my head for over 2 weeks; right now, because I just wrote about Beethoven's Pastorale, it's all of a sudden having a party in my cranial sound system.

I've put out an APB to a bunch of colleagues about what's playing in their heads this gloomy Sunday afternoon; what's in yours??

Charlie Wilson's Soundtrack

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...

Move to the music

One of my earliest musical memories involves sitting in a Honolulu Symphony concert (I grew up in Hawaii) watching, slightly mortified, my father on the edge of his seat, swaying to and occasionally air-conducting a Brahms symphony (is it the burden of children to be embarrassed of their parents??). Dad was an enthusiastic amateur musician and going to the Symphony was a regular Sunday afternoon activity. At nearly every concert he could barely keep still, so great was his need to move to the music and to participate in those performances.

A fairly recent New York Times article confirms what I have always suspected – that music directly affects those parts of the brain responsible for physical motion. Music should make us want to move. And yet, movement and participation is antithetical to the modern “concert experience”, where audiences are expected to sit still and silent until the very end.

This is something that I struggle with. On one hand, what takes place on stage during a symphonic concert requires a tremendous amount of skill and concentration, and it would be terribly distracting, if not impossible (how do you clap along to Webern?) for the audience to actively participate in any way. On the other hand, these constraints feel unnatural and forced – I mean, who really can sit still when listening to, say, the last movement of Beethoven 7? If people wanted to spontaneously leap out of their seats and dance for joy, I’m rather inclined to let them do so.

Of course, the standard concert hall is not entirely conducive to impromptu dancing (and you would probably get escorted out by an usher immediately!). Sometimes a change of venue can put a very different spin on how music is experienced; in my two seasons with the Richmond Symphony, the concert series I headed took place at a rock venue, the Canal Club. It’s all part of a larger trend (check out this article from Symphony magazine) to redefine the performance experience of classical music.

I bring this up because of what I observed during these performances at the Canal Club, where seating was limited and a majority of the audience stood for the 55-minute performance (and to be clear, although we were not performing complete symphonies, we were certainly playing movements of symphonies and larger works by Mozart, Ravel, Prokofiev, Janacek – “real” music, not “classical light” – although I don’t find anything wrong with that either…more on that in another entry). While not everyone did so (we are so conditioned to be quiet and still while listening to Mozart!), people were able to move to the music. Sometimes it was swaying or nodding. For the least self-conscious (and kids excel here), there was actual dancing, jumping.

I’m not saying that we should make audiences stand through a Mahler symphony (although sitting may not be much more comfortable – many halls have seats that feel worse than flying domestic economy class). So, the conundrum remains – if not as part of a conventional concert, how can we best experience symphonic music?

Musicophilia

I’m keen on reading the new Oliver Sacks book, “Musicophilia”, a collection of vignettes about music and the brain. For all the power music can have over us (who of us hasn’t, at one point in life, been completely overcome by a musical experience, whether at a concert, at home with headphones, playing in a high school band, or singing at the top of your lungs while stuck in traffic?), it seems that the effects of music on the mind remains a mystery to neurologists.

It made me think about a couple of questions that I’ve often pondered; are we hardwired to innately grasp music? And why is there an almost universal attraction to certain kinds of music?

I’m reminded of a Young Peoples Concert I did here last season with the Orchestra – the show was called “Kid Power”, and it was all about the extraordinary accomplishments that kids can achieve. Of course, we had the requisite student concerto competition winner, a composition by a local teen composer and performers from Circus Juventas doing acrobatics while we played Kabalevsky. The kids who come to these concerts often write to me (sometimes entire classes send me notes), and while everyone loved the young acrobats (who really were fantastic), all the comments I received about the music indicated that of all the pieces we played, the almost unanimous sentiment was that everyone loved the very first piece the best.

The very first piece on the program was the first movement of Symphony #25 written by a teenaged Mozart. It was the most serious piece of music on the program - in a minor key and all Sturm und Drang - and certainly not the piece that I thought would end up being the most popular. It made me think about the idea of an underlying universality in music; this piece by Mozart had an immediate, innate appeal to listeners who had limited exposure to classical music and were probably watching and hearing a live orchestra for the first time in their lives. Is it something about structure, proportion, melody? Or something much less tangible?

A small example, I know, and a limited sample size, no doubt; but it makes me smile to think that Minnesota school kids are debunking the flawed and tired notion that symphonic music is “elitist”.