Ask An Expert: Starting Late

Let's start off the week with an Ask the Expert question I hear a lot. In this case, it came from TJ...

Q: I'm currently 27 years old and I have been playing guitar since I was 9 (well... intermittently). I guess you could say I have played rock/blues style music mostly by ear since I started. I don't plan on becoming a full time professional musician, but I would love to learn how to play really good jazz piano. What disadvantages/ advantages do I have? What am I in store for in terms of time (assuming the law of averages)? Why am I so intimidated? I know as professionally trained musicians, you may scoff at those of us who don't fully understand what we are playing, but having a decent ear should help me learn right?

Well, first off, I would never scoff at anyone who plays music for any reason. And yes, having a decent ear and prior musical experience is always helpful when picking up a new instrument. In fact, I'd go a step further and say that having played guitar, which is a chord-based instrument (as opposed to single-line instruments like clarinet or violin,) should also make some aspects of learning another chord-based instrument (piano) easier.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the reason you're intimidated is that, with your experienced ear, you've probably detected that jazz, like classical music, is a heck of a lot more complicated than rock and blues. The beauty of blues is rooted in its simplicity, and much as I love rock music, the vast majority of it just doesn't contain all that many twists and turns, from a music theory standpoint. Just mastering the basics of jazz can take years, and that's before we even begin to discuss the whole improvisation thing.

Also working against you, TJ, is the fact that you're an adult. The adage that youth is wasted on the young is never more true than in music, for the simple reason that kids' brains are basically giant sponges capable of absorbing new information and hard-wiring it into the system at a rate that puts us 20- and 30-something geezers to shame. Which is irritating, because when you tell a 7-year-old something new about his instrument, you can just see that he hasn't the faintest idea what you're talking about, or why, for instance, it should matter whether his bow is pulled perfectly perpendicular to his violin's fingerboard. But with a couple of weeks practice, that 7-year-old will create new connections in his brain which will cause his right arm to be able to pull a straight bow, no problem. Most of the time, he won't even have to think about it.

Meanwhile, an adult who understands immediately why a straight bow is important might never actually be able to hardwire that importance into his/her brain, and will forever have to go through the laborious mental process of noticing that the bow isn't straight and telling the arm to fix it. It's like the difference between Googling something and looking it up in an old-school library card catalog. Both approaches will eventually succeed, but one is a helluva lot less work.

None of this is to say that you shouldn't start taking jazz piano lessons, of course. You don't have to be Dave Brubeck or Thelonius Monk to enjoy the act of playing, and if you're willing to put in some serious (and I do mean serious - a couple a day, and there are no days off) hours of practice, there's no reason that you couldn't become a pretty decent player eventually. I studied jazz for a couple of years in college (yes, there is such a thing as jazz viola,) and despite the fact that I am a profoundly mediocre jazz musician, I still like playing it. You could definitely shave some of the edge off the learning curve if you decided to learn jazz guitar instead of piano, but like I say, if you're willing to put in the work to learn a new instrument, there's no reason not to find a good teacher and go for it. (This is, of course, assuming that you already own a piano. Those suckers are expensive.)

Playing The Race Card

Happy Labor Day, all! Everyone nicely recovered from their State Fair food coma and ready to dive back into the real world? Excellent. Me, too. So let's start the fall with a thorny topic I've been meaning to write about for quite a while.

The issue of race in America's classical music industry is an omnipresent embarrassment that few musicians like to talk about. Orchestras tend to be made up largely of highly educated individuals who consider themselves extremely open-minded. Many musicians volunteer their skills to inner city schools, and some go out of their way to offer affordable lessons to kids who can't afford the going rate. And yet, nearly every American orchestra remains a sea of Caucasian and Asian faces, with African-Americans and Hispanics a glaring rarity.

Now, it would be easy to chalk this up to institutional racism, just as the lack of women in orchestras until shockingly recent times was a result of deliberately exclusionary policies. But it's not that simple: nearly every American orchestra now holds its auditions behind a privacy screen and identifies candidates only by a number, so that the audition committee cannot (theoretically) know who is playing. And while the advent of the screen nicely fixed the gender problem, it hasn't done anything much to add more musicians of color to the ranks.

Conventional wisdom among musicians is that the racial imbalance in our industry is a direct result of the racial achievement gap in America's schools. Public schools in poverty-stricken districts (which, of course, tend to have higher percentages of black and Latino students) frequently have no music program at all, or a severely underfunded and understaffed one at best. And when you consider that it's not at all unusual for string players, in particular, to begin taking lessons at the age of 4 or 5, a lack of easy access to instruments and lessons can kill a potential musician's career before s/he leaves elementary school.

There's also a distinct social aspect to music that might feel exclusionary not just to blacks and Latinos, but to any family that doesn't fit the usual demographic. I grew up participating in youth music programs that were centered in major cities, but nearly every kid in the programs came from the suburbs, and from families with money. My suburban public school had its racial diversity bussed in from Boston, but the Saturdays I spent in the heart of the city playing in orchestras and string quartets were, for the most part, lily-white. It would never have occurred to any of us to suggest that people with darker skin than ours couldn't play music every bit as well as we did, but neither did it occur to us to wonder why they weren't doing exactly that.

Because music takes a lifetime to master, it's very easy for all of us to point the finger backward at school boards, politicians, and even parents who choose not to expose their kids to music. But as Peter Dobrin pointed out in a blistering column in the Philadelphia Inquirer last month, that sort of buck-passing lets those of us in the industry off far too easy. "It's time to stop saying the talent isn't there, and to stop citing the objectivity of the audition screen. The only thing the screen hides is the audition process, and it's not even doing a very good job of that anymore."

As I read Dobrin's larger point, he's suggesting that orchestras won't start showing more racial diversity until they are forced to by some mechanism other than a blind hiring process. So imagine if the orchestra business suddenly instituted an aggressive affirmative action program (leaving aside the thorny issue of whether the current Supreme Court would allow such a program to stand) and began giving preference to black and Latino candidates. Musicians would scream bloody murder, of course, because this business is supposed to be entirely meritocratic. But wouldn't such a system immediately give the largest organizations in the music world a vested interest in improving the quality and availability of music education programs for underprivileged kids?

In the early years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, business owners could plausibly claim that the reason they continued to hire whites at a far, far higher rate than blacks was because of a lack of proper education and skills training in the black community. Yet, since the entire system had been set up to keep blacks at a disadvantage, a system had to be devised to force people and governments to change that system in order for the situation to improve. Simply saying blacks were equal to whites wasn't enough to improve their access to upper levels of society.

I'm not suggesting that a system of racial quotas for orchestras would fix the problem in our business. But there's no question that it is a disgrace for an industry that spends so much time talking about our value to the wider community to still, in 2009, be less racially diverse than your average corporate boardroom or Congressional subcommittee.

Just for the joy of it

Before I get started, Happy Tax Day! (OK, fine, it's not a happy day for the vast majority of us, but now at least we'll be done with it for another year.)

An interesting article in the New York Times today ; it's a slice-of-life piece on a young violinist in central Ohio and her decision to attend nursing school ("Everybody gets sick", she says) rather than going away to college to become a music teacher (noting that arts in schools are often the first to be affected by budget cuts). Blame for thwarted dreams is placed on our uncertain times, when virtually-assured employment trumps pursuit of one's passions. The article follows her to a high school orchestra competition in New York, and it's the final line that caught my attention:

What role music will play in her life, she doesn’t know. But for now, at least, she is on a New York stage, wearing a borrowed black gown, playing a borrowed eBay violin, and Tchaikovsky holds her.

What struck me was the "either/or" assumption here; either she attends college to become a music teacher or she gives music up completely to pursue nursing.

I've taught a great deal over my career so far - everything from theory and eartraining classes to conducting lessons and chamber music coachings, to all levels of students. I don't assume my students will pursue music as a profession; I certainly would not encourage a musical career, and I urge even my most gifted students not to take the leap unless they absolutely could not imagine life otherwise. In fact, I can think of few better scenarios than a talented musician entering a different field professionally, making a good living, and enjoying music on their own terms, on their own time, for their own pleasure. Why not be an active amateur musician and have the best of all possible worlds?

My father, a lawyer by trade, was an enthusiastic amateur pianist, and my most cherished childhood memories are of gathering around the piano to sing as he played, or sitting next to him and playing four-hand duets (at some point in the history of leisure time, pre-TV, such a scenario was undoubtedly more common!). His skill as an organist was what helped him fund his college education, so he must have been really good back in the day; but he was practical about the difference between making a living and having a lifelong passion separate from one's career.

One of my first jobs post-conservatory was as music director of a community orchestra - some professional musicians, but mostly amateurs - an ensemble good enough to play all the big repertoire pieces, which was fantastic for me. What struck me about this orchestra was that despite fairly disparate skill levels, the level of commitment and enthusiasm at our weekly rehearsals was astonishing, and consistent. In fact, I remember that one of my very first rehearsals with them (the group was based in Princeton, NJ) was on September 12, 2001 - and the single member missing from that rehearsal was the second trombonist, an FBI investigator, who was needed at Ground Zero.

Amateur music-making can be of incredibly high quality, but really, near-professional quality is not necessary for the deep enjoyment of simply making music. I believe we've mentioned the Really Terrible Orchestra on this blog before - the "cream of Edinburgh's musically disadvantaged" - clearly, skill (or lack thereof!) is no impediment to relishing the experience of making music.

And then there is the "Rock Choir" which has become something of a sensation across the pond. All proof positive that there lies within all of us a fundamental creative drive, a desire to make music; not because we have to, but just for the joy of it:

Taking It Out On The Kids

I ordinarily try to stay away from the kinds of debates that ensue when politicians threaten to cut arts budgets to deal with economic troubles. People who work in the cultural field tend to get all up in arms at times like this, claiming loudly that the arts are vital (which I agree with, obviously) and that arts groups are "always the first to be cut" when times get tough. And while it's true that the arts are an easy target for those wielding the budget knife, I generally have a tough time arguing that subsidies for theaters and museums should be treated as more vital than, say, school lunch programs. So I just choose not to engage the argument most of the time, and quietly thank the heavens that I'm not the one who has to make such decisions.

But I admit to being a bit indignant over this business of Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty wanting to essentially shut down a school that has been a beacon of arts education for the entire US since its inception. The Perpich Center for Arts Education was created with the primary support of former MN Gov. Rudy Perpich and his wife specifically to insure that a serious arts curriculum could exist in perpetuity in the state, even when economics dictated that many ordinary public schools trim or eliminate art, music, and dance programs. Furthermore, in its more than two decades of existence, it has made a point of accepting students from all economic backgrounds, and even offered a boarding option for outstate kids in order to insure that it didn't become the type of resource funded by the state that can only be taken advantage of by kids in the Cities.

Under Governor Pawlenty's budget plan, the Perpich Center would see its 2010-11 budget slashed by 30%, which would kill the boarding program immediately, and cause catastrophic cuts to the school's core educational offerings. The cuts would get even deeper in subsequent years. Furthermore, the governor wants to eliminate the center's unique admissions process, under which students audition much like they would for a college-level music, dance, or theater program, and replace it with the rules that govern charter schools. This would mean, among other things, that the school would be populated on a first-come, first-served basis, regardless of whether prospective students have any interest in or aptitude for the program they'll be enrolling in.

Now, as I said, I generally try not to get sucked into debates like this, because goodness knows, I have no idea how I would close a $4.8 billion budget hole. And if the Perpich Center were just another training academy for kids with wealthy parents, I wouldn't be writing this post at all, because those kinds of kids will always have options in life. But the Perpich Center isn't that kind of place. It's a model of what public education can be, and it inarguably has made a huge difference in the lives of countless Minnesota kids who otherwise might not have had any chance of making a career out of their assorted talents. Its graduates are just one more example of the value Minnesota has always placed on both education in general and the arts in particular. And I think it would be a great shame if that legacy were snuffed out, just to plug less than a half of one percent of that gaping hole in our state budget.

But that's just me. If you disagree - if you think the economic woes we're facing as a state and a nation are just too great to justify investing in anything more than bare-bones K-12 education at the moment - that's fine. I get that argument, and I don't share the traditional liberal view that fiscal conservatives are monsters who want to deprive children of a well-rounded education.

Still, I'll say this. A cut like the one facing the Perpich Center is very likely to get lost in the shuffle in a budget cycle like this, so if you don't think it ought to happen, well, it might be time to sit down and tap out an e-mail to your reps in St. Paul. They won't know how you feel unless you tell them, and believe me, they've got a lot of voices shouting in their ears right now.

Ask An Expert: Think of the Children

We got a great question this week from Chris Larson, who may or may not be aware that his query ties in perfectly with our ItC season theme of child prodigies, boy wonders, call 'em what you will...

Q: Many of the most successful performers (and composers) start seriously pursuing music at a very young age, often at their parents urging. Do you think it's fair for parents to push their young children towards a career in music so early on? And conversely, do you think there's a certain age at which it is "too late" to start a career in music?

Back when I was a kid, a violin teacher named Kay Slone, who specialized in the popular Suzuki Method of childhood music instruction, wrote a book called They're Rarely Too Young and Never Too Old To Twinkle. (The Twinkle part refers to the tune, "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," which is the first actual piece of music every Suzuki student learns to play.) The book reflected the inherent optimism of the teaching method, which was developed by a Japanese teacher in the dark days following World War II, as a way to put smiles on the faces of traumatized Japanese children struggling in a war-ravaged country.

In developing his method, Dr. Suzuki, who had been trying to learn the German language as an adult with great difficulty, latched onto the realization that infants and young children grasp their mother tongue with a speed and cognitive strength that adults can never match. He reasoned that many of the complicated muscle movements and cognitive abilities required to play a musical instrument could, perhaps, also be taught more readily to children if the style of teaching approximated the way a child learns to speak. So Suzuki students learn to play music before they can read a note of it, and they learn to memorize entire books of short songs and play them on command before ever learning what a major triad or a hemiola might be.

The relevance of all this to Chris's question is revealed in the Wikipedia entry on the Suzuki Method: "Suzuki believed that every child, if properly taught, was capable of a high level of musical achievement. He also made it clear that the goal of such musical education was to raise generations of children with 'noble hearts' (as opposed to creating famous musical prodigies.)" He also believed that in order for children to be successful in learning music, their parents needed to be deeply involved in the process, even to the extent of learning their instrument of choice alongside them, and practicing with them daily.

And this, of course, is where things can go off the rails. Parents may all be well-meaning, but not all of them are good at distinguishing between what their children want, and what they want for their children. And as a teacher myself, I can tell you that it's never hard to spot the parents who are already thinking of the day their child will be a star even as they're still struggling to learn Song of the Wind.

I don't think there's anything wrong with a parent nudging their child in the direction of studying music, even at a very early age. I also don't see anything wrong with a father teaching his son to catch a baseball while he's still in kindergarten. However, I might raise an eyebrow if I saw a father forcing a kid that young to spend three hours a day taking batting practice and running fielding drills in the hope that he might grow up to be the next Joe Mauer. I'm not a parent, but that strikes me as bad parenting.

I tend to believe that kids find their own level in the world, and while I think it's great for parents and teachers to expose them to as many new experiences as possible (how will they find out what they love to do if no one shows them the choices they have?), I've known too many brilliantly talented young musicians who burned out before they turned 20, or became deeply depressed and socially inept adults as a result of having had their childhoods effectively stolen from them by overly ambitious parents. (26-year-old superstar pianist Lang Lang is just out with a new autobiography in which he details a harrowing childhood spent nearly chained to the piano bench by his seemingly monstrous father.)

But I also know just how many of the young musicians I've known began playing music either because their parents did, or because their parents suggested it. And with few exceptions, no one forced them into some foolish pursuit of stardom, and no one made them practice 8 hours a day instead of having friends and hobbies. We grew up playing because we loved it, and to be a kid who didn't play an instrument seemed unthinkable after only a couple of years at it. Our closest friendships were forged at weekend youth orchestra rehearsals and summer music camps.

Most of us didn't turn pro, ever. Music was a hobby, a path to friendships and partnerships, but not a career goal. And that's good, because music is not only a damned hard way to make a living, but too many professional musicians find their love of the craft diminishing with the daily grind. And that's where the second part of Chris's question comes in and clashes with the first part: yes, you can be too old to have a realistic shot at a career in classical music. And if you're a string player, the cutoff age, when you absolutely need to have gotten a good start, is probably around age 10. (It's a few years later for winds, brass, and percussion, but starting earlier is almost always better.) Most of us who play in major orchestras started way earlier than that - I was 4 when I got my first violin. (My parents would want me to add that it was entirely my idea.) And that's where Dr. Suzuki was dead on: it's just far, far easier to learn the basics of playing an instrument while your brain is still conditioned to be learning everything about the world.

All for one, Part I

An interesting week, marred a bit by jet-lag (Honolulu - Minneapolis - Philadelphia in the span of 3 days, a bit rough, but scheduling a vacation in the middle of a busy summer season is my own choice!).

First up, on Wednesday, was "Broadway Rocks", with a quartet of Broadway singers and the Minnesota Chorale. It's always fun to work with people who know exactly what they're doing, and all four singers in this show certainly fit the bill. Truth be told, I love Broadway stuff, no matter how schlocky it can get, and although "Music of the Night" can get a little tiresome (this was the 20th time I've done it, in its many guises), it's still a hoot to perform it with a singer who has the timing down cold (in this case, Doug Labrecque). It's also fun for the members of the Orchestra who are called upon to play outside of their usual box, as bassist Dave Williamson, playing electric bass for the show, did.

Pops shows like this are, without doubt, much trickier to produce than a usual subscription week. When I've tried to explain this to non-industry people, I'm always met with surprise, because audiences consider it to be "lighter" fare - isn't it then easier to put together? But here's the lowdown; the music played in Pops shows is usually arranged, written in a manner different from the standard classical repertoire (I'm often reading off of a piano/vocal score with chord changes and basic instrumental cues written in), often involves adjusting to a different style of music and to soloists who, quite literally, use a different vocabulary to discuss what we're doing (it's "the bridge after verse two" for the singers, 17 bars after rehearsal letter "F" for the orchestra). We're usually on an incredibly tight rehearsal schedule (we had a 2 1/2 hour rehearsal - with 20-minute break, of course - to get through 90 minutes of music). And often, it's a one-shot deal as there's only one performance (the second performance of anything is so much more relaxed and enjoyable!!!).

All that being said, I thrive on the thrill of tight scheduling, barely-controlled chaos during the show and having the chance to think outside of the classical box. And as the packed Hall and screaming standing ovation evinced, there are a lot of people out there who enjoyed it as well.

The Orchestra generally is good-humored about their forays outside the realm of Beethoven and Brahms, although there are certainly those who grumble (sometimes a bit vociferously). Orchestra musicians on the whole have very mixed feelings about these kinds of performances, mostly because, when faced with a chart from, say, Andrew Lloyd Webber or Elvis Costello or Tiempo Libre, there is a certain discomfort in that it is not the type of music they were trained to play. Some look at pop or rock or Broadway or salsa as somehow below their training and talent, a sentiment I can appreciate, being a product of conservatory inculcation myself; for better or for worse, in school I was constantly reminded of how rarefied my chosen studies were. In fact, sometime this past season, as I was about to take the stage for yet another Pops show, an Orchestra player sidled up to me and asked, quite sardonically, "So, this is what you went to Curtis for, right?"

To which I would reply, yes, it is. Because my rigorous conservatory education gave me the solid foundation of theory and orchestration and analysis and technique to approach any kind of music without trepidation. And because that solid foundation gives me the ability to bring a great deal of skill to all types of music, whether it was specifically included in my training or not. I recently met with a prominent New York public relations specialist who confirmed for me what I have believed for years; non-classical concerts (whether we call them "Pops" or "collaborations" or "special events" or whatever) are a sovereign entity unto themselves, a category of orchestral music-making that should be well-produced and of high quality. They are most often the biggest draws (and thus money-makers) in an organization's season, and they are the productions which then have the capacity to balance out the less populist (and perhaps more artistically interesting for the orchestra - I'm thinking Mahler 9) concerts. And we should all approach these presentations as a legitimate and significant part of an orchestra's output.

Classical musicians tend to be elitist; it's a part of our training. But I think this attitude does not in any way stand us good stead, particularly as we see the symphonic world slowly trending away from the straight "classical" concert as the only model of performance. If I call myself a musician, I should have the ability to understand and appreciate music as a whole, not just my (very small) corner of it. We all have our preferences (I'm not a huge country fan, granted, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the skillful way a song is put together or the ingenious tunefulness of a melody), but this cannot prevent us from acknowledging the legitimacy of other forms of music. Because, as musicians, we should all be in this together.

Beyond lip service

I've been trying to catch up on my reading - it's no small task to get through a dozen blog sites and peruse the arts sections of major papers, and I've gotten a little lax in my weeks off! Here's an article from May about a new educational initiative in Baltimore.

Venezuela's El Sistema has been the talk of the music world for the last few years, spurred on by Gustavo Dudamel's appointment to the music directorship of the LA Philharmonic last spring and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra's triumphant North American tour last fall; the pursuant national conversation surrounding the possibility of adapting the El Sistema "system" in the US has been endlessly fascinating.

"Music education is important" has been one of those sound bites that we as conductors continually drag out whenever we are asked about the place of classical/orchestral music in contemporary culture. Yes, studies have shown that kids in music tend to have better test scores, etc etc etc. But I so often feel like that it is only so much lip service; we in the orchestra business sometimes seem more bent on using the "music education" umbrella in creating a new generation of music consumers more than anything else ("audience cultivation" from a young age, as it were). And I can't tell you how many times I've heard a conductor talk about the significance of some educational initiative while in the meantime they themselves haven't conducted a children's concert or participated in an outreach event for years.

The difference with El Sistema, and now OrchKids in Balitmore, is the notion that music education is not just a tool for test-score improvement, or an added bonus for the most privileged of kids, but that it can be, in itself, a catalyst for social change. Which is a tremendous assertion, if you think about it. By taking some of the least privileged children in the country, systematically teaching them an instrument, providing them a safe haven after school, giving them a strong sense of community and self-worth and imparting the discipline and passion that help one succeed at anything in life, El Sistema has employed a "bottom-up" approach to music education. And in the process, it has provided a stabilizing force in the lives of its students, their families, and their communities at large.

It may all sound a bit idealistic, but it's not so far-fetched (after all, it's already been done in Venezuela!), and I was thrilled to see an El Sistema-inspired program get off the ground. What was even more thrilling was to see how it happened. Marin Alsop, the Baltimore Symphony's music director, received a MacArthur "Genius" Grant in 2005, to the tune of $500,000. To get OrchKids off the ground, Alsop donated the last $100,000 installment (as a 4-1 challenge grant). Which is a tremendous show of commitment to the possibilities of change, and a refreshing display of putting your money where your mouth is; Alsop is clearly paying more than lip service.

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 5% Reality Check

So, the other day, I noticed a short post on NewMusicBox from a young Minneapolis-based composer, pointing out that, according to a seminar he'd recently attended, the percentage of college music majors who actually go on to a performing career is a miniscule 5%. 85% of music majors do end up working in the music world to some degree, but considering that the vast majority of young musicians in college go into the experience assuming that they will have a performing career, 5% is a shockingly low number. The author of the post puts it even more starkly...

Practicing eight hours a day is a great way to become a virtuoso, but it's also a great way to develop an eating disorder, and apparently it makes you only incrementally more likely to sustain a career as a full-time soloist or orchestral player than someone who only put in four hours per day.

Assuming these numbers are correct (there's no attribution in the post,) I'm of two minds on the issue. As part of the 5% who succeeded in carving out the career I sought when I entered music school, I'm horrified that there are a) so many young musicians deluding themselves about their prospects, and b) so many mediocre teachers willing to accommodate those delusions to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars in tuition money.

This isn't to say that teachers ought to be discouraging the vast majority of their students from seeking careers in the field - obviously, it would be wrong to suggest that the success stories can always be predicted from the get-go - but even at many prestigious conservatories, there are, frankly, a lot of students who don't have the slightest chance of ever landing a "real" performing gig and making a living from it. And no one tells them this! Other students feel (correctly) that it isn't their place to shatter someone's dreams, teachers worry that telling a student to find another focus would lead to (legitimate) questions about why the student was accepted to the school in the first place, and administrators really aren't terribly interested in what students do or do not do with their degrees.

Worse, music is almost unique among "skilled trade" fields in that you can major in it at almost any college and university, regardless of whether that school actually has the faculty and resources necessary to train its students for professional careers in music. The kids at these schools by and large don't have a prayer of making the big-time, regardless of their talent, because they have no hope of getting the top-drawer training musicians must get in order to advance. This may not be a fair reality, but it is a reality.

On the other hand, many of the 80% of music majors who work in "the field" but don't perform for a living would probably say that I'm taking a very limited view of these numbers. After all, what percentage of students at an average liberal arts college in the US actually wind up doing exactly what their major would have indicated? One of my brothers majored in political science at Macalester and is now a professional cook, yet he doesn't consider his education to have been wasted, since it taught him a lot about the world and how to interact with it in an intelligent way. Couldn't music be the same?

Supporting this glass-half-full viewpoint is the fact that orchestra musicians are forever insisting that the folks who manage orchestras are doomed to failure unless they truly "get" the music business. So shouldn't we be appreciative of those who start out aiming for a performing career, but change course and carve out another niche for which they are better suited? We in the orchestra business get some of our best CEOs and management types via such progressions.

I guess my larger concern would be for the thousands of young musicians who haven't the foresight to see the demise of their dreams approaching, and either fall back on teaching other students whose ignorance mirrors their own (and whose employers choose to ignore their inadequacy,) or find themselves having to start their schooling all over in order to earn a degree they might actually use.

But like I say, I'm part of the 5%, and therefore not in the best position to judge. So what about it? Anyone out there a former music major, or someone who considered majoring in music? Do you regret the decision? Celebrate it? And do you agree or disagree with my premise that there are a lot of degree-granting institutions that just shouldn't even have a music major available? Your comments are eagerly awaited...

Hat #3

Another day in my itinerant musician's life, this time in Philly, for a week at the Curtis Institute of Music where I'm staff conductor (even though I'm here only a few weeks a year). It's always interesting for me to move between what are often wildly divergent weeks of work. It strikes me that I wear quite a few hats; there are certain expectations of me as the assistant conductor of a major orchestra, a different set of expectations when I'm guest conducting, and a whole different protocol when I'm in a conducting/teaching role as I am this week at Curtis.

I generally enjoy teaching, although I find it to be the most taxing thing I do. Part of the stress has to do with the responsibility I feel when trying to impart information and perhaps a different perspective to a group of young people. Another part lies in the necessity, when teaching, to not only understand that information and perspective internally, but to also be able to coherently express it. Teaching forces me to both organize and formalize, and in the process I often find that I inadvertently clarify, for myself, my own viewpoints.

I spent 6 years teaching at Curtis (I was hired the Monday after graduation, so for a long time it felt like I had never left the place!), and it's an experience for which I'm tremendously grateful. I taught a conducting class for all non-conducting majors, a required course for a bachelor's degree, which meant I saw almost all of the enrolled students at one point or another in my class. We discussed the history of the art of conducting, orchestration and analysis, as well as the physical aspects of conducting. Teaching analysis forced me to be acutely methodical and disciplined in my own studying; teaching technique pushed me to find a more systematic physical vocabulary. Professional orchestras often thank me for the clarity of my beat; I would in turn thank my teaching years. When a student asks you how to achieve an accent on an off-beat, you need a very compact and specific answer. The absolute understanding and clarity of intent one needs to be a proficient teacher in turn has helped me in my conducting.

The teaching comes back to me in another way as well; many of my students have gone on to successful careers as soloists and orchestral musicians, many of whom I've encountered over the years. And when they tell me that they can still recall from memory the Haydn symphony movement I had them conduct, or that they remember how to give a neutral preparation beat to an active upbeat, I feel that little flutter of pride; something I'd taught had made enough of an impact to remain in their memory, to become a part of them.

Dance, dance

Yes, we are in the thick of preparations for tomorrow night's Inside the Classics concert, and I'm happy to report that we all survived this morning's rehearsal intact (Peter sounds fabulous). There are, however, other concerts going on this week as well, and this afternoon the orchestra rehearsed for tomorrow morning's Young People's Concerts, a full performance of Rimsky-Korsakoff's "Scheherazade" with dancers from the University of Minnesota and professional dance ensembles. All four movements have been specially choreographed for this show, and it's really quite fascinating. Instead of taking the obvious path of creating a "story ballet" to go along with the programmatic elements of the music (Sinbad's ship, the tale of the prince and princess, etc.), the choreographers have instead devised abstract pieces that are reactions to the sound of the music itself.

The result is at times positively kaleidoscopic, with groups of dancers whizzing across stage in opposite directions - it's a really kinetic piece, which I think will suit the audience (upper elementary kids). The dancers often have gestures that accompany a certain melody, and the return of the gesture when the tune comes back puts a spotlight on melodic repetition and musical structure. To me, the dance effectively amplified the expressive content of the music, often highlighting certain emotional elements, often reflecting the fluctuating energy of the piece.

Adding visual elements to "concert" pieces always has an element of controversy. The argument, usually, is that these works were meant to stand alone without any "extras", and doing so somehow detracts from the music. I really think it depends on how it's done - in this case, not only are there dancers, but also projections above the orchestra of words used by elementary school students to describe the music in each movement. Thus, we are given several different perspectives - the thoughts of students via the projected words, the expressive motions of the dancers, and the glorious aural sweep of the music itself. I found myself totally engaged during the rehearsal.

What I'm very curious about is how this will translate to a hall full of students tomorrow morning, particularly as each movement of "Scheherazade" clocks in at over 10 minutes - a pretty long time for young attention spans. It's an unusual show (and very abstract when compared to most of our other Young People's Concerts), but I'm delighted that our education department is willing to take the risk to try something utterly new, which really is the only way to find out if it works!

The Noisiest Women...

It's gotten awfully serious around these parts lately, so I thought we could all use a good laugh. To that end, here's one of my favorite bits of musical comedy: Anna Russell's hilarious summation of Wagner's Ring cycle of operas. There's actually a lot more to it than this - the full routine lasts more than 20 minutes, and is well worth a listen.



Russell was a classically trained singer living in Canada when she came to the difficult realization that her voice (which was quite shrill) was unlikely to lead her to a glorious operatic career, and she began to peddle herself as something of an educational speaker on music for adults, putting together quite the variety of routines as she did so. ("How To Enjoy Your Bagpipe" is a classic, as is her song for overly dramatic sopranos, Schreechenrauf.) Through sheer persistence (most audiences outside of her home city of Toronto had no idea what to make of her for a very long time,) she became a huge star all across North America, and her albums have never, to my knowledge, gone out of print. There would be other musical comedians after her - notably Victor Borge and Peter Schickele, both brilliant in their own ways - but in my opinion, no one was ever more simultaneously entertaining, informative, and welcoming to the world of this supposedly "serious" music than Russell.

Hard Truths

CORRECTION APPENDED, see below.

I want to go back to something Sarah was writing about last week - the idea that our conservatories and music academies are currently overflowing with aspiring musicians, many of whom are simply never going to find permanent, steady employment in this field. Sarah was very kind to suggest that the problem here is simply an issue of supply outstripping demand, but I'll take it one step further: many college students majoring in music are simply not good enough musicians to ever have a real hope of making it in the professional world, and no one is telling them this!

This is a bigger problem than I think we want to acknowledge. It certainly doesn't apply to all schools - Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, for example, is still small and exclusive enough that it accepts only the very, very best young musicians, all of whom have at least a chance of finding success in this highly competitive field - but I believe it applies to most. I attended a fairly prestigious conservatory with a strong reputation and plenty of alumni spread across the music world, and I was consistently shocked by the presence of students who were clearly deluding themselves in pursuing a career in music. I'm not talking about other violists who I somehow felt didn't measure up to my own abilities here. (If anything, I have a bad habit of always assuming that I'm the worst player in any given room, and my college studio was a pretty non-competitive one in any case.) I'm talking about people with little to no sense of rhythm, pitch, or musicianship, who were somehow being allowed to train professionally for a job which they would clearly never be able to perform.

Now, I know that everyone, regardless of profession, knew people in college who were just sloughing along, wasting their parents' money and minoring in drug use and slacking while doing just enough work towards their degree to avoid flunking out. These people presumably found work of one sort or another after graduation, even if it had little to do with the profession they were ostensibly training for in school, so what's the big deal if a few wannabe musicians end up chucking the business after they leave school?

But this is exactly the problem. With a few exceptions such as pre-med, most undergraduate majors at American liberal arts colleges are designed not just to train you for a specific job, but to give you a complete and well-rounded education that will serve you well professionally even if your life takes an unexpected turn after you leave school. Music schools are different - in fact, they're less like colleges than they are like trade schools, academies for the focused instruction of a single topic. The upshot is that people who graduate with a Bachelor of Music degree are usually trained and prepared for one and only one professional sphere. And it is a sphere that many of them are wholly unprepared to enter, and will have little chance of ever breaking into.

The more self-aware of this unfortunate group may realize quickly that they are out of their depth as performers, and seek another professional path before it's too late. But what most non-musicians don't realize is that, once you leave school, you receive almost no feedback on your playing from other musicians (auditions are anonymous exercises, remember,) with the result that it is entirely possible for an inadequate musician to continue bumbling along on the fringes of the business, convinced that only bad luck and vast conspiracies are keeping them from full and satisfying employment.

This is a tough problem to attack, especially for those of us who have had a modicum of success in the business. Among freelance musicians, there is a very real (if frequently unspoken) belief that those with full-time gigs have just gotten lucky. In the same way, freelancers who have trouble getting even menial gigs are often convinced that those at the top of the gig ladder have gotten there not through superior musicianship, but by playing the political game. (Fueling these delusions, of course, are the undeniable facts that a) luck does play a role, albeit a small one, in a successful audition, and b) there are political games being played in most professional situations.) It's a simple human defense mechanism: admitting failure is much, much harder than finding an alternate explanation that involves someone else's sinister machinations.

So what's the solution? I'm tempted simply to say that conservatories need to stop admitting so many students, and teachers at the collegiate level have to start being honest with their underperforming charges. You could even make a case that undergraduate schools that aren't prepared to seriously train top young musicians for the professional world have no business even offering a music major. It's fine for the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople to have an orchestra, and even to offer private lessons. But a major indicates that, after four years, the school expects that you will be prepared for a career, and most undergraduate music departments can't come close to fulfilling that promise for most students.

I know that it isn't as simple as that. Teachers are supposed to encourage their students to improve, and if they bail on all but the obvious prodigies, a lot of promising young musicians might never have a chance to fulfill their potential. (I might actually have fallen into that group, since I know for a fact that I didn't work nearly hard enough in my first couple of years at Oberlin, and only woke up to the reality of my situation in my junior year.) And maybe this whole thing isn't as big a problem as I think it is - I know more than a few former classmates who've gone on to non-performing jobs on the fringes of the music business and are perfectly happy.

But I also know a lot of musicians who were probably never going to be good enough to make it, but were never told so, or never believed it if they were. And after years of watching success elude them, I've watched them slip into some very, very dark places. And every time I see it, I just wonder what might have happened if, back when they first considered majoring in music, someone had taken them aside, and said: hey, c'mon - we both know this isn't for you.

CORRECTION/APOLOGY, appended 01/08: In a response to Don Picard's comment below, which references the book, "Mozart in the Jungle" by Blair Tindall, I explained my skepticism of Ms. Tindall's conclusions in part by claiming that she had been sloppy and inaccurate on several important points in an article written for the New York Times about the Minnesota Orchestra in 2004. A wounded and mystified Ms. Tindall subsequently replied in the comments, as well as in private communications to me, that she could remember writing no such article, and in fact that she didn't work for the Times in 2004.

She is absolutely correct, and I was clearly the sloppy and inaccurate one. Somehow, in a raft of follow-up correspondence (most of it written more than a year after the article ran) with concerned musicians' union leaders, Ms. Tindall's name got substituted for the name of the actual author of the piece, Cori Ellison. I've deleted my original comment containing the incorrect assertions. I've reposted the part of my comment that was relevant to Don Picard's original question at the bottom of the comments. My sincerest apologies not only to Ms. Tindall, but to anyone who was misinformed by my sloppiness.

Addendum to Band Aids and Tourniquets

A majority of the musicians I know are involved with music education in one form or another. From a musician’s point of view, it’s only logical, as part of being an artist is ensuring the continuation of that art by passing on the knowledge and skill required to produce it. As Sam wrote in a recent post, arts organizations play a significant (if incomplete) role in providing at least a modicum of arts exposure and education through outreach programs - it doesn't make up for the lack of music and art in many school curricula, but it's something.

I can't agree more that the lack of arts curricula is a serious deficit in our educational system - there's no shortage of anecdotal and statistical evidence showing how arts education can influence discipline, organizational skills, self-expression, self-esteem, ability to work with others, etc. Further, it lays the groundwork for a lifelong appreciation of music and art, which indisputably enriches one’s life. Hard to argue with all of that.

So, the message so far is "Music education good!". Here's where I'll stir the pot; more arts education in the elementary level is absolutely necessary, but I wonder about the necessity of so many music schools at the college and graduate level.

Over several bottles of wine the other night, a group of friends, all professional musicians, all teachers at the college/graduate level, discussed the disproportionate number of students in performance degree programs. Conservatories and music schools are pumping out graduates at record levels at a time when expansion in the music field, particularly with orchestras, is slowing. It is difficult to make it as a performer - 200 potential candidates will apply for the average orchestral job opening, not great odds by any means. From a purely practical perspective, we don't need increasing numbers of performing musicians; it’s progressively difficult to find employment and it’s a ridiculously competitive and saturated field. From an institutional standpoint, what we need are well-educated music enthusiasts who have the knowledge, and therefore the ability, to enjoy (and support) all kinds of music – that should be provided to them via that disappearing arts curricula that both Sam and I are bemoaning.

Any thoughts out there in the ether as 2007 comes to a close?

Band-Aids Where We Need A Tourniquet

There are endless theories on what music education should be, and how the task of introducing kids to high culture should be divided between schools, parents, and arts organizations. In recent years, as school budgets in the US have gotten ever tighter, music has often been the first thing to be cut. At the same time, teachers burdened with ever more stringent national and state curricula have a hard time making time in the school day for anything but the subjects that their students will be tested on at year's end.

As a result, orchestras and other professional music groups have stepped into the void, offering huge numbers of children's concerts, musician visits to classrooms, and other assorted educational activities. These projects, which are expensive to develop and sustain, frequently receive a hefty amount of funding from both public and private sources, and the dirty little secret of cultural grantmaking these days is that if there isn't an education component to your proposal, you might as well not bother submitting it to most philanthropic organizations and state legislatures.

Most in our business would say that despite the challenges they present, these educational outreach programs are unquestionably good things, and that orchestras are fulfilling their duty to their community by stepping in where schools increasingly choose not to tread. But Allan Kozinn at The New York Times has a different, more nuanced view of the way such programs work in his city:

Often halls are rented, musicians are hired and transported, and everything from ushers to piano tuners (and movers) are paid for, all using cash that the city’s Department of Education should be spending on full-time music teachers and instruments. Seen that way, these programs actually deprive students of a musical education rather than help to provide one.

Kozinn goes on to suggest that we need only look to the past to see what we should be giving kids instead...

Back then it was simple: Music was part of the curriculum, like math, science and social studies. Kindergartners and first graders began with singing, note-reading and rhythm-beating, and as the course continued through high school, it touched on the history of music and how it works... Even more crucial, if you wanted to play an instrument, lessons were free, and the school would lend you an instrument until you felt sufficiently committed to buy your own. As interesting as the class work could be (depending on the teacher), the real business of getting to know how music works took place in instrument lessons.

Now, I wasn't around in the 1960s (the era Kozinn is talking about,) so I don't know whether his memory of such quality music ed is accurate or not. But his thesis makes a lot of sense. Most musicians in our business believe fervently in the educational aspect of our jobs, and many of us do additional education work outside of our primary jobs. But when it's entirely possible, even probable, that a kid in our community could go all the way through school without ever being offered an instrument, or a chance to learn how to sing, it does start to feel as if we're banging our heads against a wall.

I don't have a solution to propose here. I know better than to expect that legislators in my state or any other will be eager to raise taxes to support something that political opponents could quickly label an unnecessary frill. It's certainly not my place to tell the voters of Stillwater or Shoreview that they ought to be voting for the local levies that would give their schools the money to fund real music programs. My own local school district (Minneapolis) is in such a deep and perpetual crisis that a lack of arts funding has to wait in line behind such immediate problems as plummeting enrollment, unequal distribution of resources, and a crippling shortage of good teachers. And I have no interest in getting into a pointless debate with the wingnuts who believe that our schools would have plenty of money if only the fatcat teachers and their union would stop hoarding it all.

But I do know that I was the very definition of a problem student when I was a kid. Unquestionably bright, said all my teachers, but unfocused, inconsistent, and profoundly undisciplined in my approach to learning. It was only through music that I learned not only how to play an instrument, but to commit to really learning something, even if it was boring, or complicated, or hard. Music taught me how to think, how to analyze, how to persevere, and how to become truly good at something that, at first, it seemed I had no aptitude for.

I'm no expert. But to me, these seem like valuable educational skills. And I hate the fact that the majority of American kids today aren't getting anything close to the opportunity I had to acquire them.

Does Identity Have To Come With A Demographic?

Don Lee, formerly a producer over at the 800-pound gorilla of public radio, was at our first Inside the Classics concert a couple of weeks back, and he was intrigued enough to call me up and ask if we could sit down and discuss the series, the web site, and more broadly, the need for new approaches to concert music in general. Don and I wound up talking for more than an hour, during which time I believe I uttered approximately four coherent sentences, and babbled aimlessly about God knows what for the rest of the time.

Several times during our talk, Don tried to pin me down on the subject of just who Sarah and I are hoping to ensnare with our somewhat unconventional approach at the ItC concerts. In other words, what demographic are we aiming for that isn't already being served? This wasn't the first time I'd heard the question (in fact, Steve Staruch asked it almost word for word when Sarah and I were guests of his on MPR Classical a few days earlier,) but I've found that I still don't have a good, concise answer. I suspect that what Don was driving at was the idea that orchestras are forever looking for ways to attract a younger crowd, and live in fear of some mysterious bogeyman called "the graying of the audience." But here in Minnesota, where the arts are a far more ingrained part of the broader culture than they are in much of the U.S., I'm honestly not terribly preoccupied with how many under-35s we draw, since we tend to see a lot of them at our regular subscription concerts already. (This is most emphatically not the case for many American orchestras, particularly in the high-profile cities of the Northeast.) If it were to turn out that what Sarah and I are doing is of interest only to lefthanded accountants between the ages of 48 and 51, I think we'd both be fine with that (if a bit perplexed,) so long as they were passionate about the music and represented a large enough group to fill the hall.

Basically, Sarah and I are taking the only approach we reasonably can as we write, plan, and rehearse our concerts. We're creating a show that we find entertaining, and banking on the idea that the two of us are typical enough of the average 21st-century music fan that what makes us laugh or cry or think will do the same for a lot of other people as well.

Anyway, Don's take on the series, and our conversation, is now up at MinnPost, the Twin Cities' much-discussed new online daily paper. I'll be interested to hear what others think...

Art, schmart

A recent memory: I was in a city that shall remain unnamed, conducting the local orchestra. Post-concert, a couple of musicians and I go out for a drink, where we strike up a conversation with a local. When I explain what I’m doing in town, he expresses surprise: “I didn’t know there was an orchestra here in _______!” Never mind that we had just performed a few blocks away. Then he leans over to the musicians at the table and asks what their day jobs are – we explain that playing in the orchestra is a full-time deal. “Wow, who knew, I mean, it’s not like you’re providing a necessary service, or anything like that.” (He was a telemarketer – it took a lot for me not to snap back with a snarky rejoinder – I really try not to start bar fights!)

I was reminded of that evening while looking over an article from a couple of months back about ”El Sistema”, the Venezuelan youth project founded in 1975 by Jose Antonio Abreu as a social program to improve the lives of underprivileged kids. Essentially a network of youth orchestras, it has, since it’s inception, trained over 400,000 Venezuelan children, 90% from the lowest economic stratum, and in most cases turned their lives around.

This quote from Abreu: “As a Venezuelan musician, I proposed to make my art an instrument of authentic social development, an instrument to build citizens, a powerful vehicle to achieve an integral education for children, compensating in this way the traditional deficiencies of the continent's education system. " And he has succeeded on all accounts – Venezuela now has a network of nearly 220 youth orchestras which continue to build a sense of community and tremendous civic pride. In fact, now the entire world is looking at El Sistema as the gold-standard of arts education, and graduates are going on to successful careers in Berlin and Los Angeles.

What is extraordinary about the Venezuelan system is the notion that providing musical training, with the discipline and opportunity for self-expression that comes with it, can reshape and fulfill the lives of children living in some of the worst slums in the world, kids who would otherwise be caught in an endless circle of crime, drugs and despair. And this is why the comment from the telemarketer in the bar really rankled; music IS necessary and can be transformative in a very tangible way. Art is not fluff – it’s the stuff that makes humans human, that makes life a deeply joyous enterprise.