May Auld Antagonism Be Forgot...

There was an interesting concert review in the New York Times over the weekend, interesting partly because you don't often see newly formed new music ensembles that play in Greenwich Village clubs getting full-length reviews in the Gray Lady, and partly because of the direction critic Anthony Tommasini chose to meander in the later paragraphs. Early on, Tommasini notes that, "Though the performances were brilliant, it was the irreverent mixing of works that excited me,"and he goes on to detail a widely varied program ranging from thorny Modernism to pop-influenced music by ultra-trendy 20-somethings.

The lesson we're meant to draw is one I've written about before, that the new generation of young performers and composers "could not care less about the stubborn ideology that divided the camps long ago." This is hardly a new notion, of course. Many of us in the music world have been writing about this long-overdue evolution for years, and ArtsJournal even hosts a music blog whose tagline declares, "No Genre Is The New Genre." But Tommasini notes an exception to the new egalitarian rule:

"Still, the program was not all embracing. The works played here were either by complex modernists (Stockhausen, Babbitt, Berio), or younger freewheeling composers of a post-modernist bent, what the critic Greg Sandow calls the “alternative classical” music of today. Missing from the roster was anything by composers of, for want of a better word, the middle ground, what John Harbison has wryly referred to as “us notes-and-rhythms composers,” meaning those who more or less write pieces for conventional instruments, largely eschewing electronics, composers more concerned with thematic development than with instrumental atmospherics and sound collages."

Now, that's a very interesting observation to me, because, for those of us who play in symphony orchestras for a living, those "notes-and-rhythms" composers are almost all the new music we see! Orchestras, which by definition have to draw huge audiences to survive, rarely program the kind of aggressively modernist works that sent audiences scurrying for the exits in the 1960s and '70s, but we also rarely play works by those hip young experimenters so beloved in the New York club scene. (This isn't because we don't like them, by the way - it's because most of them aren't writing music for orchestras yet. Stress on yet - those who like to see every new musical trend as yet another sign that orchestras are dying love to claim that every new generation of composers has abandoned the large-scale orchestra, when the reality is always that there's simply no point writing an orchestral piece until you know there's an orchestra waiting to play it.)

What we do play is music by those more "mainstream" composers that Tommasini worries about - John Harbison, Aaron Jay Kernis, John Corigliano. (Does Kalevi Aho fit in that group? Not sure...) And while I think the Times is right to point out that there's still a wide gulf between the music that is held in high esteem in academic circles and that which large swaths of the public are likely to embrace, it's not something I think of as a serious problem. Academia is always operating on a different (and less market-driven) plane from the rest of society - it's why academics prefer to stay in the academy, while the rest of us couldn't wait to escape it.

As Tommasini says in his final paragraph, "The important news is that the end of dogma is indisputable. Empowered American musicians and composers from the new generation have it in them to foster pluralism and save classical music from itself." To which I can only add: ...and it's about [redacted by request] time.

FutureClassics Redux

This year's edition of the Composer Institute is now a week behind us, but those of you who missed the FutureClassics concert and want to hear some of the music that we were blogging about can now hear it online, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio. The main audio player on this page has the entire concert in one continuous track, but if you want to listen to individual pieces, look for the list of repertoire in the center column.

Classical MPR announcer (and onetime professional flutist) Alison Young hosted the concert and interviewed each composer onstage just before his/her piece was performed. We've found that having a live host serves two important purposes: 1) giving the audience a chance to get some background on what to expect, as the pieces that make up the concert are usually quite diverse, and 2) giving the percussion section the time they need to change over their entire area of the stage, since massive percussion setups seem to be the new black with today's composers.

Nearly everyone I talked with (both in the orchestra and in the audience) agreed that the level of skill displayed by this year's Institute participants was the highest it's ever been, and that's saying something. The music ranged from effervescent to soaring to overwhelming, and I strongly suspect that more than one of them will be showing up on a Minnesota Orchestra program in the not-too-distant future...

Fightin' Words

UPDATE, 11/18: Composer Institute participant Spencer Topel's latest blog entry is up over at NewMusicBox. This time around, Spencer's pondering just how far composers will travel to hear the music they've written, and how that ties into Americans' sense of distance...

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Over at ArtsJournal, composer/critic Greg Sandow is celebrating the Chicago Symphony's announcement that Mason Bates and Anna Clyne (a Composer Institute alum!) will be the CSO's composers in residence next season. And Greg's excitement boils down to what he sees as a possible evolution of the flavor of living composer that major American orchestras choose to showcase. Notably, he sees Bates and Clyne as part of a new generation of young composers who mix genres, drop in pop references, and most importantly, write music that your average concertgoer will enjoy listening to...

"For years, the Big Five orchestras -- New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Philly, Boston -- featured modernist new music. Boulez, Matthias Pintscher, Birtwistle (a Cleveland favorite), Magnus Lindberg currently in New York, Carter and Babbitt currently in Boston. Along with a welcome dose of John Adams, but the emphasis was modernist. Or, in other words, on music that hardly anyone likes (whatever its virtues might be), music the normal audience can't respond to, and which also has no base (for instance among artists in other fields, or younger people) outside the classical audience. It's music like this, I think, which leads orchestras to conclude that new music doesn't -- no matter what many people might expect -- attract a young audience."

Now, this is a controversial paragraph, because fans of certain Modernist composers have never really been willing to acknowledge that Modernist music sounds like indecipherable noise to most listeners. (And to be fair, a lot of those who think Modernism was ill-conceived and hurt classical music badly also don't do a very good job of separating that judgment from the clear reality that Carter, Birtwhistle, Boulez, et al are brilliant men who deserve respect.) But if you ask me, Milton Babbitt's notorious screed, "Who Cares If You Listen?" (originally published in 1958,) tells us that Modernist music established itself as contemptuous of the audience at a very early stage, and I really don't think that's a debatable point.

So why is it that Modernist composers didn't fall out of fashion with orchestras and the people who lead them the moment an alternative style of composition was available? Composers have been writing far more ear-friendly (and yet unquestionably serious) music for decades now, and yet music directors like James Levine in Boston (not picking on him in particular, he's just the highest-profile example going at the moment) continue to insist on packing concert programs full of Carter and Wuorinen, despite audible dissatisfaction from the audience.

I've had any number of theories about Modernism's death grip on orchestras over the years. I used to think it was a peculiarity of the Northeast's overly academic personality. (That one dissolved when I started traveling more, and realized that geography didn't seem as relevant as I'd suspected.)

Then I decided that it might have to do with a simple intellectual disconnect: if you've spent a lot of time studying Modernist music, as many musicians do in the course of learning to be musicians, it does start to make more sense to you, and it can be hard to remember that your average concertgoer did not spend four years listening to Babbitt and Stockhausen as preparation for attending your concert.

I still think that second theory has potential, as does the possibility that the musicians who continue to promote Modernism truly do believe that one day, we'll all wake up and it'll sound as normal to us as Stravinsky. (This is an absurd idea, and maybe someday I'll go into the many, many reasons why.)

I'm all for challenging audiences, and I'm not for a moment suggesting that we should just give up on "serious" new music and start considering John Williams and Mark O'Connor to be the new Copland and Dvorak. But I'm with Sandow on the undeniably positive nature of an orchestra with Chicago's pedigree embracing a generation of composers who, frankly, have been getting way too little respect from the orchestral establishment and the press that covers it.

Readying For The Composer Invasion

Our annual Composer Institute starts up again next week, and since Sarah and I have blogged about it quite a bit in past years, I won't rehash the basics. But I wanted to quickly draw attention to NewMusicBox, the much-respected online resource for composers and fans of new music, which has once again convinced one of the participating composers in our Institute to keep a running blog of the goings-on.

His first post is up already, and since NewMusicBox doesn't seem to have a tag that will take you to all CI-related content, I'll try to remember to link to his future posts as well. But in case I miss one, just bookmark the site's front page - they usually do a good job of really featuring the Institute during the week it's going on.

By the way, nearly all this year's participating composers have personal web sites with extensive audio clips. So if you'd like to get to know their work before next Saturday's FutureClassics concert wraps up the Institute, check them out here...

Angel Lam
Hong Kong

Spencer Topel
Hanover, NH

Roger Zare
Sarasota, FL

Fernando Buide
Santiago, Spain

Kathryn Salfelder
Boston, MA

Carl Schimmel
Grinnell, IA

Geoff Knorr
Baltimore, MD

Pushing The Limits

Last week, the Minnesota Orchestra played what will probably stand as the most difficult and exhausting program we'll perform in this entire season. There were four major works to be gotten through, each one hugely challenging in its own way, and for a lot of us, it was our first time playing three of the four.

One of the dirty little secrets of professional orchestras is that the reason we're able to crank out reasonably good performances of an ever-changing array of repertoire (think about it - do you know of a theater company or string quartet that mounts 50-70 completely different programs every year, with just three or four rehearsals for each?) is that we already know most of it pretty well. Sure, it might take a few minutes for the particular intricacies of Brahms or Stravinsky to slip back under your fingers, but it's the same notes you played the last time that particular piece crossed your stand, and after a few years in the profession, you've got a pretty good handle on 75-80% of the core repertoire you'll be playing for the rest of your career.

So if muscle memory and simple musical recall are an orchestra musician's best friends, then a program full of world premieres and obscure works from the past would seem to be our worst enemy. But for most of us, that's not the case at all. Yes, there are musicians who would rather just slog through the same old familiar warhorses and pick up their paycheck while putting in as little effort as possible, but for most of us, new challenges keep the work fresh, and the chance to attack a score we've never seen before is deeply satisfying, assuming that the music in question is quality stuff.

The world premiere we played last week was by a composer we've gotten to know well during Osmo's time in Minnesota, and whenever we see his name on the schedule, we know we'll all need to sign out our parts weeks in advance of the first rehearsal. Kalevi Aho's music is rich and distinctive, well-constructed and obviously composed with a deep understanding of the orchestra and its various components, but it is also invariably at the absolute outer edge of playability for nearly every instrument. In the days leading up to an Aho week, musicians are constantly wandering up to each other backstage, saying things like, "I mean, have you looked at page 14? The hell am I supposed to do with that?"

Still, the satisfaction I get from practicing new music that pushes me to my limits has always been one of the things that thrills me most about playing music for a living. Back in my college days, the Contemporary Music Ensemble was the group that all the best players wanted to be in, not because most of us believed that the music was somehow better than Beethoven or Brahms, but because once you can play Stockhausen, or Carter, or Wuorinen, you know you can play anything. And that's a powerful realization.

Last Friday night, I was asked to speak to a group of the orchestra's most loyal supporters before the concert, and give a bit of a preview of the music they'd be hearing that evening. Mr. Aho was present for this event, and in the course of describing the piece we'd been working on, I took the chance to address the composer directly. I told him that the first piece of his I'd ever played was his Insect Symphony, and that, at the time, it was the most difficult thing I'd ever played in an orchestra. "That was four years ago," I said. "Now, that symphony isn't even in my top five, and those other five are also all yours."

The incredible thing about Aho, though, is that music that is so fiendishly difficult for those of us on stage can sound so natural and comprehensible out in the audience. There are a lot of composers today writing music that's so difficult that it can barely be played. Most of them do it on purpose, hoping that, by stressing out the performers, they'll create a sense of urgency and chaotic panic in the music that the audience will instantly be able to sense.

Aho, on the other hand, reminds me more of Stravinsky - he must know that the music he's writing will fall beyond the capabilities of all but the finest musicians of his era, but he's not necessarily writing just for us. The musicians who first played some of Stravinsky's now-famous ballet scores called them unplayable, but I've been playing them with no great discomfort or stress since my college days. I fully expect (and I'm guessing Aho does, too) that the musicians of the late 21st century will find Aho's symphonies no more challenging than I find The Rite of Spring. I only wish I could be around to hear them...

Celebrating The New In NY

It's a whole new era at the New York Philharmonic, as the Phil's new 42-year-old music director (and native New Yorker) Alan Gilbert took up the reins last week, live on national television. It's always a lot of fun to watch one of the first concerts a professional orchestra plays under a new MD - not because they're likely to be the best concerts of the new MD's tenure, but because everyone on stage is so eager, so energetic, and so determined to show what they can do. We saw it here in Minneapolis when Osmo took over in 2003, they saw it in Dallas and Pittsburgh last season when Jaap van Zweden and Manfred Honeck took over the outstanding orchestras of those two cities, and now New York is enjoying its own honeymoon.

As I was watching the Phil's opening night performance on PBS's Live From Lincoln Center, I was struck by a couple of things. The first was that Gilbert has immediately changed the seating of the orchestra's string section to match the "antiphonal violin" arrangement that Osmo put in place at Orchestra Hall several years ago. Having played at Avery Fisher Hall myself, I'm guessing this change is a bit of a cold shock for the musicians - it can be very hard to hear across the stage in that hall, and when the musicians you've always been able to hear suddenly switch places with the ones you haven't heard in years, it takes time (and a lot of effort) to recalibrate. But according to the New York Times, the players at the Phil seem more than game.

The second striking thing about the performance was that Gilbert had chosen to open his tenure by commissioning a brand new work from the Phil's new resident composer, Magnus Lindberg. The piece was, in a word, breathless, and I actually rewound my DVR to the beginning to listen to it twice more after it was over. It was the kind of piece that people who still believe that all living composers are writing unlistenable music full of dissonance should hear - a ball of energy unleashed across the orchestra, filled with the unmistakable symbolism of the Phil's new beginning.

That having been said, the performance of the Lindberg sounded to me just ever so slightly muddy, as if it could have benefited from one or two more rehearsals. And this is always the problem with performances of new music - orchestras work so fast, and on so many different pieces of music simultaneously, that we count a lot on our muscle memory from whenever we last played what we're playing now. And when it's a world premiere (especially a difficult one, and the Lindberg sounded pretty tricky,) that muscle memory hasn't been created yet. So you do your level best, try to hear the really important cues that you can't afford to miss, and then, when you run out of rehearsal time, you just put your head down and play. And most of the time, with a really good orchestra, it works out fine, as it did in New York last week.

But I've always wondered why, given the limitations of what even a great orchestra can accomplish with a brand new work in 2 to 3 days of rehearsal time, we focus so much on world premieres, and so little on repeat performances of newer works. After all, I'm guessing that one of the reasons the audience at the infamous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring reacted so badly to it was that there's simply no way that the orchestra had a real handle on the piece yet. How could they? Stravinsky had written a ballet score unlike anything ever produced before it, and a piece that still challenges every professional musician every time it's performed! Now imagine if that world premiere had been simply chalked up as another notch on the chart that orchestras keep to prove they're committed to new music, and never performed again. Would we ever have recognized its greatness?

In the decade that I've been in Minnesota, we've played more world premieres than I can count, and as a big fan of new music, I'm thrilled with that fact. But I can think of at least five of those pieces just off the top of my head that I'd love the chance to play again. And again. And again, until that muscle memory kicks in, and we can nail a world-beating performance of that piece every bit as securely as we nail Beethoven's 7th. Think how we could change audience perceptions of living composers if they got the chance to hear them more than once, and at a level of performance comparable to the old warhorse symphony on the second half of the program!

I'm not saying every new piece deserves this treatment, of course. The thing about world premieres is that you're essentially paying for the act of creation, and you have no idea what the quality of the finished score will be until the first rehearsal. But when we get our hands on one of those truly rare gems that more composers than you'd think are turning out these days, I'd love to see those of us in the orchestra world seize the chance to make them a permanent part of our repertoire. And maybe the NY Phil could start with that Lindberg...

Boredom & Rage In 9/32 Time

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

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



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

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

Audience Participation

Hey, who needs a break from all the doom and gloom that's been dominating the music biz lately? I do, for one, and a comment on a recent post (from a gentleman who believes that new music has been useless and unlistenable roughly since Schönberg came along) got me thinking about the uphill battle we still have to fight to convince today's audiences that most composers got over the whole "noise as music" thing years ago, and a lot of great young composers are writing stuff that's just begging for exposure to a mass audience.

Case in point: my friend Geoff. One of several composers I've commissioned solo viola music from over the years, Geoff has lately been dedicating the lion's share of his time to projects aimed at children. At the moment, he's working on a set of string quartet albums that help young musicians develop their ensemble skills while at the same time allowing them to play "real" pieces of music. And a couple of years back, he actually wrote an entire opera for kids. This wasn't some dumbed-down piece of pop crossover masquerading as opera, either - it was very serious music on a very unserious subject: namely, bugs. The Bug Opera premiered in Massachusetts, and has since been performed by a few professional regional opera companies around the US. There's even been interest from overseas - a company in Stuttgart is awaiting a German version.

The plot of The Bug Opera is pretty simple: the main character is a mosquito who finds the idea of sucking blood disgusting and mean. But of course, if she doesn't suck blood, she'll die, so the opera finds Mosquito embarking on a quest to resolve this primal conflict. On the way, she meets a pack of mindlessly gluttonous caterpillars, a deadly and unrepentant spider, and a paper wasp who becomes sort of her Jiminy Cricket. It's the kind of piece that, when you see it performed, your first thought isn't "My, what intellectually stimulating music, and such a wonderful lesson in the complexity of life!" No, the first thing you think is: "That is just way cool. Why didn't anyone think of this sooner?"



Interestingly, Geoff (and his librettist/wife, Alisa) developed the opera in the same way that they're developing the string quartet project: by holding dozens of workshops and mini-performances with kids around the country while the pieces are still being written. The idea is that, if you write a piece for kids while sequestered in your home, you won't know whether you succeeded until opening night, and if the audience isn't impressed, well, too late. So by giving kids a chance to interact with bits and pieces of the work as it's being put together, Geoff gets instant feedback which he can then use in tweaking and improving what he's doing.

I actually had the chance to be a part of one the workshopping moments for The Bug Opera, at the summer camp I've written about before where Geoff and I both teach. Along with a few other faculty members, I sang the caterpillar's "Eat, Chew, Chew" chorus for the pre-teens at the camp, and Alisa (who is also an accomplished coloratura soprano) sang the spider's creepy come-hither aria. All the while, Geoff had a video camera trained not on the performers, but on the kids, to get a record of their reaction to all sorts of musical and dramatic moments. It's amazing how much a child's face can tell you about whether or not you've captured their imagination.

Geoff's latest project (the string quartet thing) will actually be getting a workshopping of its own this summer at Minneapolis's own MacPhail Center for Music, before moving into its final phase of composition and eventual public performance, which should happen in 2010. It's not the sort of high-profile project that gets a composer labeled The Next Big Thing, but it's one more example of the amazingly diverse place that the music world has become these days, and of the creative approaches musicians, composers, and others are taking to get their work out into the public ear.

[Full disclosure: In addition to being a good friend of Geoff's, I also serve on the board of Hybrid Vigor Music, a small non-profit company that provides support and guidance for both The Bug Opera and the Quartet Project. I have no financial stake in any of it - I just think what Geoff is doing is worth sharing.]

A Legend Gets His Due

The 2009 Pulitzer Prizes were announced the other day, and fans of minimalist uber-composer Steve Reich are rejoicing that their man has finally been honored. Reich, whose "Clapping Music" was responsible for changing the way a huge number of people thought about concert music (ItC fans who go back to the David Alan Miller days may remember that David featured Clapping Music on his final Casual Classics program back in 2007,) has never slowed down in the 37 years since he wrote that seminal work, and the Pulitzer honors one of his newest works, a Double Sextet commissioned by new music wunderkinds eighth blackbird, who themselves walked away with a Grammy recently.

Now, one of the great things about eighth blackbird is that they produce a LOT of online content, both audio and video, so there's no need to wait for a studio recording of the Double Sextet to hear what so impressed the Pulitzer committee. Here's a clip of the blackbirds taking their first rehearsal crack at the piece...



And here's a behind-the-scenes look at the recording session the group did last year to lay down the "other" sextet part that plays simultaneously with their live performances of the piece...



Lastly, for those of you in Los Angeles (and we know there are a couple of you, at least,) the blackbirds will actually be performing the Double Sextet this very weekend at the Colburn School of Music, as part of a weeklong residency they're doing there. You can check out the group's concert schedule here (but note that they change up their repertoire a lot, so the Reich, which premiered last month, may only be on a few upcoming programs,) and read their own blog post on the Pulitzer announcement here...

Strangely Mesmerizing

If you've ever been sent into a trance by the music of minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and wondered just how they create that mesmerizing effect with nothing looping snippets of music, this site is for you. Part video game, part geometry test, and part compositional aid, you create your own mathematically generated piece just by drawing lines in the way of bouncing balls. Even just drawing a single horizontal line directly under the ball's entry point results quickly in an ever-more-complex world of sound. Box in the whole screen, and see how long you can keep the result from becoming cacophonous.

I'm normally not terribly susceptible to supposedly addictive games. But I've already spent several hours playing with this one. And I'm not even that big a Glass fan...

Build A Better... um... Theremin?

When you're talking about orchestras and the instruments within them, there are a lot of legitimate questions that can be asked. (Why do we have trombones and bassoons, but no saxophones? Why clarinets but no harmonica? Why two violin sections and only one of cellos when the cello is without question a better instrument?) But I have to admit that the idea that we might be lacking some instruments that no one's even invented yet isn't something that I've spent a lot of time considering.

But apparently, someone has. And that someone has thousands of dollars lying around that s/he is willing to throw at inventors who come up with these incredible new noisemakers. Some of them are honestly pretty stupid and unpleasant-sounding (there are sound files of all the finalists on the Wired story I linked to above,) but some others (the Silent Drum and the Sorisu in particular) are instruments I wouldn't mind hearing worked into a larger ensemble.

After all, there's a history of using technology to enhance the orchestra. Messaien made extensive use of the oddly spacey ondes martenot, and the electromagnetic air guitar known as the theremin has become something of a cult favorite over the years. My only question is how long I have before someone decides that a Sorisu section would be a nice replacement for violas...

a theremin in action...

Damn The Recession, Full Speed Ahead

As we settle back into our normal routine post-tour, I've been catching up on some of what we missed while we were overseas. (That Top Chef finale on my DVR isn't gonna watch itself, after all.) And last Friday's Wall Street Journal carried a review of one of Minnesota's other classical music organizations that is well worth a read. What makes the story newsworthy is that it's about an organization bucking the tried-and-true strategy of arts groups getting hyper-conservative in their programming the moment things turn ugly financially. Apparently, the leaders over at Minnesota Opera see a different way...

"[Minnesota Opera] has launched a $5.5 million initiative intended to infuse the operatic repertoire with new works. Spanning seven seasons, the project, called Minnesota OperaWorks, involves three commissions, three revivals of neglected works, and the co-production of a new opera... Minnesota Opera deserves enormous credit for continuing to devote resources to the future of the art form, especially now."

Now, there's a bit of hyperbole involved here, because MN Opera had undoubtedly planned this project before the global crisis really took hold. But at the same time, this is exactly the sort of project that orchestras and opera companies tend to take an axe to when times get tough (we almost lost our own hugely successful Composers' Institute to a round of budget cuts several years back,) and the Opera folks obviously have no intention of backing off their ambitious plans. For an art form that tends to be even more hidebound and artistically conservative than the orchestral world, this dedication to bringing new works to the fore could represent a major step forward, and will likely have resonance at companies around North America.

Now, wouldn't it be nice to see a few orchestras step up and announce a major commissioning project to keep a few composers off the welfare rolls in these troubled times?

In Which The Blog Goes All Arty And Introspective (For A Change)

While Sarah and most of the rest of the orchestra are still getting over their jet lag from Saturday/Sunday's overnight flight from Minneapolis to London, I'm feeling downright energetic today, having taken the opportunity to jet over to the UK a day early to visit some friends and reacquaint myself with one of my favorite cities.

This morning, I hopped on the Tube and headed down to the area just south of the Thames known as Bankside. For my money, the view from the south bank of the river looking back into Central London is the perfect encapsulation of this complicated metropolis. From a single vantage point, you see London's past, present, and future colliding before your eyes. Look one way, and the sooty, majestic dome of St. Paul's Cathedral fills your field of vision, until you glance down to see Anthony Caro's futuristic Millenium Bridge leading from Bankside to the Cathedral Gardens. Look to the right, and the gleaming cone of the glass skyscraper known as The Gherkin towers above stately old Southwark Bridge. Glance back over your right shoulder, and the unmistakable thatched roof of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre rises comfortably from a riverside walkway which also leads next door to the massive, warehouse-like Tate Modern, arguably the world's most celebrated contemporary art museum since its opening in 2000.

It was the Tate that had brought me here, and specifically, a newly opened exhibit focusing on two of the giants of the Russian/Soviet Constructivist art movement, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova. Having grown up in the dying years of the Cold War, I've always been fascinated by all things Russian, and studied Russian language, literature, art and history through my high school and college years. I remembered Constructivism as something of a precursor to Socialist Realism (though I suspect that real art scholars would call that a distortion,) and more generally as an art movement that I'd never really understood in my school days, so I was eager to take another whack at it.

The original Constructivists (not to be confused with New Constructivists - ain't art fun?) essentially believed that art had become far too bourgeois and enamored of its own worth, and wanted to reduce the artist's profession to something simpler and more scientific than had been the case in the 19th century. Rodchenko and Popova shared a belief that art could and should be made in the same way that an engineer designs a road, by arranging existing materials in a highly meticulous fashion and eschewing emotionalistic flourishes. Their work is doggedly geometric and, usually, completely abstract (they would eventually break with even visionary abstractionists such as Kandinsky over what they saw as Kandinsky's over-reliance on the physical world.)

In looking over the works in the exhibition and reading about the evolution of the Constructivist philosophy, I was struck by one particular paragraph detailing the context of some of Rodchenko's early works. The catalogue reads: "Rodchenko's own investigations placed a particular importance on the line as the sole essential element in a work of art. Colour, tone, texture and surface, he argued, could all be eliminated as mere decoration, or as techniques for imitating the appearance of things."

Now, this is useful information when you're looking at Rodchenko's paintings, but taken simply as a mile marker in the developing ideology of an art movement, it bears the unmistakable ring of rigidity and absolutism, which, to me, is where any ideology (artistic or otherwise) begins to go off the rails. Indeed, only a few years after commiting to the supremacy of line, Rodchenko would paint three flat canvases with a single primary color - red, yellow, and blue - and declare that he had essentially ended the universe of painting. That kind of brash self-importance can be amusing, and even informative, but is always self-defeating in the end, if you ask me.

I bring all this up because, as I wandered through the Tate exhibit, I found myself thinking a lot about the piece of music that will be opening every concert we play on this tour, beginning tomorrow night at the Barbican. It's a not-terribly-well-known work called Slonimsky's Earbox, by one of the lions of American composition, John Adams, and to be perfectly honest, I have a bit of a problem with it.



Let me stress that I have no problem at all with John Adams as a composer. His Chamber Symphony is, in my opinion, one of the very best compositions of the late 20th century, his operas are frequently revelatory, and he has demonstrated throughout his career a willingness and ability to evolve and adapt with the times that most composers haven't the talent or imagination to achieve.

That having been said, there are some Adams pieces that I find myself inwardly frustrated with when I perform them, and Slonimsky is one of them. It's the kind of piece that many listeners and critics would label as "minimalist," though that label has been known to annoy Adams. Essentially, it's machine music, steadily driving forward through the use of snippets, small motives, and repeated drones. It doesn't have melodies or traditional harmonic motion, and instead uses the ever-changing blend of disparate sounds to create a flow. Dynamic changes, when they occur, are stark and jarring, and traditional phrasing is almost non-existant (at least, on the individual level at which musicians normally think of it.)

This may be a flawed comparison, but as I stared at the Rodchenko paintings, I began to see them as a visual representation of Adams's Slonimsky. What better way to describe such music than as a highly developed representation of line and geometry, with a bare minimum of colo(u)r, tone, texture and surface serving as mere ornament? In a way, Adams is asking the listener to experience a complete work of music performed by that most vibrant and versatile of ensembles, a full symphony orchestra, but to do so without most of the normal accoutrements and contexts that an orchestra provides.

I suspect that this may be the reason that Adams's music has a tendency to be easier to listen to than it is to perform. Even if we disagree with a philosophy that says that only line and geometry are important to the creation of art, our minds are fully capable of indulging the idea long enough to appreciate a painting created under those strictures. Similarly, a piece like Slonimsky can sound to the human ear like a constantly bubbling fount of musical ideas, even as it asks the musicians performing it to put aside many of the ideas and skills that we're trained to bring to every new piece we play and focus only on the endlessly cycling notes in front of our eyes.

It occurred to me as I left the Tate that Rodchenko was lucky to be working in a medium like painting, where his canvasses are left to history exactly as he imagined them. Poor John Adams has to simply trust that overanalytical performers like me won't screw up his musical ideas at the first opportunity just because we don't fully agree with the philosophy behind them...

The Change We Need

Kyle MacMillan, one of my favorite classical music writers, had an excellent article in Sunday's Denver Post about classical music's next wave of innovators:

This new generation of classical artists possess all the technique necessary to tackle Brahms or Beethoven, but they would rather perform innovative repertoire that blurs into genres from hip-hop to electronica, rock and beyond... They might substitute with the New York Philharmonic one night, play a concert or two with a pop group then join other colleagues in some hybrid ensemble in between.

Sarah and I have written about this sort of genre-hopping in the past - she's been known to lead orchestra performances in bars and used to sing with a punk band, and I've played everything from avant-garde classical to jazz to bluegrass to disco in venues ranging from recital halls to New England barns to college bars - but Kyle puts his finger on what makes the trend significant to the wider world of classical music.

Specifically, this is the generation that will likely put an end to the war that has been going on for more than 50 years between traditionalists, who never trucked with controversial innovators like Carter, Cage, and Babbitt and just wanted everyone to go back to playing Brahms and Beethoven and pretend that most of the 20th century never happened; and hardcore modernists, who decided decades ago that they cared more about impressing each other at conferences than they did about writing music that audiences, even sophisticated ones, could relate to.

To musicians in their 20s today, these battles are not just tired, they're quite literally history. Someone born in 1988 looks at the debate over serialism in much the same way that s/he looks at Communism: a relic of the past, to be viewed through the lens of history, and while perhaps important to study, certainly not an ongoing debate one has with one's friends. The fact that many 20th century composers chose to write music that sounded harsh and deliberately unpleasant to most ears is a fact that young musicians recognize, but they don't associate that fact in any way with the dynamic and genre-busting new music they focus their careers on today. Nor should they. Here's MacMillan again:

All art forms need to be revitalized to survive, and too often classical music has been more concerned with preserving its past than defining its future. These groups offer an exciting way forward. They honor the essence of classical music, while devising meaningful ways to refresh and extend the genre.

On this historic inauguration day, with the word "change" on everyone's lips, I can't think of a more important revolution for the entire music world to embrace.

Is Freedom Overrated?

For those who like ruminating on composers and their craft, there's an excellent piece up over at NewMusicBox which asks the question: does the diversity of musical styles in use at the moment really offer composers the creative freedom that many believe? Or, as the article puts it, "is the progress from a common practice to a diverse one truly progress, when it compels us to choose between a reactionary, audience-friendly idiom, an exclusionary avant-garde, or a sober modernism or ironic postmodernism that hovers between these two extremes?"

In other words, back in the 18th and 19th centuries, there was basically one set of rules for how music was written, and while composers regularly pushed the envelope (chords that were considered wildly dissonant in Bach's time, for instance, became commonplace by the time Brahms and Wagner came around,) everyone followed the rules. Then came the 20th century, during which rabble-rousers like Arnold Schönberg, John Cage, and Steve Reich discarded the rule book chapter by chapter, until it seemed that you could put together any combination of notes and silences and call it music.

Of course, there are still rules - it's just that composers have their choice of any number of different rule books, which bear little resemblence to each other. The Modernist rule book is longer and more complicated than the old tonal rule book was, while the Postmodern rule book is more like a single sheet of paper with the sentence, "Don't do anything the modernists do" scrawled across it in crayon. The Neo-Romantics have their own rules, based heavily on the rule book of 100 years ago, and function basically as if the Modernists and Pomos had never existed. And for the composers who place themselves in the New Complexity camp (don't ask,) there are presumably hundreds of rules, but they don't matter because the music will wind up sounding like someone just dropped a piano onto a bagpipe regardless.

So do composers benefit from being able to choose from such a wide array of philosophies? Do audiences? Those who despise dissonant music would probably wish for everyone to go back to writing tonal music with the old rules, but reducing the number of dissonant works wouldn't necessarily mean that the music would be better. Statistically, only a very few composers build a legacy that significantly outlives them, so you're always going to hear more bad or mediocre new works than you will mediocrities from the 19th century. It's not that there weren't plenty of mediocre composers back then - we've just stopped playing their music.

Common sense would seem to dictate that when composers fragment, it takes music as a whole longer to evolve, which could be why we've gotten a bit stuck in the decades since Schönberg started messing around with his twelve tones. Still, it's probably impossible to really assess the impact of philosophies that are still developing, and I know several composers who believe that all the navel gazing should really be left to musicologists and historians, and that composers just ought to write whatever music speaks to them. And with that, we've come full circle...

"Online" Orchestra

I've often bemoaned the slow pace of change in large arts organizations, particularly in relation to 21st century media. Which was why I was both delighted and fascinated by a recent article in the New York Times about a new "online" ensemble, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra.

In short, musicians from around the world are invited to apply by downloading sheet music provided on the site (from Tan Dun's "Internet Symphony No. 1") and submitting a video of themselves playing the selection. There's even a video of Tan conducting, to keep you in absolute tempo, because the winners of this audition will then be part of a mash-up to create an online "performance" of the entire piece.

The other component is the video submission of a standard repertory piece - that puts you in the running for a chance to play the live version of the "Internet Symphony" at Carnegie Hall, if you are selected by YouTube viewers in an American Idol-style selection process, of course.

A great use of modern media and technology, in my book, and I'll be curious to see the final product(s). Part of the purpose, ostensibly, is to create a more organized dialogue about classical music on YouTube, which is a fine idea. I cringe a little, however, when thinking about comments that may be left on audition videos; I've seen enough snide (if not downright cruel) comments attached to individual performance videos to know that the anonymity of the internet allows for a degree of mean-spiritedness usually not seen in face-to-face interactions. The eternal optimist, I hope to be pleasantly surprised!

Of course, the project has its celebrity promoters - Tan Dun and Michael Tilson Thomas, or course, and the inimitable Lang Lang lends his own peculiar flourish. My burning question, though, is this; isn't the "Internet Symphony" simply a glorified expansion of the Olympic Medal Cermony Theme from the 2008 Beijing Olympics (with a bit of Eroica added in for good measure)? Which seems such a terribly unoriginal musical idea for such an innovative project. Take a listen and judge for yourself (the Olympic Theme becomes recognizable at about 1:06').




And here's the Olympic music (with Tan conducting, too!) for comparison.

Feedback Day

Having just spent the day rehearsing the seven pieces that will make up our FutureClassics concert tomorrow night, I can now confidently say that the audience (which you're planning to be a part of, right? I mean, c'mon, the tickets are ten bucks...) will be in for quite an array of styles and sounds.

Composer Aaron Jay Kernis, who runs the Composer Institute along with MN Orch staffer Beth Cowart, seems to make a point of selecting participants who come from very different backgrounds and musical points of view. So this year, we've got a minimalist, a couple of hardcore atonalists, one fan of electronica, one storyteller, and a couple others that I can't begin to categorize. I'd be lying if I said I loved all the pieces, but that's exactly the point of a concert like this. We all listen with different ears, and a work that leaves me cold might just make your night. (And for the record, there were a couple of pieces that so impressed me that I'm hoping we get a chance to play them on a subscription concert in the near future.)

Part of the rehearsal process for this concert that differs from our normal routine is that each member of the orchestra is given a feedback form for each composer, and we're asked to comment on everything from the overall feel of the piece, to how the writing works (or doesn't) for our individual instruments, to whether the parts we're working off of are laid out well. I always struggle a bit with these forms, because I'm sure the composers get a lot of contradictory advice - musicians aren't known for our group-think abilities - and I don't want to add to any confusion or frustration they may have on reading our reactions to their work.

So I try to make my comments as specific as possible. If I don't think a piece works, I try to figure out exactly what would need to change to make it work. (Much of the time, my advice tends to be, "Thin out the orchestration!" Composers used to writing for small ensembles frequently try to do too much at once with a full orchestra, which is when you wind up with a cacophony. 98 musicians make a lot of noise in full cry.) Today, I advised one composer to change the register of some high pizzicatti in the viola part (they were so high up the fingerboard that they sounded like pitchless clunks,) suggested that another reformat the parts to make some of his rhythmic figures easier to understand on the fly, and wondered whether some orchestrational choices had caused a third piece to be more difficult than necessary to hold together rhythmically.

The harshest thing I wrote was this: "There is nothing inherently wrong with atonality, but you can't just use it as a weapon against your listeners. When you give the audience nothing at all to grab on to aurally, they'll simply shut down in defense, and won't bother coming along to wherever you're trying to take them." Tough, yes, but I wouldn't have bothered if I didn't think the composer on the receiving end was an obviously intelligent individual, capable of writing great music.

The bottom line is that we should have quite a show tomorrow night, with each of the composers appearing on stage to talk about their work before we perform it. And if you really can't make it out to Orchestra Hall (seriously, people - ten bucks), the concert will be broadcast live on the classical stations of Minnesota Public Radio (99.5 KSJN in the Cities,) and streamed live on MPR's website.

Pushing The Limits

The Composer Institute is in full swing now, with the participants going through daily seminars with musicians from different instrument groups of the orchestra, each of whom pick apart the scores mercilessly, pointing out any register problems, notation vagaries, and other issues that will make the parts either difficult or impossible to play. I've led some of these seminars in the past, and with very few exceptions, I've been deeply impressed with the humility of the composers as their work is critiqued, and their openness to new ideas, even when they don't entirely agree with what's being said.

One of our blogging composers, Ted Hearne, discussed this difficult process today, and brought up an issue that seems to come up more and more as composers push the envelope of what musicians can do on stage:

One of the composers called for the timpanist to hit the copper bell of the drum, and there was massive resistance to this idea from the percussionists. "I didn't do it for John Corigliano, I'm not going to do it for you," the timpanist was relayed as having said. I understand this mentality, given the price of the drum you're asking a professional to play in an unconventional, potentially damaging way. However, some string players don't like to play col legno [hitting the string with the stick of the bow] and some piano technicians won't let you prepare the piano or touch the strings either... The question is: as a composer, where do you draw the line?

Now, this is a tricky problem. The reason our timpanist doesn't want to hit the bell of the drum is that timpani are a) hugely expensive and b) more fragile than you might imagine. The drum wasn't designed to be struck anywhere except the head, and even a small dent in the kettle can affect the quality of sound. But Ted's also right that musicians can be awfully whiny about unconventional methods of playing their instruments, and some musicians are more squirrelly than others, so it's nearly impossible for a composer to find that imaginary line when dealing with an ensemble as large as a symphony orchestra.

Just for instance, a few weeks ago, on the program Sarah conducted, the Shchedrin piece called for some of the string players to rap the sticks of our bows on the edge of our music stands (which are made of either metal or hard plastic) in a fast rhythmic pattern for about 15 seconds. I knew immediately that I couldn't do this. My primary bow, which I purchased from MN Orch violist Myrna Rian when she retired a couple of years back, is worth over $16,000 (more than my viola, actually,) and is my most prized possession. (I also haven't finished paying it off yet.) It's made of rare Brazilian pernambuco wood, which is uniquely stiff yet flexible, but still as fragile as you would expect a thin dowel of hardwood to be. When Myrna owned it, she never even played col legno with it. I do (gently,) but I draw the line at thwacking it repeatedly against a sharp edge.

Ordinarily, I might have switched to one of my backup bows for the piece (I have two others, one of which I might be willing to risk against the stand,) but the Shchedrin is a fairly tricky piece, and I wasn't comfortable trying to perform it on a less than stellar piece of equipment. So instead, I armed myself with a sturdy pencil, and knocked that against my stand in the performances instead. (Since pencils are shorter than bows, this also made my rhythm much more accurate, too.) I would say that more than half the viola section did the same.

Still, my refusal to execute the passage exactly as the composer wrote it doesn't mean that I think he shouldn't have written it. These things tend to be situational, and most of the time, if a musician balks at a direction in the score, a suitable compromise can be found. So I generally think that composers are better off asking for exactly what they want, but being prepared to negotiate later if necessary.

Minneapolis Overrun With Composers!

I'll be writing more about the Minnesota Orchestra's vaunted Composer Institute later in the week, as the orchestra itself joins the festivities and starts rehearsing the seven works that will make up this Friday's FutureClassics concert, the Institute's culminating event. (Get your ridiculously affordable tickets here.)

But if you'd like to follow along with our participating composers as they struggle through what will undoubtedly be one of the most exhausting and information-packed weeks of their young professional lives, you can check in over at the excellent NewMusicBox website, where New York-based composer Ted Hearne and St. Olaf College composer-in-residence Justin Merritt are blogging the week. If they're anything like the blogger/composers NewMusicBox has tapped for this duty in past years, they'll have no shortage of opinions, and likely a few things to say about the experience of working with us jaded, cynical professional musicians. Stay tuned...

Language Barrier

In yesterday's post, I talked a bit about conductors and arrangers who "speak the language" of orchestra musicians, and how important that can be to the success of a non-classical orchestra performance. And that got me thinking back to an uncomfortable experience I had several years ago, during one of the early years of our Composers' Institute.

The folks who run the Institute make a point of trying to select as widely varied a group of young composers as they can to participate in the week of seminars, rehearsals, and performances, which means that we in the orchestra get the chance to engage with a lot of different schools of musical thought in a single concert. Some of the composers we see are ultra-serious types, whose music reflects a deep commitment to academic rigor and complex multi-layered composition. Others are more outward looking, if no less serious about their craft, and it's not at all unusual to dive into a piece that looks technically daunting, only to find that you're playing a deconstructed riff from a '70s funk band, or some such. And a select few of our visiting composers come at the work using an entirely different musical vocabulary than the one we're used to.

It was one of this last group that I encountered several years ago, when I'd been asked, along with violinist Stephanie Arado, to lead a seminar for the institute composers on upper string writing. The idea was for us to go through each participant's composition line by line, ask them questions about why they chose to write certain passages in a certain way, and help (if we could) in making their music clearer and more idiomatic for the musicians who would be playing it.

The seminar was going fine - I'm always amazed by how open most composers are to constructive criticism, and how eager they are to engage with musicians, qualities which are not always reciprocated by performers - until we turned to a work that had baffled me when I first looked at it. This was a jazz composition, scored for orchestra, but written almost entirely in the musical language of jazz.

This was a problem. Classical musicians, string players in particular, are almost never conversant in jazz, partly because we usually don't need to be, but mostly because, unlike rock music or country or showtunes, all of which are fairly simple for an experienced musician of any kind to grasp and play, jazz is hugely complicated and difficult to play, just like classical music. Unless you've spent a serious amount of time studying it, you're just not going to be very good at playing it. (I studied jazz on the side for a couple of years in college, and I'd still be considered below beginner level in my understanding and ability.)

There are, of course, ways to work around this gulf if you really want to hear an orchestra play jazz. Duke Ellington did it very successfully, by writing out jazz scores in purely classical-style notation, and all but removing improvisation from the mix. And countless composers use elements of jazz in their orchestral music. But what never changes is that, in order for the orchestra to play it the way you want it, you pretty much have to write it out exactly as you want the sounds to come out of the instruments. When you have a combo of 3-5 jazz musicians playing a tune, improvisation and spontaneous creativity are a natural thing. When you have 16 first violins who all have to play in unison to avoid complete aural chaos, you just can't have folks wandering off on their own.

The composer in our seminar wasn't having any of this, though. When Stephanie and I queried him as to what he was actually after in writing his score in a manner that classical musicians would have great difficulty reading (some chunks, in which he had simply written in chord changes, were completely outside our ability to interpret,) he began an extended rant on the narrowness of the classical music education system, and said that it was the responsibility of orchestra musicians to diversify their knowledge.

I quickly agreed with him, and I believe Stephanie did, as well. Conservatories don't offer nearly enough diversity of instruction, and I've always thought that orchestras in general would have a far stronger sense of rhythm and ensemble if every music student was required to study jazz. But this was neither here nor there, we said to our apoplectic composer, when you've written a piece of music that you want to be performed by an existing orchestra, today, under today's conditions. You know for a fact that they can't really execute what you're asking them to with the notation you've chosen to use, so why not look for a way to say what you want to say, using the orchestra's language?

He was furious, insisting that it wasn't his job to limit himself as a creator of music simply because musicians were too lazy to look beyond their comfort zone. I tried to calm the situation by asking whether he meant for the orchestra to fail, whether the meta-statement he wanted to make with the music was, "I have given you a piece that you can't play because you lack context, and this should make you curious about what else might exist in the world that you don't know about." No, he insisted, that wasn't it at all. He wanted the piece played as written, and he saw no reason other than stubborn disinterest that it couldn't be done.

I wish I could say that we resolved this - Aaron Kernis, our new music advisor who runs much of the Institute, made some valiant attempts to bridge the gap and achieve some small changes in the scoring that would at least give the orchestra a toehold to cling to. But in the end, we were in a stalemate. It was as if I had walked into one of the better taquerias down on Lake Street and complained loudly that few of the employees there seemed to speak English. In the larger scheme of things, immigrants to America will probably be better off learning English, yes, but that's irrelevant to my immediate quest to order lunch, which even my non-Spanish speaking self would be perfectly capable of doing under the circumstances.

In the end, the orchestra read the piece (this was thankfully before the era in which we began holding a public performance at the end of the Institute) as written. And we more or less failed utterly to play it correctly, sabotaged as we were by our own limited knowledge, and the immovable ideology of the composer. Pity.

Embracing What's Next

An e-mail dropped into my inbox this afternoon from one of our hardworking artistic staffers, Beth Cowart, detailing the schedule for this year's edition of the Minnesota Orchestra's Composer Institute. I blogged about the Institute last fall, shortly after we launched the Inside the Classics site, and every year, I'm amazed by how much work the composers we feature and our staff guiding them go through in a single week.

The public only sees one night of the institute - the final performance of all the featured works - but the composers are here for eight days or more, attending a dizzying array of seminars, Q & As, and training sessions on everything from how to write idiomatically for bassoon to how to deal with copyright and licensing issues. And somewhere in there, they get to hear their work rehearsed, picked over, and performed by a major orchestra.

Earlier this year, the American Composers Forum, which is based in St. Paul and has been a major partner in making the Institute what it is today, put together a video showing some of last year's highlights, as well as interviews with the composers, Osmo, and our concertmaster, Jorja Fleezanis, who is well known as a major advocate for new music. It's well worth a look...

Kagel's Finale

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

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

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

Oberlin percussionists performing Kagel's Dressur

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

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

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

Cutting remarks

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

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

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

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

Future music

We're inordinately proud at the announcement this past Monday of a BMI foundation "Outstanding Musical Citizen Award" that went to our very own Beth Cowart and Aaron Kernis for their work as co-directors of the Minnesota Orchestra Composers Institute.

The Minnesota Orchestra’s Composers Institute is a program unique in the orchestra world; each year 7-9 composers are given the opportunity to have their works performed by the Orchestra in our FutureClassics! Concert following an intense week with the Orchestra, Aaron Kernis (our composer-in-residence) and Osmo. For the 2008 incarnation of the Composers Institute we received over 150 applications, a huge stack of scores by anyone’s standard. Of course winnowing this down to the lucky 8 or so composers is an arduous process, one which required a 12-hour day for the panel of judges which, this year, included me.

Conductors tend to have an abundance of new scores pass their desks; often composers send their music unsolicited in an effort to get their works out and seen. In addition, my position at the Curtis Institute requires me to work on a consistent basis with young composers (students and graduates) from Curtis as well as the University of Pennsylvania. And a few weeks back, during an epic day at the American Music Center in New York, I perused over 70 scores of composers ranging in age from 18 to 55.

Apart from the excitement of deciding on those winning scores, the experience was fascinating in that I was able to pore over new scores with some esteemed colleagues and discuss what we saw. All of the panelists remarked on a trend; pieces that relied on skilled and colorful orchestration that sometimes revealed a paucity of actual musical ideas. Writing a symphonic score requires expertise in two distinct areas; compositional skill (the ability to put together nuanced musical ideas within a coherent structure) and mastery of instrumentation (a facility in distributing the aforementioned musical material amongst the different instruments of the orchestra). Ideally, both skills are interconnected and equal, but if this group of composers is any indication, the current tendency is to highlight well-developed orchestration skills over complex musical content.

I’m not sure to what we can attribute this trend, although I have my theory about the influence of culture and technology.

First, the technology. Most composers eventually input their music for engraving via programs like Finale or Sibelius. These programs provide instant playback of an input score, allowing the composer to hear a reasonable representation of what they have written. While this is a fantastic tool, I have observed some composers writing directly via these programs, ie, doing without initial thematic/harmonic sketches or even overarching structural ideas. Because these programs are so convenient to use, perhaps there is the temptation to do without the significant step of working and reworking thematic ideas in the mind's ear and via written sketch, which I've always found to help truly internalize something that you're working on. It's easy enough to move around a slew of notes on a computer screen, push playback and see if it sounds pretty; I've done it myself. But does this ease of execution perhaps allow us a little intellectual laziness?

The cultural impact I've observed is the tremendous influence of film music (which many of my composer friends are keenly interested in, as it can be quite lucrative!). The best symphonic film music naturally uses orchestral colors to full advantage, and this has certainly worked its way into our collective consciousness. And it's gotten to the point where we can point at a young composer's score and say, "Hey, look, a Williams moment", where a sweep of harp and percussion, decorative high woodwind figures and a brass chord voicing are an unmistakable (and perhaps not entirely conscious) mimicking of the great film composer John Williams (whose music, incidentally, I've loved since I first heard his score to "Star Wars" as a kid.)

Or perhaps it just happened to be this batch of scores I saw. But while I certainly don't want to make sweeping generalizations, it seems to me that while in the past one would have to develop substantial compositional chops before attempting a large scale orchestra piece, it has, via technology and the ready availability of recorded music, become plausible for composers to take a shot at such a piece much earlier in their development.

I pondered composition at one point - I did my BA in composition at Harvard - but I found it wasn't for me. I felt uneasy creating something and then giving it away to a performer to bring to life, even if, ironically, I was the performer, conducting my own work. For me it created too much of a disconnect; and, besides, I always liked it much better the way it sounded in my mind's ear (does that make sense to anyone but me?). And I found composition to be such difficult work; it's too easy to become self-consciously avant garde, or to rely on a saccharine tonality, or to flounder around with minimalist techniques. It takes far more to actually find your own unique voice.

I'm happy to report that there were indeed some very unique and personal voices in that pile of scores, and I look forward to hearing them brought to life by the Minnesota Orchestra next fall!

Cutting Room Floor: Validation & Legacy

Some musical works that we think of as masterpieces today were given a decidedly rocky reception on their first performance. (As we demonstrated in dramatic fashion at our January Inside the Classics concerts, Tchaikovsky's violin concerto was one such piece.) But Copland's Appalachian Spring was not only an instant hit on the concert stage, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1945. Which got me wondering what else had won the Pulitzer during the musically tumultuous 20th century.

The music Pulitzer was awarded for the first time only two years before Copland won it, and William Schumann was the first recipient. (Schumann's music is not frequently performed these days, but he was extremely popular with orchestral audiences in the mid-20th century.) In 1944, it was Howard Hanson (another too frequently forgotten composer) taking the prize for his fourth symphony. (Hanson's best known symphony was his second, which the Minnesota Orchestra will coincidentally be performing next season.) Other familiar names capturing honors in the Pulitzer's first decade included Charles Ives, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Walter Piston.

If the initial ten or fifteen winners have anything in common, it's that the majority of them fell outside the musical avant garde that was fast overtaking concert music at the time. Germany's Arnold Schoenberg, whom we'll be discussing at next week's Inside the Classics concerts, had thrown down the atonal gantlet with his system of 12-tone composition decades before, and by the 1950s, composers had well and truly splintered into multiple movements, some of which clung to traditional models of tonality even as others disdained anything that average audience members might actually enjoy listening to.

The avant garde may have been fighting their way to the fore of the compositional profession as early as the 1940s (or even earlier, if you count such luminaries as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Berg as members,) but it took the Pulitzers a while to catch up. The first significant work of seriously atonal music that I see on the list is from 1960, when Elliott Carter won for his second string quartet. (In general, I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the atonal music that was written mid-century, but Carter's string quartets, like Bartok's, are truly masterworks, and did a lot to advance both composition and performance of chamber music.) Interestingly, the 1962 award went to Robert Ward, who rejected 12-tone and atonal music as "boring," for his operatic version of The Crucible, which is still regularly performed by companies the world over. And while the Pulitzer committee toyed with the avant garde a bit in the '60s (Leslie Barrett won in 1967, George Crumb in '68,) it stayed largely away from the most "out there" compositions of the era.

But then, in 1970, the committee decided to jump headfirst into the new, and gave the award to Charles Wuorinen, for his synthesizer symphony, Time's Encomium. There are those in the music business who will tell you that this was the moment when concert music in America truly went off the rails and lost popular audiences forever. (I may not disagree - I generally despise Wuorinen's music, and most of what he stands for as a composer.) There are others who would insist that it was only when Wuorinen was legitimized in the eyes of the musical establishment that those of us in the hidebound, old-fashioned orchestra world finally began paying attention to the important changes underway in our profession.

For most of the 1970s, the Pulitzer would go to an avant garde composer; not a surprise, given what was going on in America's larger culture during that decade of experimentation and rebellion. (One of the exceptions to the rule was Minnesota's own Dominick Argento, a staunch melodist who won in 1975 for From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, a song cycle premiered at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis.) But in the '80s, things throttled back a bit as composers began to emerge from decades of intense pressure to reject any idea that reeked of the past. By 1987, when John Harbison won the Pulitzer for The Flight Into Egypt, it seemed that tonality and atonality were on their way to a reconciliation.

The last couple of decades have firmed up that idea, at least as far as the Pulitzers are concerned. A new generation of American composers, from Aaron Jay Kernis to John Corigliano, won the award for compositions that embraced traditional melody and harmony without sacrificing intellectual content. Some composers who had never gone away during the decades of experimentation (John Adams, for instance, who won in 2003 for a symphony inspired by the 9/11 attacks) experienced career resurgences. And in 2007, there was an even more positive sign: a jazz score, Ornette Coleman's Sound Grammar, won the Pulitzer for the very first time. (Jazz legend Wynton Marsalis had won the award in 1997, but it was for a classical composition.)

A lot gets made these days about the collapse of traditional barriers between musical genres, and certainly, embracing jazz in 2007 doesn't exactly make the Pulitzer committee a risk-taking bunch. But just as orchestras (the biggest, costliest, and most unwieldy ensembles of the music world) are generally an important bellwether of which trends are truly here to stay in the classical world, the Pulitzers tell us a lot about which composers may (and I stress may) stand the test of time. The full list of winners is here if you want to peruse it yourself, and I'd love to hear about any winners that leapt out at you, or any you find incomprehensible...

Rode Hard And Put Up Wet

Just because I love it, here's a clip of Brooklyn Rider, a great (and more than slightly unconventional) New York-based string quartet playing an arrangement of the classic Mexican folk song, La Muerte Chiquita. The arrangement is by Osvaldo Golijov, the Argentinian-born Israeli composer who now makes his home outside of Boston, and may well make the history books as the preeminent composer of this era.



Brooklyn Rider, by the way, is made up of brothers Colin and Eric Jacobsen on violin and cello, respectively, with violinist Johnny Gandelsman and violist Nicholas Cords. The ensemble grew out of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble, and has been making some serious noise in various locales in the Northeast. They also inaugurated a recital series in Stillwater, Minnesota two summers back, and this summer, they'll be in residence at Minneapolis's MacPhail Center for Music for a couple of weeks in June.

There seems to be an ever-growing number of small ensembles like this one out there in the music world these days, seamlessly blending the worlds of classical, folk, rock, and who knows how many other genres. It may seem far removed from what those of us who make our living in the big granddaddy ensembles do, but the reality is that some fusion of what we do and what they do could well represent the most likely future of the professional music world. At least we can hope so.

Want more? I thought so...

Music To Go With The Words

For anyone who was intrigued by my last post about Stephen Paulus's oratorio, but didn't get a chance to see it live this week at Orchestra Hall, there's one more chance to hear it before the CD we're currently making comes out late this year. Minnesota Public Radio taped Tuesday's performance, and will be airing it tonight in our normal Friday night slot on all MPR Classical stations across Minnesota and the Upper Midwest. (The flagship is KSJN 99.5fm in the Twin Cities, and if you're outstate, or in many parts of Wisconsin, Iowa, either Dakota, the Michigan UP, or Idaho, you can find your local affiliate here. MPR also streams live 24/7, so you can hear the broadcast online as well.)

The concert starts at 8pm Central, and includes a stirring first half featuring clarinetist Burt Hara performing a movement from Olivier Messaien's Quartet For The End Of Time, cellist Janet Horvath soloing in Bruch's Kol Nidrei, and the string section of the Minnesota Orchestra playing Steve Heitzeg's tribute to the victims of war and genocide, Wounded Field.

A few blogs have written about the performance as well, which also happened the last time we played this piece. Over at MSP Mag, Lani Willis called it "a gut-wrenching experience I expect to be digesting for a very long while." (She meant it in a good way, I think.) And those of you music diehards who double as Twins fans (as I do) may have been surprised to see an extended post from the one and only TwinsGeek describing his daughter's experience as a member of the children's choir performing the oratorio with us. (Full disclosure: the Geek is an old friend of mine, and I've been known to pen articles on baseball and hockey from time to time in one or another of his various online and print publications.) His daughter's favorite part of the experience? "When Osmo pointed to us, and we standed up alone, and everyone clapped extra hard.” Well, naturally.