The phrase came to mind as I was flying back to Minneapolis last night (and in a decidedly non-Pythonian context) - I was putting Post-Its on my La Mer score to mark excerpts for our Inside the Classics concerts this week (fun arts and crafts!):
I've just finished a subscription week with the North Carolina Symphony (my "other" orchestra) and baritone (and dear friend) Randy Scarlata, a program of Liszt, Mahler and Dvorak. It's an interesting mental leap to go from a very standard concert format playing some great warhorses - with 4 rehearsals, to boot! - to an unconventional format where I'm worried about timing my music theory portion and making a smooth transition between talking and conducting and marking excerpts correctly...and making it all happen on a single rehearsal.
But the very challenge is what makes it fun, and I remind myself that one of the reasons I do the things I do is that I love the different-ness of it all.
Rested and refreshed from my week off (really, truly, an entire week! I have to remember how good this feels...).
To get back into the swing of things (blogging included), "rest and refreshment" in a very different context:
September 22, 1802
Gentlemen,
It was a most pleasant surprise to receive such a flattering letter from a part of the world where I could never have imagined that the products of my poor talents were known. But when I see that not only is my name familiar to you, but my compositions are performed by you with approval and satisfaction, the warmest wishes of my heart are fulfilled: to be considered a not wholly unworthy priest of this sacred art by every nation where my works are known. You reassure me on this point as regards your fatherland, but even more, you happily persuade me -- and this cannot fail to be a real source of consolation to me in my declining years -- that I am often the enviable means by which you, and so many other families sensible of heartfelt emotion, derive, in their homely circle, their pleasure -- their enjoyment. How reassuring this thought is to me! Often, when struggling against the obstacles of every sort which oppose my labors; often, when the powers of mind and body weakened, and it was difficult for me to continue in the course I had entered on;-- a secret voice whispered to me, "There are so few happy and contented people here below; grief and sorrow are always their lot; perhaps your labors will once be a source from which the care-worn, or the man burdened with affairs, can derive a few moments' rest and refreshment." This was indeed a powerful motive to press onwards, and this is why I now look back with cheerful satisfaction on the labors expended on this art, to which I have devoted so many long years of uninterrupted effort and exertion...
Hip-hop might just beat out classical music as the most misunderstood and unfairly maligned musical genre in existence today. When I tell other classical musicians that I'm a hip-hop fan, the reaction tends to range from blank stares to outright revulsion. Only once or twice have I ever gotten a positive reaction of any kind. And that's a real shame, because the creativity that's out there in the rap world at the moment is truly staggering, and compared with genres like pop, rock, and country, the level of musical complexity and lyrical elegance that hip-hop employs is extremely high.
So why do so many people think rap is nothing more than violent, misogynistic garbage aimed at getting suburban white kids to dress and act like gang members from South Central LA? Well, let me turn that question around for a moment. Why do so many people think that classical music is nothing more than repetitive waltzes and elevator music played for snoozing rich people? The answer in both cases is, "Because that's the only part of the genre that gets on TV on a regular basis."
If you're not already a fan of classical music and don't know where to find the good stuff, Andre Rieu and whatever other garbage PBS airs during their endless begging sessions might be the only classical music you hear in a given month. Similarly, if you go to BET looking for hip-hop music, yes, you will find a parade of offensively talentless rappers who buy their backing beats from other people, treat women like their pets, and embrace the whole Thug Life thing. And here's the important part: real hip-hop musicians feel the same way about the rappers on BET that you and I feel about Andre Rieu. These are musical hacks who have found a comfortable niche that makes them a lot of money. Which is fine - not everyone has to be edgy and daring - but they are not to be confused with shining examples of the genre they purport to represent.
Now, I'm not one of those sorts that believes that the election of Barack Obama was some sort of magical healing balm that is going to eventually allow Americans to put all our racial baggage behind us, but I do take a certain amount of hope from the fact that he has made a point of bringing quality art and music back to the White House, and that he seems to understand that hip-hop owes as much of its legacy to slam poetry and civil rights as it does to the Sugarhill Gang. I mean, honestly: Alexander Hamilton?
But it works, doesn't it? And it comes off as passionate and real, not preachy and uptight, the way a song in any other musical genre would if it were about the same subject. By the way, that's Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Tony Award-winning actor/writer responsible for the hit Broadway show In The Heights, which makes liberal use of hip-hop, as well as a range of other genres.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that we tend to brand unfamiliar music genres in our mind as somehow being reflective not of the artistry of the people making the music, but of the stereotypes we associate with the audience for that genre. Classical music goes in the "stuffy and elitist" bin not because it is, but because we have an image seared into our brain of stuffy elitist people listening to classical music. Hip-hop goes in the "violent and angry" bin not because it is, but because we have an image of gangbangers and wannabes listening to hip-hop.
Maybe hip-hop just isn't your thing, and that's perfectly fine. Bruckner leaves a lot of people cold, too. I'll personally never be a big fan of Motown, though I can recognize that it's quality stuff. But I'm always amazed at the number of musically sophisticated people who've never really even given rap a chance to impress them. If you're one of them, and want to rectify that, Minnesota's actually an excellent place to start...
I'm back in the Twin Cities and settling into my new house - the movers arrived yesterday with several tons of belongings (pianos and scores are very, very heavy), and with the cable installed I finally have internet access! I managed to unpack most of my books today and am in the midst of the arduous process of reordering, recataloging and reshelving several hundred scores.
Often, hearing just a few moments of an old, familiar song on the radio (80's nostalgia, anyone?), we're taken back into a particular moment in life - the summer of a first love, a memorable high school dance - (for me, 50 Cent's "In Da Club" takes me back to a difficult couple of months during the messy dissolution of an orchestra with which I was working, but that's a whole other story...) . I experience something similar when I merely glance at certain scores, because they bring back powerful memories of when I first encountered them.
Dvorak - Symphony #8: the first piece I ever conducted, at 16. My high school orchestra director handed me a baton and took off to take a phone call. I was both utterly enthralled and completely terrified; it's the moment I got totally hooked.
Chausson - Symphony in Bb Major: on the podium at the Monteux School in Maine many years ago, being yelled at by Charles Bruck. One of the very few times I've had to fight back tears on the podium.
Bach - Brandenburg Concerto #1 onstage at the Curtis Institute with an all-star cast of classmates; extraordinary music-making, but more importantly, an extraordinary sense of cameraderie and a unity of purpose that one rarely experiences. The death of one of the performers several years ago only adds to the poignancy of the memory.
Brahms - Symphony #4: a subscription debut with a professional orchestra during my final student years; I had carefully annotated my own parts, and the concertmaster and I came to loggerheads with the bowings for the third movement. "It's backwards!" he said; "But it puts the accent and the long note in the right place!" I replied. I won the argument - after several rehearsals, I finally won the concertmaster's approval.
Strauss - Egyptian March: one of the pieces I conducted on a concert the night after my father died. I've done everything else on the program since then; subsequently, the memory of that awful period has been erased from them. But this is a piece I've not encountered since, and hearing it takes me back to a very dark time.
Stravinsky - Petrouchka: first heard as a young kid on "Dance in America" as part of a tribute to Nijinsky featuring Rudolf Nureyev. I had never been so mesmerized in my (at that point, very short) life, and hearing the whirling exuberance of the opening carnival tableau always reminds me of the sense of thrill and wonder I felt then.
It's been a ridiculously busy couple of weeks moving my household (and husband) half-way across the country, an effort not without it's stresses. But there's a deep reassurance in opening box after box of my old friends, a flitting memory accompanying each, as I ease each volume onto the shelf.
My former colleague over at ArtsJournal.com, Laura Collins-Hughes, has detected a noticable uptick in the number of people who seem to be reading and talking about Dickens lately, and she speculates that it may be that the gloomy, moralizing Dickens is the ideal author for Hard Times. Which is interesting, because I have to confess that Hard Times make me want to read David Sedaris and watch old Eddie Izzard routines until I forget that we're in Hard Times.
I wonder, too, about the music people choose to listen to when the real world is getting to be a bit much to bear. Does it make you more likely to look for something deep, dark, and meaningful on a concert program, or something escapist and light? What's the better cure for an economic malaise and global unrest, something that socks you in the stomach but makes you think, or something that lets you just drift away from reality for a while? Mahler 6 or The Marriage of Figaro? Britten's War Requiem or Bernstein's West Side Story? Sinead O'Connor or Sonny & Cher?
More importantly, does anyone's choice really change that much when times aren't tough? If you answered Mozart, Bernstein, and the Bonos above, would you really be likely to drop $50 on an evening of Mahler if your 401(k) was looking a little better and there was peace in the Middle East? Or are we just who we are in our cultural preferences, regardless of global circumstances?
One of the few pleasures of travel these days is that the endless flight delays at least afford me the luxury of catching up on my reading. At the top of the stack this afternoon is the most current edition of Harvard Magazine (insert Ivy League joke here), which includes an article on John Adams' recent autobiography, Hallelujah Junction (which will soon be at the top of my reading stack!).
Although certainly one of the most respected and recognized composers of his generation, Adams has often taken a critical bashing. A minimalist aesthetic isn’t for everyone, I know (though it would be unfair to say that Adams is simply a minimalist - it’s merely a jumping-off point for him); but it’s hard to deny that, beneath the surface gloss, there is a distinct and direct musical voice at work.
Adams frequently cites his early musical influences - Rodgers and Hammerstein, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin – influences not just from a stylistic standpoint but from a pedagogic one as well: “I made more progress in my command of harmonic practice by reproducing these pop songs [by the Doors, the Beach Boys, and others] from memory at the piano than I ever did by my forced marches through the figured bass treatises.”
But, as Adams himself says, “I am not a vernacular composer”; rather, he’s a classical composer with multiple points of reference. To him this is an important distinction, as he finds that much contemporary classical music is “complex and self-referential. For me, though, inspiration comes from trying to connect with an audience. Music is fundamentally the art of feeling.”
Which, for those espousing a more European/avante garde aesthetic, might be a radical statement. Emotion in music should be an obvious given, but it’s a complex premise for both composers and performers. From a composer’s perspective, the question might be, should one simply try to express a personal feeling? Or is the duty of a creative artist to tap into a more universal zeitgeist? How does the expression of a personal emotion translate when put into a performers hands? From the performers viewpoint, does one’s expression of the music need be tied to the (assumed) original emotional intent of the composer? Or does one inject one's own personal sentiment? And how does that all translate to the listener – the emotional intent of a composer filtered through the prism of meticulously organized (and notated) sound and interpreted by yet a separate entity?
In times of emotional crisis, the old adage has it that it’s not as important to know exactly what to do as it is to simply care, and that maxim holds up well in this exchange as well – or, as Harvard Magazine puts it:
One spring night in 1976, Adams was driving his Karmann Ghia convertible through the Sierra foothills and listening to “Dawn” and “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” from Götterdämmerung. “I said out loud, almost without thinking, ‘He cares.’” It was a matter of the sensual and emotional power of harmonic movement; for Adams, it was also a matter of sincerity.
“Caring”, on the surface of it, seems so wide-ranging and ambiguous, particularly from a performer’s perspective. Music-making is certainly a visceral experience, and there are those who throw themselves into it with extreme physicality – a way of showing that one “cares”. Yet for some musicians, this very visible expression of caring smacks of insincere showmanship. Grandstanding is a disservice to the actual music; by the same token, many concertgoers find it engaging from a purely visual standpoint, which then perhaps makes them “care” more about the performance. But is this really the kind of “caring” we want to encourage?
Some artists, however, while equally physically demonstrative, are not so to the detriment of the music; it’s hard to qualify what makes the difference, but for me it goes back to that matter of sincerity. I’ve long admired Yo-Yo Ma for his utter involvement when he plays – there’s something both selfless and intensely personal at the same time. And for me, he’s one of those rare artists who is clearly engaged not just with the music but with everyone else on stage, and with the audience as well. It’s a kind of total immersion in the experience of music that results from sincerely caring.
A sense of caring applies not just to individual artists, but to ensembles as well. I had a recent guest conducting experience where an oboist was playing, during a concert, with legs crossed (a big no-no – it’s kind of an “I couldn’t care less” stance). Needless to say, the playing wasn’t so engaging.
The quality that I love most about my home band, the Minnesota Orchestra, is that it collectively throws itself into every performance, be it the first concert in a subscription run or the last concert in an 6-Young-Peoples-Concerts week. The level of commitment and engagement is always inspiring; it’s absolutely tangible to the listener, and it’s a constant reminder to me that when we care about what we do onstage, the audience mirrors the sentiment right back to us. And that wonderful, wordless communication is why we all chose a life in music.
Pianist Stephen Hough, who's been dazzling our audiences lately (and will be doing so again this week, as we work on a continuing project to record all of Tchaikovsky's piano concertos live in concert for a CD set to be released next year,) is someone I've always admired greatly as a musician, but never thought much about as a person. This is pretty common for an orchestra musician - for the most part, we don't get to know our soloists personally. (After all, since there are close to 100 of us, and we're only on the same stage with a soloist for a few hours, it would be positively oppressive for any number of us to try to engage socially with a guest.)
But Minnesota Public Radio's Brian Newhouse, who hosts our weekly live radio broadcasts, frequently gets the chance to sit down with each of our soloists, and occasionally, he surprises me with the direction he takes the interview. For instance, it seems that the man I've thought of only as a supremely gifted pianist also has a deeply religious side that he's quite happy to talk about. He's even written a book about it.
This is a pretty unusual thing in the classical music world. Not musicians having a religious life, of course, but being willing to talk publicly about it. Religion has become such a contentious issue in recent years that I think most of us would no sooner speak to the press about it than we would offer up our views on presidential politics or Roe vs. Wade.
But Hough has a remarkably easy way of talking about his faith, and it comes across as so genuine that I can't imagine anyone ever begrudging him his desire to share it. The whole conversation's worth listening to, but here's my favorite line. As soon as I heard it, I thought of a cousin of mine who's been a Maryknoll missionary in South Korea for most of his adult life, and who would probably agree with every word...
"What's so wonderful about spiritual life is that there are really no experts in it, and I think the ones who spend their whole lives doing it feel like beginners..."
Sarah and I have mentioned once or twice before that, despite being a global industry, the music world actually feels very small, and you tend, over the course of your career, to run into the same folks over and over, sometimes in the most unexpected places. When I started in the Minnesota Orchestra back in 2000, two of the first people I ran into on my first day of work were percussionist Kevin Watkins, who I'd known well at Oberlin Conservatory, and substitute violinist Dorris Dai (now with the Kansas City Symphony,) with whom I'd gone to summer camp in the late '80s and hadn't seen since. This kind of thing happens constantly, and the unexpected reunions can be a lot of fun, as well as an ever-lurking reminder that you'd better be careful whose toes you step on in a business where you're almost certain to see everyone you've ever met again someday.
I found myself thinking about this "small world" phenomenon last week, when I was talking to someone about the first major national music competition I ever took part in. It was my senior year of high school, and the competition in question was one of the bigger ones going at the time, sponsored by General Motors and Seventeen Magazine (there's a sponsorship combo, right?) with finals held at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan.
To be honest, I had little to no interest in the GM/17 shindig. I've never really understood the point of competitions that don't end with job offers, and I spent most of my time as a student coming up with clever ways to avoid them. But that year, my teacher was bound and determined that I was going to take a serious run at a serious competition, so we spent an afternoon in my high school's auditorium making the best tape I was capable of, and packed it off to the judges.
I was honestly shocked when I was invited to the national finals - since the age of ten, I'd been living in small-town Pennsylvania, and hadn't had a lot of opportunities to measure my abilities against the huge numbers of talented musicians who gather in big cities to play orchestra and chamber music every weekend. But invited I was, so, battling a nasty cold and a lingering disinterest, I packed myself off to Interlochen, there to spend the next week living with and competing against four other violists, a gang of violinists, plus flutists, horn players, and a few other assorted instrument groups I've forgotten.
To be blunt, it was not the greatest experience. First of all, the competition had a bizarre rule severely limiting our individual practice time once we arrived on site, and the rule was enforced by not allowing us to leave our assigned dormitory floor without a chaperone. Second, my cold morphed into full-on Martian Death Flu within hours of stepping off the plane, and I didn't stop hacking, wheezing, and sniffling for more than thirty seconds for the next week. Third, I wiped out of the finals on my 18th birthday, partly because the Death Flu was preventing me from hearing anything coming out of my instrument.
Still, as I was telling a friend this story last week, I started to think about the other finalists I'd met at Interlochen that winter, and I realized that, almost without exception, I know, off the top of my head, where every one of them is today, even the ones I haven't seen in over a decade. Because like me, they're all in the music world, and most of them are doing quite well for themselves, too. Of my fellow violists, one is living and playing for various ensembles in Berlin, one is the violist of one of America's fastest-rising string quartets (which, coincidentally, is performing in the Twin Cities this very evening,) and a third (the winner of the string division at GM/17 that year) is the assistant principal of the Boston Symphony and a much-respected soloist, which is saying something when your instrument is viola. Four of the five of us wound up attending college together for at least a year or two.
Going beyond the alto cleffers, one of the flutists I spent most of my time hanging out with in our dorm prison at Interlochen wound up in Minnesota only a couple of years after I arrived, where she became a member of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. And the sweet, unassuming horn player who no one knew what to make of when we arrived at the competition (but who wound up walking away with the well-deserved grand prize) is now the principal horn of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Oh, and just to drive home the small world point, she's also the sister-in-law of MN Orch tuba player Steve Campbell.
Musicians tend to take the close-knit nature of the business for granted after a while, but it never fails to amaze me that we can work in a business that more or less guarantees that the people we grow up knowing will be flung far and wide around the globe (you go where the work is, as the saying goes,) and yet, we never stop running into each other. It's definitely one of the fringe benefits of doing what we do for a living...
We're playing the Bruch violin concerto on this week's concerts with superstar violinist Leila Josefowicz, which is presenting an unusual opportunity for those of us in the orchestra to compare how two different musicians approach the same piece. Ordinarily, a couple of years will go by in between performances of even well-loved concertos, so our memory of the last soloist who played Concerto X will have faded by the time we play it with a new soloist. But in this case, we just played the Bruch with Joshua Bell on our European tour (no, you didn't miss it - we never played it in Minneapolis,) and the interpretations couldn't be more contrasting.
Obviously, both Josh and Leila are outstanding musicians, but they've taken very different approaches to the life of a traveling soloist. Josh, of course, is one of the acknowledged masters of the core violin repertoire, excells at giving audiences emotionally charged performances of warhorse concertos, and dabbles from time to time in "crossover" music. Leila spends a lot of her time and energy seeking out and performing complex contemporary music, and even when playing a piece as familiar as the Bruch, she always seems to be searching for a new way to approach the music.
If I had to sum up the two versions of the Bruch that we've been a part of this season, I'd say that Josh's version was pure comfort food - lush, warm tones, everything seeming to fit together seamlessly, the kind of performance that just washes over you effortlessly. Leila takes what I would call more of a connoisseur's approach to the same music, offering a complicated reading that forces the listener to engage intellectually as well as emotionally.
In fact, Leila gives much of the first movement a distinctly spiky and angular quality that I haven't heard anyone else try in this context. When I first listened to her play it on Wednesday morning, I wasn't entirely sure what effect she was going for, until the moment when the first movement dovetailed into the elegant and beautiful slow movement, and then I suddenly got it. By denying us some of the outright romance that most violinists bring to the first movement, she was making us crave the release that she knew was coming all along. And the simple lines and delicate textures of the slow movement, in turn, set up Leila's ferocious attack on the virtuosic and showy finale. Rather than feeling like three separate chunks of music, as concertos so often do, Leila's approach gives a distinct narrative flow to the entire work.
In the end, I wouldn't trade either Josh's or Leila's interpretation for the other - the Bruch is, I think, one of the more underrated violin concertos in the repertoire, in large part because it leaves so much room for the performer to interpret how it should be played. Getting to be a part of two distinctively different approaches in such quick succession is a rare treat.
I'm a little disappointed to be missing the Orchestra's Carnegie concert, but schedule intervenes, and after this week I won't be back to the Twin Cities until well into June. In the interim I get to spend a couple of very-much-needed weeks at home with my husband and dogs, as well as guest-conducting with a handful of symphonies - Eastern Connecticut, Atlanta, National.
This reminds me of a very interesting conversation a few weeks back with our principal percussionist, Brian Mount. After rehearsal one day he popped into my dressing room, sat down, and said, "I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but you, like every other conductor who's on our podium, conduct ahead of the orchestra. What's up with that? Is it just us, or is every orchestra like this? I can't tell, because at this point this is the only orchestra I know."
I hadn't really thought of it this way before. Not the beating ahead part - all orchestras play on varying degrees of delay, and it's something you get used to, to a certain extent. Usually it's a matter of finding just the point where you keep momentum up without being so far ahead that it starts muddying up the beat or the musical intent. But how would the average orchestra musician know if this was normal or not? After all, if you're in a full-time professional orchestra, it's unlikely that you spend any amount of time working with other orchestras, so your understanding of orchestral playing becomes totally dependent on your job.
My answer to Brian was, no, it's not necessarily just any orchestra, although our Orchestra has a very strong tendency to take time at the end of a phrase and start the next phrase at a slightly slower tempo - the effect is a long and steady slowdown over the course of a piece - and to counteract that, I'll push ahead when needed. There were a couple of groups that I've conducted recently - LA Phil in particular pops to mind - where the orchestra tended to be more on top of the beat. Every group is different. But then, how would you know unless you've experienced the variety?
There's an upside and downside to this. The upside is the individual character ensembles can develop over and extended time of playing together (like the plummy MO string sound - which, incidentally, is also a contributing factor to the whole slowing-down thing...). The downside is that just as much as good habits can be reinforced, bad habits can be institutionally ingrained.
A conductor with an active guesting career has built-in checks and balances; it certainly keeps me honest. One might get a little lazy working with the same group for an extended period - musicians can figure out a conductor's strange habits or lapses in technique and learn to work around them. But take that sloppy technique to a new orchestra and you'll probably find yourself in some trouble.
Academia quite wisely prevents burnout and encourages the furthering of knowledge through sabbaticals; wouldn't a similar situation, in an ideal world, benefit orchestra musicians? How about a mandated musician swap every 5 years? It would certainly be a learning experience for everyone, and keep viewpoints from becoming too singular...
In a yoga class the other day, the instructor reminded us that there was no single correct way to execute the triangle pose (trikonasana). I was having a particularly hard time of it - it was one of those days where I was feeling distracted and very out of tune with myself, and the whole breathing-with-movement thing on which yoga is predicated was not coming easily. As I eased down into the extension, she spoke again: "There is no single trikonasana; there are an infinite number because each of us individually is different from each other, and none of us will ever do trikonasana the same way we do today."
This got me thinking about music (OK, I confess, just about anything gets me thinking about music, but that's what musicians do). I've alway wondered about performing a piece multiple times, and how different it feels each time, even if a recording of each iteration might have very little ostensible variance. I end up doing a lot of repetition with the Orchestra when I'm doing Young People's Concerts (which we'll be doing this coming week), and even with the pieces that the Orchestra has performed a billion times ("Ruslan and Ludmilla" Overture comes to mind) it is never the same over two (sometimes back-to-back) performances.
But what if those performances were identical, would two different audiences react to them in the same way? And would the musicians creating those identical performances actually experience them in identical ways, or can you duplicate a musical product while having a disparate personal experience internally?
This reminded me of a post over at "On An Overgrown Path" about the very nature of music. What is a piece of music? Is it the notes on the page? Is it what the composer heard in his head as he was writing down those notes on a page? Is it and aggregate of all the performance ever of that given piece? Or is it the last performance of it that you heard? The conclusion here is that: "The answer must be that the Matthew Passion, or any composition, is simply the music we hear in our head at any one moment in time - whether the source be a score, a live performance, a recording, a memory, or our imagination."
Which I rather like. The post goes on to talk about the impermance of music (with which I also agree) - the delight in music is that it's ephemeral, ungraspable and utterly unquantifiable. Every performance is a coming and going that only exists in that moment, and that's why we savor them.
I've started to dread getting up in the morning and turning on my computer to see the latest batch of bad economic news for orchestras and the arts in general rolling off the virtual presses. Obviously, times are tough all over, and no one who works in our business would ever have expected it to be spared given the global circumstances, but there's something about the steady, seemingly endless drumbeat of bad news from all corners of the industry that makes it hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Some days, the most optimistic thought I can muster is something dark and schadenfreudian like "Glad I'm not in that orchestra."
But the fact is, no matter how bad this economic malaise gets, or how long it lasts, we are eventually going to come through it, and most of us will not have been reduced to begging on Nicollet Mall or selling apples out of a wheelbarrow to survive. Even as we see the statistics on home foreclosures and corporate layoffs roll past us on the news every day, I think it's important to remember how many of us are still okay, and more importantly, in a position to help get things back on track.
Reality is a tough thing for an awful lot of people right now. But when I take a step back from the ball of navel-gazing fear that CNN wants to turn me into, here's the personal reality I need to focus on: Barring a truly unthinkable catastrophe within my organization, I am not in any danger of being laid off. Furthermore, even if I were to wind up taking a substantial pay cut (certainly a possibility) to help stabilize the orchestra's finances, it is almost inconceivable that it would render me unable to afford the extremely modest home I own. I have relatively little personal debt. I have no children to put through college. And I've had the opportunity to put some money away for emergencies.
In other words, I'm going to be okay. I'm not remotely wealthy, and never will be, but at a time like this, I start to feel awfully fortunate to have the limited stability I do. And watching the sandbags pile up in the Red River Valley this week, I've been struck by the generosity so many people will show at the slightest hint of the need for it, even as a lot of them could probably use some charity of their own.
So here's my plan. As of right now, I am done worrying about AIG's bonus payouts, President Obama's stimulus plan, or Governor Pawlenty's LGA cuts. I'm through shivering in my little news cave waiting for the sky to fall in, and I'm also done fearing, every time an orchestra agrees to a pay cut or a temporary furlough, that it means The End Of The Music World. Instead, I'm making a commitment to seek out the people and organizations whose work makes my life here in Minneapolis worth living, and support them on a far more consistent basis than I have in the past.
Specifically, instead of hoarding every dime I bring home in preparation for the apocalypse that isn't coming, I'm committing to going out and putting some of my income to good use at least twice a week. I'll buy tickets to a theater I've never attended before, or take a chance on going to see a new band at the Entry. I'll take advantage of all the museums and galleries that the Cities have to offer (and not on the days when they let everyone in for free.) And if, some weeks, I'm just too exhausted or overworked to contemplate an evening like that, I'll go buy a few new books from Magers & Quinn, plunk down a few bucks at a neighborhood wine bar, or invite friends to join me for dinner at one of the countlesslocally owned, chef-drivenrestaurants that make Minnesota unique.
You might say this is an easy commitment for me to make, since all I'm really promising is to pay people to entertain, educate, or feed me. You'd be exactly right. It's ridiculously easy, and I don't know why I ever allowed the Voices of Economic Doom to convince me that I shouldn't be doing it all the time. Because wouldn't I feel silly if, at the end of all this mortgage-backed-security-credit-default-swap-Wall-Street-vs.-Main-Street foolishness, I was left living in a world stripped of the art, music, and literature that I value, only to realize that I could have helped keep it alive?
Admit it: you'd feel silly, too. Now who's with me?
It’s easy to get caught up in the endless sweep of travel/play/eat/sleep now that we’re past the midway point in the Tour; there are more than a few bleary-eyed musicians (sometimes it seem like I'm seeing double, like the image above), and creeping exhaustion is getting to most of us. The schedule is tough – get up, eat, travel to a new city, eat, rehearse, change into concert clothes, perform, eat, sleep, repeat. But we’re also gaining a sort of collective momentum from performing repertoire over and over in different venues; what at first was jarring (“this hall sounds completely different from the one last night!”) has become a normal part of our everyday tour experience, and I think Osmo and the Orchestra have been giving fantastic performances.
It’s hard to be away and constantly on the move for so long, and the sense of unsettled unease that can arise from an itinerant schedule is compounded by the unsettled unease of the world these days. Let’s face it; these are uncertaintimes, and it feels like we are skirting total chaos on a daily basis. And for those of us who, during the tour, tune in to CNN or BBC at the airport or in our hotel rooms, it’s difficult no to get sucked into the vortex (although I’ve always felt that the advent of 24-hour news channels adds to – rather than alleviates – fear).
It’s not lost on me that here in Frankfurt, the financial and commercial capital of Germany and base of many international organizations, the Japanese department store, Mitsukoshi, across the street from the hotel is shuttered and empty – a sign of the times. And throughout our journey, I’ve seen more homeless on the streets since my last extended trip to Europe, just pre-9/11.
I don’t mean to overstate the doom and gloom – it is what it is. What interests me, however, is our role in all of this. So forgive me as I wax philosophical for a bit here.
We’ve been playing mostly in pretty well-sold houses – in particular, last night here in Frankfurt, the house manager said the hall was 90% full. And that simple fact, that amidst everything people still want to come to concerts, tells me something. But it’s the smaller things, the individual reactions, that speak volumes.
In Stuttgart I watched an elderly lady, prim in her widow’s black, listen raptly to the Sibelius Symphony, her eyes darting, as if taking in every detail onstage. In Berlin I watched a music student (at least I assumes he was a music student – unless everyone in Berlin walks around with manuscript paper) quietly taking notes during the Adams. And in Frankfurt I watched a bevy of young girls, thrilled to pieces after the Bruch Concerto, leaping to their feet as a group – a mini standing ovation.
The collective gasp of delight (and in Frankfurt, laughter) after the Adams tells me that the audience really gets it and is feeling the bubbling energy of the piece. The meaningful pause before the wall of applause (and curtain call after curtain call) tells me that the audience has fully taken the journey through the Nielsen Symphony.
I keep saying that concerts are one of the few live communal experiences we have left in our online/Netflix/iPod age, and now more than ever I’m aware of the need for people to gather and share in the very human experience of music. In uncertainty, we become even more acutely aware of the order, beauty and comfort of Art (with an capital “A”), because that’s what represents the best of what the human species does. Trying times will come and go, and as they say, the world keeps turning - but we cannot forget that it’s exactly that best stuff of the human species that keeps us going, what makes life something more than a mere act of survival.
I believe deeply in what I do as a musician, and I believe it even more when I feel the buzzing energy of a crowded concert hall in some far-off land and the inherent sense of commonality amidst our differences, even as half a dozen different languages are bouncing around the room. Our lasting legacy as a species cannot be enumerated simply by imposing edifices or amassed wealth – it is just as much in this organized collection of sound we call music, and its ability to bring us together in a fractured world. And it is this vitally important and uniting work that we have undertaken in our careers as musicians, and the work that we continue as our Tour draws to a close.
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...
Back around this same time of the year in 2004, when the Minnesota Orchestra was heading out for a major European tour, there was a fair amount of excitement among press and public about it, and the advance coverage we got (it was Osmo's first year as music director, so there was a certain audaciousness to an attempt to showcase our collaboration internationally after such a short time) bordered on breathless at times. I wrote an extensive blog about the tour for ArtsJournal.com, and the amount of attention it garnered from both the mainstream press and ordinary people following the tour seemed positively unreal.
It's decidedly different this time around, and not only because our orchestra's rise under Osmo's directorship has become something of an old story after five years. The fact is, with the world economy well and truly in the crapper, and everyone wondering how the fallout will affect each of us personally, it's an awkward time to be mounting something as big and flashy as an international orchestral tour. To a lot of folks on the outside, it might even seem insensitive. So why not just stay home and quietly wait for things to perk back up at least a little bit before we go gallivanting off around the globe?
The answer is both complex and simple at the same time. The simple answer is this: tours are planned years in advance, and to call off a tour that is already fully planned and funded would do untold economic damage to our orchestra, to each presenting organization that will be hosting us, to the thousands who have bought tickets, and most importantly, to every individual who works for any organization associated with the tour. As with any business hit by an unexpected wave of misfortune, it's the aftershocks that can do the most damage.
Our orchestra has had a policy in place for a number of years now that says that we do not pay for touring out of our general operating budget, which is the budget that the money we receive from ticket sales, endowment draws, and general contributions goes into. If we decide that a tour is a wise use of our time and resources, the money for that tour must be raised separately from our main budget, and the tour cannot be confirmed until that money is in place. In other words, we would actually hurt our financial position by not touring, since the money that's offered to us to pay for it cannot be used for any other purpose.
There's also an aspect of all this that I think sometimes gets lost in the shuffle when everything we hear on the news suggests that the world is circling the drain and we're all going down together. I thought of it recently when I read of a sharp exchange between a local reporter and an executive with the Minnesota Twins, who were unveiling the design of the multimillion dollar public plaza at their new ballpark in the Warehouse District. The reporter asked whether the Twins didn't think it a bit crass to be trumpeting such a project at a time when people are losing their jobs in other industries. The executive's response was, "Not every company is bankrupt, you know."
The importance of that statement was more or less lost in the ensuing brouhaha over whether this was or was not a slap at the reporter's employer, which is bankrupt. But the truth of the statement is that every company has employees, and every last job in the world is frighteningly valuable right now. For the Twins, a profitable company, to scale back their plans simply because they were worried about appearances would affect not only their company's bottom line, but the jobs of every construction worker who's employed on the project, every individual who works in the team's sales, ticketing, or promotion offices, and every employee of every company that does business with the team. Given that fact, wouldn't it be irresponsible of the team, which, again, is on firm fiscal ground, to fail to undertake such a project?
Blogger Andrew Taylor wrote an excellent post a couple of weeks back about the strange notion that funding the arts at a time of fiscal austerity might be considered irresponsible, pointing out that arts organizations are workplaces like any other, and employ many millions of Americans whose salaries, benefits, and fiscal stability are as important (and as at risk) as anyone else's. Many of those employees are not artists or performers themselves, but bookkeepers, stagehands, designers, payroll managers, and all manner of other office workers. As Sarah put it when she and I were discussing this earlier today, "Is a carpenter who builds opera sets for a living less of a carpenter than one who builds houses?" Not in my world.
By my count, the Minnesota Orchestra employs nearly as many non-musicians as we do musicians. They're incredible people, as deeply committed to their jobs as I am to mine. And at the end of the week, they never get the chance that I do, to stand on stage and be applauded by thousands of people for their work. And the task of those at the top of our organization is to do everything possible to make our company thrive, even in the worst of times, so as to protect not only my job, but the job of every 9-to-5 (or 7-to-7) worker we employ. It's a scary time, yes, everyone knows that. But we're not going to climb out of this hole by continuing to dig ourselves in.
No, this isn't going to be a post about quilting or psychomotor skills, I promise!
I've written about the methodical way I approach score-study, and it came up at a discussion during brunch this morning. A non-musician friend asked how we kept all that sound organized in our brains - how do you remember what's coming next? To which I answered, it's all about pattern recognition. Or more specifically, understanding the particular patterns of pitch, rhythm and emphasis that are initially established in a piece of music, and discovering how these morph (or, occasionally, remain the same) throughout the work. Which might sound a bit clinical, but it's an approach that's useful in that it can be applied to any composer and any style.
Which all made me a bit philosophical, because isn't life all about pattern recognition? Certainly true with all human relationships; we strive to understand the patterns of those individuals around us ("normal behavior"), because a shift in the pattern indicates something has changed. Food for thought.
Maybe I'm thinking of patterns because discussions of the topic have been floating around the blogosphere lately (another "pattern" in itself? Now I'm reading into everything...) For instance, a great post about words that made their inaugural appearance in the latest Inaugural Address. It's a fascinating list of words - I particularly like the sequence "tirelessly - toiled - towards" - and was surprised that, in a post 9/11 world, "firefighter" is making its first appearance. And now I've added a word to my vocabulary (hapax!).
Which reminded me of an exhibit at the Weisman I saw last fall in which artist R. Luke DuBois took State of the Union addresses and arranged words in a kind of "eye chart" according to frequency of use ("Gentlemen" made the most appearances for George Washington, "Terror" for George W. Bush). I actually attended the opening, during which DuBois did a set - he's a composer as well, and I recently discovered that he does some really interesting stuff.
My last pattern observation; when I'm wrapping up a precious few days at home, as I am now, I tend to become a bit more reflective and philosophical.
For any of you who attended the Bobby McFerrin/Cantus concert at Orchestra Hall last Friday, you know what I'm talking about (for those of you not fortunate enough to attend, it was a lyric from the audience-sing-along encore).
McFerrin has always been a think-outside-the-box musician, and his concerts never disappoint. There are a few things you can count on (a lump-in-the-throat beautiful version of "Blackbird" and, if you're lucky, a laugh-out-loud funny 7-minute musical condensation of "The Wizard of Oz"), and then there was the new element, the collaboration with Cantus, which yielded moments of utter spontaneity that were surprising to the performers as well as the audience.
Two observations (from my vantage point in the soundbooth in the back of the Hall - where there was a gaggle of standing-room-only audience members taking it all in): first, how utterly relaxed he is onstage. I've certainly seen many other performers with a very comfortable stage presence, but McFerrin's is different - you don't get the fleeting moments of tension or expressions of super-conscious thinking. I'm thinking a lot of it has to do with the fact that what he does on stage is so improvisatory in nature, even if it's planned out. If you're always making it up, it's hard to mess it up. Backstage I asked him if he put a lot of thought into what sounds (consonant and vowel combinations) he used for different registers or patterns. He looked at me quizzically, then told me no, not at all, just what came out at the moment.
It reminded me of the notion of the limitation we classically-trained types are always dogged by, on some level; the fact that what we do is written out, dictated to us, in a way. Yes, there are those few who have incorporated improvisatory skills into classical performance (a skill that used to be commonplace back in the day - and organists still have it as a regular part of their training), and yes, there is of course room for individual turns of phrases that may change night to night, but the fact is that we can't mess with a Brahms Symphony on the spot. We can't even really change a Brahms Intermezzo on the spot - it then ceases to be Brahms. It's a limitation within which we find infinite freedom, but a stricture no less.
It also reminded me of an article I read in a recent Gramophone magazine, an interview with pianists Martha Argerich and Stephen Kovacevich, two artist I admire a great deal, to whom performing is not a relaxing prospect at all:
Argerich: "...one doesn't choose to be a performer...It's not your free choice...Maybe you want to learn and move closer to music, and, yes, to what you love - but that doesn't mean that you enjoy the performing."
Kovacevich: "It's a kind of torture as well, sometimes."
The other post-concert thought was about the amount of audience participation - a lot! - McFerrin had us chiming in for everything from the theme to "The Beverly Hillbillies" to the Bach-Gounod "Ave Maria" (there were some lovely voices in the audience!) and, most notably, one song where he had us accompanying him on a series of pitches. He taught us the pitches by standing at a particular point onstage, singing a pitch, and having us repeat it. He moved over a foot or so, sang a different pitch, had us sing it, etc. He taught us 4 pitches, then proceeded to leap around stage on those four points, and the audience sang the pitch corresponding to the point, as taught.
What was surprising then was the fact that at a certain point, he started moving beyond those four points, up to nearly an octave lower and an octave higher than the original pitch set, and the audience kept in the same mode (and no, it wasn't a major scale). It was completely unconscious, simple, and I unthinkingly sang along.
It wasn't until I left the concert that it even occurred to me that he'd taught us 4 pitches out of a pentatonic scale, and we just went along with it and what came naturally. The music-analysis part of my brain was completely shut off, because I so instinctively knew what he wanted that I didn't need to analyze. And neither did anyone else in the audience - they just sang along, naturally, with what sounded right to their ears.
Which to me goes a long way to show that the natural, unconscious and automatic understanding of the organization of pitch and rhythm that is the basis of music is absolutely instinctive. It's inborn and innate within us. And what's more powerful than that?
I had an interesting day at work yesterday, and I somewhat doubt that I'll ever have another one like it. We're playing Handel's Messiah this week, and as is standard these days, the orchestra and chorus are both cut down to chamber size, so as to be more authentic to what Handel would have expected for a performance of his oratorio. Now, whenever we cut string players from a performance, we always leave one extra player in each string section for the first few rehearsals. This player is called the "plus," and won't play the concerts unless someone else in the section gets sick. So basically, you rehearse the repertoire, and are then on call for the performances.
I'm the plus for our Messiah this year, and I know already that I'll be playing Sunday's concert, since our principal will be out of town that day. So I showed up for rehearsal yesterday afternoon and took my place at the back of the reduced section. But only a few minutes into the rehearsal, the conductor (the estimable Christopher Warren-Green) realized that, with such a small orchestra, the extra players were making it difficult to accurately judge the balance of sound. Since soloists frequently struggle to be heard above the orchestra in Messiah, proper balance is a real concern. So, smiling apologetically, Chris looked at those of us in the plus chairs, and said, "How would you feel about not playing - you know, just watching?"
We felt fine about it, since obviously, we've all played this piece many times, it's not overly difficult, and as long as we were still in the room, we'd hear and see whatever particular changes and stylistic things Warren-Green might ask for. But as I put down my viola and settled in, I immediately felt profoundly out of place, like an interloper who'd snuck into the orchestra and was just standing there, staring at the musicians. I felt like this for the whole afternoon, especially once the chorus showed up. (Since they were behind me, I now had 40 or so people watching me watch the orchestra. Surprisingly, only one asked me what the hell I was doing there if I wasn't going to play.)
I tried putting a magazine on my stand eventually, just to give my mind something to do when nothing requiring my attention was going on. (Wind and brass players, who frequently have long gaps or even entire movements where they don't play, do this all the time, sometimes even in concerts.) But I found that I couldn't focus on the article I was reading while the orchestra was playing. If I heard something start to pull apart in the ensemble, I reacted physically the same way I would have if I'd been holding the viola, leaning in towards my principal and bobbing my head with the pulse. It was a very odd sensation, almost like an out-of-body experience. This was my orchestra, and I was on stage, but really, I wasn't, at least not in any way that mattered. Disconcerting. Sort of fun, in a pseudo-voyeuristic sense, but still, disconcerting.
A quick follow-up to Part I, which covered the choice of repertoire for my subscription concerts last week.
During the first rehearsal last week, I opened by mentioning to the Orchestra that over the course of my two seasons with them, I had conducted over 70 performances (yes, I counted!), and of those, not a single one received more that one rehearsal, which was kind of an astonishing thought. All of our Inside the Classics, Pops, Sampler/Preview, educational and outreach concerts are done on a single rehearsal, and preparing a show on one rehearsal is a skill set unto itself, and one I feel like I've pretty well mastered. The pace is relentless, and there is little time to go back and fix anything but the most egregious of errors. (During a recent Sommerfest concert, I recall, we were missing the ending to a piece due to a library mishap. We had no time to fix and rehearse, so we simply crossed our fingers and played it for the first time in the performance that night with a singer, no less!) What counts most is absolute clarity of intent.
But rehearsing a subscription week is an utterly different experience, and I often had to remind myself to slow down my usual hyper-efficient pace - we had four whole rehearsals - a luxury in itself. More rehearsal times means more time to work on the larger musical shape of a piece, as well as tackling the smallest details. Often, on those one-rehearsal shows (and particularly if it's something unfamiliar), I feel I have to pull the ensemble along by sheer force of will. Having the time to work on passages over multiple rehearsals helps us establish a groove together, which means that come concert times there are sections which will simply "happen", ensemble-wise, which allows me to focus more on the purely musical aspects.
Rehearsing is an interesting psychological process as well, because over the course of those 9 or so hours, one establishes a certain synthesis through both compulsion and compromise. It's never lost on me that an orchestra is a collection of individuals, and the concomitant variety of predilections and perspectives; it's the conductor's job to get everyone on board with a single viewpoint, and so it needs to be one that everyone can respect even if they don't necessarily agree with it.
In the end, for me, the rehearsals are the most challenging (and thus the most interesting!) part of the whole process. Concerts are thrilling, yes, but we couldn't have gotten to that point without the work before. Performing, despite its conclusive nature, is the easy part, where you enjoy the fruits of your labor; the magic of a concert can only come from cumulative, careful work in rehearsal.
In many ways, it's a big deal; it's my debut on a series that's considered both "front-ranking" and the most artistically significant. And, of course, Minnesota is a major American orchestra, so these concerts carry a weight, in terms of my career, far beyond Minneapolis; other orchestras and presenters watch with interest when a staff conductor takes on a major program.
In many other ways, this week has been just business as usual; first of all, because I've certainly conducted subscription concerts with many other orchestras (albeit smaller organizations), and second, because this is my home orchestra, everything has been a well-known quantity (there's certainly a huge benefit to knowing an ensemble well).
Since this week's program has been in my book for about 10 months, I've had ample time to wrap my head around the program - which is a challenging one, both for myself and the Orchestra! Two pieces were "given" to me - the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante for Winds and Copland's "Quiet City", pieces meant to showcase members of the Orchestra as soloists. I ran with the whole idea of showcasing our musicians, which is where the idea of Concerti for Orchestra (Shchedrin and Lustoslawski).
I've been asked why I chose the Lutoslawski as my main work rather than, say, the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, which is certainly a better-known piece and a staple of the repertoire. My choice of Lutoslawski comes from two strongly held convictions; one, that part of my job as a musician is to champion lesser-known but artistically worthy pieces that can help broaden the standard repertoire (in particular, if I have a powerful connection to those pieces), and two, that as a young conductor, my artistic growth is enhanced by working on repertoire that is not already ingrained in an ensemble.
Osmo and I agree on that second point (we chatted about it sometime last season). An orchestra of Minnesota's standing has played the standard repertoire countless (countless!) times - just thinking about the collective experience with, say, the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, is staggering. Which means that the Orchestra has deeply etched ideas of how that piece should go, how the work "feels" when played by this particular ensemble, and which idiomatic or traditional "extras" (not indicated in the score, perhaps, but part of an accepted performance practice) that they'll execute without even thinking about it. All of which, while easy on an ensemble, is hard on a conductor, particularly if you have a differing view of the work. The challenge in this lies in getting an ensemble to see your perspective and to adopt that view over the rehearsal period.
Rehearsing a piece that hasn't been played in 15 years (1993 was the last time the Lutoslawski was performed here) presents very different challenges, mostly because there is little collective perspective of the piece. Ask the Minnesota Orchestra to play, say, any Brahms Symphony, and they'll happily fall into a groove - everyone knows how they fit in with everyone else, everyone knows what to listen for, everyone knows where the challenging passages are, everyone knows the variations of tempi. Given a less familiar work, there is a shallower collective understanding to fall back on, making an orchestra more reliant on the conductor, which presents me with more work to maintain ensemble.
But the benefits far outweigh this challenge, because a less familiar piece allows me to work with a much cleaner state. Without strong predispositions toward a piece, it is much easier to mold the musical architecture from my own perspective of the work. And this musical molding, of giving a piece a viewpoint that is both true to the intent of the composer and unique in its perspective, is the most fascinating work that I can do as a conductor. And working those details and making artistic discoveries is heightened when working on less familiar repertoire.
It's been an enormously rewarding week from a personal viewpoint so far; over the weekend, my second post on the topic will delve into the rehearsal process and the concerts themselves.
No doubt that these are rough times for all. Although here in southeast Texas (where I am for a guest conducting week), the economic climate is a bit more upbeat. Still, it's hard not to get swept up in the sense of gritted uncertainty.
But sitting on yet another flight (my sixth in 12 days!) today I have a small moment of clarity and conviction. I'm reminded that whenever I need comfort, I turn to music. Whenever I need a brief escape from the pressures of life, I turn to music. Whenever I need a reminder of my essential humanity, I turn to music.
And I think of the audience in Orchestra Hall last week, at the end of a dreadful tumble of days, some faces preoccupied, of course, but some faces transported. It reminds me that what we as musicians do is vital, now perhaps even more. And that all art provides an imperative reminder of what it means to be a thinking and feeling being. And that no number of bank closures can change that fact.
And that the world is always better with a bit of such idealism.
