I'm not a witch, I'm your wife

(Yes, cinephiles, that is indeed a "Princess Bride" reference)

While Sam and the Orchestra have been occupied with the Composer Institute this week, I've been preoccupied with Humperdinck...well, actually, this Humperdinck.

I'm always surprised how well-known Hansel and Gretel is - not because of the piece itself, which is beautiful - but because of the exposure many seem to have had as children (it is, after all, a "fairytale opera"). It's a funny matter of personal experience, I suppose - for many, H&G is their first contact with opera; for me, it was Samson et Dalila, but I guess that makes sense for a 7-year-old obsessed with Placido Domingo (I don't think Humperdinck is really his bag). In the interim decades, I've heard H&G quite a few times but never studied it (except for the omnipresent Prelude and Dream Pantomime, both of which I've done over a half-dozen times).

So, as I hadn't been around for any of the previous iterations of this production with the Orchestra, my first real involvement with the complete work came this past summer, when I initially delved into the score.

One of the most fascinating discoveries I've made in the score is how unsympathetic a character the Mother is (yes, yes, I've pondered musical stuff too - don't get me started about use of percussion in the Witch's Ride and how triplets in the tambourine intimate magical/evil). But, wow, this woman is painted as such an unsympathetic character; her first entrance is marked with hysterics; she knocks over the jug of milk herself and takes it out on Hansel and Gretel; then in a typically manic-depressive switch she has suicidal thoughts while falling asleep at the kitchen table after she chases the kids out of the house; she has no idea how dangerous the woods are or that there's a hungry ogress or that witches ride broomsticks (why does Father know all these things??); and in the happy reunion at the end she merely has a single line ("Children, dear") while Father has quite a few lines - and the kids, quite tellingly, call him first ("Father, Mother!" - although maybe I'm simply reading too much into that?).

Our "Mother", Lola Watson, and I shared a few laughs at our first rehearsal about how mentally unbalanced the character seems, and the possibility (as some have interpreted) that the Mother is the Witch. While that seems a little far-fetched in context of the opera, I wonder what a feminist fairytale scholar's take on that notion would be? A tantalizing alternative to ponder as I peruse the score this morning for the umpteenth time.

In any case, I'm delighted to be taking a break from operaland to attend the Future Classics concert tonight - the next 6 days holds nearly 23 hours of staging/orchestra/sitzprobe/full-run rehearsals for H&G!

Necessary procrastination

So, a grey afternoon here in Virginia, where I finally have a few days off to gather my thoughts, learn a truckload of music, wash my concert clothes and get back on the road again - I'm in Burlington, VT next week premiering a piece by my very good friend David Ludwig with the Vermont Symphony, and then back in Minnesota for the second installment of "Inside the Classics" shows of the season.

It's been an exhausting month since mid-December - a pretty unrelenting schedule which has been hitting me physically and psychologically (hey, conductors need breaks, too!). All of which makes it harder to be sitting here in my studio, trying to get some work done. It's nice to have some good distractions, and this is one of my favorite things to listen to when I need a couple minutes to clear my brain (it's got quite a surprising ending - don't let the meandering mood fool you):



György Kurtág's music takes you into a completely different realm, with an intensity and precision and often an altered spatial sense that is transportive. And sometimes you really, really need to get out of your own head - or at least I do, when I'm spending hours poring over dots on a page! Which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Kurtag: "I keep coming back to the realisation that one note is almost enough" - enough, that is, to sum up the essence of a thought, a gesture, a sensation. Or, as in the case of the video, a selection from Játékok, a set of "learning pieces", maybe one technique (the glissando) is almost enough.

A good way to procrastinate for a few minutes. But now, back to work!

A little nit-picking

I'm headed to Philadelphia for rehearsals and a concert with 20/21, the Curtis Contemporary Music Ensemble. The program next Friday includes a trio of pieces by Messiaen, one of which is "Oiseaux Exotique", which captures Messiaen at his most birdsong-obsessed. It's a trippy soundscape of timbres and rhythms, citing the calls of over 40 species of birds, and is one of the more rhythmically complicated pieces I know. It's hard for the ear to catch any single thing that's happening because it's so densely orchestrated, with individual instruments most often playing discrete parts.

The Minnesota Orchestra played it a few seasons back under de Waart, with Peter Serkin as soloist, which I remember as an excellent performance. Yesterday, as I was poring over the score, I decided to listen to a recording that had been recommended to me, of the London Sinfonietta led by Esa-Pekka Salonen and featuring the Messiaen specialist Paul Crossley at the keyboard. I was rather enjoying the recording (people seem to have vastly differing ideas about tempi in this piece!), until I got about midway in the long central tutti. I've been studying this score for several weeks, and have a pretty good grasp of it, but as I listened, something felt very, very off.

Which, I discovered, it was. I listened to those few minutes a few more times, to discover that the xylophone is off by an entire half-measure for about 16 measure (or 26 seconds of music, depending how you want to look at it). I don't usually listen to recordings looking for mistakes (and with modern recording technology, anything is fixable, so it's usually useless to go looking in the first place!), but this one surprised me. Particularly because, even within the dense writing, Messiaen expressly states that in this tutti the xylophone is forte and solo, an important voice. Granted, if you were simply listening to the recording it might be impossible to catch, but as, say, a conductor or producer looking at the score (or even the xylophone player, who clearly had to add two beats to get back in sync with the rest of the ensemble) the error is obvious. Which makes me wonder why they didn't bother to fix it. Or did they simply not catch it?

Any other recorded "errors" out there that people have encountered?

Delinquent

Sorry for the sparse posting on my part; I've been trying to finish up some arrangements for our Scandinavian Christmas concert in December and, in the parlance of my Hawaiian roots, it is kicking my 'okole. Arranging and composing always seem to take me much, much longer that I anticipate; add to that the fact that I've just recently switched from Finale to Sibelius, and things slow to a crawl (although I think I prefer Sibelius, now that I'm getting the hang of it...).

We're not even into the thick of the season, and I'm already pretty swamped. Different concerts have different timelines; for instance, for subscription shows, I need a ton of time to focus on the repertoire, as it's usually a good amount of music, and it's all about the music. As I've described in several posts, learning repertoire, or even polishing up repertoire that I've already done, is a time-consuming process - you just can't fake preparation. I've got my subscription debut with the Minnesota Orchestra coming up, which is preceded by a subscription show for another orchestra (more on that at a later date!), so that's a good amount of repertoire to contend with.

Then of course we have our very first "Inside the Classics" concerts coming up in November, which require a different kind of preparation - scrip-writing, preparing excerpt lists, memorizing lines, etc. Time-consuming in a very different way! Pops concerts present their own challenges, particularly if I'm providing arrangements. Not to mention that I head to Fort Wayne tomorrow to rejoin Ben Folds on his fall tour (we did a show together in Philly in early September and hit it off). All of which tends to lead to blogging delinquency! But, as they say, a busy conductor is a happy conductor...

Dog day afternoon

Those are my lovely girls, Bamse (the hairy German Shepherd in the back) and Sieglinde (my deaf mutt), doing what they do best on a chilly Virginia afternoon (chilly being a relative term – it’s a balmy-for-Minnesota 40 degrees.)

While Sam’s been exploring the glorious northern hinterlands on the Orchestra’s State Tour, I’ve been home in Richmond, VA all week on some planned downtime. My schedule with the Minnesota Orchestra allows me these occasional breaks; although I’m frequently acting as cover conductor when I’m not conducting, I share those covering duties with our Associate Conductor, Mischa Santora, so when the stars align – Mischa’s covering and I’m not required to be somewhere else on a guest conducting stint – I get a glorious week at home with the husband and dogs (and, man, does absence makes the heart grow fonder…)

Downtime, of course, is a completely relative term, as I’m pretty much working every day when I’m home in Richmond, as evidenced by the state of my kitchen table, below:



(And yes, I do love a glass a wine when I’m working on Shostakovich.)

Weeks like this are a luxury because I can actually get up in the morning, have a leisurely cup of coffee and start going through scores without any time constraints whatsoever. During conducting weeks, it’s hard to find time to be studying other scores – and my brain’s filled with the stuff I’m performing that week. Covering weeks aren’t so bad – outside of rehearsals, I’ll have some free time to work on upcoming music, although my schedule is often crammed with the non-musical parts of the job – meetings, presentations – that need to happen while I’m in town. Guest conducting weeks can be impossible, particularly if I’m being trotted around for media interviews and board events. So when I can carve out a week at home, I’ll spend the time working on upcoming repertoire without distraction, which feels like an extravagance.

Most musicians I know always feel pressed for time to learn music, and conductors only more so. When you consider the schedule of a typical full-time orchestra, it’s easy to see why; the progression of concerts over the season is relentless (at least a full concert’s worth of music every week), frequently with only one day off every seven. It requires some pretty highly-developed time management to figure out how to be prepared in time for new repertoire or difficult pieces that are coming up.

Whenever I can I try to prepare pieces many weeks out, if not months. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, preparing a score is labor- and time-intensive venture. I always calculate, for a new piece, that for every hour of music, I really need about 20 hours to feel comfortable with it on the podium (and of course, every conductor is different, as is every situation – I’ve certainly had to do pieces on nothing more on a couple of hours notice, and then you just cross your fingers and hope the orchestra is aware of the situation…). And the vagaries of the human mind make it so that those 20 hours are better spent over a longer period of time than crammed into a couple of days, which is where all that time management comes in handy.

So take a look at that pic of my messy kitchen table again – I snapped this shot because I found it so indicative of the learning process that I had to capture it for posterity. Shostakovich Symphony #5 is for tomorrow, when I’ll be reading it with the orchestra at the University of Minnesota; Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra is for next season (October, to be exact); the Copland Ballet Music compilation includes “Appalachian Spring” is for our next Inside the Classics at the end of April; and the Debussy compilation on the bottom includes L’apres midi d’une faune, which I’m doing in a Young People’s Concert in a few weeks. And in the foreground, open, is Schoenberg’s Ode a Napoleon, because it’s cool, and this is one of those few weeks where I can crack open a score just because I like it…

…or just lie about with my dogs, the ultimate activity for a quiet Sunday afternoon.

Ask An Expert: Conductor Prep

This week's Ask An Expert question comes from Cinda Yager, who asks:

Q: How far in advance of rehearsals/concert does a conductor begin preparing/studying the scores? Is most of the preparation done at the piano or on the road?

This one, clearly, is right up Sarah's alley. So here she is, live from Seoul (and somehow still awake!)

Sarah's Answer: It really depends on the situation (and on the conductor! For the ease of answering, I'll speak for myself and not for all of conductor-kind, although most people I know have similar score-preparation philosophies.)

For repertoire I know well (and that I've performed fairly recently - say, in the couple of years,) I probably only need a couple of hours over a few days before the first rehearsal. For less familiar repertoire, I'll push up the preparation so I start looking at the piece a week to 10 days before, maybe spending 8-10 hours total on it. Pieces that I've studied but not conducted require a different kind of preparation, because I may understand them from an analytical and theoretical standpoint, but I may need technical preparation to get my ideas across clearly to the orchestra. Any piece that I don't know requires a LOT of work - I'd say 10-20 hours for every hour of music, at least, to really understand it. I try to start at least a month out.

Much of my work is at the keyboard, because I find it much easier to score read (i.e., look at a full orchestral score, reduce it in my head, and play it at the piano) than to simply visualize or try to hear things in my head. Of course, there are times when I'm on the road and don't have access to a keyboard, which makes things difficult. I have a very easy time hearing melodies and standard harmonic progressions, but I find complicated chords and extremely chromatic harmonies difficult, so I really prefer a keyboard if at all possible.

Memorizing a score is a whole other topic and requires it's own timeline!

I tend to start preparation very early, because I find it easier to digest information if I take in smaller pieces over a longer period of time. Osmo has told me he often will wait to really delve into a score because if he starts too early, he begins to second-guess decisions he has made. He goes through an enormous amount of repertoire a year, and with his schedule, there really is no time for second guessing!

Detail work.

I'm finally back at work after two weeks in Pennsylvania, and this morning's rehearsal was the first time I'd touched my viola since leaving town in a rush on the 17th. This kind of layoff is a huge deal for musicians, who are used to practicing at least a little bit more or less every day, even when the orchestra isn't in session - in fact, I thought about it, and decided that I haven't taken that long a break from playing since I was 9 years old. I'd be lying if I said I was totally comfortable, but I was surprised by how much easier it was to transition back to playing than I expected. Some things were trickier than usual, especially complicated bow technique, which is usually my forte, but other aspects of the job that I was expecting to struggle with for a few days until I regained my form (notably vibrato, never my strong suit) fell right into place. Of course, those sitting around me might have had a different perspective, but I felt like I didn't do any musical damage to myself or my section, so I'm calling the comeback a qualified success.

On another note, we're playing Beethoven's 7th symphony this week, which is one of my favorite pieces, and also significant because we'll be recording it in January for the final installment of our much-ballyhooed Beethoven cycle. I love everything about this symphony - the bouncing lilt of the first movement, the dark harmonies of the allegretto, right through to one of the greatest and most energetic finales ever written - but I'm always shocked by how much work it takes to put it together. Playing it under Osmo presents a special challenge, because (as usual,) he is not content to simply play the piece the way everyone else plays it, counting on the orchestra's drive and experience to pull off an exciting performance.

To be honest, the 7th is a symphony in which conductors are usually inclined simply to stay out of the orchestra's way. (Sarah may disagree with that statement, of course, but it's about time we had a good argument on this blog, so I'm throwing it out there.) We've all played it dozens of times, we know how it goes, and even if all you did was wind us up and let us go, we'd likely be able to pull off a fairly passable rendition. With works like that, the very familiarity the orchestra has with the piece can make tinkering very, very dangerous, especially with a limited rehearsal schedule. Poke around too much in the machinery, and you might break something you don't have the time to fix.

Osmo is not in the least fazed by this particular problem, and one of the things that critics around the world have cited in praising our Beethoven recordings has been the attention to detail, the very audible sense that every twist and turn of these massive works has been meticulously planned out, so clearly, our music director knows what he's doing. But it does make for some exhausting rehearsal situations in which he makes us repeat a few seconds of music over and over, when we all think we know how to play it already, because he's detected a flaw that will stand in the way of creating the right flow for the music. Today's example of this can, in fact, be broken down to a single rhythmic figure:

Looks innocent enough, doesn't it? But that little reverse snap runs more or less continuously, in one instrument or another, throughout nearly the entire first movement. And while playing it once in a fast tempo is no big deal, playing this...

...presents a number of challenges for strings, winds, and brass alike. Without going into boring specifics, let's just say that the rhythm can easily get flabby and start sounding like some sort of lazy jig, rather than the crisp angular line that Beethoven wanted. Osmo despises flabby rhythm, and nothing will get him on our backs faster than playing this figure incorrectly.

But it gets worse. Sometimes, you might not be asked to play the whole figure, but just a chunk of it, like this: Now, this is even harder to do correctly, because you're being asked, at a very high rate of speed, to snap that 16th note at exactly the right moment, after having counted out precisely five 16th rests. As I mentioned, most conductors are relatively lenient about this, and allow the strings a small cheat which makes the partial figure easier to play together without anyone crashing in early or late. If you were to write out the cheat in the score, it would look basically like this:

Osmo hates this cheat. Hates. And while we know this full well, and honestly try to avoid doing it when he's on the podium, years of having done it make it a very difficult habit to break, and even after slaving over it for an hour this morning, we still haven't quite got it back in the perfect rhythmical swing he wants for it. I have no doubt we'll get there by concert day, but there's probably some more blood, sweat, and tears ahead before we do...

A whole new world

So, you'll have to forgive me, as I'm totally new to the blogosphere and don't yet have the years of experience and accumulated wisdom that Sam brings, but life is all about trying something new, right?

As Sam has eloquently introduced us and what we are doing here, I thought I'd dispense with the niceties and dive right in...

I’m experiencing an unusual abundance of new scores – and when I say new, I mean really new, fresh off the presses (or, in one case, in PDF format on my laptop). It’s a confluence of a couple of things: the premier of Stan Skrowaczewski’s Flute Fantasy; the Orchestra’s Composer Institute; a world premiere by a former Composer Institute participant on the Young People’s Concerts next week; a world premiere on the Orchestra’s Pops series featuring Tiempo Libre; and a world premiere of a 60-minute War Requiem in Seoul, South Korea in November. It’s a ton of music to learn, and just looking at it listed like that is enough to send me into a mild panic. Fortunately for me, Osmo is conducting the Composer Institute concert, but as I’m his cover conductor for the week, I at least need to have a basic grasp on all of the pieces – but the rest of those concerts are ones I’m conducting.

People often ask me what conductors do when they learn a piece of music – do I listen to a recording, do I hear it all in my head, do I practice waving my arms in front of a mirror? (I tried the arm-waving thing once, but I couldn’t keep a straight face at the absurdity of it all.) My standard answer is, if I want to learn, say, a 30-minute symphony, the bare minimum probably involves 8-10 hours or study. And at that point I have hardly delved into the piece, but I’m probably prepared to at least have a basic understanding of structure and harmony and phrasing, enough to get me through a rehearsal (and it’s unbelievably uncomfortable to rehearse a piece you don’t know too well). If it’s a totally new piece, as all those world premieres are, I’ll probably spend a big chunk of time at a piano plunking out the score – score reading is one of those really important conductor skills, although you occasionally hear about people who can (or just do) get by without it. It would be amazing to be able to hear everything on the page without a keyboard – generally I can hear a melody and some harmonic progressions – but new music tends to be complicated, and score reading becomes an absolutely necessary step. Unless, of course, the composer provides you with a MIDI file of the score, which tend to sound weird and artificial and nothing like what a live orchestra will do with the piece!

New pieces are stressful – particularly if composers are still tinkering with them (or, in the case of the Requiem, if they are still not finished) – but there is an undeniable attraction in bringing a new score to life. Part of my non-Minnesota activities involves the Penn Composers program at the Curtis Institute of Music (my alma mater) – graduate composers at the University of Pennsylvania are given several opportunities every season to have their works read and recorded by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, and I’m the coordinator and conductor for the program. I like the collaborative aspect of working on a new piece; I like being a part of the “birthing” process; I like the thrill of something new. And, let’s face it, new music is what helps keep symphonic music vital and current and relevant, and that’s perhaps the most important part of all.