If you're having a bad day...

...watch this, and I challenge you not to smile. I particularly love the über-flat Db at the first key change. And the little walk. Trololololo!

The (Meaningless) Sound Of English

Anyone who listens to a lot of opera is probably used to listening to words sung in a language you don't understand. It takes some getting used to, yeah, but after awhile, you just get accustomed to the distinctive flow of, say, Italian or German, and even though you don't comprehend the words, the audible sound of the language becomes familiar.

So have you ever wondered what English-speakers (Americans, in particular,) sound like to foreigners who are constantly bombarded with American pop music, but don't actually understand English? Well, wonder no more: an Italian singer put together this video to demonstrate. It's an original song sung with American English diction, but the lyrics are nonsense.

It sounds surprisingly familiar, doesn't it? You feel like you ought to understand it (especially when the occasional "Baby!" or "All right!" jumps out at you,) but you don't. This is actually more or less what I feel like whenever I'm in Amsterdam. Dutch sounds basically like a blend of American-accented English and German (which I'm conversational in,) so I'm constantly on the verge of understanding what I'm hearing without actually achieving any real comprehension.

Still, I admit I'm surprised that English doesn't sound coarser than that to non-English speakers. It's certainly unique-sounding - no wonder Europeans are so good at picking the Americans out of a crowd...

Sounds of Silence

Everybody loves a good Hallelujah Chorus, especially at this time of year. And if there's anything more uplifting than listening to the most famous movement of Handel's Messiah, it's singing it yourself! But what if you're a devout monk (I know, I know, but stay with me) who's taken a lifelong vow of silence? Must you deprive yourself of this most simple and pure of Christmas traditions?

...Not anymore!



That is just purely brilliant. A big hat tip to my friend Susie Telsey (she's the spangly bassoonist in last week's Christmas music post, btw) for sending this my way...

Happy Thanksgiving!

A little feel-good story for you this gray (at least here in the upper Midwest) Thanksgiving Day; Placido Domingo signed autographs post-performance last night until nearly 2 am. A wonderful thought, on two levels: 1) that an artist of his stature would be so gracious with his time, and 2) that there would be so many fans (purportedly over 500) seeking autographs!

Fighting For The Right To Complain

This past week, an honest-to-God US Congressman introduced a measure on the floor of the House which would designate the day before Thanksgiving "Complaint Free Wednesday." His heart was probably in the right place, but honestly. The economy's in the tank, Wall Street seems to have gotten away scot free with most of its own wealth while making all of ours disappear, political civility is at an all-time low, the unemployment rate is through the roof and still climbing, and one of the guys tasked (in part) with preventing this kind of thing from happening wants us to stop complaining?

Besides, there are better ways to deal with the human propensity for constant griping. Consider the Helsinki Complaints Choir, the brainchild of Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen...



My personal favorite part of this is the complaint about cell phone ringtones, sung to the tune of that ubiquitous Nokia ringtone. See there, Congressman? There's good to be found everywhere - even in perpetual whining.

Bless The Rains

It's been forever since we had any significant rain here in Minneapolis, which makes for a nice mosquito-free summer, but also for crispy brown lawns and impossible farming/gardening conditions. Nothing we can do about it, of course, but a little rain dance couldn't hurt, right?



That's an Eastern European choral group called Perpetuum Jazzile turning in a pretty stunning rendition of my very favorite one-hit-wonder song from my childhood in the '80s, Toto's "Africa." Gotta love the creative thunder and lightning effect at the beginning...

(Hat tip to former MN Orch personnel manager Brian Woods for bringing this clip to my attention.)

Oh Say Can You Sing

On this, the last day of baseball's regular season (unless you're the White Sox, the Tigers, or the Twins,) let us take a moment to consider the North American practice of singing or playing national anthems before sporting events, a tradition which may cause more cringeworthy moments than any other type of musical performance. Musicians (and non-musicians who can tell the difference between Ashlee Simpson and Deborah Voight) attending ballgames almost always have to look away from each other to avoid giggling or groaning during the anthems, and you need only run a quick Google search to come up with hundreds of embarrassing attempts.

Part of the problem, of course, is that The Star-Spangled Banner is really difficult to sing. It spans more than 1-1/2 octaves, whereas Oh Canada and Take Me Out to the Ballgame require only a single octave's range. If you aren't careful to start on the right note for your particular range, you may find yourself in a world of hurt when the rockets start glaring, as Carl Lewis famously found out one night at a Chicago Bulls game...



Then, there's the fact that a shocking number of Americans seem more than a little fuzzy on just what order the lyrics come in...



The problem isn't helped by the fact that a lot of sports teams seem to view the singing of the anthem not so much as a musical performance, but as a chance to let some ordinary fans on the field. The Minnesota Twins, for example, tend to trot a bunch of elementary school "choirs" (should you really be allowed to call it a choir when everyone is singing in unison?) out onto the MetroDome turf to shriek the anthem while giggling and poking each other, perhaps on the theory that no one is ever going to sound good in a Dome with an antiquated sound system, so why the hell not? The Minnesota Wild, by contrast, have had a succession of professional and semi-professional singers on staff to sing the anthems at each game, but then the Wild have pretty much had a handle on the whole choral music thing from the beginning.



In Canada, they seem to take the whole anthem thing awfully seriously - in Ottawa and Montreal, actual Mounties with voices good enough for the operatic stage are regular anthem singers, and Irish tenor John McDermott frequently stops by to do the honors for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Even at a minor league baseball game I once attended in Winnipeg, the anthems were sung by a shockingly talented barbershop quartet.

But taking pride in our obvious shortcomings seems to be a distinctly American quality, and there's actually something endearing about clearly unqualified vocalists willing to risk public humiliation for a shot to stand on a field with a microphone. There but for the grace of God and all...

Brendel thoughts #1

Alfred Brendel joins the Orchestra tonight as part of a "farewell tour" that caps a distinguished 60-year career. Listening to rehearsals over the last several days, I was struck by a couple of observations which I thought I'd share over the course of the next few days.

Thought for today: why do some instrumentalists vocalise when they play? All players, to varying degrees, make occasional sounds as they ply their craft (and sometimes a loud exhalation can actually help produce the desired sound). Mr. Brendel falls into the category of performers whose "singing" is audible not just to those orchestra members close to him, but to the audience as well.

Conductors, in rehearsal, will sometimes sing how they want something to be played in lieu of trying to explain the desired effect (it's a remarkably efficient way of getting across a point), and sometimes in performance I catch myself humming those very same sections under my breath as the orchestra plays (I trust a first stand string player would tell me if it became loud enough to be distracting!). Part of it, I think, is getting swept up in the moment, and part of it is how external the creation of sound is to a conductor - produced by a mass of other people, not ourselves - and how we occasionally give in to the primal need to participate in some way with that resonance.

That might explain the vocalising of conductors, but what about pianists? I wonder if part of the issue is not the nature of the piano itself, a percussion instrument that, despite its "sustaining" pedal, produces sound that, after the finger-strike, decays immediately. Yes, the best pianists can make the instrument sing, but that is an aural illusion; each note fades exponentially to time, so different from a string or wind instrument that can sustain a pitch as long as a bow or breath will bear. Maybe singing at the keyboard is an attempt to make up for the limitations of the piano.

The other thought I had is how, when we are deep in the music, musicians are communing with something other that our conscious selves. In the best moments of music-making, we are not thinking coherent thoughts, or at least nothing that one could put words to. Instead, we are carrying on a profound discourse with others and the innermost part of ourselves. And when we are so engulfed in this state of musical being, it seems natural to let our voices, the original musical instrument, to lend its sound.

Speak No Feeling

By my count, in the last two posts I've written, I churned out nearly 2,000 words in trying to figure out what gives the human voice such a powerful ability to entrance and enthrall us in a way that instruments rarely seem to. That's a lot of typing, and I don't know that I've really gotten any of us any closer to an answer.

So today, I'm trying the opposite approach. Rather than tell you about some powerful experience I've had with vocal music, I'll just offer you the same experience. The video below is of a British singer-songwriter named Imogen Heap, whose music you may have heard on the radio, especially if you're in the habit of listening to The Current. The song she's singing is called Hide & Seek. The first time I heard it (I won't tell you where and when, because it shouldn't matter, other than to note that I was not in the least paying attention to the radio before it came on,) it absolutely stopped me and the friend I was with cold. The conversation we'd been having came to an abrupt halt, and we both just sat there listening until the song ended.

One caveat before you click play: If you're of my generation, you will undoubtedly have trouble getting past the fact that the video makes Imogen Heap look a lot like the evil ancient god that tried to vanquish the Ghostbusters on top of a New York skyscraper. It's distracting, I agree. Just look away and listen.

Coco's Song

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rise Up Singing

I've been thinking a lot lately about the power of singing, and of those who sing. Minnesota is home to an almost shocking number of amateur and professional choirs, and our orchestra never goes a season without performing with at least one or two of them. Audiences here simply go nuts for the sound of the human voice, and we can always be assured of an enthusiastic response whenever we program something that includes a couple hundred singers. (This goes double if there is a children's choir involved.)

That having been said, those of us who play instrumental music for a living have a bad habit of regarding vocalists as something less than ourselves. It's a prejudice borne mainly of stylistic differences, I suspect, as well as from the simple contrast between amateur musicians (of which most large choirs are made up) singing purely for the love of music, and professionals who rely on music for both artistic satisfaction and a steady paycheck. To those of us in the orchestra, chorus people often seem unnaturally enthusiastic about absolutely everything, as if they're perpetually on the edge of either laughing or crying hysterically. To them, I'm sure we seem perplexingly casual about and unaffected by the great music we're performing together. It's an uneasy relationship, at best, and I'm sometimes amazed that our performances of choral works don't reflect that unease.

Additionally, even professional singers, vocalists who can shake the foundations of the largest concert halls with their powerful human instruments, do not share much of the musical culture that instrumentalists are brought up in, and we've been mistrustful of each other since our conservatory days. Where we spent hours in school locked away in practice rooms slaving over details, the singers always seemed to be laying about in the lounge, sipping bottled water with lemon, wrapping scarves around their necks in 70-degree weather, and whispering to each other lest their delicate vocal cords be damaged by the act of conversing normally on top of their whopping 45 minutes of daily practice. They were the divas to our backup singers, the porcelain figurines to our homemade rag dolls, the - forgive me - Truman Capote to our J.D. Salinger.

Even Osmo, at the press conference at which he was introduced as our music director back in 2002, betrayed a bit of this musician bias when he was asked by a member of the media who also sings in the Minnesota Chorale whether he planned to expand the number of choral works we play every year. I remember vividly the slightly evil smile that played across his face as he first acknowledged the importance of maintaining the orchestra's commitment to great choral music, then added slyly, "However, I don't know whether we will do more choral music. To be honest, sometimes musicians can feel that working with singers is sometimes not worth the trouble." The whole room broke up laughing, except for the reporter/singer who had asked the question.

But as I say, I've had a number of recent experiences, both as a performer and an audience member, that have gotten me thinking more deeply about singers and singing. Rather than restrict the subject to a single post, I'm planning to spend this coming week blogging about each of them in turn, just to see whether my own biases and preconceived ideas change at all during the process. As my mother would remind anyone who cared to listen, I have a long and mostly undistinguished history with singing myself, so clearly, I could stand to reengage the form. We'll see what, if anything comes of it...