Looking For A New Classic

Last night, the NHL's Minnesota Wild opened their 2008-09 season at home against the Boston Bruins, a fact which was noted in eye-rolling fashion by our principal trombonist, Doug Wright, during the stage-setting break between the first and second works on our Saturday night program, when he walked into the musicians' lounge to find five musicians plus Osmo clustered around the TV, checking the score before we had to rush back onstage for a piano concerto. (Doug, who doesn't play the concerto, had the right to make fun of us. The hockey obsessives in this orchestra do tend to be fanatical, even by sports fan standards, and I noticed that Osmo had one of our personnel managers reporting the score of the game to him as he came offstage for intermission, as well.)

Later, at the end of intermission, principal cellist Tony Ross had to literally drag Osmo out of the lounge by one arm when the "on stage" call was heard, lest he plant himself permanently in front of the game, where the Wild had jumped out to a 4-1 lead. This, of course, is why Osmo doesn't have a TV in his private dressing room.

Meanwhile, up in Canada, a music-related hockey drama has been slowly unfolding over the past several months, ever since the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation somehow managed to lose the rights to the theme music to Hockey Night in Canada.



Let's understand the seriousness of this. Those of us who live south of the 49th parallel and have no connection to our neighbors to the north probably can't really grasp just how famous the Hockey Night theme is. The closest we can probably get is the Monday Night Football theme, but even then, I'd wager to say that a far higher percentage of Canadians can sing you the hockey theme than Americans can sing that pumped up NFL jingle. It's a major cultural touchstone for a proud hockey-loving nation, and it's now gone from the airwaves of the national broadcaster.

(That's not to say it's actually gone completely. The reason CBC lost the rights is that it was outbid for them by commercial broadcaster CTV, which owns TSN, Canada's version of ESPN. TSN broadcasts multiple hockey games to the entire country every week, and the hockey theme now prefaces each of them. But to a lot of Canadians, that's just not the same thing.)

So, CBC was in a spot. Obviously, it wasn't going to cancel Hockey Night in Canada, a Saturday tradition that still draws some of the highest ratings anywhere. So it needed a new theme, and it turned to the public to get it. Culling 15 finalists from over 15,000 entries it received from across the country, the network spent a ridiculous amount of time over the past month or so flogging its viewers to vote for a winner. Last night, they revealed the winner live just as Hockey Night in Canada went on the air...



The winning composer is Colin Oberst from the western province of Alberta (note to Bright Eyes fans - that's Colin Oberst, not Conor - no relation as far as I know,) and I have to say, while his theme isn't the classic that the original theme was, I like it a lot. It's up-tempo, innocent, and a bit old-fashioned, which is just so Canada, and the Celtic pipes that open and close the song are a distinctive nod to Atlantic Canada's roots in the British Isles. And all in all, despite the fact that many will likely never forgive the CBC for letting the original theme get away, the whole contest strikes me as a great way of involving the audience in something they care passionately about...

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...

Into the wild

Well, not really, I'm heading up to Maine and Vermont to festival hop with my husband (a rare pleasure, as we seldom get to travel together, and I've taken time off this summer to do just that). I'm not sure what internet connectivity will be like, so posting will be spotty for the next few weeks.

I leave you with this:



The opening ceremony of the Olympics was stunning, immensely impressive and cinematic in scope; but what really struck me was Lang Lang's presence in the middle of it all, a testament to the rise in popularity of Western classical music and to Lang Lang himself. A lot of food for thought there, that I'll hopefully get to before too long.

Hope everyone is enjoying some time off this summer!!

And It's Root, Root, Root For the Twinkies...

Around this time of year at Orchestra Hall, while Sommerfest audiences are spending their intermission break sipping wine, strolling Peavey Plaza, or conversing on any number of high-minded topics, the best place to find about half our orchestra's musicians is clustered in a corner of our backstage lounge, watching the Minnesota Twins on one of the two TVs we've stacked on top of a filing cabinet there. (We even have cable!)

Why two TVs? Well, we've had one forever, or at least as long as I've been around, and it was fine for baseball season (if a bit small for a whole roomful of people to try to watch,) but during the winter, disputes were known to break out between the hockey crowd and the basketball crowd over which sport should be on, and eventually, our principal cellist used his winnings from our annual NCAA March Madness pool to buy us a brand new set, and our wily stagehands threw a splitter on the cable wire, and voila! No more arguments.

Well, okay, there are arguments. But they tend to be your standard-issue sports talk arguments, which, as everyone knows, are fun, right up until they aren't anymore. And with multiple games playing on multiple sets simultaneously, there can be some very entertaining (and confusing) crosstalk in our little corner...



I recorded that last November, I think, just to hear how much we sound like a bunch of typical morons at a sports bar. Quite a bit, apparently. By the way, the cast list for that little bunch of nonsense, as best I can make out, includes yours truly, bassist Dave Williamson, violist Megan Tam, and violinist Mike Sutton on the hockey talk; cellist Tony Ross, percussionist Kevin Watkins, and horn player Mike Gast talking hoops;and violist Richard Marshall asking questions about a sport I can't identify.

So, anyway, back to the Twins. They're doing awfully well this year, quite a bit better than anyone really expected in what was supposed to be a rebuilding year, which is great for us in the orchestra, because we tend to make a lot of noise in our little sports corner when good things are happening to our teams, and it's always nice to go back on stage with a bit of extra adrenaline. But what's impressed me most about the Twins this summer isn't anything they've accomplished on the field: it's something they dared to do off it, in full view of the public, despite virtual assurance that they'd come off looking more than a little goofy.

If you've watched any Twins games this season, you probably know what I'm talking about. The team, always known for the great TV commercials it produces, got its entire pitching staff together to record a promotional ad in which, for no apparent reason, they stand on chorus risers in the middle of an outdoor diamond and sing about themselves to the tune of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," while pitching coach Rick Anderson conducts them with a miniature bat.



That takes some serious guts, if you ask me. Imagine if someone asked you and everyone you work with to sing a little song for everyone in your city to watch on television for the next six months. (Actually, you don't have to imagine it. There's a reality show on TLC that does exactly that...) And the most amazing thing about it is that, with the notable exception of Matt Guerrier, these guys all seem quite capable of singing on pitch! I mean, none of them is going to be taking gigs away from Nathan Gunn anytime soon, and maybe I'm just imposing a stereotypical view of professional athletes on the situation, but doesn't it seem surprising that the Twins pitchers can (almost) all sing decently?

Just one more reason to love 'em, I guess. Now, if you'll excuse me, SportsCenter's about to start...