Wow

A Japanese ELEMENTARY SCHOOL BAND at a band competition. Enormously impressive, more so because they are playing with the music memorized (note that the teacher/conductor is the only one with a score!).

I'm constantly reminded of the undeniable fact that kids can do extraordinary things, given the right guidance, opportunity and discipline. Inspiring stuff!

Audience Participation

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Taking It Out On The Kids

I ordinarily try to stay away from the kinds of debates that ensue when politicians threaten to cut arts budgets to deal with economic troubles. People who work in the cultural field tend to get all up in arms at times like this, claiming loudly that the arts are vital (which I agree with, obviously) and that arts groups are "always the first to be cut" when times get tough. And while it's true that the arts are an easy target for those wielding the budget knife, I generally have a tough time arguing that subsidies for theaters and museums should be treated as more vital than, say, school lunch programs. So I just choose not to engage the argument most of the time, and quietly thank the heavens that I'm not the one who has to make such decisions.

But I admit to being a bit indignant over this business of Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty wanting to essentially shut down a school that has been a beacon of arts education for the entire US since its inception. The Perpich Center for Arts Education was created with the primary support of former MN Gov. Rudy Perpich and his wife specifically to insure that a serious arts curriculum could exist in perpetuity in the state, even when economics dictated that many ordinary public schools trim or eliminate art, music, and dance programs. Furthermore, in its more than two decades of existence, it has made a point of accepting students from all economic backgrounds, and even offered a boarding option for outstate kids in order to insure that it didn't become the type of resource funded by the state that can only be taken advantage of by kids in the Cities.

Under Governor Pawlenty's budget plan, the Perpich Center would see its 2010-11 budget slashed by 30%, which would kill the boarding program immediately, and cause catastrophic cuts to the school's core educational offerings. The cuts would get even deeper in subsequent years. Furthermore, the governor wants to eliminate the center's unique admissions process, under which students audition much like they would for a college-level music, dance, or theater program, and replace it with the rules that govern charter schools. This would mean, among other things, that the school would be populated on a first-come, first-served basis, regardless of whether prospective students have any interest in or aptitude for the program they'll be enrolling in.

Now, as I said, I generally try not to get sucked into debates like this, because goodness knows, I have no idea how I would close a $4.8 billion budget hole. And if the Perpich Center were just another training academy for kids with wealthy parents, I wouldn't be writing this post at all, because those kinds of kids will always have options in life. But the Perpich Center isn't that kind of place. It's a model of what public education can be, and it inarguably has made a huge difference in the lives of countless Minnesota kids who otherwise might not have had any chance of making a career out of their assorted talents. Its graduates are just one more example of the value Minnesota has always placed on both education in general and the arts in particular. And I think it would be a great shame if that legacy were snuffed out, just to plug less than a half of one percent of that gaping hole in our state budget.

But that's just me. If you disagree - if you think the economic woes we're facing as a state and a nation are just too great to justify investing in anything more than bare-bones K-12 education at the moment - that's fine. I get that argument, and I don't share the traditional liberal view that fiscal conservatives are monsters who want to deprive children of a well-rounded education.

Still, I'll say this. A cut like the one facing the Perpich Center is very likely to get lost in the shuffle in a budget cycle like this, so if you don't think it ought to happen, well, it might be time to sit down and tap out an e-mail to your reps in St. Paul. They won't know how you feel unless you tell them, and believe me, they've got a lot of voices shouting in their ears right now.

Cutting Room Floor: Smells Like Teen Spirit

Posts tagged as Cutting Room Floor are where we put all the material relevant to our Inside the Classics concerts that we know we won't have time to get to in the actual shows. Some of it is serious, some of it is silly, and some of it is just extra information about the featured composer or piece of music that we didn't know what else to do with. Click the tag to see all this extra source material in one place...

One of the themes we'll be turning to a lot in this week's Mendelssohn concerts is the composer's distinctive voice, his embrace of raw, unvarnished emotion, and how that approach stemmed from his teenage years, when he wrote some of his best-loved works. Illustrating this point for us will be the finale from Mendelssohn's incredible Octet for Strings, which we'll be tacking onto the end of the first half of the concert.

We won't actually be talking a lot about the Octet itself, though, which is why I wanted to get to it here. We could go on forever about the intricacy of the writing, about how impossibly hard it is from a compositional standpoint to get two complete string quartets playing together without cacophony being the result, or about the supreme confidence with which a 15-year-old Felix Mendelssohn obviously approached this task.

But what I want to talk about is that fantastic adolescent quality that pervades the Octet, the driving, pulsating energy that rushes up to you in the first moments of a performance and refuses to let go until you've been drained of all your stamina. Most composers aren't good at sustaining that level of intensity, and truth be told, most performers aren't, either. This is what led one teacher I used to study with to declare flatly that the Mendelssohn Octet should never be performed by anyone over the age of 18. It's a teenager's piece, written with a teenager's view of the world, and requiring a teenager's endless supply of energy to pull off, so why beat around the bush? Get a bunch of teenagers to play the damn thing.

We won't be taking that approach at our concerts, but there's something to the idea. At the summer camp that I wrote about last August, the Octet has become a signature piece, the first and last movements played more or less every year by groups of teens so thrilled to be part of the experience that you practically have to shield yourself during the performance to avoid getting soaked by their adrenaline.

This is at the camp's senior session, which comprises young musicians aged 14-18, many of whom are at just the right level to be attacking the Octet for the first time. At the junior session (ages 10-13) where I teach, we don't generally do the Octet. Trying to pick out eight kids that young who can handle the blazing speed, the non-stop passagework, and the various other pitfalls of the piece is just too risky, and we tend to stick more to Mozart, Haydn, and early Beethoven.

But back in 2003, we decided that we finally had a group that could handle the massive first movement of the piece, though we knew it would be a major stretch for all of them. I practically begged to coach the group, and embarked on one of the most exhausting yet exhilarating teaching experiences I will ever have. For six frantic days, I clapped rhythms, stomped beats, yelled entrance cues, begged for them to listen to each other, and spent many extra hours giving private lessons to a little blond girl from North Dakota who couldn't quite believe she'd been placed in the group.

In the end, the performance was exactly what we'd hoped for: the eight of them started off somewhat cautiously, like they weren't sure they could do this, even as they were plainly doing it. But somewhere about halfway through the performance, they hit their stride, and you could sense the crackle of electricity passing between them as they stampeded to the end.

The audio below is of that 2003 concert, starting roughly two-thirds of the way through the movement. It is not a professional-caliber performance - it's better. You can hear the group occasionally start to pull apart, then snap back together as collectively, all eight musicians recognize a milepost in their parts. At the 2:22 mark, you know for certain that you're listening to kids, as they hit the first of several climactic moments in the coda, and slam their bows into their strings like their lives depend on it. At 2:52, you hear the first cellist desperately attempt to calm himself after several minutes of frantic scrubbing for his last lyrical solo, which comes out of nowhere. And the moment the piece comes to its shattering conclusion, you'll hear the audience (made up of all the other kids at the camp, plus parents, faculty, and staff) explode like no crowd you've ever heard at a Juilliard Quartet concert. It brought tears to my eyes back in 2003. It still does.



The performers are violinists Oren Ungerleider, Nikki Leon, Rebecca Ryan, and Brian Ho; violists Nate Lesser and Geertrui Spaepen; and cellists Tavi Ungerleider and Chloe Perret. With the exception of Spaepen, who was a camp counselor, all were either 12 or 13 years old in August 2003.

The Change We Need

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cutting Room Floor: From The Minds of Babes

As we draw within a few days of our first Inside the Classics concerts of the season, Sarah and I are in our usual mode of painstakingly cutting material from the show that we desperately want to get to, but simply won't have the time for. And as we did last season, we'll be using the blog as a way of giving you access to some of these extra bits and pieces. (Click the Cutting Room Floor tag to see all the entries that fall into this category.)

Later this weekend, Sarah will be writing about Mozart's largely ignored sister, who by all accounts was nearly as talented a musician as Wolfgang, but who was expected at a certain point to give up her music and settle down to raise a family. (All three of the "Young Wonders" we're featuring on this year's concerts actually had or have similarly talented siblings, so this is a subject we'll definitely be returning to throughout the year.)

But for today, I thought it would be fun to talk a bit about just what defines a prodigy in the neurobiological sense. What was so different about Mozart's 5-year-old brain as compared with yours or mine at that age, and how do the extraordinary minds among us develop differently than those with more average intellects? To that end, I've sought out an expert in this particular field to help us out - an expert, it should be said, to whom I have a deeply personal connection. Listen in below...

Ask An Expert: Think of the Children

We got a great question this week from Chris Larson, who may or may not be aware that his query ties in perfectly with our ItC season theme of child prodigies, boy wonders, call 'em what you will...

Q: Many of the most successful performers (and composers) start seriously pursuing music at a very young age, often at their parents urging. Do you think it's fair for parents to push their young children towards a career in music so early on? And conversely, do you think there's a certain age at which it is "too late" to start a career in music?

Back when I was a kid, a violin teacher named Kay Slone, who specialized in the popular Suzuki Method of childhood music instruction, wrote a book called They're Rarely Too Young and Never Too Old To Twinkle. (The Twinkle part refers to the tune, "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," which is the first actual piece of music every Suzuki student learns to play.) The book reflected the inherent optimism of the teaching method, which was developed by a Japanese teacher in the dark days following World War II, as a way to put smiles on the faces of traumatized Japanese children struggling in a war-ravaged country.

In developing his method, Dr. Suzuki, who had been trying to learn the German language as an adult with great difficulty, latched onto the realization that infants and young children grasp their mother tongue with a speed and cognitive strength that adults can never match. He reasoned that many of the complicated muscle movements and cognitive abilities required to play a musical instrument could, perhaps, also be taught more readily to children if the style of teaching approximated the way a child learns to speak. So Suzuki students learn to play music before they can read a note of it, and they learn to memorize entire books of short songs and play them on command before ever learning what a major triad or a hemiola might be.

The relevance of all this to Chris's question is revealed in the Wikipedia entry on the Suzuki Method: "Suzuki believed that every child, if properly taught, was capable of a high level of musical achievement. He also made it clear that the goal of such musical education was to raise generations of children with 'noble hearts' (as opposed to creating famous musical prodigies.)" He also believed that in order for children to be successful in learning music, their parents needed to be deeply involved in the process, even to the extent of learning their instrument of choice alongside them, and practicing with them daily.

And this, of course, is where things can go off the rails. Parents may all be well-meaning, but not all of them are good at distinguishing between what their children want, and what they want for their children. And as a teacher myself, I can tell you that it's never hard to spot the parents who are already thinking of the day their child will be a star even as they're still struggling to learn Song of the Wind.

I don't think there's anything wrong with a parent nudging their child in the direction of studying music, even at a very early age. I also don't see anything wrong with a father teaching his son to catch a baseball while he's still in kindergarten. However, I might raise an eyebrow if I saw a father forcing a kid that young to spend three hours a day taking batting practice and running fielding drills in the hope that he might grow up to be the next Joe Mauer. I'm not a parent, but that strikes me as bad parenting.

I tend to believe that kids find their own level in the world, and while I think it's great for parents and teachers to expose them to as many new experiences as possible (how will they find out what they love to do if no one shows them the choices they have?), I've known too many brilliantly talented young musicians who burned out before they turned 20, or became deeply depressed and socially inept adults as a result of having had their childhoods effectively stolen from them by overly ambitious parents. (26-year-old superstar pianist Lang Lang is just out with a new autobiography in which he details a harrowing childhood spent nearly chained to the piano bench by his seemingly monstrous father.)

But I also know just how many of the young musicians I've known began playing music either because their parents did, or because their parents suggested it. And with few exceptions, no one forced them into some foolish pursuit of stardom, and no one made them practice 8 hours a day instead of having friends and hobbies. We grew up playing because we loved it, and to be a kid who didn't play an instrument seemed unthinkable after only a couple of years at it. Our closest friendships were forged at weekend youth orchestra rehearsals and summer music camps.

Most of us didn't turn pro, ever. Music was a hobby, a path to friendships and partnerships, but not a career goal. And that's good, because music is not only a damned hard way to make a living, but too many professional musicians find their love of the craft diminishing with the daily grind. And that's where the second part of Chris's question comes in and clashes with the first part: yes, you can be too old to have a realistic shot at a career in classical music. And if you're a string player, the cutoff age, when you absolutely need to have gotten a good start, is probably around age 10. (It's a few years later for winds, brass, and percussion, but starting earlier is almost always better.) Most of us who play in major orchestras started way earlier than that - I was 4 when I got my first violin. (My parents would want me to add that it was entirely my idea.) And that's where Dr. Suzuki was dead on: it's just far, far easier to learn the basics of playing an instrument while your brain is still conditioned to be learning everything about the world.

Decompression.

Well, Sarah has her definition of vacation, and I have mine. I've never been much for relaxing on a sunny beach, or for that matter, relaxing at all. Having a lot of free time tends to make me nervous, so when the orchestra takes a break, I tend to look around for something else to do. And the something else that I look forward to most is called Greenwood.

Now, I know how obnoxious it is when someone goes on and on about some summer camp you never went to, so I'll just say that I've been going to Greenwood every summer since I was ten years old. (Okay, I missed 2006, but that was the orchestra's fault - we were on a European festival tour.) It's a beautiful place, nestled on 75 wooded acres in the Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts, where the cell phone towers can't find you and the internet is a vague rumor.

yep, they're singing. spontaneously. for fun.

Like Apple Hill, my other New England summer haunt, Greenwood is not a place bent on turning out prodigies or drilling the fundamentals of instrumental music into a bunch of overstimulated 12-year-old heads. It's a place for kids to be themselves, to form lifelong bonds with other kids over a shared interest, and mostly, to be astounded by just how much they're capable of. When they come off stage to a roar of applause and shouting after performing at their first Saturday night concert, every kid has the same look. It's a look of surprise and exhilaration at what they've just done, of only-just-acknowledged exhaustion following a week of hard work, and mostly, of sheer pride that they are as good as they hoped they might be.

So this is where I'll be spending the next few weeks. Like I mentioned, the net hasn't exactly found Greenwood yet, and since the nearest town of any size is 40 minutes away, you probably won't be hearing from me more than once a week or so until the end of the month. But you can bet I'll have some excellent stories to tell when I get back...

Days That Make It All Worth It

So, as I mentioned a while back, I'm spending a couple of weeks in rural New Hampshire, teaching and performing at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music. It's my second summer here, which, as anyone who's ever worked at a summer camp will tell you, means that it's my first summer actually feeling comfortable in my surroundings. Like most other music camps, Apple Hill is chock full of people who've been coming for years or even decades, and it takes a newcomer a while to get his/her bearings. To make matters worse, I spent most of my time here last summer either on the phone dealing with a sudden and unexpected family crisis or rehearsing frantically for a performance of Bartok 4 that seemed to be on an impossible timetable. I left after putting in my two weeks, wondering whether I had come across as an antisocial jerk, and not 100% sure that I'd done a very good job as a coach.

As it turned out, I can't have screwed it up too badly, because I got asked back almost immediately, and judging from the number of Apple Hill people who found my Facebook profile and got in touch over the year, I must have at least been social enough to leave an impression. And that's a good thing, because I'm having an absolute blast this time around. I'm performing a Mendelssohn quintet that I've always wanted to play with four incredible musicians, two of whom I went to college with and have been waiting for the chance to reunite with. (The piece also induces a lot less stress than a Bartok quartet, which is nice when you have only six days to rehearse.)

I'm also coaching three small chamber ensembles - early quartets by Mozart and Haydn, and the Franck piano quintet - and as always, I'm struck by the unique challenge each separate group poses. On the one hand, I've done enough coaching in my life that I've developed a style that tends to stay with me regardless of who's in front of me. But one thing I learned from my college viola teacher was the importance of adapting to the needs of your students, and to me, that's the most challenging aspect of the job. I've had quartets so timid that the slightest sharp word would put them near tears, and others so enthusiastic that it was all I could do to keep them under control. Most fall in between those extremes, and the really fun groups have a mix of personalities in which a good coach can use the strengths of one player to draw out new skills from another.

It's a heavy schedule of teaching, rehearsing, and performing here - I'm actually working many more hours each day than I do back home with the orchestra, and since we live in the same basic area as the participants, I'm more or less always on duty if someone needs help with something. But places like Apple Hill, while they may be exhausting, offer the kind of experiences that professional musicians will often go out of their way to seek out.

When you make your living playing concerts week in and week out, it can become a grind, and grinding leads to cynicism and a lack of real appreciation for what we get to do for a living. Helping a group of teenagers learn how to pull off a single, confident, competent performance of a piece that was flummoxing them only a few days earlier is rejuvenating. More than that, it's a living reminder of similar experiences that made each of us want to play music for a living.

A few minutes ago, as I was writing this, the violist from my Franck piano quintet bounced in the door and flopped into the chair next to me. She's from Bulgaria, and is studying music in Boston. In our first coaching today, I wasn't sure how to approach her - she seemed a bit shy compared to the others in the group, and I didn't want to overwhelm her on the first day of what will surely be a difficult week. But here she was tonight, sitting here and talking a mile a minute about how much she loves viola, how her favorite composer is Shostakovich, and how excited she was to hear that a violist would be coaching her group. And all I could think about was how I used to sit on the porch at my own childhood music camp, talking a mile a minute to my favorite coach about how great the viola was, how Shostakovich was my favorite composer, and how excited I was to dig into the piano quintet I'd just been assigned for that week.

I think tomorrow, I'll try pushing her a little harder for that extra rich sound I need on her big solo in the Franck...