We Are So Hollywood

So, apparently, those of you attending the orchestra's Sounds of Cinema festival this weekend or next will be getting an intermission faceful of all that video we were shooting during last October's Inside the Classics concerts, wrapped up in classic Tinseltown movie trailer format...



Heh. Nothing like getting a high-definition look at yourself on stage - I'm still decidedly unused to to that part of my role in this series, and the anxiety I feel whenever something like this is in the works has made me understand why people who work on camera for a living are so obsessed with cosmetic surgery. (Sarah, of course, looks fabulous as always. Maybe I need to stand further away from her so as not to invite the comparison - St. Cloud, say.)

Interestingly, the tagline that the unseen voice intones at the beginning of the trailer - "Don't think of it as a concert, think of it as a show about a concert" - was taken from a bunch of meaningless backstage banter that our video crew taped as Sarah and I were getting ready to go on stage for the first ItC show of the year. You just never know where you're going to find your next advertising slogan.

And speaking of video, we've got a whole mess of raw and edited footage taken from those same October concerts over at the new and improved Video section of the website. In addition to the introductory videos Sarah and I shoot for the series each season, you'll now find extensive clips of the first half of the Beethoven Pastoral show, as well as a bunch of videos of our favorite audience members talking about what exactly we do up there. Thanks to anyone and everyone who jumped in front of a camera for us - y'all say it better than we ever could...

(P.S. Extra credit to anyone who can pick out which audience member featured in the above trailer is related to me...)

I'm seeing colors

Back after a much-needed summer hiatus! Now, to ease myself back into regular blogging...

An ex-musician friend happened upon this video of Beethoven's 5th Symphony - a "visual representation" of music:



For a "color code" of what each line represents, click here.

This makes me think a bit of (don't laugh, now...) the vocals "notation" used for "Rockband" (yes, the video game for XBox/Playstation/Wii), which I find genius in its simplicity and accessibility. It's a reminder that there are a myriad ways to notate pitch and time (we in the orchestra business tend to get stuck on the dots and dashes on five lines that we look at every day).

Other cultures have very different systems:



Japanese Shakuhachi music.



Russian Znamenny chant.

And finally, an interesting link outlining alternative notation within the Western classical notation.

Heaven 'n' Hell

A stunning video installation in the elevator of the Standard Hotel in NYC by artist/director Marco Brambilla, depicting an eye-popping journey from hell to heaven:



It's positively Boschian (with Brueghelic undertones!), and I love that Stravinsky was chosen as the soundtrack - it's looped and manipulated, of course, but very well done, seamless.

A more hi-def version can be found here for your viewing pleasure, and worth watching to catch the profusion of images - it's ridiculously replete with pop-culture references - see if you can spot Michael Jackson...

Cirque du...?

Whatever happened to this contortionist version of the Andrews Sisters? And what does "Solid Potato Salad" mean? Questions aside, it's three minutes and fifty seconds well spent - I particularly like their big close. Hang in there until the one-minute mark, where the real magic starts...

Busted.

So, as it turns out, that wonderful live performance at the inauguration by Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, et al? Wasn't so live.

Now, on the one hand, it seems silly to criticize either the performers or the organizers for having pre-recorded the piece that they then pretended to play live, since playing instruments with any degree of dexterity when temps are in the teens is essentially impossible. (I should also point out that, had it been the Minnesota Orchestra scheduled to play at the inauguration, the performance would simply not have happened, since we have strict minimum temperature standards to protect our instruments, and that minimum is a helluva lot higher than an average January temp in D.C.)

On the other hand, controversies over lip-synching seem to crop up constantly when pop music is involved (Ashlee Simpson, anyone?), and it doesn't seem fair that classical musicians should get a complete pass. So what do you think? Should the pre-taping have been explicitly disclosed at the time of the "performance"? Should, perhaps, the pre-taping have included video, which would have allowed everyone present to watch the actual performance, rather than a mock-up? Or is this all just much ado about nothing?

Harold In The Balcony

It's been an interesting week at Orchestra Hall, in part because we're working with one of my favorite guest conductors, in part because there was a 46-hour turkey-related gap between our first and second concerts of the week (always dangerous, since professional orchestras work by creating extremely fast muscle memory for each week's program, then discarding and starting again the next week,) but mostly because we're playing Berlioz's Harold in Italy, the world's strangest viola concerto.

In truth, Harold isn't a concerto at all. It's more of a symphonic tone poem which happens to feature a particular solo instrument. (Not unlike Strauss's Don Quixote, which features the cello and viola as the title character and his trusty sidekick.) For the bulk of the first movement of the piece, the viola is front and center, playing more or less as a soloist with the orchestra chiming in on several extended tutti passages. But in the second movement, the solo viola doesn't play a lot, and what he does play is mainly accompanying the melodic progression of the orchestra. In the third movement, the orchestra keeps playing the melodies, while the viola chimes in occasionally with a bit of an obligato over the top of things. And finally, the finale barely features the soloist at all, other than a few flourishes at the beginning that hearken back to earlier movements. In fact, some violists choose to either melt back into the orchestra at this point, or at least start playing the orchestral viola parts from the soloist's position, just to avoid having to spend ten minutes standing there looking like a dweeb while the orchestra finishes your concerto for you.

So while Harold is a very fun piece to play and listen to, it's a bit awkward to watch if you're used to the traditional interplay between orchestra and soloist. Our principal viola, Tom Turner, actually called a number of colleagues around the world before the week began to ask how they handle the odd semi-soloist role. He got a number of opinions, but nothing that really dealt with the problem. But on the second day of rehearsals, Tom and conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier hit on a bizarre but surprisingly effective solution.

(Spoiler Alert: I've waited to write about this until the end of the week, in case a bunch of you were planning to come to the concerts. But we've still got the Saturday night concert to come, so if you're holding tickets for tonight, or think you might want to stop by, you'll be wanting to wait to read the rest of this post. Trust me - the whole effect is much more fun if you don't know what's coming ahead of time...)

So, what happens in the Tortelier/Turner version of Harold is that, towards the end of the first movement, when the viola has played its last solo and the orchestra is crashing through our last tutti, Tom takes his instrument off his shoulder, turns a few pages in his score, and then walks briskly down a set of stairs attached to the front of the stage, and walks straight out one of the doors on the main floor to the right of the stage. He's gone before we finish the movement, as the audience stares and tries to figure out what's gone wrong. (Our audiences thus far have seemed about evenly divided between those who are utterly baffled by this, and those who figure out almost immediately what's going on.)

As we begin the second movement, a pilgrim's march led by the strings, Tom is nowhere to be seen. And it isn't until a minute or so later that he reappears, standing in the corner of the first balcony overhanging stage right. From that position, he plays nearly the entire second movement, which creates the effect of the accompanying viola hovering over the orchestra sonically - it's more clear to the audience that he is no longer in a traditional solo role than it would be were he still standing at the front of the stage playing arpeggios. As the movement ends, Tom again turns and leaves the concert hall, stopping outside the balcony door long enough to play his final phrase from out in the hallway, with the door held open by one of our crew.

The third movement begins with a sort of sea shanty in the violas and piccolo, after which a lyrical motion takes over. This time, Tom pops up in the opposite balcony, again overhanging the orchestra and using his position to sing his obligato lines over the top of the ensemble. Again, he leaves before the end of the movement, and this time, as he plays his closing cadence from outside the door, the crew actually lets the door swing slowly shut, creating a real-life fadeout.

At this point, while the orchestra and conductor catch our breath and the audience begins looking around for where else the soloist might materialize, Tom essentially has to run out the balcony door, down a flight of stairs, up a sloping hallway, and into the very back of the hall on the main floor. We give him roughly an extra 20 seconds to accomplish this, but he has no chance to reach his position before we start the finale, and the conductor would ruin the effect by looking back to see if he's there before giving our cue, so there's a fair amount of trust involved. Were Tom to trip and fall on the way down the stairs, things could get interesting.

As it is, we start the last movement, and almost immediately, Tom is singing out from behind everyone. As his first phrase finishes, and the orchestra takes over, he stalks down the aisle and takes up a new position about two-thirds of the way to the stage, where he plays his next solo entrance (while, it should be said, mugging for the crowd around him a bit.) Following that, he walks to a third position nearly right in front of the stairs he came down at the end of the first movement, and plays one more solo line, before bolting up the stairs, striking a bit of a pose, and launching into the last real solo passage he'll play before the orchestra takes us the rest of the way. By this time, a good percentage of the audience seems to be grinning back at Tom, and he's been tossing a few smirks the way of the viola section as he swashbuckles through this last bit.

For the remainder of the performance, Tom essentially becomes our principal viola again, albeit a principal standing apart from us. He plays most of the orchestral passages, and finishes the piece as part of the larger ensemble. But since he's already played so many different roles over the course of the performance, it doesn't seem in the least odd, and the ovation he's been getting would seem to indicate that the crowd approves of the theatrics. It's always dicey to add a non-traditional element to an orchestra concert (Will the critics approve? Will our more traditional-minded concertgoers tolerate it? Will anyone understand what we're trying to do?), but in this case, it's definitely been worth the effort. I'm now firmly of the belief that Harold should always be played this way.

(A funny moment happened following the first performance of the week, as the violas crowded backstage to congratulate Tom. As we all marveled at his calmness in such an unusual situation, and his smooth transitions between the movements, the most veteran member of our section, Tokyo-born Eiji Ikeda, came up to shake Tom's hand, but then shook his head and admonished our principal. "Tom," said Eiji, "why you no make costume changes between movements?")

So, if any of you were at the concerts, I'm curious to hear how you reacted. Were you shocked? Amused? Bemused? Let us know in the comments, and enjoy the rest of the holiday weekend...

Clapping, part III

A few last thoughts on the clapping question.

Also, some Clapping Music. It's utterly hypnotic...

Damn The Tuxedos!

Composer/critic Greg Sandow had an interesting post over at his ArtsJournal blog this weekend, positing, with photographic evidence, that the formal dress sported by orchestras is an outdated remnant of a time when ordinary citizens of a certain class dressed much the same way on a daily basis, and orchestral music was largely the province of those certain classes. Greg's conclusion: "There isn't any [such] context now. Formal dress for classical performances just looks weird, and ancient. Time to put a stop to it."

Now, before I wade hip deep into this debate, let me state for the record that musicians are quite divided on the subject of concert dress, as are audiences. (The comments on Greg's post show that his readers are hardly of one mind.) In the last few years, I've begun to get the sense that a critical consensus is forming within the ranks of those who write about classical music for a living that it's time to think about ditching the white-tie-and-tails look, but even among those who agree with that statement, there's no widespread agreement about what should replace the tuxedos. Suits and ties, such as we wear for daytime concerts and pops? Simple black-on-black ensembles for everyone, which would have the men of the orchestra matching the women, who have never worn anything approaching the formality of a tux? T-shirts and jeans?

I'm not going to bother getting into what about the formal look turns some people off, and makes others happy, because I think both sides of that debate are fairly obvious, and have been hashed through ad nauseum elsewhere. Instead, I'd like to provide an argument in favor of ditching the tails that I haven't seen anywhere else. It's the major reason among many that I hate our dress code, and it has nothing to do with "looking professional" or making us more accessible to anyone who might find the formalwear intimidating and off-putting.

The argument is this: tuxedos are almost unimaginably uncomfortable to perform in, especially for string players, who must have pinpoint precision control of hundreds of small and large muscle groups at all times during a performance. The heavy tailcoats, needlessly bulky vests, ruffled shirts, and bow ties seemingly designed to get in the way of any shoulder-hoisted instrument quite simply make it harder to play well. I honestly believe that we become less elastic and adaptable as an ensemble the minute we put on these multi-layered monkey suits, and I can't believe there hasn't been a full-scale revolt before now.

Summer dress is even worse (again, if you're a man. Women's orchestral dress codes are almost always far looser, and never require topcoats under any circumstances.) Those white dinner jackets we wear with black bow ties and tux shirts are nearly always made of polyester, making them ridiculously hot for summer wear, and they're also nearly always badly tailored, which is an absolute killer when you're a violinist or bass player who needs a full range of arm motion. (Why don't we get non-polyester, you ask? Well, you know how there are always a few musicians wandering the stage in what look like unacceptably dirty white coats? Those are the cotton ones - they simply don't come in real, true white, so either you go poly or you look filthy.)

If you ask me, switching to a suit-and-tie dress code, as some high-profile European orchestras have done, doesn't really address the larger problem that topcoats make playing string instruments needlessly more difficult than playing without a coat. The women don't wear coats, and most of them look perfectly fine in their concert black. Why couldn't those of us with y chromosomes simply start wearing something more in line with what our female colleagues wear? A simple black button-down shirt with black dress pants and dress shoes is visually smooth, comfortable to play in, and in no way makes the orchestra look unprofessional or sloppy. (This, of course, is the dress code the Minnesota Orchestra employs for our Inside the Classics concerts.) For summer, we could switch from black shirts to white, as, again, the women already do.

Now, I know all the arguments for keeping things as they are, and I realize that many of you reading this probably aren't buying my contention that tuxes are really all that awful to play in, since orchestras have been doing so for ages, and sound perfectly fine. And as I said, there is no shortage of orchestra musicians who believe strongly that the formal look is an integral part of our presentation, and would hate to see a change.

But if you ask me, the truth is in actions, not words, so I tend to keep a close eye on what my colleagues choose to wear at our periodic chamber music concerts throughout the year, when no strict dress code is in place. Over the past years, I've seen colorful vests, well-tailored suits (mainly on wind players,) simple black ensembles, vibrant colored tops, and even a feather boa donned for effect during a classic film score.

What I have never, ever seen is a member of the Minnesota Orchestra choosing, of his own volition, to play a chamber music concert in white tie and tails. Why? Because they're awful to play in. Simple as that.

How much for a dozen?

I know, I know, they're talking flowers, but it's such a nice visual viola joke...

Here's another one from a tremendous catalogue:

Why do violists stand for so long outside their houses?
They can't find the key and they don't know when to come in.

And, just to be fair, one more:

A conductor and a violist are standing in the middle of the road. which one do you run over first, and why?
The conductor. Business before pleasure.

Your own favorites welcome as comments.

Forest for the Trees

As a general rule, musicians tend to be suspicious of marketers, agents, and other PR types. It's not that we think we can do without their services, of course, but we're taught from the first time we pick up an instrument that the music we play is deeply meaningful stuff, and selling it to the public like its a case of beer or a football game seems somehow wrong to us. Throw in the fact that people who work in music and people who work in PR each tend to speak in a very specific insider language, and that they aren't the same languages, and the gap widens.

The best way of explaining it might be to say that musicians harbor a deep-seated fear that the people who market us would be happiest if we agreed to drop all the Mahler and Stravinsky and just play the 1812 Overture and an assortment of Beatles arrangements every week. And on the other side of the coin, the folks who dedicate their professional lives to making our performances seem like something the public should spend its money on are frequently exasperated and baffled by musicians' seeming disinterest in (or even outright opposition to) any effort to make what we do more accessible to the people buying the tickets.

All of which is to say, it's an uneasy partnership. Everyone's on the same side, really, but not always on the same page. And as a result, a lot of marketing techniques that the for-profit world of commerce takes for granted never really get tried when the product being pitched is an orchestra (or a theater or a museum, for that matter.) So I'm always on the lookout for the obvious sorts of ideas that those of us in my business frequently miss while we're too busy worrying about being taken seriously.

Here's one now - promoter/agent Amanda Ameer, blogging about just this sort of thing over at ArtsJournal, points out that retail marketing has become so sophisticated and subtle that just this week, she walked into a clothing store she had no need to go into, just because it was inviting (by design.) She then compares the techniques employed by the store to those employed by Carnegie Hall, just down the block, and concludes that Carnegie isn't even marketing in the same ballpark. Forget the stock posters that ring the building, says Ameer - why isn't there music playing from just inside wide-open doors, or a video display touting upcoming concerts? Why should the public take an interest in what you're selling if you don't seem terribly interested in offering it up?

This is the kind of thinking that led the Minnesota Orchestra a few years back to adorn the entire front and sides of Orchestra Hall with giant pictures of Osmo, the orchestra, and even a few audience members. At the time, it was supposed to be a one-year thing, just to get people talking and spruce up the look of our 30-plus-year-old facade. It worked - we got plenty of press coverage out of it (my favorite write-up was from local writer Christy DeSmith, then of The Rake, who described Osmo as sporting "a slightly dopey smile, as if he had just bumped his head,") and the "wrap," as we call it, leaves no doubt about what our building is, and what you'll find inside. There's no longer any thought of going back to the unwrapped look.

The music world is so wrapped up in itself (by necessity - doing what we do for a living requires a ridiculous level of single-minded devotion to purpose) that we frequently forget that the rest of the world doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about Beethoven symphonies and the new Grapes of Wrath opera. And when we do remember, we tend to look for ways to make the general public as obsessive about music as we are, rather than finding ways to draw in the casual listener, or even random people who have no idea that they might enjoy the concert hall experience. And that's a shame, because - as Ameer's blog post demonstrates - it's not that hard to make people want to walk in your front door.

Torn from the tabloids (or Scientific American)

A recent slew of opera announcements has caught my attention, not least for the fact that each of these projected productions is based on contemporary, topical and perhaps controversial subject matter.

First up, the seemingly silly, an opera based on the brief but sensational life of Playmate/golddigger/Trimspa spokeswoman Anna Nicole Smith by Richard Thomas and Mark-Anthony Turnage. At first glance, it’s a superficially sensationalist, ripped-from-the-headlines topic by the same guy (Thomas) who was librettist/composer of “Jerry Springer – The Opera”. On closer inspection, it appears that this tawdry and tragic life isn’t so far removed from countless other opera heroines, from Dalila to Carmen, who manipulated men for adoration/power/financial gain. This could be an interesting production, particularly with Turnage, a highly-respected jazz-influenced English composer who has two very successfully operas under his belt, at the helm.

Next up, another tragic story, this time fictional; an opera based on Annie Proulx’s novel “Brokeback Mountain” (yes, the very novel that yielded Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning film) commissioned by the New York City Opera. My surprise at this production came not so much from the subject/libretto (although I find the idea of a cowboy opera absolutely charming), but from the composer, Charles Wuorinen. While Wuorinen is certainly no stranger to the novel-turned opera (his adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel, “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”, premiered at the City Opera in October 2004), he’s a seriously serialist composer whose works are notable for their unrepentant twelve-tone modernism that make little concession for populist tastes. It could be that because this story has been such a part of the contemporary cultural zeitgeist (not least for it’s honest treatment of a homosexual relationship) I have a hard time imagining it under a very different artistic/aesthetic guise. By the same token Wuorinen was highly lauded for his last effort for the City Opera (the aforementioned “Haroun”); “Brokeback” will be a reimagining that I look forward to with great curiosity.

Finally, another movie-connected opera based on Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” commissioned by Milan’s famed La Scala and to be composed by Giorgio Battistelli. Climate change has been at times a controversial topic (there are still some very vocal global warming skeptics who claim that current climate changes are due to cyclical global temperature shifts and not because of human-caused increases in greenhouse gas emissions, despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary) and certainly a rather loose and unrestricted basis for an opera (will there be an “Ozone Aria”?). "It will be about the tragedy of our present situation," Battistelli said. "It is a great challenge, of course, to write an opera on such an unusual subject. It is certainly not the story of Romeo and Juliet." To say the least. But from a production standpoint, there is the exciting possibility of using projections, SFX and other multimedia as part of the performance experience.

Opera tends to be more cutting edge than anything you would encounter in a concert hall; the theatrical aspect certainly supports innovation. In an increasingly visual/multimedia society, it has the upper hand in terms of visibility and popularity (one only needs attend an HD Met Broadcast to see that opera certainly reaches a wide demographic). What does this bode for the future of concert music?

Classical pinups?

A fashion spread on Esquire.com features, refreshingly, handsomely be-tuxed classical musicians, from Joshua Bell to members of the New York Philharmonic.

Seeing is believing

Composer Zhou Tian is in town – the Orchestra had commissioned him to write a piece for the Young Peoples Concerts we’re doing this week – and we had a chance to sit and do coffee after a busy couple of days. Tian and I went to music school together (he went by “Zhou” or “Joe” then, and the name change has been a little confusing), and it was nice to catch up, gossip about mutual friends and talk about Portishead. (You didn’t think we just sat around all day thinking about Mahler, did you??)

We also talked shop, and one of the many topics that we alighted on was how we reacted to music in films. Not “film music” – John Williams, Howard Shore, et al. – but music used in films. Tian’s example was ”Being John Malkovich", which at one point features Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste. He had heard the piece before, of course, but had no feeling of connection to it until he heard it in the film. As he explains it, it’s not that he remembers the movie now when he hears that Bartok, it’s more that it brings back the emotion and engagement he felt while hearing the music in context of the movie. It went from a piece that he didn’t particularly like to one he enjoys immensely.

My example was ”Amadeus”, which I’d seen in the theater as a kid. Before seeing the film, I had never encountered Mozart’s Requiem, and so “Amadeus” was my first exposure to this piece- it had a tremendous impact on me at the time, and my mom will tell you I would run around singing “Confutatis maledictis!” (I must have been a weird child…) I still feel a sense of connection to this piece, particularly because it still evokes the powerful emotions I felt when watching the film. Again, it’s not that I recall the film or any specific imagery – it’s all about the associative emotions.

Of course we all have music that we adore because of associations – the song playing on the radio when you had your first kiss, that piece you played in high school orchestra when the world seemed so full of promise – but Tian’s example struck me particularly. The context of that particular Bartok piece within that movie made him hear the music in a different way. And it makes a lot of sense that in an increasingly visual world, visual impact necessarily influences auditory impact (MTV proved that in the ‘80s – I mean, would Britney Spears be a star without music videos?).

That always raises the question of the visual impact of concert music, which, all things considered, is not tremendous. Yes, there are 90 or so people on stage at any given orchestra concert, which gives a sense of scope, and conductors and soloists are generally interesting to watch, but is that enough? Some orchestras have experimented, with modest success, with video screens mounted above the stage and cameras onstage to give closer views of musicians as they perform - it certainly does something to upgrade the visual impact. Is this something that should concern us in the orchestra industry? Or is it our responsibility to educate people in the much more reflective art of sitting and simply listening to music?