Emotional Rejuvenation

I find, perhaps more often than I would like, that there are days when my mind is in a rut--when there's nothing particularly irking me or getting me down, but when my mind simply cannot kickstart itself. I'm learning more and more over time that this really isn't a problem with my mind but rather one result of a need for an emotional stirring. Perhaps almost as much as food itself, the evoking of our emotions is a form of sustenance--sustenance of one's being.

Today, I watched a Kultur videorecording of Bernstein rehearsing Mahler 9, entitled Four Ways to Say Farewell. Bernstein's understanding of the piece, his concept of Mahler's saying "farewell" to human love, to society, and to life itself, is utterly convincing. There is a common perception that Mahler had a preoccupation with his own death, but Bernstein was able to recreate that preoccupation in a remarkably human way, rather than in the caricaturish manner in which we typically view it. Bernstein himself is often viewed as a caricature, prone to histrionics and self-absorption. Perhaps that is part of what allowed him such empathy for Mahler.

As the last few strains faded in the last movement, evocative of the final struggle to hold onto life and then the calm acceptance of death, my heart dropped into my stomach. In that moment, I felt as if I finally knew Mahler, as if I were a wide-eyed child, led hand-in-hand by a parent into this intimate understanding of a dying person. From that, I once again felt truly alive.

On Conducting Pedagogy, Part I

Today’s column is the first of a multi-part series of columns on conductor education in colleges and universities in the United States. I have spent the last nine years of my life affiliated with colleges and universities, in or around their music departments, and in that time, I have encountered a number of things that strike me as either odd or counterintuitive about American conductor training programs.

First, it should be noted that the way we train wind conductors seems to be fundamentally different than the way orchestral conductors cut their teeth, a direct result of the reality that wind bands are still primarily supported by academia and have no widespread professional outlet of their own. If a student wants to conduct winds for a living, they can safely assume that they will wind up working at a secondary school or college/university. Most students who study wind conducting in college, therefore, are trained to become classroom teachers first and musical scholars, leaders and ambassadors second.

Conductor training in the European tradition, however, places a premium on field experience.The relative abundance of community ensembles, combined with a wide range of opera houses and regional orchestras, allows for young conductors to be thrown into conducting on a large scale early in their careers. They also learn from this type of experience that shaping an artistically viable and compelling musical experience is their primary concern, rather than having to occupy themselves with the nuances of things like budgeting, IEPs and block scheduling.

This is not acceptable—it is a disservice to the musicians being conducted and the music itself. Some enterprising students realize early on that they must create their own conducting opportunities, usually by organizing chamber ensembles of their peers and preparing works for independent performance. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity for the cooperation of student conductors and student composers, who are perpetually looking for players to perform their works. I feel very strongly that schools should do more to encourage this sort of cooperation—a good start would be to take a more active role in organizing concerts of works by young composers featuring student conductors and performers.

Next time, we will begin to dig into the real meat-and-potatoes of conductor training with some thoughts on the pedagogy of physical technique.

Quiet Riot

In my last post I rambled on a bit about some of the responsibilities of the conductor in art music as prompted by tales from Howard Taubman’s biography of Toscanini, The Maestro. While Toscanini’s relationship to the score piqued my curiosity as a conductor, I found equally intriguing the interactions he had with the listening public. As I noted last time, Toscanini came to be known in part for his propensity for butting heads with the listening public to the point of even walking out in the midst of a performance. A number of things about that struck me.The opera-going public of Toscanini’s time was accustomed to an operatic score being manipulated in performance to allow soloists to show off, often by either altering the printed music for the sake of virtuosity or by permitting repetitions of an aria at the audience’s behest. Toscanini, servant to the printed score that he was, would have none of that, and his stripped-down and literal performances, inspired though they might have been, rubbed many listeners the wrong way. Taubman retells several stories in his book about crowds that grew restless to the point of staging coordinated protests before, during and after performances involving the Italian maestro.

Now, I believe that these malcontents could have expressed their displeasure with Toscanini’s unwillingness to bend in a more civil fashion than by—as one disgruntled musician reportedly did—setting off a small explosive behind the theater during a performance. Perhaps had they chosen to try to understand Toscanini’s musical philosophy and methodology more carefully, they may have grown to appreciate him more easily. But perhaps there is also something to be learned from these opera-goers.

Maybe, just maybe, the listening public today has grown too passive in its listening and appreciation of art music. We certainly don’t need to have people throwing bombs and making threats to musicians or conductors. But honestly, when was the last time art music had a good riot at a performance? When was the last time that the majority of art music enthusiasts could claim to care more about the content of what they were hearing rather than their status as so-called music connoisseurs?

In one of my first columns, I spoke with excitement about how these days in art music, anything goes. I spoke of how we can now hear serialism intersect in a single musical work with anything from Romanticism to Rock and how invigorating such artistic freedom has the potential to be.But this passivity from listeners is the ugly other side of that coin. If we as listeners passively accept everything we hear, without honest thought about its content, sensibility and design, then we are not appreciating anything at all. Instead, we are letting it wash over us. Truly, if the conductor has her responsibilities, this should be the responsibility of the listener: to stay always actively involved with the music, to turn it over in the mind and continually rediscover it from new angles. And perhaps, every now and then, to riot in the face of an artistic travesty.