Contrary Motion

We're Almost There

2006-07-24T01:32:00.000-04:00

Now I know that this place has been kind of empty. There are no excuses (well except for me being in the hospital again) but I've been keeping an eye on this little blog of mine and I see it reaching the 1000 hits mark.

Nothing could make me happier.

So I want to say thank you to everyone who's stopped by (or stumbled upon) our little page. It's boosted my confidence extremely. And I have big plans for the coming months like podcasts and interviews (that's what happens when you graduate from college) so stay tuned! We're allowed to go on a little hiatus, no?

If Alex Ross can...

Next time on Contrary Motion: In Memoriam - Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and The Shostakovich Centenary.

Putting A Subjective Idea Into An Objective Box

2006-03-13T20:10:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year again --- no, not March Madness (even though it is that, too --- go tarheels) --- time for auditions for collegiate musicians across America. I myself have fallen into that trap, preparing for my grad school auditions and one topic kept appearing during my conversations with many other musicians undergoing the same plight. How do you take something as subjective as music, and even more so an audition and frame it in an objective way that can be understood by all?

"Well if the stars are aligned, the weather is just right, my instrument is fine, I'm not sick and someone sprinkles me with fairy dust then maybe i'll be fine."

True, there will always be a level of the audition process that is easy. Sometimes you have people who are amazing and you have people who are less than stellar. Those are the easy decisions. But most of the time, it's a little bit more complicated than that. Usually, it involves deciding which one has a better vibrato, more musical interpretation (that you can agree with), choice of tempi, the smallest, most minute things that make the difference. And this is where there's a difference of opinion. Sometimes as a musician, it's out of your control. They may not like your sound that day or there just may be someone they like more.

Then how do we as musicians deal with that?

This does not apply just to college musicians. The same goes for auditions in professional symphonies. I've heard stories of orchestras closing auditions for a time because they just weren't pleased with anyone that day and asked everyone to come back, no fault to them. For them, there's much more at stake. The relationship between that of the musician and the symphony is one that can last for several years and, in many instances, bear fruit for both parties.

But honestly, the audition is the not first place in music where we come to this dilemma. Critics and reviewers, historians and just your average listener encounter this daily. What if I don't like a piece of music that the collective tells me is a masterwork? As it stands, judging on any level is completely human and will always occur in every facet of art. How we choose to judge what we listen to do and what we think is good, whether it is buying a recording or deciding who gets into college, is an aspect of the human mind that I'll leave others more skilled than I to evaluate.

Just Give Me Two Weeks

2006-02-08T23:30:00.000-05:00

So, we all know that in life, there are things that take over all one's time. For me, that just so happens to be the recital i'll be giving in two weeks from tomorrow. After that's over, I can devote myself to all my other loves, including Contrary Motion! I have a whole spiel about that hooplah that is Mozart's 250th birthday among other things so, John, take the wheel. I (unfortunately) have a performance to plan.

Till then, blogosphere. (Oh man, i hate that word.)

Overheard in the Coffee Mill

2006-01-27T19:57:00.000-05:00

While I sat at the bar today, sipping my cup of coffee and reading Gunther Schuller's history of conducting, two Coffee Mill employees were talking about a tank toppy/skirt garment that one of them made:

A: See, I wish I had an education in doing measurements and all that, since I suck at that part. This was originally supposed to be a skirt, and look.
B: Well, it seems to have worked out okay. You'll get an education in that eventually, right?
A: Yeah, I will.
B: But sometimes, it's good to do that without an education. If you get an education in it, then you can't do it as freely, because your eye has been trained a certain way.
A: I suppose.
B: And if you've got real talent in something, you can do it without an education.

--

I'm not sure that I agree with this argument against the value of education. Perhaps it's because I've benefitted so much from the education I've received. I know that I wouldn't be one-tenth the musician I am now without having spent so many years almost single-mindedly devoted to the betterment of my artistic skills.

I very strongly get the impression that non-artists give too much credit to "innate talent"--whatever that is--when trying to explain proficiency in the arts, making virtuosi out to be blessed with powers supernatural or magical. I contend that it's nothing of the sort. The arts are like anything else in this regard--you can become fluent in them if you immerse yourself deeply enough in them for a long enough period of time. The lion's share of the work is in learning the craft--the rest is simply in learning how to use that craft in a way that people can, in some sense, relate to. There's a very distinct reason that Sir Simon Rattle once said that, for just one example, "all great conductors are over 60. You and I are no exception."

Of course, the importance of lengthy study and practice of an art does not necessarily imply schooling, at least not in the formal sense. Some of the most fluent artists in the world never had formal training. That said, however, they weren't fueled by fairy dust, pacts with Satan, or the Force. They lived and breathed their art, and their devotion and training--informal though it was--helped them to cultivate their genius.

I would argue that on a certain fundamental level an artist is no different than a lawyer, a surgeon, or any other specialist. A surgeon is not born with a supernaturally-endowed talent for triple-bypass surgery--her elegant incisions and life-saving transplants once may have appeared to be magical, but now appear almost mundane. Nor, I suspect, do lawyers have a magical gift for brazenly mocking all semblance of common sense--though Michael Jackson's lawyer might yet prove me wrong.

I'm not sure why this particular conversation struck such a chord in me. I think it's because there seems to be a continually growing disconnect between the average person and the artist. The culture industry (danke schoen, Herr Adorno) has helped create consumers who often, upon experiencing the work of a master, either pass it off as elitist pap or, conversely, deify it and in doing so forfeit any serious attempt at a critical understanding of the work. The appreciation of a work of art requires at least some critical thought, and while worshippers at the altar of talent honestly and happily believe themselves to be participating in that critical exchange of ideas, the conversation simply washes over them. Dig into your arts and your culture, folks. Don't be afraid to form an opinion. Come back into the conversation.

Birgit Nilsson, 87

2006-01-11T11:22:00.000-05:00

For all of you opera fans out there, I read some sad news today--Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson died on January 1, at the age of 87. One of the most well-known sopranos of her time, she made her operatic debut in Sweden on three days' notice (in Der Freischutz) in 1946, her American debut in 1956, debuted at the Met in 1959 in Tristan und Isolde in 1959, and remained a powerful figure on stage until her retirement in 1984. Thankfully for us listeners, recordings were made at one point or another of all of the major roles she played throughout her career.

I'm still a relative newcomer to opera, but am learning to appreciate it more as I go. I've heard her in the Decca recordings of Der Ring des Nibelungen, and they're powerful examples of a vocalist at the height of her craft. I look forward also to hearing her in some of the bigger Italian operas like Turandot and Tosca. Since Nilsson quite famously sung the role of Brunnhilde in the Ring Cycle, it is more than a little tempting at this point to make a joke about the fat lady singing--I'd not be the first to do so, nor, undoubtedly, would I be the last. Suffice it to say, however, that the world of opera has lost one of its giants, and she will sorely be missed.

A Past That Is Tangible

2006-01-01T18:29:00.000-05:00

Over lunch with a few friends of mine i hadn't seen in maybe a year, we got to talking about our majors in college --- something I suppose all friends do. I asked one of my friends the meaning of her major (Public History) and she told me her specialization was 18th Century Colonialism in the South up to 1776. She then asked about my specialization (for my musicology degree) and I said Early 20th Century America up to 1945 --- she thought it was a scintilating choice. When I said those words, for the first time, a shiver went down my spine and I got to thinking, what is it that led me to this time period, this choice out of the 300 years of history regarding the Western art music tradition. I have always been fascinated it, but why?

A couple of days after this, I found myself watching "Rhapsody in Blue", a fictional biopic about George Gerswhin. There is a scene where Gershwin's "teacher" is telling him to listen to the musical voice inside him like Schubert, Wagner and Beethoven. And then he shows Gershwin a manuscript that was given to him and signed by Brahms. I felt this same chill I had felt at lunch the previous day and it didn't stop there. At Gershwin's premiere of Rhapsody in Blue, the likes of Rachmaninoff and Heifetz showed their faces. And while Gershwin was in Paris, working on what would be An American in Paris, he was introduced to Ravel. Throughout all of this, I was filled with this sense of awe, even though i knew that only so much of this was true. And then, amidst all of these random thoughts and questions, it clicked.

For me, I had always found it very difficult to relate to Beethoven, Mozart or Haydn because of the distance between myself and them. I have no real concept of the age in which they lived other than what I learn in school. But Stravinsky, Dvorak, Mahler, Bartok, Schoenberg all seem so tangible, living in a time that i know, that i'm familiar with --- the time of my grandparents and parents. Living in New York City does nothing but enhance this, passing a house where Mahler lived, playing in a hall where Dvorak's works were premiered. The places have changed but only very little. The knowledge that I am only so far removed from genius, that they were walking, talking and composing is mind-boggling. There is also the question of will we, as in my generation, see another renaissance like the one happening in America in the first 50 years of the 20th century. I often ask my colleagues if we'll ever see another Mozart or Beethoven or does the world that we live in make it impossible fo that to happen. It's a troubling thought knowing that only a short time ago, the time of my parents' childhood, Leonard Bernstein was producing his Young People's Concerts on television, a major network at that.

We may never see something like that again in our lifetime, maybe not for many, many years but as long as we have memories, like that of my teacher who felt that same chill when she took music out of a file cabinet that had Hindemith's signature on it when she studied at Yale, hopefully, people will continue to be inspired. And then maybe, just maybe, something might be done about that whole next American renaissance.

Every Ending a Beginning

2005-12-31T23:48:00.000-05:00

There is a term for a musical phrase whose ending serves also as the beginning of the next: an elision. Few musical phenomena have such fitting symbolic use at this time of year, as one year melts into the next. Honestly, January 1 is an arbitrary date, and constitutes no more official a beginning than does Chinese New Year or Rosh Hashanah. But as humans we seem to need beginnings and endings as a way of measuring our progress and reminding ourselves of both the tragedy and the miracle of our own mortality.

So every year, as December 31 passes into January 1, I celebrate the many elisions that have come and gone in the passing year. I want to take a brief moment to thank the few people who actually read this silly thing. It's an outlet, and is important to me even solely as such. But for those of you who do read it, I hope you enjoy reading it even half as much as I enjoy writing in it.

Here's to the upcoming year, the beginning of some wonderful experiences, happiness and health. Cheers!

The Crusty Artifice of Pop Music

2005-12-01T14:53:00.000-05:00

In recent years, one curious division amongst contemporary pop musicians occurs between musicians who perform their own compositions versus those performing works by professional songwriting teams. This differs markedly from the distant past, when the composer of music was the true creative force and the performer was a mouthpiece for the composer. Now, music lovers are reduced to saying that, for just one example, Avril Lavigne is a more viable musician than, say, Britney Spears solely because Lavigne writes her own music. In many eyes, Lavigne's status as songwriter makes her immediately viable, since it has become so rare these days to find a pop star who actually does write his or her own music.

Strangely, it seems that to many people, having written one’s own music in today’s prepackaged, sanitized-for-your-protection world of popular music makes one necessarily musically viable. Most listeners are apparently not deterred if the music that person writes is trite, meaningless or unoriginal--if the performer wrote it herself, goes the theory, it must contain some greater amount of personality or sincerity--and thereby, meaning--than the latest of the cookie-cutter hits.

People today are searching for meaning, clawing for it in a world that has become so overgrown with artifice that we hardly know what meaning is when we see it. This conundrum is represented these days most aptly by so-called "reality" television. These programs purport to expose the drama inherent in real human interactions, but instead present viewers with a slickly produced, fantastic version of reality. In many ways, reality television must be so if it is to be profitable. Not only is it obviously a part of the artifice, it is a part that is sucessful only because it brazenly claims not to be. Likewise, we now find ourselves immersed in music where today’s fresh new image, deftly crafted from demographic numbers and dollar signs, is sent to market, destined to become tomorrow’s mass-culture reality.

With this trend in mind, the pop stars of today cannot be viewed as musicians in any purely creative sense. More accurately, they have become strictly recreative--singing, dancing figureheads of social institutions that push a particular angle on modern life and personal identity. Certain pop stars, like Madonna, have been fortunate enough to market themselves from a variety of different angles, thus extending their shelf life. In reality, however, this is more a feat of creative salesmanship than innovative music-making. Undoubtedly, Madonna will be remembered far less for her music than for the evolving images of womanhood that she represented over the course of her career.

This truly highlights the sorry state of popular music as a commercialized product as we find it today in America. Popular music is, indeed, everywhere: in commercials, in the backgrounds of television programs and films, in automobiles, elevators, office radios and iPods. And as is the case with any other commercial product in a capitalist society, the goal has become to see who can produce it the cheapest and sell the most of it. The music industry--for it truly is a factory built for mass production--has systematically lowered our artistic expectations for music so that it can sell us less art, less meaning, for more money.

Our choice should not be between the pop star who writes her own music and the one who does not--that seems a slim set of choices indeed. It should be between blindly buying what pop culture peddles and learning to listen critically to music in order to to decide for ourselves what is and is not artistically appealing.

Thoughts on Tone Deafness

2005-11-23T22:52:00.000-05:00

The October 2005 issue of BBC Music features a fine column by Lauren Stewart on the topic of amusia, commonly referred to as tone-deafness. Her description of the condition parallels amusia with certain types of color-blindness in which people cannot distinguish between two given colors. Likewise, people with true tone-deafness generally cannot perceive changes in pitch. It is commonly thought that around 14% of people claim to be tone-deaf. But if Stewart's definition of amusia is accurate, then it must be assumed that far more people claim to be tone-deaf than actually are.

Stewart reasons, and I agree, that most people identify as tone-deaf either out of a simple lack of training in vocal pitch reproduction or a shyness in doing so for others. Thus, over time, the scientific description of tone-deafness has been supplanted by a vaguer social one. I'm sure we've all met people who fall into this mischaracterization of amusia--the friend at the karaoke bar who absolutely refuses to take the microphone, for example. But more often than not, when this person sings, they prove that they at least can distinguish and reproduce pitch changes, even if awkwardly.

The University of Newcastle in Britain has done research into the phenomena, proving first and foremost that Newcastle is home to more than just fine brown ale. Newcastle's results showed that almost all people with amusia require a change in pitch of over a semitone before they can recognize the change, while some require up to ten semitones before hearing the difference. Ten semitones! On the other hand, people without amusia could usually hear pitch differences of less than a semitone, with some people hearing changes down to a tenth of a semitone. The difference is profound, as high level amusia renders every piece of Western music unintelligible to the listener. The American National Institute of Health has also found a strong genetic component to amusia, leading us further away from the idea that tone-deafness occurs as a result of a lack of exposure to or participation in quality music.

More striking still are the ramifications that this sort of tone-deafness has on a person's comprehension of the nuances of speech. In Western languages, of course, people rely on inflections of pitch to indicate subtle changes in the meaning of a given word--we use it to separate a question from a statement, for instance, or sarcasm from something genuine. While most people would probably learn to sense these differences through facial expressions, they would be at a loss when listening to someone over the telephone, for instance. This problem is made doubly challenging for speakers of Mandarin or Vietnamese, in which a given word may mean five or six wholly different things depending on its pitch inflections.

Many people with amusia cannot recognize common melodies except by rhythm and often perceive music as simple noise. But as musicians with profound hearing loss have proven, nearly anyone can still participate in music through sensations of rhythm and vibration--most famously in the case of Evelyn Glennie. As we learn more about this phenomena, then, our view of students whom we too easily toss off as tone-deaf must necessarily evolve. If we fail to impart to these students why music is worth loving and do not find ways to give them at least some tools for interacting with it, then our creativity as educators has likewise failed.

So much to learn, so much to hear.

2005-11-21T16:42:00.000-05:00

Today's listening adventure involved the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with Previn at the helm, in the Vaughan Williams 5th Symphony. The bulk of my time with Vaughan Williams has been with his wind music--most specifically his Folk Song Suite. One of the founding pillars of the wind band repertoire, it's a charming piece, one that I've had the pleasure of performing three or four times. It showcases the British military band format, which at the time of the Suite'scomposition was still, artistically speaking, in its infancy. It dips its toes into the waters of the artistic range of which wind ensembles are capable. Without it and pieces of its time, we could not have the impressive range of music for winds that we have today. But when it comes to Vaughan Williams output, I am coming to realize that it is child's play.

My first real experience with RVW's orchestral output was the Sinfonia Antartica, which I--foolishly, perhaps--took on as a final project for an orchestration class three years ago. With its rich palette of color and huge ensemble size, I thought I could bring it to life as a piece for large wind band. The project was an exercise in diligence and frustration, as I struggled to make the work accessible for winds. While other students hammered away at orchestrations of 16-bar hymns for their final projects, I lived with Vaughan Williams for three months, every night trying to make progress on this beast, this musical headstone for Robert Falcon Scott and his doomed expedition to the South Pole. As the years passed, popular perception of Scott has changed from one of reverence to doubts about his competence. But all criticisms aside, I could not ignore the drama of the final journal entry he penned before his death on the Ross Ice Shelf, which RWV took as inspiration for the Antartica:

I do not regret this journey; we took risks, we knew we took them, things have come out against us, therefore we have no cause for complaint.

The more time I spend with Vaughan Williams, the more I appreciate his voice amongst 20th-century composers. I'm still a small fish in the world of orchestral and wind repertoire, I don't deny it. But as I listen to more works, both widely accepted and on the fringe, I also refuse to hide my wide-eyed excitement when I come upon one that reaches me profoundly. It no longer matters to me if that piece is not on the cutting edge of musical development, even at the risk of appearing naive. If my wonderment makes me naive, so be it. I would rather open my heart to a popular work like the 5th than remain bitter and closed off, resigned only to championing the works of the avant-garde. New works must always be championed, I agree, but not at the price of ignoring the beauty of works that came before and may simply be less experimental than the latest Stockhausen or Rands.

Previn talks about how people are often afraid to program Vaughan Williams' less violent symphonies out of fear that people will not come out to hear them. But in the 5th, Vaughan Williams crafted a gem, an introspective work that does not need to be on the cutting edge. It stands on its own amongst 20th-century symphonies, a heartstopping work that shows an old master wielding the forces of a large symphony orchestra deftly, almost effortlessly, and to astonishing effect. The Romanza alone made my bottom lip quiver and brought tears to my eyes. I felt so exposed, so utterly revealed that I had to rest my head in my hands while listening to it. It brought me to that moment of emotional intimacy in which I feel physically weakened, when my sense of being in my own skin and skeleton fades, replaced by an overwhelming sense of immersion in something beautiful, truthful and larger than myself.

I hope never to reach a point in my life where I am no longer capable of going to that state. If the childlike wonderment that allows me to access that state makes me naive, then I will celebrate my naivete as long as I am able.

The Question No Young Musician Wants To Hear

2005-11-10T21:34:00.000-05:00

"So, what are you studying in school?"

Yes, that question. And you might think that that is a very ordinary, unassuming question but for anyone in college who's had to answer that question and the questions that always follow that question, then you know just what a hassle that conversation can turn into. Unfortunately, I have spent a considerable amount of time this year in the hospital. While there, I suppose to make some sort of small talk, the nurses and hospital workers would ask me questions about myself. Think of any uncomfortable question that someone could ask you and they asked me but I brushed those off with ease. But then, it would always come back to the aforementioned question. And I would always sigh a great sigh.

So why is this question so bad, you might ask. Well, there's a myriad of reasons but I'll start with the basics. Apparently, no one seems to study music anymore (this being the opinion of the general populus) and whenever you say "um, I study music", the response is always the same. one of astonishment and confusion. This leads to the second question --- "do you sing/what instrument do you play?". For me, I always get the people who believe that if you study music, that automatically makes you a singer. And so when they ask me do I sing, i never know what to say. First off, all collegiate musicians sing in some respect even though we may not all be singers. And I, personally, do sing but that is not my primary instrument. This is where it gets complicated for me. I always respond with "no. I play bassoon."

I'm sorry?

That always gets their goat. Now i don't mind that people don't necessarily know what a bassoon is. I tell them not to be ashamed or feel bad or try to hide the fact that they don't know, I don't mind. What bothers me are the people who say "bassoon? that's so weird. like no one plays bassoon! what made you play that?" spoken with a tone that reeks of disappointment, confusion and "wow, this girl is an idiot.". I don't know why I always seem to get that reaction, as if I've just made the biggest mistake of my life by choosing to play bassoon. But not even that's at the heart of this matter.

Apparently, if you go to the Czech Republic, they have a 95% music literacy rate, meaning, if you stopped someone on the street and asked them to sing a major scale, they probably could. If you asked someone that here, on the streets of New York City, well who knows what would happen. It's no surprise the lack of arts education in America. Now I do realize that this is not Europe where the Western art music tradition is so closely tied to the culture, nor should it be. My feelings about the state of music education in all its forms in this country are too many for this short commentary. And I can't even get into how questions like this, loaded if you will, can attack the already fragile identity of someone who chooses to study music. There is no support in the families, in the schools and in a society that values making money and moving up in the world as opposed to doing something you love and doing something that creates beauty and brings life. I know I've been the victim of feeling like it would have been better if I had gone into a "respectable" profession. This coming from the know-it-all adults who move through the muck and mire of life just to survive. All I want to say to the adults of this nation is this:

Yes, music is a real profession. It's been around longer than all of the IT jobs and upwardly mobile urban professions (well, most of them anyway) and it's not just singing do re mi, it's history and it's math and it's science and physics, acoustics, literature, physiology, psychology, human nature. It's the language of some of the most innovative, foresighted, creative geniuses in recorded history --- the myths of Wagner, the dreams of Berlioz, the religion of Bach, the vitality of Mozart. And not all of us want to play some piece you've never heard of at a concert you'll never go to. We're in law, medicine, business, education, publicity --- all of these things are part of the great doctrine that I study. I do not mock you for the thing that you work hard in and devote your life to, please try to return the courtesy.

And for all of you who wonder about the bassoon? Well, you have no idea what you're missing.

Emotional Rejuvenation

2005-10-25T15:33:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-19T11:34:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-01T01:32:00.000-04:00

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.

On Toscanini and the Score

2005-09-30T10:08:00.000-04:00

Recently, I have been reading with great amusement Howard Taubman's 1951 biography of Arturo Toscanini, entitled simply The Maestro. One of the recurring themes in his account of Toscanini's career is the maestro's propensity for clashing with performers and audiences over matters of artistic integrity and adherence to the printed score. The book is filled with tales of a frustrated--to some, petulant--Toscanini slamming down his baton and walking out in the middle of a performance in response to an unruly crowd demanding an encore of a popular aria or a subpar effort by a performer. Taubman does a fine job of describing these incidents from the perspective of both the frustrated conductor, nearly obsessive in his attention to detail as presented in the score, and an audience that was both relatively well-informed and set in its expectations for the music it consumed. This brought to mind for me a number of rather charged thoughts about the functions of both the conductor and the listening public. Today I will discuss very briefly--for on this topic I could surely prattle on--some perspectives on the conductor's role in art music.

Toscanini was at the head of a generation of conductors for whom the score was sacred and whose sole perceived purpose was to be as faithful as possible to the composer's intent as conveyed in the score alone. Most conductors perceive the score as a blueprint from which we are to recreate the composer's sonic image. This can be done with a great measure of, but never total, accuracy, as the notational tools available to composers are detailed but limited. Composers have become more inventive in this regard over time, making vast improvements in the realm of visual and non-standard notation over the last century. Many of these notational techniques have not been standardized, however, making the conductor or performer's job of accurately executing them more challenging.

These sorts of challenges have taught us the lesson that working with living composers is an absolutely invaluable experience. At the turn of the 20th century, when Toscanini was at La Scala, he had the advantage of being in close contact with the likes of Verdi and Puccini, and this allowed him to forge a very personal link to the creative impulses and motivations behind their works. It also allowed him to question their decisions and make corrections to parts and scores that often were at the time rather inaccurate.

It is only in the last hundred years or so that we have begun a trend of performing the works of long dead masters far more than those of living composers, and when preparing many of these older works we are denied that link to the composer of which Toscanini and others made such great use. We cannot go back and ask Wagner how he came upon the Tristan chord, or why Bach chose one particular chorale harmonization over another. These days, we can only make our most educated guesses based on what we see in the scores of the composer's collected works, the composer's own writings and the often inaccurate historical accounts of the composer's lifetime.

I worry also that with the evolution of mass-produced recordings and more standard, accepted editions of scores, we conductors have perhaps become less inquisitive and more passively accepting of what we see in scores and hear in recordings. Instead of having to build our own conception of a Debussy work from the ground up using only the score, our piano realization skills and our inner ear, we can resort to any of a hundred recordings of that work. This is a dangerous notion. I often say that the most important thing a musician brings to music is her own life and experiences, for these things are what shape how their inner ear perceives a work. I maintain that listening to a particular recording of a work too much before performing that work can cause our own conception of a work to be supplanted by someone else's, which essentially takes our uniqueness out of the equation. A conductor friend of mine, for instance, told me once that for a long time he would not watch films of Karajan working with an ensemble for fear of having his concept of the work overwhelmed by Karajan's. We conductors have a responsibility to the music to not allow these sorts of lapses, but rather to built an interpretation that is inimitably ours.

As scores have become more and more complex over the course of the last century, the problem of complacency has also become more obvious. Textures are often thicker than ever before. Art music's harmonic language is now freer than one and two hundred years ago, as are schemes of rhythmic and instrumental color. As a result, we must be students of the score specifically and music in general even more today than in the past in order to parse through and understand some of these works. As we look into a score, we are first presented with questions: why was it written this particular way and no other? What gives this piece its particular uniqueness and voice? Though our scholarship--our understanding of the medium of music, its history, instruments, balance, form and design, often we can answer these questions on our own. But when we arrive at questions for which we have no solid answer--as we invariably will from time to time--we must whenever possible seek out the composer's advice.

Next to the score, of course, composers are conductors' greatest resources. Not only are they the source of our repertoire, but they are the most authoritative voices on the compositional process and the choices that shaped each of their works. They understand that process from the inside out on a level to which all musicians should strive. Currently, in the wind world, we conductors have the luxury of still being able to consult with the vast majority of our composers. We should therefore encourage them in their creative endeavours and never hesitate to go to them with questions regarding their works. We stand to benefit by bettering our understanding of their music and being able to present more convincing interpretations of their work, and they in turn benefit by the reassurance that their works are receiving the careful artistic consideration and preparation that they deserve. I have never once been rebuffed by a composer for asking an honest question about a puzzling moment in a work. If you are curious about a work, I urge you to try the same--it can open up a whole new understanding of a musical work. I also urge you to take out some of your old scores and plunk through them on the keyboard--you may find things in there that you've never heard on a recording.

I hope you'll tune in next time, when I will discuss my thoughts regarding Taubman's description of audiences of Toscanini's time and how they compare to today's art music listeners.

Dumbing Down For The Masses

2005-09-25T12:16:00.000-04:00

A few things over the past couple of weeks have brought something to my attention --- an article in the New York Times, New Overtures for the Symphony, my reading of the essayist Samuel Lipman's collection of essays entitled Arguing for Music, Arguing for Culture and just talk among my colleagues --- about the lengths that our artistic organizations and their government/private funding counterparts will go to in order to fill those seats. Now this problem and the treatment of this problem is not new to me but I never really considered the artistic rammifications. Institutions like the New York Philharmonic, which used to be the leader in pioneering new American music, have fallen into the trap of what I like to call "safe programming" --- pieces that everyone knows along with some old but familiar American music (Copland, Bernstein and maybe Barber) and a few new premieres, ones that don't require too much conceptualizing. And so, in order to counter that trap, ensembles put together festivals or series that make music seems more accessible to the general populus. This, in a way, is to remove the stigma of upper class, well educated savants being the only ones able to understand the music being presented.

But isn't this just an empty solution not aimed at the actual problem?

Like you could say for any other skill, appreciation or understanding of anything, it starts at the very beginning, from the ground up. Arts education has been relegated (on a secondary level) to that of pure arts appreciation and not the things that lead to a comprehensive education for a young mind. And as those children grow up and become the consuming public because the foundation is not there we have to fix things at the higher level. This is where we come across things like the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's "Beyond The Score" series or the series of lectures that are being given right now at Lincoln Center by the infamous Peter Schikele. Anything to get those who would normally stray away from the classical music scene into the great American halls.

Here is where my concern grows. I have never seen this as being the role of an orchestra, any orchestra. Because those in charge are being convinced (or already believed it to begin with) that this the direction which the group must take, they drift away from what I feel are their main roles: providing an outlet for the newly created works by the composers of the day, expanding upon and building up that repetory and playing the music that they (or in most cases, the artistic director) feels should be played, whether that be music of the classical Western art form or otherwise. These ensembles have shyed away from this task because the reality of subscription and ticket sales is being pressed upon them.

Now don't get me wrong, those running the ensembles should think about the life of the group (this is why there are artistic directors but mainly management and a board of directors) but at what cost? And even with all of these measures in place, does anyone believe that this will save the great American orchestra? At best, this a futile attempt to delay the inevitable --- that which is inevitable on this path.

So to groups like the NEA, I say, let's not throw money at the problem. Money is the problem (always has been and always will be) America is not like the Europe of old with great patrons and a monarchy that influences the repetoire of great and large performing ensembles. America is an entirely new beast that we should tame from birth and not passify and patronize. Only then can we truly hope for a resurgance in the classical music scene like that of the first half of the 20th century.

School's Back In Session

2005-09-15T10:29:00.000-04:00

Now don't mind us. Most of us here at Contrary Motion are high school and college students and the beginning of the fall semester is always the busiest. But myself and the other writers will have lots to talk about as the year continues (there are things brewing in my head just waiting to be written).

So don't go anywhere --- check back every now and then and who knows, we just might surprise you.

Theremin and Back Again

2005-08-23T00:06:00.000-04:00

The musical world suffered a tragic loss this past weekend, as pioneering engineer Bob Moog died of brain cancer Sunday at the age of 71 at his home in Asheville, NC. Moog is best known for his invention of the first analog synthesizers to find common use by professional musicians. Moog instruments have found their way into everything from psychedelic rock to art music, and many of the earlier examples of Moog’s instruments have in recent years become collector’s items. In the 1980s, as digital synthesizers began to supplant their analog counterparts, Moog’s production slowed, but many musicians have since come again to value the unique feel of the analog units.

My first up-close experience with a Moog-style analog synthesizer came when I was in high school, working a low-budget light-design gig with a close friend of mine. One of the acts in the evening of puppetry featured musical accompaniment by a fellow in his early twenties tweaking the dials on a four-octave keyboard—probably a MiniMoog, in retrospect—that looked to my untrained eyes like a reject from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. It was a stubby thing, not at all elegant, but the sounds it produced were something from another world. As a child of the 1980s, I was no stranger to electronically-produced sounds in music, but this was something totally new to me. I was surprised not only by its unique warmth but also by its astounding flexibility and expressive range. Hearing it employed as a solo instrument was a musical experience that I’ll never forget.

It wasn’t until recently that I learned that Moog was a theremin enthusiast, a fact that I should have surmised long ago by the sound of his synthesizers. Invented in 1919 by a Russian engineer, Lev Sergeivitch Termen, the theremin was the first real electronic musical instrument—Termen developed it while researching proximity sensors. The instrument itself is controlled by variances in the proximity of the player to the instrument’s two metal antennae, with one hand typically controlling pitch and one controlling dynamics. This, of course, makes the theremin somewhat unique—the player at no time actually touches the instrument. The sounds that result can be eerie, almost like a supernatural performance on a musical saw.

Initially, Moog’s instrument manufacturing company specialized in the theremin, but Moog took Termen’s idea one step further by creating synthesizer modules that allowed the player to manipulate the shapes of the soundwaves in addition to their length and amplitude. He started with single-effect modular synthesizers that were controlled by a central keyboard, and eventually moved on to integrated units like the MiniMoog I saw as a wide-eyed teenager. Now, Moog Music not only makes synthesizers but is also the industry standard in theremin manufacturing. Moog’s influence is pervasive in modern music—everyone has heard his sounds, but very few people know what went into creating them.

Music lovers will certainly miss Bob Moog and his “magical connection” to musicians and music-making. I can only hope that his unfortunate passing will reignite an appreciation for the electronic music on which he had such a profound effect.

Putting the Arts Back in Marching

2005-08-15T18:36:00.000-04:00

This past weekend, the eager young performers of Drum Corps International (DCI) descended on Foxborough, MA for their annual World Championships. The ensuing spectacle did not disappoint, with the New Jersey-based Cadets taking home top honors, with the Cavaliers (Rosemont, IL) and Phantom Regiment (Rockford, IL) rounding out the top three.

In any discussion of DCI specifically, and marching activities in general, musicians tend to drift into two opposing camps. There are those who feel that these sorts of activities can represent the best in quality performance and are vital to the motivation and education of young musicians. There are probably just as many who feel that the marching arts are inherently unmusical and that promoting competition in music is contrary to the spirit of the arts. Both sides have proven to be rather vocal in their support or dissent, with viewpoints as varied and numerous as the different marching experiences students have in high school, college and independent marching ensembles in the United States.

Opponents’ arguments can be very compelling. There are still high school band programs in which marching band is the only aspect of music-making seriously focused on by the instructional staff. There are the tales of innumerable students who have permanently turned their backs on music-making as a result of music programs in which the goal was not to grow musically and personally but to beat the other guys. I pride myself on never having been involved with such a program, but they’re clearly still out there.

DCI seems, to an outsider, anyway, to eschew this kind of attitude. There is still scoring and competition involved, and champions undoubtedly take pride in their achievements. But the stories I hear most often from ex-corps members sound like tales from a mobile summer music camp, an atmosphere in which every member—and every competing corps—does everything in its power to push the musical and visual envelope. Long gone, it seems, are the days of putting the latest pop hit out on the field for a ten minute “park and blow.” Groups in recent years have performed everything from Gershwin, W. C. Handy and Nobuo Uematsu (he of Final Fantasy video game fame) to Bartok, Schoenberg, Bizet and Shostakovich with frightening musical and visual precision.

I’ve been on both sides of the fence of this issue. My high school had (and still has) a very competitive marching program that taught me a lot about leadership but made me question what I wanted to accomplish as a musician. I’ve been on the educational staff of several high schools now and have had friends and colleagues march drum corps. I’ve come to the conclusion that the marching arts do have a lot to offer our young musicians, but only if we are very careful about how we promote and execute them. We must remember that our goal is music and personal growth first, with competition a very distant second. We must use this activity to bring students in, to give them a home in music. And if our students have musical aspirations that do not include marching, we cannot penalize them. We must equally encourage them by opening up opportunities with community ensembles, chamber music and private lessons. Too many band directors act first for the glory of their program rather than for the needs of their students, and we, as young teachers, must not make the same mistake. As the new school year dawns again, then, I put forth a challenge for the young educators among us to constantly keep in mind the future of our field and the educational good of our students, who will bear the torch of this noblest of arts when we are old and grey. Best wishes for a healthy and happy school year.

Is This The New Classical Music?

2005-08-09T12:28:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I took a well-needed vacation to Nashville and to Atlanta to attend one of those lovely concert-in-the-park concerts that seem to occur around this time of year. Little did I realize just how much my companions and I would be in shock as to what we would be hearing. The concert was one of many in a series with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra with featured guests. We were going to this particular concert to hear country singer Wynonna. Now because none of us had any of the details, we didn't know it would be so pops-oriented --- the orchestra playing western-inspired music in the first half (Copland's Rodeo from Billy the Kid, John Williams March of the Cowboys, etc) and then Wynonna singing some of her songs along with standards with the orchestra as accompaniment. My Nashville friends weren't too pleased with the setup and frankly neither was I. But this was not the first pops concert I had been too and on that long 3 hour drive back to Nashville, I tried to figure out why it irked me so much. Then I came to some sort of conclusion. It wasn't the idea of a pop/classical merger as much as it was the reasons for the occurance.

The past five to ten years or so have seen an abundance of collaborations just like this in every genre. The first one that always comes to mind is the album S&M, the tandem effort of Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony. As far fetched of an idea as that may have been, it was much more succesful than the same idea implemented by the Scorpions with their biggest hit, Rock You Like A Hurricane. For some reason, people thought that this would be a good idea, especially if it was at its most extreme --- pairing heavy metal with classical. Now instead of taking the best parts of both genres to create something new and musically exciting, each group sticks to their previously defined roles, the orchestra providing some sense of overpowering drama that can only be achieved by a massive amount of strings and the other group, no matter what they might be, showing that they can still rock even with those white-haired old fogies behind them, that being what someone might say of orchestral musicians, not my term.

The cheapening of the music does no good for either party. Those orchestras that take part thinking that this might award them some newfound publicity are sorely mistaken on most occasions and those die hard fans of the other present genre clamor for something else, something old instead of this new venture into the classical world (it can be said that fans can be the most brutal, whenever their favorite artist turns in a new direction, unleashing a backlash that could never be predicted). And as a result, the idea that in order to succeed as a new, young classical artist is to be as crossover as possible, no matter how true that might be, is propagated. From this arises artists like Josh Groban and Charlotte Church, finding success in a mainstream world that seems intolerant of the musicians and sounds of old.

So what does all of this mean? Probably nothing. It is, like many things a fad, one that will, if it hasn't already, start to fade away. If anything, it's telling of the public and the industry's idea of what classical music is and should be. But this is by no means a death sentence for the art. If anything, it's a chance for the music to have a place to evolve in American culture, just as it has always done except this time a little more publically. And hey, no one said that evolution was pretty.

Le Sacre du Printemps: A Silent Movie to the Music of Igor Stravinsky

2005-08-04T11:25:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine recently recommended this short film, directed by the late Oliver Herrmann. In short, it is a story of three people:

1) an apparently successful yet mysophobic brain surgeon in his mid-40s,
2) a 20-something girl, a survivor of parental sexual abuse who still lives with her predatory father and torpid mother, sleeps in her childhood bed and now spends the bulk of her time seducing and having sex with anonymous strangers, and
3) a woman in her late thirties so obsessed with the death of her husband that she keeps all of their possessions covered in white sheets, undisturbed, and sleeps in what appears to be a coffin.

God, played here by a portly black woman, spends her time fashioning creatures out of bread dough in her kitchen, some of which go to the Earth below and some of which remain in her kitchen—strange, colorful prototypes never considered for mass production. She places our three characters in an unnamed, impersonal metropolis and watches as their lives intersect in a grand human experiment. As Stravinsky’s score plays out, we see the development and manifestation of the characters’ neuroses. As the characters reach an emotional snapping point, there is a solar eclipse, and they find themselves on a tropical island, where Santeria orishas take them to a place where all of the world's religions are practiced side by side, peacefully. Here, the characters undergo an ancient Santeria ritual that is meant to heal them of their emotional scars.

Visually, Sacre is a fantastic film--Herrmann, initially a photographer by trade, had a particularly poignant sense of intense color and drama without dialogue. His broad palette of vivid colors is as striking in this film as is Stravinsky’s revolutionary orchestral colors and use of rhythm. The characters are played very expressively, without speaking a word. Each is entirely believable and heartbreaking in her obsessions. The music is as true to Stravinsky's jarring vision as I can imagine it, as performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker under Simon Rattle. Sadly, Herrmann did not live long enough to see the final screening of the film, as he died two days before its release from complications arising from diabetes. I fully recommend seeing it if you get a chance. This is a genre of filmmaking that has thus far been sadly overlooked, and I feel it deserves more attention from music and film lovers alike. Stravinsky himself is quoted in the film’s production notes:

“…I have always had a loathing for those who listen to music with their eyes closed, without their eyes playing an active role. When you want to understand music in its whole meaning, it is necessary to see the movements and gestures of the human body, through these you learn…”

Personally, I look forward to seeing Herrmann's other silent films, set to Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire and Schumann's Dichterliebe. Hopefully, after Herrmann’s death, other filmmakers will take up his mantle and continue to bring these great works of music to new audiences through the use of film.

Hermann, Oliver. Le Sacre du Printemps: A Silent Movie to the Music of Igor Stravinsky. eins54 Film, 2003. Music by Berliner Philharmoniker, Simon Rattle, cond. www.eins54film.com.

Boulez in Rehearsal

2005-07-22T11:59:00.000-04:00

Several years ago I had the distinct pleasure of meeting, quite briefly, Pierre Boulez. At the time, I was a college student, just beginning to learn about music of the 20th Century, so I'm sure I didn't fully appreciate the weight of the situation. Boulez, of course, had become since the 1950's one of the most important musicians of the 20th Century, renowned as both a composer and conductor. The time we met, he was a visiting composer at my undergraduate college, presiding over a couple of forums and sitting in on rehearsals of Le marteau sans maitre. I quickly found that, even in his 70s, Boulez was razor-sharp and as bold as ever, still the same man who decried the university situation in the mid-20th century as "incestuous" and a "self-made ghetto." At first glance, I found Boulez to have the look of a grandfather, kind yet grizzled, shaped by a thousand encounters and experiences that I would never fully understand.

With that image firmly in mind, I always wanted to see Boulez conduct, but never had the opportunity to do so in person. The closest I've come was a recent viewing of a recording of Boulez in rehearsal with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1998, during which the orchestra worked on Alban Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6, and Boulez' own Notations I-IV. The recording showed Boulez as a no-frills kind of conductor, his countenance detached but focused, his gestures clean and concise. When he gave direction, he did so with the same blunt honesty for which he became well-known earlier in his career, remaining professional and courteous all the while. His knowledge of the scores in question was keen and intellectual, and he made no mention of emotional content at any point in the rehearsal. Even without any mention of emotion, however, the orchestra displayed moments of inspiration that belied the calm control of its conductor.

There are many things in this recording that the young conductor can take to heart and apply to her own work--Boulez' firm control of the ensemble without being overbearing, his fine understanding of the score, and the brevity of his comments being the most obvious among them. Those things alone make watching this DVD worthwhile, and as a musician who often gets more out of watching rehearsals than performances, I highly recommend this view into the day-to-day workings of both a world-class orchestra and a world-class composer/conductor. In fact, I would like to challenge conductors to make more recordings of this sort for our younger conductors to study as a sort of living textbook on rehearsal technique and conductor preparation. The more exposure our conductors have to brilliant musicians like Boulez, the more perpared they will be to strike out into the bright future of our art!

Pierre Boulez: In Rehearsal with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, 1998 Spectrum TV and RM Arts. Distributed Exclusively by Image Entertaiment.

Are We The Only Musicians Here?

2005-07-22T01:02:00.000-04:00

This past Tuesday, I, along with several of my friends, attended the last concert given by the New York Philharmonic in Central Park as part of the Concerts in the Park series. I was so excited because the concert was all Dvorak, a composer very near to my heart. (My entire high school orchestral bassoon experience can be summed up in his works, especially considering we played his 8th Symphony for two years straight) But just like before when I went to the concert in Cunningham Park in Queens, I wondered; just who exactly is coming to these concerts, and why?

Now of course I can't not give the people of New York City their due --- that's part of the reason why I live here, for the slightly exaggerated myth and persona of the intellectual and cultural elite who spend their time mixing with literati and glitterati alike, drinking champagne at fabulous art nouveau opening night parties and galas. Yes, those people do exist in New York but that's just a small part. So besides the fireworks (which by the way were highly disappointing), the chance to have wine and cheese on the Great Lawn and some damn good music, why go?

Well those are all incredibly good reasons, reason enough for anyone to go but it was hard for me to fathom because for me, as a musician, it went deeper than that. And because of that feeling, it led me to propose a question (or maybe a few questions) to myself --- is there ever a time when I can just go for the fireworks, wine and cheese and is there anyone else out here on this enormous patch of grass like me? Because every once in a while, I'm overcome with the feeling, no the need, to sit with people of the same persuasion and discuss the surprising and disconcerting ritenutos that Maazel orchestrated himself in the second movement of the 9th Symphony, the elegance and flawlessness of Thomas Stacy's english horn solo and how disappointing it was that the crowd roared over Lynn Harrell's powerful performance of the Cello Concerto. I almost wish that everyone around me is thinking these things, just waiting to put in their two cents. But that leads me back to the first question. I pose this to many of my other collegiate musician friends. Can we ever divorce ourselves from that of our calling? And if we could, would that be wise?

Now I'm sure you're saying, "Imani, I'm sure you can listen to classical music just to enjoy it and not analyze it like a musician." and of course I can but that "listening" is predicated on all of the things that I've ever learned over the past eleven plus years that enable me to enjoy the music even further. Because I know Dvorak, I love listening to it even more. I think back to when I was in third grade learning about Haydn's "Suprise" Symphony and learning what made it a suprise. After I knew that, the second time around was much more enjoyable than the first with which I had the horrible experience of being scared so much that I fell over in my chair.

So yes, there are days when it's all about the fireworks, wine and cheese and I relish those days but there is a voice in my head, constantly nagging me, asking, 'are we the only musicians here?'. Well, little voice, maybe not but even so, its not that bad of a thing. Maybe someone sitting behind me will be as anxious to hear the second theme in the exposition of the first movement of the 9th Symphony or maybe they'll just be drinking their glasses of merlot, looking at the stars. But in the end, the most important thing is that they're all there --- the laypeople, the struggling music students, the noveau-riche --- for some reason or another, under the opening sky, enjoying a little Dvorak.

Anything Goes

2005-07-18T18:48:00.000-04:00

A colleague once told me that the most unique characteristic of art music of our day is a prevailing compositional spirit in which, as they say, anything goes. In a way, this is true: only in a time like ours can one find such a wide range of compositional aesthetics on simultaneous display. In the last century, composers were wont to blaze more or less one compositional trail at a time, as was most notably the case in the last century with the oft-contrasted Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. Critics and historians have at times gone so far as to place Schoenberg and Stravinsky in diametric opposition to one another, the yin and yang of 20^th-Century compositional methodology and intent. Surely, while the differences between the two men’s approaches sprung from the same essential quandary—that of how to speak meaningfully about the human experience after the First World War brought Romanticism to a crashing halt—the end result of those approaches differ in a number of important manners that make each composer’s work essentially singular.

The single-mindedness with which earlier composers developed their ideas has, in a certain sense, allowed contemporary composers to create the musical smorgasbord that we now enjoy. The radical nature of the innovations of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Cage, Varese, Stockhausen and others required such devotion in order to be sharpened individually with any degree of sufficiency. Now they help form the wide collection of musical tools composers carry in their bags and often use in conjunction. Western common-practice tonality, bitonality and post-tonal dodecaphony now freely mingle, and one is now more likely to find two or all three in a newly-composed piece than just one. One can now expect any manner of formal scheme in a work, executed by myriad combinations of musicians. In inexperienced hands, the use of so wide a range of tools can sound convoluted; in the hands of an innovator, they can be brilliant.

For just one example: only by following the “emancipation of the dissonance” to its logical conclusions did Schoenberg answer his own musical questions and help make dodecaphony a valid compositional tool—indeed, it was the rule more than the exception in academia through a fair portion of the 20th century. Since then, thankfully, we have learned an important lesson: dodecaphony is just one of many answers to the musical difficulties of these complex times. One by one, such has become the case with all of the innovations of the 20^th century; they have all become diverging roads that still, somehow, lead to the same place. That is, in fact, exactly what they should be—and that is why today’s music must be championed.

Critics often speak of an ever-widening gap between the listener and the composer, complaining that the ears of the audience are not as open as they once were. Surely, many listeners were (and still are!) apprehensive of almost everything composed post-Stravinsky, panning it as irrelevant and esoteric. The onus, therefore, falls on us as musicians to bring listeners along, to show them that there is nothing to fear in having a willing ear. After all, why should listeners be fearful when today’s composers write from so many diverse and exciting influences? How would these fearful music-lovers feel to know that when he composed The Death of Klinghoffer, in addition to minimalism, John Adams drew on such far-flung ingredients as “Berg, Stravinsky, rock and roll, doo-wop music, Arabic music and Jewish music?”

Solely on the strength of the diversity of its sources, art music of our time has the potential to bring old listeners back onto the edge and new listeners into the fold. Therefore, it is our job as performers, conductors, critics and listeners alike to encourage our young composers, those brilliant musical toddlers who are only beginning to realize their powers, to perform their works, and to help remake art music into the vital part of cultural life that it can be once more.

More Evidence of New York's Love for Gustav

2005-07-17T20:52:00.000-04:00

While I was looking around the New York Philharmonic site, getting more information on the last Concert in the Park concert in Central Park of which my friends and I will be attending (and I will be writing about here on Wednesday) I saw an interesting little button on the sidebar of the page entitled "Mahler in New York" so I clicked on it. Lo and behold, it's a wonderful site talking about the uproar behind Mahler's stay here, work with the New York Philharmonic and again, the 1st Symphony.

Mahler In New York

I suggest looking it over, it won't be up for long.

A Love Affair With Mahler

2005-07-16T11:13:00.000-04:00

Last fall, as I walked around school, I listened to the buzz coming from my fellow students. For some reason, they all seemed to be talking about the same thing --- Mahler. I didn't understand how so many people could be so desperately in love with one person, all at the same time.

Now don't get me wrong, I always love Mahler.

But during this November, there was an overabundance of Gustav, and not just among my friends but throughout New York City. Everyone I knew was going to see performances of Mahler's 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th and 9th symphonies (I personally attended a fantastic performance of the 1st Symphony with the New York Philharmonic with my then boyfriend that reaffirmed my undying love, er, for Mahler, that is) and it was the thing to do. During classes we talked about rediscovering symphonies, how we felt on Mahler as an orchestrator, rewriting the works of Beethoven and the following backlash, Gustav as a conductor and the German Romantic Legacy.

As fun as all of this was, I couldn't figure out why everyone was going Mahler crazy. Then I remembered back to my senior year of high school when the exact same thing occured --- everyone I knew was discovering Mahler. It was then that I fell in love with Das Lied von Der Erde after analyzing it in my AP music theory class and really went back to listening to again, his 1st Symphony. As soon as I thought about this, it came to me. When I was a high school sophomore, all of 15 maybe, my youth orchestra decided it would be a good idea to play, in our spring program, the 1st Symphony. I remember being outraged thinking a little girl like me was not capable of really playing this piece no matter how talented I may have been at the time. I hadn't experienced enough in my life emotionally to be able to convey the passion withheld in this work. And I was scared out of my mind when I realized that it would be me playing the bassoon solo in the second movement. We were all so young, so fresh and innocent, naïve to the ways of this music and we had no idea what were getting ourselves into.

I realized that we can play the music of different composers at different stages in our lives. For example, any child can play Mozart but no matter how tired you may get of those tunes you know so well, the older you get, the more you can come back to Mozart and realize that you've only nicked the tip of a massive iceberg --- I've been playing Mozart's Bassoon Concerto in Bb Major, K191 for almost 10 years now and it's still revealing its secrets to me. And then there are composers like Mahler, with which I honestly believe that you have to live a little before you can really dive into it. When I played the 1st Symphony, I knew nothing of what that symphony was trying to tell me. When I studied and fell in love with Das Lied von Der Erde, I was three years older, had lost my best friend and found the love of my life. Three years later when I rediscovered the 1st Symphony and fell in love with the 2nd and the 5th, I was in my first relationship after the messy end of my engagement and had just learned what it was like to wake up in the morning with someone and hear the fourth movement of the 5th Symphony. When I first heard it at 14, there's no way I would have known just how much love is expressed in the Adagietto.

So it was then that I understood that every couple of years, after our triumphs and tribulations and after we've learned a little more about ourselves, we find Mahler anew and fall in love with him all over again. And the best part is, he'll always be there waiting --- waiting for us to discover more of ourselves through his music.

Don't Clap! A Layman's Guide to Concert Etiqutte

2005-07-16T04:06:00.000-04:00

Now first off, this is no elitist musician’s take on how one should behave at concerts --- it’s very simple. When i’m on stage and someone does something at an inopportune moment, say clap, I become very distracted. And then, I think to myself, wasn’t there a time when everyone knew what to do at concerts or was that something that faded away while the stigma of rich intellectuals attending stuffy concerts grew? Well no longer. Attending concerts of any sort, be they orchestras, chamber music or opera is supposed to be enjoyable and easy. So in this short essay, we’ll talk about what to do when you go to the recital hall.

Now I was inspired to write this after attending an outdoor concert given my the New York Philharmonic. On the program was Wagner’s Overture to Der fligende Holländer, Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.5 and multiple times during the five movement Lalo and four movement Tchaikovsky there was clapping --- clapping during some sort of pause or quiet moment, some point of uncertainty. I looked over to my friends, other musicians, to see what their reaction was to the mass adulation that couldn’t really stop except by some loud chord given by the orchestra. It made me wonder, why exactly did these people clap? Did they really think it was over? And I really want to believe that you don’t have to be a musician or some kind of cultural savant to know when to clap. So here’s the first tip: read the program. the program for that New York Philharmonic concert looked like this:

Wagner (1813-83) Overture to Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) (1840-41, rev. 1860)

Lalo (1823-92) Symphonie espagnole for Violin and Orchestra, op. 21 (1874)
Allegro non troppo
Scherzando: Allegro molto
Intermezzo: Allegretto non troppo
Andante
Rondo: Allegro

Tchaikovsky (1840-93) Symphony No. 5 in E minor, op. 64 (1888)
Andante -- Allegro con anima
Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza
Valse: Allegro moderato
Finale: Andante maestoso -- Allegro vivace -- Moderato assai e molto maestoso

The words under the title of the piece (i.e. allegro non troppo) are the movements. If there are five lines, that means five movements, four distinct stops not including the end. So for the most part, it’ll sound like it’s over four different times before you get to the very end. If you know that, that’s a good start.

The second tip, which can’t always be accomplished, is just to watch the conductor. If those hands are down for a good 10 seconds then the piece might be over. The conductor will let you know (they want that silence more than anybody) I’ve even been in concerts where the conductor waved off the audience at the sheer thought of clapping because it wasn’t over. They tend to be the nitpickiest out of all of us and the idea of that silence inbetween movements is close to sacrasant.

My last tip and I think is the best under any situation is simple – don’t clap! If you think it’s over and you’re not sure, don’t clap. If other people around you are clapping, don’t clap. Even if you’re positive it’s over, don’t clap. Better to be safe than sorry, right? And believe you me, we do want you to clap – we hope that we’ve done something worth clapping about so trust me, it doesn’t irritate us too much (it’s better to hear clapping at the wrong time than to hear no clapping at all) but we don’t want anyone to miss out on hearing anything, no matter how small.

Now there are lots of other things that people do during concerts that common sense can fix like answering phones (that is a pet peeve, one of the biggest) talking to people in the audience (we’re in an acoustically reinforced hall, we can hear you) getting up/coming in/leaving during a piece (we can see you too, no matter where you are) things that maybe people may take for granted. Maybe it bothers us musicians because it makes us feel like people don’t appreciate what we’re doing, what we love so much. But that is a completely different essay.

When I give my concerts at the college I attend, a very unique problem we have is the opening of candy and food that make the loudest noise that we can hear throughout the entire hall. I start to laugh to myself when I think about how silly of a distraction that is but it is unnerving. think about if you were giving a speech you had prepared for days and someone has opened a big bag of fritos and starts munching away. Not the best.

I would like to talk about why people feel the way that they do when it comes to seeing classical music performed but as I said, that’s an entirely different subject. So until then, follow those three tips and you won’t go wrong. You and your fellow attendees might hear something they’ve never heard before. Happy listening!

2005-07-15T19:15:00.000-04:00

Contrary motion is now up and running. I hope to write my first entry tonight but it's always when you want to be busy you're not and, well you get the idea. I hope this gets it up and running!