Kenneth Woods- A View From the Podium

Work loves work.

Since I set out on the road to being a full time free-lance conductor some years back, I’ve become exceptionally sensitive to the rhythms of work.

This experience and the careful study of my own situation now brings me to my new “special theory of the gravitational fields of stuff-to-do.”

This is the first law of the special theory of the gravitational fields of stuff-to-do:Work, that is, stuff-to-do that is directly related to one’s chosen field, exerts the strongest gravitational field around it. Likewise, the absence of work exerts an equal but opposite strength of anti-gravitational field around itself.

Therefore…. When one has work, one gets more work. The new work is attracted by the work one already has, so all incoming work attempts to be scheduled for the same days. When I first quite my university job, I only had 34 days of work in my calendar (my OES contract at the time) for the coming year. For the next couple of months, I had no calls, no enquiries of any kind. The anti-gravitational field of non-work was at full force.

Then, a friend asked if I would take over a charity concert for him. It didn’t pay, but it would be my first chance to conduct anything in Britain. I happily agreed. Within a week I had three more calls for gigs on the SAME DAY as the gravitational field around that single gig was so strong. Think of it, I had 330 free days in my calendar, and in a week I had four requests for the same day, and none of them could happen at other times.

Music can also exert funny gravitational fields of its own. As of the end of last season I had never conducted, covered or studied a work by Nielsen. I didn’t own any Nielsen scores. It was safe to say that in March of 2006, Nielsen was the most important composer I had never performed. I made up my mind to change that, and proposed several Nielsen pieces to several orchestras. In the end, it worked out that I would conduct the Helios Overture with the Oregon East Symphony in January 2007, and the Nielsen Flute Concerto with the Surrey Mozart Players this Saturday, September 30^th.

What then were the odds that within less than two weeks of finalizing the SMP program for this week, I had a call from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales asking if I would do the same Nielsen Flute Concerto for them on October 3^rd.  Not only had I never done a Nielsen piece before, nobody had ever suggested one to me before, and now I find I’m doing the same piece with two orchestras within 3 days….

I didn’t particularly seek any gigs for August this year so that Suzanne and I could have some time to ourselves, but I wouldn’t have cried if some fabulous band called me to fill in last minute at a Prom or something. No- the repellent force of non work held- not a single inquiry from anyone about anything in the entire month of August except for the first couple days of Kent County Youth Orchestra. Not even a turkey gig. Now, I have six programs to conduct, all with different orchestras, in different cities on two continents in 10 days. Not complaining, this is what it’s all about, but isn’t it just a little weird? Now I’m getting the effects of second law of the special theory of the gravitational fields of stuff-to-do:  non-work-related stuff-to-do gravitates towards the time when I have work-related stuff-to-do. Car mirror breaks, dog needs the dentist, visa has to be renewed, coffee grinder is on the fritz, concert jacket needs a button…. None of this happened in August!Surely this happens to everyone- stories, pease?

Gravity, man…..

A view from the podium, Performing Life

I was content to let the 100th birthday of Shostakovich pass without comment.

Just think, though….

Already, just a few years after his death, we’re beginning to see his body of work recognized as the single most important contribution to Russian culture and cultural history in the 20th Century. The old admonition that “nobody remembers who the Prime Minister of Bavaria was when Beethoven was writing his 9th Symphony” is already beginning to ring true for Shostakovich. After all, who has had a more profound impact on today’s world, Napoleon or Beethoven?

For all his killing, Napoleon never succeeded in redrawing the map of Europe in any lasting way. His importance and his influence have long since faded. 

Likewise, even with the deaths of tens of millions on his hands, Stalin is now no more than an irrelevant and discredited petty dictator. His grand program to remake the world is a forgotten nightmare. 

Murder is a feeble tool, whether for building empires or remaking societies. 

I recently heard the commentator Keith Olberman’s (sorry, once-a-year reference to politics at VFtP) powerful commentary on America’s obscene failure to create a meaningful monument to the dead of September 11, 2001 even five years later.  He’s right, of course, but should we really entrust mere politicians with the memory of the lost?

Do we need our leaders and teachers to tell us when to grieve and how to mourn? Are governments really credible agents of remembrance? 

Shostakovich showed us, and all those that come after us, that we don’t need the might of governments, mountains of money, or even the blessing of our leaders, to bear witness, to speak in memory of the dead and the bereaved, to remember, or even to condemn those who cause suffering and loss. After all, far too often it is our governments and our leaders who are the cause of that suffering and loss. One human being can sit in a room and put notes on paper and begin to heal that which seemed beyond healing.

Sometimes, people can’t wait for memorials to be built.

There is no need to canonize Shostakovich. We don’t need him to be a martyr- a chain-smoking, vodka-swilling, football-loving, depressive, sarcastic, conflict-avoidant musical genius will do fine.

Accept then that this mere man, this imperfect being could show us so great an example.

Can we not do better in our own times? 

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods 
 

A view from the podium, Favorite posts

A sign of truly great music is not just the extent to which it pleases the listener and satisfies our expectations and predilections, but the extent to which it irritates, confounds, frustrates and repels the listener, but keeps them listening anyway. 

A view from the podium

When we think of rehearsals, we tend to think in terms of two main goals- improving our technical standards, and developing our shared vision of the music.

There’s another less process that can take place in  rehearsals, which, when it happens, can be more illuminating and helpful than either of the others. Rehearsals can give you the opportunity to hear parts of the piece in different contexts, and sometimes what you hear when you do that can completely blow your mind. In other words, sometimes the point of doing something slower, or separating out parts is not just to technically simplify a difficult passage, but to give everyone a chance to hear an aspect of the music that is not necessarily obvious when you listen to the whole thing at tempo.

I remember one time in my quartet rehearsing the first page of the Bartok 2^nd Quartet very, very, very slowly. When we finished we were all a bit speechless- to hear each and every note and to really savor every chord is quite overwhelming.
More recently, I remember marveling at the horn writing in the last movement of the Rachmaninoff Second Symphony. To hear those four equal voices dancing around each other, unencumbered by 90 other musicians… amazing.  

Maybe we should be allowed to take a minute in concerts to say to the audience- “We did this bit with the second violins and violas really slowly in rehearsal and it was really cool- check it out.” Okay, maybe not…

Anyway, for whatever reason, I thought we had a lot of those moments in Sibelius 3 today. That’s when it’s worth six hours in the car to get to and from a rehearsal.

A view from the podium, Performing Life

I have to admit that I’m surprised not even any of my friends who read this blog regularly pointed out how completely crap my recent concert announcement for the September 30 Surrey Mozart Players concert really was. I was appalled at it even as I wrote it, but gave into time restraints- better to put up a load of empty and meaningless platitudes on time, than to hold off a few days and not give people who might actually come to the concert a chance to organize themselves.

Nevertheless, I would like to apologize for this load of cliché ridden rubbish-

“Ken says-I’m really looking forward to this program…. It’s my first concert with the SMP as their official Music Director. They did a fantastically exciting Beethoven 7 last spring that I really enjoyed preparing and performing, so I’m looking forward to working with them regularly.”

And especially this one-

“Sibelius 3- what can you say? It’s a piece that will always sound fresh and full of life. I’ve often heard it called his Haydn symphony, but to me it is more Sibelius version of Beethoven 7- full of rhythmic life, drive and forward motion, and never heavy.”

It’s not that I didn’t mean these, or any of the other things I said in my brief editorial on the concert. My concern is that I didn’t offer anything really personal or thoughtful- anyone could have said those things about any pieces with any orchestra, more or less. I’m excited to be doing a concert! The orchestra is good! The music is good! Concerts are fun! You deserve better…

So, I’ve decided to offer a little more genuine commentary on the program as a form of pseudo-rebuttal to my earlier post.

Part One- How do I feel about the concert?

I am looking forward to this program, but it is quite a feeling going from being a guest conductor to the music director, and it’s not something you can really plan for. As it is, we’ve ended up with a very, very challenging first program here. Challenging for me, challenging for the players and challenging for the audience. Our last concert was the Dvorak Czech Suite, the Mozart Bassoon Concerto with the great Meyrick Alexander as soloist, and Beethoven 5. Unless something goes badly, badly wrong, that’s a concert that everyone is going to leave with a smile on their face.

Both the Nielsen and the Sibelius are substantially more technically difficult to play than either the Mozart Bassoon Concerto or Beethoven 7, and they’re also both very musically thorny and hard to pull off. Should I have started with another Mozart/Beethoven show? I hope not! I’m encouraged, because, although you can play Beethoven 7 badly and still have a success, SMP played it well and had a big success. Although it’s harder to get through Nielsen and Sibelius without a train wreck than Mozart Bassoon and Beethoven 7, nothing is harder to play at a high level than Beethoven 7. I think that if we can get past that first technical obstacle course in rehearsal, then everything will fall into place, but it will be a challenge- it is an obstacle course to be reckoned with.

Part Two- How do I feel about the pieces?

I think you already have a pretty good idea that at least two-thirds of this concert is musically tricky stuff.

Lets start with Sibelius’ Third Symphony. I love to read what composers themselves have to say about their music and about music in general, whether it’s Copland or Shostakovich or Bartok or Mahler. However, composers are not always to be trusted- sometimes they speak to get a reaction or spark a controversy, and sometimes they use language to obscure their true aims, maybe to help them curry favour with contemporaries.

I wouldn’t presume to know why he said it, and it’s possible he thought it was true when he said it, but I find Sibelius’ most famous quote about music, which he wrote as he was composing the Third Symphony, totally suspicious.

“I am particularly pleased to see it stressed that my symphonies are founded on classical symphonic form,” he wrote in 1904.

I think this sentiment obscures just what a radical composer Sibelius could be. As I wrote the other day when discussing the Fifth Symphony, Sibelius seems completely unconcerned with the core classical values of closure and symmetry. Mahler actually wrote a perfect, totally orthodox sonata-allegro movement (the first movement of his Sixth Symphony, complete with exposition repeat), something Sibelius couldn’t seem to bring himself to do. The first movement of Sibelius’ Third is very nearly an orthodox sonata-allegro movement, or at least as close as you could hope to get from Sibelius, but in the coda, instead of wrapping up the themes and ideas of the entire movement, he instead INTRODUCES A NEW THEME. Hardly classical. Not just a theme, but the most memorable tune in the symphony, which he states, then leaves, never returning to again.

The finale is even more radical and subversive. With its constant changes of tempo and mood and its references to earlier movements, it seems as though the third and final movement might be making satirical reference to the beginning of the last movement of Beethoven 9, but this neurotic and scattered approach is no mere opening gambit, it is the body of the movement. In fact, in the whole large first 6/8 section of the finale the over mood is one of confusion (hopefully not for the conductor!). There is a general sense that he works his way through a body of music twice, but in different keys and with ever changing landscapes, Near the end is a ferocious section that almost becomes a fugue, except that it refuses to act nice like a fugue. Calling it “a freely contrapuntal developmental episode” doesn’t quite get accross to the reader just how wonderful weird it is.

Just when the music seems to have painted itself into a corner it breaks out of it’s 6/8 groove into a beautiful, and very four-square tune. Interestingly, in the whole first part of the Finale he never gives us any sense of regular four-bar phrases, but once we get to the four-four it is almost all four bar phrases to the end of the piece.

One initially thinks that this is something like the last two movements of Beethoven 5- a shadowy scherzo that elides to a finale, but the scherzo never lets itself dance at all, and the finale is really only a single, huge wave of energy.  From the beginning of the 4/4 to the end of the symphony we hear only one melody, and basically only one harmonic center, and everything just repeats and evolves as the tempo gradually increases. It’s very much like the finale of Beethoven 7, but only the coda of that movement- repetition, repetition, rhythm and more rhythm, with an accelerando thrown in for good measure.

It’s pretty exciting stuff, but we have to bring it off. Audiences are used to 200 years of symphonies that come full circle, that achieve closure. Sibelius never answers any questions in this symphony, he never resolves any formal tensions or settles any musical disputes. Can a symphony end with departure?

I’ll have thoughts on the Nielsen Flute Concerto soon- as you can see, it will be a big part of my life for the next 10 days.

C. 2006 Kenneth Woods

A view from the podium, Performing Life

A view from the podium

Upcoming Concert
Tuesday, October 3^rd, 2006
7:30 PM
Studio One, Broadcasting House, Llandaff

BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Kenneth Woods Conductor
 

Nielsen Flute Concerto
Sharon Bezaly, flute

This concert is presented by the BBC as part of the Listen Up! Festival of Orchestras 

About Sharon Bezaly-
 

Sharon Bezaly started to play the flute at the age of 11 and gave her début concert as a soloist with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Zubin Mehta when she was 14. On the advice of Jean-Pierre Rampal she continued her studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris under Alain Marion, Raymond Guiot and Maurice Bourge, winning the Academy’s first prizes for flute and chamber music. She was subsequently invited by Sándor Végh to play as principal flautist in his Camerata Academica Salzburg, a position she held until his death in 1997. 

Since leaving the Camerata Academica, Sharon Bezaly has concentrated on expanding her solo career and has performed in the leading concert halls worldwide with orchestras such as the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC National Orchestras of Wales and Scotland, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Belgian National Orchestra, SWR Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Camerata Academica Salzburg and both the Munich and Vienna Chamber Orchestras. As a chamber musician she has also participated in festivals alongside such musicians as Gidon Kremer and the Bartók Quartet.  She has recently expanded her repertoire with a disc of newly commissioned concertos by three Scandinavian composers (Kalevi Aho, Haukur Tómasson and Christian Lindberg) entitled ‘Nordic Spell”. The recording has received the highest international critical acclaim and been singled out both as an Editor’s Choice in Gramophone and as a Choc de la Musique by Le Monde de la Musique. 

A view from the podium, Announcements and reviews

It’s been a strange week here at VFtP headquarters.

I spent way too many hours on Monday (and Tues early hours) at the computer helping a colleague assemble a grant proposal for a recording project. We all know that this is the future for everyone who wants to record, as record companies top footing the bill for recordings foundations, sponsors and patrons will be our only hope. Thank goodness they’re out there, but who needs this….

“Research/creation refers to any research activity or approach to research that forms an essential part of a creative process or artistic discipline and that directly fosters the creation of literary/artistic works. The research must address clear research questions, offer theoretical contextualization within the relevant field or fields of literary/artistic inquiry, and present a well considered methodological approach.”

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but my eyes go out of focus just after “Research/.”

All in all, the instructions for this application were nearly 50 pages. Bearing in mind that I was just helping, and that all our actual content was ready to go, this cut-and-paste/fill-out-the-form job was one I worked at from about 9 AM to the following 3 AM. Tuesday proper began as more of the same as we went through each others corrections and modifications, emailing documents back and forth at a furious pace. Finally, at about 2 PM, I sent off the last batch of stuff and took a proper lunch break and a quick shower. Thirty minutes later I looked at the computer screen and had a frantic email saying the last bunch of attachments had not gone through successfully. I re-sent them, the broadband went out, I got the broadband back up, resent them again, and then about four minutes later the power went out and stayed out for the next six hours. Talk about close calls!

Moments later, I was in the car, late, on my way to a Nottingham Philharmonic rehearsal. There’s really nothing like a three hour drive to get you mentally ready for a rehearsal, especially when you’re completely exhausted when you put the key in the ignition. The voyage was not bad, just long, but I really hate just pulling up and getting out of the car and starting a rehearsal. It’s so hard to really be on best form. I did get to rehearsal early enough to have a snack and a flip through the music, but then the phone rang again with more questions about the grant and an update from VFtP headquarters with an update on our electricity situation (still out). Alas, no flipping time. Does James Levine have to help write grants, I ask myself (probably not)… Does the electricity cut out at the Barbican? (probably does).

I had grand plans for how I wanted to start the rehearsal, lovingly taking apart the opening of Sibelius Five into its constituent parts, sorting out the blend between the woodwinds and horns and all that. It wasn’t meant to be- there was an accident on the road and most of the players I needed for this exercise were on their mobiles making apologies as the oboist gave the “A.”

Funnily, I rarely make a plan for rehearsals, other than setting a rehearsal schedule that hopefully saves players waiting around and helps me be sure we cover everything. It’s not like me at all to say “I’m going to do this and this, then work on that, make a joke, do this slowly, tell a story, scold the slackers, tune that chord, tell the horns they’re late, make the timpanist change sticks, then have a break, run it and go home.” I like to start somewhere and see what happens.
So why did I have a complete momentary panic when I couldn’t use my plan? God knows. After about thirty long seconds I managed to get a message through to my brain that we could just start somewhere else. Genius! It’s a wonder I’m not running the BPO with problem solving skills like that.

In any case, we started with the scherzo, then went back to the opening later once everyone arrived. It’s great music, and I think it’s a great piece for an orchestra and a conductor to get to know each other through. First rehearsals can often create false impressions- sometimes good orchestras read poorly and sometimes it works the other way around, but what is really important is how quickly you can move on from the level of reading, and Tuesday was great fun from that point of view.

Even though I was that much more tired going home, I, for once, didn’t struggle to stay awake on the drive back, arriving home bright-eyed and chipper at 1 AM, to a house with LIGHTS.  Post rehearsal, and full of driving adrenaline, and elation at the restoration of electricity- this all meant I didn’t get to sleep until about four, but that’s fine- all the best TV is on after midnight.

I’m not sure what happened to Wednesday morning, but it went away quickly with a couple of emails and a look through the Nielsen Flute Concerto, and shortly after lunch I was back in the car for another three hour journey to the first Surrey Mozart Players rehearsal of the season, with more Sibelius (the Third, and Spring Song) and the Nielsen. Once again, I pulled into the parking lot all too close to the rehearsal start time, and was instantly pulled into about five conversations at once, and as I started the first movement of the symphony I found myself wishing and wishing I’d had an hour of peace and quiet in my office/green room/car to forget about roundabouts and traffic jams (no adrenaline rush to help the drive home this time- just more coffee and a long hard slog to get back, all the way feeling like death). Nonetheless, we got down to it and the orchestra is on good form, especially the horns. It’s a funny piece (Sibelius 3) in that the first four minutes of the third movement are exponentially more difficult than anything else in the work.

Ah well, that’s why we have rehearsals. In fact, on Sunday I’m going to start the rehearsal with the third movement of Sibelius 3- go straight for the jugular. 

I will present a well considered methodological approach.

I’m going to do this and this, then work on that, make a joke, do this slowly, tell a story, scold the slackers, tune that chord, tell the horns they’re late, make the timpanist change sticks, then have a break, run it and go home.

C. 2006 Kenneth Woods

A view from the podium, Music and Media, Performing Life

Fantastic news- 

New UK air security regulations just announced DO allow musicians once again to bring instruments on board as carry-on baggage, subject to extra screening. 

A rare, but welcome, victory for common sense. 

KW   

A view from the podium, Performing Life

From A.C Douglas at Sounds and Fury, a great discussion of the CBC’s coverage of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. My post of the day: 

“One might argue that Canada’s state-funded way of doing such things is inimical to our market-driven, private-capital model which controls how we Americans go about handling such matters, and so the comparison is unfair.

Bullshit. We’re overwhelmingly the richest country in the world, and all that’s lacking here is the will, not the cash — petty cash at that as expenditures of tax dollars go.

We Americans are in the habit of poking good-natured fun at our Canadian neighbors generally, but we’ve much to learn from them, and rather than casting good-natured gibes their way we would do better — lots better — in this domain at least, to pay them close and earnest attention. In this domain they make us, collectively, appear to be not much more enlightened and cosmopolitan than a just-off-the-turnip-truck yokel.

PBS, NPR, and their Congressional federal funds allocators take serious note.”

A view from the podium

Concert Announcement
Surrey Mozart Players
Kenneth Woods, Music Director
Saturday, September 30
7:30 PMElectric Theatre, Guildford
Sibelius- Varsang (Spring Song)
Nielsen- Flute Concerto
            Katherine Baker, flute
Sibelius Symphony No. 3 in C Major, op 52

Ken says-I’m really looking forward to this program…. It’s my first concert with the SMP as their official Music Director. They did a fantastically exciting Beethoven 7 last spring that I really enjoyed preparing and performing, so I’m looking forward to working with them regularly. Katherine Baker is a wonderful player who has already served as principal flute in the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Halle.

The Nielsen is musical quirkiness personified- witty, slightly weird, but really lovely. The dialogue between solo bass trombone and solo flute has to be one of the funniest musical ideas in history, and yet the piece has a real sense of grace about it in the end.

Sibelius 3- what can you say? It’s a piece that will always sound fresh and full of life. I’ve often heard it called his Haydn symphony, but to me it is more Sibelius version of Beethoven 7- full of rhythmic life, drive and forward motion, and never heavy. Interesting that in the various versions of the Fifth Symphony, Sibelius had to work very hard to find a formal structure that generates irresistible forward motion when he’d already found it in the last movement of the Third. More info and audio samples are  here.
  Katherine Baker, flutist(photo credit- Chris Stock)

Born in Croydon in 1975, Katherine Baker studied at the Royal Academy of Music with William Bennett, Sebastian Bell and Kate Hill and during her time there she won the Academy’s highest award for performance, the prestigious DipRAM. In 2004 Katherine took up her new position of Principal Flute with the Hallé orchestra and Mark Elder. Having already held the same position with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales for the previous four years, she has now become a very sought after guest principal and regularly plays with some of the country’s leading orchestras, most recently the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev.    

When the duties of motherhood permit, Katherine also gets involved in a great deal of chamber music. She has played with such groups as the Galliard Ensemble and recently gave a recital with the flautist Michael Cox, but it is to being one half of the popular and successful Alwyn Duo with the harpist Suzanne Willison that she devotes most time. Together they have performed at festivals including Cheltenham, Brighton and Presteigne, on the South Bank and at music societies around the country. The duo is a keen champion of new music, and has given the first performances of pieces by Joe Duddell and Rhian Samuel.  As a soloist, Katherine was regularly broadcast on Radio 3 during her time with the BBC NOW, playing Bach, Saint-Saens and Poulenc Concerti. In 2005 Katherine played Bach’s Suite No.2 at the Linari Festival in Italy with Principals of the Concertgebouw Orchestra and earlier this month she performed Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg concerto with the pianist Angela Hewitt and the Hallé .      

A view from the podium, Announcements and reviews

“1907…  

During the next decade many composers would hear a voice summoning them to a leaner life. Sibelius heard it sooner.”   

Michael Steinberg   c. 2006 Kenneth Woods   

A view from the podium

This just in, as a follow up to my post and that of Alex Ross on Mahler’s salary as conductor of the New York Philharmonic— 

“In reply …, the salary proposed to Mahler by the Guarantors’ Committee of the New York Philharmonic in February-March 1911 for 80 to 90 concerts was $30.000, not $90.000. I do not have the time just now to search through the English volume of Mahler’s letters to Alma, but I was one of the original editors of the German volume and I worked together with Antony Beaumont throughout the whole time of the revision. 

Thus, I do not believe that such a shocking error could have crept in.  If I am wrong I would be grateful to know the reference so as to inform Antony Beaumont and the American publisher that the figure is erroneous and must be corrected as soon as possible.”   

Henry-Louis de La Grange  * 

Interesting then that Mahler’s salary in modern numbers would be about $600,000 for 90 concerts, or a meager $6,600/ concert- about a 10th of what top earning conductors might charge today.

Alex Ross was not mistaken in his original post; according to the English version of “Gustav Mahler: Letters to His Wife”, on p. 391 is the following quotation: 

“On 8 March he wrote to the Committee accepting their proposal of 90 concerts for a fee of $90,000” 

So the error is in the book (assuming that Prof. de La Grange is correct).

What amazing times we live in, when a scholar like Professor de La Grange can uncover a mistake like this through the power of a couple of blogs and an email list. Thanks to Deborah Hess and Peter Sheldorn of Mahlerlist for helping get to the bottom of this as well. 

* For those of you who are not Mahler nuts, Prof. de La Grange is a leading biographer of Gustav Mahler- the author of a multi-volume biography on the composer.               

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods             

A view from the podium

A few weeks back, I wrote briefly on the value of relevance in music, speaking in that instance of the music of Viktor Ullmann. 

“Copland’s real achievement … was to create an American vernacular from materials that were mostly self-fashioned.” 

 

Quite true. However, he also says- 

“Though the music may show none of the alienation of a Mahler or the expressive frenzy of a Schoenberg, it comprehends the loneliness inherent in American individualism, and accepts it as a price worth paying.” 

“To have given musical voice to a nation as heterogeneous as America is a staggering achievement, all the more surprising when you consider that this vision of a rural WASP uprightness was achieved by an urban, left-wing, homosexual Jew.” 

“Here in the US we composers have no possibility of directing the musical affairs of the nation- on the contrary… I have the impression that more and more we are working in a vacuum. There seems to me less than ever a real rapport between the public and the composers and of course that is a very important way of creating an audience, and being in contact with an audience. When one has done that, one can compose with real joy.” 

When I say that classical music should charge the ramparts, that we should be fearless participants in the struggle to shape a better world, it may sound a bit silly. Yet, in 1933, who would have thought a “left-wing, homosexual Jew” could help heal, sustain, reinvent and redefine the nation for the better simply through his music?As Christoph von Dohnanyi said in an interview a few years back, nobody remembers who the ruler of Germany was when Beethoven was writing his Fifth Symphony. Art is the single most powerful positive force in society.

Even as we feel that great music in all genres has never been more pushed to the sidelines of our culture, we can hear in Copland’s words that we were not the first generation to feel that ours was becoming a hopeless cause.  Copland escaped the vacuum without sacrificing the depth and integrity of his musical approach. Appalachian Spring may be a more accessible work than the Dance Symphony, yet its musical construction is just as sound and sophisticated and integrated as anything by Berg or Brahms, never mind the rest of his own music. He literally wrote the soundtrack for the country’s modern history. If only the country we’ve become were as loving, as humble, as charitable and as hopeful as the one he imagined for us.   

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

 

Copland made a conscious choice to turn toward a more accessible idiom for the good of his fellow citizens. A choice he made knowing that many of his fellow citizens would never entirely accept him as one of their own. In the early years of his American project, he agonized over the distance between musicians and society, saying in 1933- 

   

Which may also be true when you discussing his major America-themed music of the 1930’s and 40’s, but was not always true throughout his career. In fact, in works like the Second Symphony, Connotations, Vitebsk and Statements, Copland could be thorny, frenzied and abstract. He had a profound understanding of, and respect for, all the techniques and approaches of the early 20th Century, and in Connotations even used his own 12-tone system. Bernstein himself often said there were two Coplands- the loving grandfather of “American” American music, and the forbidding Old Testament prophet who wrote Inscape. Aaron the prophet could write music that was as forbidding and foreboding as anyone’s. 

A view from the podium Appalachian Spring, Copland, ullmann

For those of you who read and followed the original Mahler Journey thread on this blog, which chronicled the Oregon East Symphony’s 20^th Anniversary performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2-

The 21^st Season of the Oregon East Symphony and Chorale will conclude on May 13, 2007 with a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major. 

I can’t tell you what an unlikely turn of events this seemed like throughout all of last season! The “Journey” continues, and we’re now hoping this will be a part of an annual festival weekend in Pendleton.

For information on that, stay tuned.
KW

A view from the podium, Mahler