Monthly Archives: October 2006

KW Unplugged

Posted on by
Reply

It’s a busy day for me here in Pendleton, with a rehearsal and concert to get through, but I want to take a few lines to clarify what I said about classical music as acoustic music. 

Robert Gable at Aworks is quite right to point out that there are certainly important examples of works in the classical tradition that integrate electronics with acoustic instruments. There is also a substantial and important tradition of totally electronic art music. Perhaps I would have been better to use the terms “symphonic and chamber music is overwhelmingly acoustic music.” 

Nonetheless, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that amplification remains, as I said yesterday, a blunt instrument, and integrating sounds from speakers with sounds from instruments is incredibly difficult on a purely technical level. Also, works that integrate live performance with things like tape or computer-generated sound tend to date very quickly. Even more quick to date are pieces that use synthesizers- many early examples are now limited by the difficulty in finding a working Moog or whatever else. We all smile mockingly when we hear the formerly ubiquitous tinkling of the Yamaha DX-7, scourge of 80’s music, but there are pieces in classical music that are also prisoners of outdated technology. Violins will still sound hip in 50 years, but I’m not sure about the DX-7. 

On the other had, Turangalila is one of my all-time favorite pieces, and the strangeness of the Ondes-Martinot really helps to make the piece for me. I love the theremin, wouldn’t leave planet earth without it. Black Angels wouldn’t be the piece it is without Crumb’s use of amplification. 

However, I’m not sure that putting body mics on singers in the opera house is anything more than a concession to sloppy orchestration or performance practices, unless the composer has specified that the voice should be not only amplified, but somehow manipulated by a signal processor. An expert orchestrator should be able to create just about any palette of sounds without making the orchestra so loud that singers need to be amplified, and a good conductor should be able to keep a well orchestrated piece of vocal music soft enough for a trained singer to be heard easily (and once amplified, what happens to the more subtle aspects of the orchestra writing?). At its best, the human voice is the most thrilling sound on the planet, and something of its color, power and beauty is always lost when it passes through a circuit. Certainly there are specific artistic situations where that is a worthwhile tradeoff, but it would be a tragedy if we just suddenly decided to start shoveling the voice through an amplifier as a matter of course. 

I guess what I’m saying is, in the circumstance of the Cal series, no amplification system is going to make acoustically conceived music sound better, only louder, more artificial, and more confused. Your adding sound sources, which gives the listener a much more confused sense of where the music is coming from, and you’re still not fixing the problem, which is that you apparently have a room that does bad things to musical sounds. You’re also creating a sound picture that is not what the composer or the performer had in mind. Acoustically conceived music should be performed acoustically. 

In the larger context, of course electronics can bring something to a work that is totally integral to the music, but, I would also say that anytime you bring electronic instruments, electronically generated sound or amplification into the orchestra or the chamber ensemble, you sacrifice a large range of color and nuance in the acoustic instruments, and you create a lot of technical challenges. I’ve seen plenty of Turangalilas ruined by an out-of-control Ondes, just as an example. Feedback, E.Q problems, balance problems, uneven mic coverage, or just being, as Birtwistle put it, “so effing loud.” Yikes! If you, the composer, are sure that you’re prepared to make those sacrifices and accept those challenges, we, the performers, will go through hell to make it all work for you. Just make sure your sound man is a genius.  c. 2006 Kenneth Woods   

 

Share

No electricity required

Posted on by
1

I would like to call your attention to a post from A.C Douglas at Sounds and Fury. I think this is part ofa very, very important question, and we’d be smart to think through the wisdom of  the path towards a multimedia concert experience before it becomes an unchangeable fact. I like to think I’m about as unreactionary and open-minded as anyone, but that doesn’t mean that I think all modern day trends are good ones…..

He calls our attention to this recent news item….

“Berkeley’s Cal Performances, one of the busiest arts presenters in the country, thinks it may have an answer [to the problem of concert hall acoustics]: It has endorsed the new world of sound enhancement, at least for the coming season, by installing an “electroacoustic architecture system” in Zellerbach Hall, its main venue. It involves lots of microphones and speakers, a supersonic mixing board, computers, and all sorts of digital equipment”

I’m not sure either exactly what this has to do with ipods, but I’m very glad to see him challenging the assumption that this is somehow a good idea.

But, I digress….

Mr. Douglas quotes the following from Sequenza 21.

“Why is making halls sound better with electronics any different from making them sound better with architecture [sic!]? [...] If your goal is to make music sound as good as possible in the space available, electronic reinforcement is a very useful tool.”

Well, it is not that it is “different” to make halls better with electronics than with architecture, it is that it is impossible to make acoustic music better with electronics. Classical music is acoustic music*. One of its many strengths is that it is not limited or dated by technology. There is no circumstance under which the sound of an orchestra or a string quartet or a voice recital can be improved by amplification. Electronic reinforcement may be a necessary evil in outdoor concerts and pops shows, but, even a necessary evil is still evil. During my rock years, I learned a lot about sound reinforcement and worked with it every day, and the main thing I learned is that it is just about the bluntest tool imaginable. What they are trying to do in Berkeley is comparable to trying to play a Bach suite with your bow attached to a tractor.

As it turns out, we at the Oregon East Symphony have the fate of working in hall that can, at best, be described as “acoustically very problematic.” We’ve been working with the city and other civic groups for years to improve things. We have bought a new shell, we are working on reducing absorption, we want to completely take out the existing balcony and install one that is shallower, and we want to put some deflecting baffles in the room. All will improve the sound. Amplification will only make the problem worse. If a space murders musical sounds, adding more sound to the space will just give the room more sound to murder. Also, the laws of thermodynamics tell us that once musical information enters the mircophone, then the cable, the pre amp,. the console, the power amp, the speaker cable and the speaker, at every stage in the process the signal will be degraded and corrupted, because each stage in the process generates a certain amount of chaos. You cannot put the sound of a Strad through an electronic circuit and have it emerge on the other end with equal clarity, detail and purity.

Also, I can’t think of any sound engineer on earth I would trust to regurgitate my Daphnis and Chloe performance through an “electroacoustic architecture system”….

I did just a little quick research on the series at Berkeley, and it certainly seems they do interesting and ambitious things, and this system might be great when they have pop, world music and novelty acts come through. However, please turn it off for Brahms.

 

*The subject of electronic music is a complicated one, and not something I’m going to even try to tackle here. However, music created on a computer or in a studio is generally not what is going to be performed in a 2000 seat arena, so we can save that discussion for another time.

UPDATE

 AC DOUGLAS Follows up

 ”there’s an entire generation walking about out there that imagines what they’re hearing through their iPod headsets is what music — genuine music; classical music — really sounds, and ought to sound, like. Is it any wonder that Berkeley’s Cal Performances imagine there’s not only nothing amiss with amplification of acoustical instruments performing classical music, but that it’s a really nifty way to correct for the acoustic deficiencies of a concert hall? And is it any wonder that BCP is absolutely certain the overwhelming majority of its audiences will agree with them? For if they weren’t absolutely certain of that audience response, you can bet your last bippy they never would even have contemplated such a grotesquely mindless “solution” to the acoustic shortcomings of Zellerbach Hall.”

He’s right, and it’s important that we stress the difference between live and recorded music if we want people to come to concerts. Recordings are wonderful, but concerts can do things they can’t. If we turn acoustic concerts into electronically corrupted and manipulated events, we lose the main reason for punters to fork over the cash for a night out at the symphony

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

Share

Disco Post Mortem

Posted on by
3

I’ve had a few email requests for a post-mortem on my concert/recording project for Discovering Music with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales last week. It’s nice to know readers are paying attention, and it was a project that left me with a lot to think about.

It’s always special to work with a really great orchestra, and BBC NOW is a great orchestra. This project was made even more interesting since I did have the opportunity to do the same piece with two very different orchestras and two very different soloists back-to-back. However, this program involved a very unusual bit of repertoire, which made the whole thing both more interesting and yet maybe a bit less satisfying.

I’ve often had the experience when doing a very challenging piece of being pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to put together in the end, but that was not an experience I had with the Nielsen Flute Concerto. Stravinsky and Mahler both look ferociously hard on the page, but I’ve always found performance preparation for them to be a very simple, organic process. Part of this can be attributed to their understanding of instrumentation and of orchestration- they understood what was playable for each player and anticipated how timbres would work together.

Continue reading →

Share

Thought for the day

Posted on by
Reply

If you go into a coffee shop and order your latte or cappuccino, and they ask you “would you like any flavor with that?” decisive action is called for. You have two honorable courses of action.
1-       Leave
2-       Politely and calmly inform them that….COFFEE IS A FLAVOR!

And remember- it’s best not to buy coffee in places that sell “expreso”

Share

Concert announcement- OES Oct 14

Posted on by
Reply

Upcoming Concert- October 14, 2006

Oregon East Symphony and Chorale

Annette Vogel, violin

Gershwin- An American in Paris, Rimsky-Korsakov- Capriccio Espagnol, Ravel-Tzigane, Sarasate- Zigeunerweisen

 From the official OES press release- 

Oregon East Symphony Opens 21st Season with Gypsies and Travelers

World-renowned violinist Annette-Barbara Vogel to be featured in first concert

The Oregon East Symphony and Chorale have begun preparations for their 21st Season.  The 2006-7 Season will feature six performances at the Vert Auditorium, as well as events in the Pendleton area in collaboration with the Portland Opera and musicians of the Rose City Chamber Orchestra.  Season tickets, which are offered at a significant discount from single ticket prices, are now available.   

Highlights of the year are sure to include performances by world-renowned violin soloist and recording artist Annette-Barbara Vogel, and concert pianist Rick Rowley, who charmed and wowed Eastern Oregon and Washington audiences when he performed with the OES in 2005.  Major works this year include Gershwin’s beloved American in Paris, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Elgar’s Enigma Variations (played in celebration of his 150th birthday) and Mahler’s epic Symphony no. 1. 

The symphony opens their season under the direction of Kenneth Woods on Saturday, October 14 at the Vert Audotrium in Pendleton, with a concert titled Gypsies and Travelers, featuring Annette-Barbara Vogel performing pieces by Maurice Ravel and Pablo de Sarasate. The orchestra will perform audience favorites An American in Paris by George Gershwin, and Capriccio Espagnol by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakoff to round out an evening of musical works featuring travel and adventure as their common theme.

Ms. Vogel, violin soloist for the October 14 concert, is currently Artist-in-Residence and Assistant Professor of Violin at the University of Western Ontario. She has performed throughout Europe, Canada, the Caribbean, the U.S. and Asia as a soloist, recitalist and chamber musician. Ms. Vogel regularly records for the Harmonia Mundi and Cybele labels. Her performances and recordings have drawn rave reviews from critics and musicians throughout Europe and the U.S.

Tickets for the October 14 concert are available at the Oregon East Symphony office or at the Vert Auditorium prior to the concert.  For more information about the October 14 Gypsies and Travelers concert or season tickets, please contact the OES office at 276-0320 or oes@uci.net.

Share

Felix Rocks

Posted on by
3

We had a good weekend with the preparatory orchestra at Wallowa Lake. It is an even younger group this year than last, but also our strongest overall so far (this is our fourth year).

Our main project this month is preparing Mendelssohn 5 for a joint performance by the youth orchestra and the OES. After two long days working very, very hard on this piece, I just wanted to use this space to let fly with one of my long held frustrations.

Almost all composers tend to get misrepresented by history. Of course, the great modern example is the “debate” about Shostakovich, in which many American academics continue to promote a portrait of the man at odds with descriptions of him by all his children and colleagues. Of course, there was more to Mozart than the cartoon-ish figure in Amadeus, and if Mahler was really as neurotic and emotionally unstable as he’s often portrayed, he could never have run the two biggest opera companies in the world.

However, I think Mendelssohn has gotten about the worst treatment in the press of any major core-repertoire composer. Why is it that he is still treated as the composer of cutesy-wootsey, nicey-nicey music? Why do writers so often call his music “brilliant” as if that were an insult? How often does a commentator really come to grips with the true spiritual depth of his music?

Let’s set the record straight. Let’s make this perfectly clear:

Mendelssohn’s reputation has been shortchanged for over 150 years because of repeated, clearly anti-Semitic attacks by commentators in the 19th Century, who created a false portrait of a composer of surface brilliance whose music somehow lacked the profound spiritual content of his non-Jewish contemporaries and successors. It was with the worst of intentions that those who wrote history described his music as  “sweet and tinkling without depth” (Wagner’s words).

History has taught us to look for deep meanings in every note by Beethoven. Wagner, who repeatedly denounced Mendelssohn in his less-savory writings, told us himself that we were to look for symbolism, context and meaning in every bar of his music. With Brahms it is assumed that we will always treat his every thought with reverence and deep contemplation.  In fact, we may have shortchanged of these composer’s capacity for humor and good cheer by insisting on treating their ever thought as deeply personal, and powerfully felt.

On the other hand, as often as we hear Mendelssohn’s “hits,” we rarely get any discussion of what this music means, only how popular it is and how easy it was for him to write. We treat the Violin Concerto as harmless, remembering only the sunny and virtuosic finale and forgetting the tragic and stormy first movement. We think of the Italian Symphony as a virtuoso showpiece for the orchestra, but isn’t there something quite ferocious and wild about the tarantella? Both piano trios are in minor keys and are just as stormy and scarey as anything by Dvorak or Brahms.

No one in his generation understood Beethoven better, or was more successful in responding to Beethoven’s ideas about form and meaning. Mendelssohn’s early A minor String Quartet is a beautiful and very thoughtful answer to Beethoven’s own A minor Quartet op 132. Mendelssohn’s Fifth Symphony traces a truly Beethovenian path from tragedy to celebration, and yet commentators have scarcely noticed the tremendous pathos of the slow movement, or the high tragedy of the first.

Of course Mendelssohn himself expressed some reservations about the Fifth, but these seem to have been the result of his eventual realization that the anti-Semitic voices in the press were never going to accept him on his merits. I can’t help but feel he lost the stomach for this work which so eloquently celebrated the legacy of the Reformation. Quite a tragic turn for a man who had been baptized and raised in the Lutheran church.

Of course, for 19th century listeners it was easy to equate profundity with pomposity, and there is not a pompous or self indulgent note in all of Mendelssohn’s music.

Mendelssohn’s music is %100 fat-free.

It is pure fire, pure direction.

At its best it can devastatingly tragic without a hint of sentimentality or self-indulgence, or boundlessly jubilant and radiantly hopeful.

It is a challenge to find any resource on Mendelssohn that avoids these pernicious stereotypes that have haunted him since his death. If you visit the website that bears his name, you’ll read this.

“Whether he was born with his incredible talent or was the product of an artistically and intellectually-inclined family will remain a mystery, but like all prodigies, Mendelssohn showed signs of true genius from childhood.”

I’m sorry, Mendelssohn clearly was born with incredible talent and was the product of an artistically and intellectually inclinded family. Moreover, he did not “show signs” of genius from childhood, he clearly was a fully accomplished genius as a child. He was not the next great child prodigy after Mozart, he was a greater child prodigy than Mozart. Nothing Mozart wrote before the age of 22 can be compared to the best works of Mendelssohn’s teenage years, such as the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture and the Octet, as well as the early quartets.

He worked himself to death as conductor, giving us back the music of J.S Bach, and wrote possibly the most perfect choral work of the 19th Century in Elijah, which we continue to offer up for public massacre at the hands of inept church choirs everywhere. Felixmendelssohn.com suggests that he was “a great composer who’s contribution would have been greater, had his life been marred with more hardships,” and yet he died at 38 with the body of an 80-year old. For me there is just as much hardship and pathos in the very-brief third movement of the Fifth Symphony as in all of Tristan. Let’s stop talking about him as a man who somehow wrote facile music that sounds good and recognize him for what he truly was so that we can appreciate him for what he really gave us. It’s not just music that sounds like great music, it is great music, and as performers and listeners we ought to be thinking harder about what this music really says.

By the way, can you think of any composer who wrote more often in minor keys?

UPDATE- A nice response at My Second Act

c.2006 Kenneth Woods

Share

Enjoying the trip

Posted on by
Reply

I’m heading into the back country this morning. 

Twice every year we take the youth orchestra here on a weekend retreat. Instead of heading for a private school built around an ancient mansion (as we have in Kent), the OES Prep Orch heads into the nearby mountains, either the Blues in the spring or the Eagle Cap mountains in the fall.   

Pendleton is a pretty place, but Wallowa Lake is spectacular by any measure. Situated just inside the mouth of the high mountains, the lake was literally carved out of the mountain range by a great glacier, and as the glacier retreated it shaved the earth absolutely flat on the north side. The effect is stunning, as one side of the lake is surrounded in towering peaks and the other is encircled by a perfectly smooth, featureless shore. 

I like working different places, and over the years I’ve developed some strong ideas about how to enjoy life while I’m working there, so here is how to enjoy life at Wallowa Lake. 

How to get started- Coffee from the art gallery in Enterprise.  What to do- Hike, hike, hike 

Where to eat- Wallowa Lake Lodge or the Bakery in Joseph Where to hang out after rehearsal- Terminal Gravity Brewery in Enterprise 

What to have- Terminal Gravity IPA (best beer on the planet). 

If you’re in Cincinnati it might look like this How to get started- Iced cap at Baba Budan’s 

What to do- Red’s game on a summer night (bring a gas mask if there is smog alert) Where to eat- Red Pepper (Dead Lepper) Chinese 

Where to hang out- Christy’s Biergarten and Rathskeller What to have- Warsteiner 

In my home town of Madison we have How to get started- Whatever coffee you like at Café Espresso Royal on

State Street

What to do- People watch 

Where to eat- Kabul Afganistani Cuisine on State Where to hang out- Lakeside at the Union Terrace 

What to have- Sprecher Amber 

In La Grande, OR where I worked for three years How to get started- Sorbenots Espresso 

What to do- There is nothing to do  Where to eat- Foley Station (what a place!) Where to hang out- Bar at

Ten Depot Street

What to have- Terminal Gravity IPA (not as good as at the brewery, but still good) 

In Portland 

How to get started- Stump Town Coffee Roasters (world’s best) What to do- Check out the scene 

Where to eat- Too many to list Where to hang out- County Cork (next door to my friend’s house, there are hundreds of places) 

What to have- Lagunitas IPA 

I could and may make a list for Britain, but even though the coffee situation has improved miraculously there, one is still hard pressed to find a locally owned coffee shop whose wares make you glad to be alive. 

In Domain Forget, Quebec How to get started- Coffee from the little stand up the road in the village 

What to do- Whale watching Where to hang out- on the hill overlooking the St Lawrence on the Festival grounds 

What to have- La Fin du Monde (Quebec produced Belgian style ale, yum….) 

You’ll note that for every venue, one must really have a coffee that makes life worth living and a beer that reflects the local scene. Let’s face it, you can get a martini made the same way anywhere, but it’s nice to have something that reflects the local culture and beer and wine are the way to go. Wine page must be coming soon!

Share

Changing the bedside manner

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been thinking this week about the whole question of the conductor’s bedside manner. 

It’s always been my belief that a conductor should choose his or her tone and approach and not let their way of working be too influenced by their work situation. I remember watching Peter Oundjian (former first violin of Tokyo Quartet, now MD of Toronto) in my student days coaching chamber music at CCM. In the rare situation where he had to deal with a resistant or arrogant student in a master class Peter never fell into the trap of being dragged down to the student’s level of behavior, but instead continued to act with his usual charm and good manners, even when he would have been well within his rights to throw the student out. To me it was a greater show of strength than the more common response of getting mad. 

Recently, however, I’ve had a few instances in which I suddenly realized that for one reason or another I had to change my bedside manner very abruptly. For instance, one of my basic approaches is to work under the shared assumption that both I and the players know when a mistake has been made or when something needs to be cleaned up. I feel a lot of technical work is best resolved through working toward a more musically valid performance. As a result, if something is not together, I might not address it directly right away if I feel that it will self-correct once the players get a sense of the phasing or just figure out what they need to listen for or watch for. I find that if you can use the rehearsal to get to a shared understanding of the music, and to get the players all listening to each other in the most helpful ways you only need to fix a very few technical things directly. In fact, it’s almost impossible for musicians to play out of tune or not together if they know what to listen for. 

However, I recently had an instance where I suddenly realized that if I didn’t immediately point out everything that was out of tune or not together, it would be assumed by some that I couldn’t tell or that it wasn’t going to get fixed. In this instance, it was a musician(s) I’d worked with before, where the performance went very well indeed, who seemed worried. Maybe I had made it look a little too easy the previous time? Maybe they prefer the security of a work approach where we identify each problem and work on it directly? To me, that’s a bit clumsy, but in this case I felt I had to do it that way to get the player’s confidence back, and we certainly didn’t have time to let things work themselves out over several rehearsals or concerts. In fact, it seemed clear that I needed to show them immediately that we could address the technical things before we worked on the music. I believe that’s an inefficient approach (as you may have to re-fix things once you put it into context), but maybe less inefficient than pursuing a path that a colleague is not comfortable with. 

This first came to my mind just minutes before a concert last spring. We had two major works on the program, one that everyone thinks is hard but is really quite forgiving and another that everyone assumed they could play brilliantly but is actually one of the toughest and most exposed works in the repertoire. I focused intently on the second work, absolutely confident that the first would be first rate in the concert. However, on the day of the show, I ran into several players who were actually rather cross that I hadn’t spent more time on piece no. 1. As it turned out, both pieces went exactly as I predicted, and the review spoke equally glowingly about their performance of both works. Had I not had those conversations, I might have walked away from the project feeling that I had handled the situation marvelously, but what I know now is that some of the players ended up not enjoying the experience of piece no. 1, even though it went well. They thought somehow we got away with it when we shouldn’t have. Had I even thought to say- “I know you think some of this is rather scary, but trust me, it will click into place in plenty of time,” they might have come away from the experience feeling better. They needed to know that I knew they thought they weren’t going to be ready and that I had a plan. 

I’ve seen this same sort of issue come up in conductor auditions. Even if an auditioning conductor can fix an ensemble problem with their hands and eyes, it may be a good idea to say something about it anyway or the committee may not know that you knew. You can just imagine someone on the committee saying “the first time through it was a total trainwreck at letter E and he didn’t even notice, then the next time the players fixed it.” Maybe the conductor had noticed and had non-verbally helped to fix it?

Of course, we all have our toolboxes, and we often change rehearsal techniques depending on what we think is the best approach to take, but what I came away from this episode with a new appreciation for is the need to know when to change tools not because the conductor thinks it’s the best way to make the music sound better, but because someone else needs to know you have that tool in your kit. 

Share

PDX PDQ

Posted on by
Reply

We’ve thought from time to time about moving to Portland, Oregon. It’s a famously nice place, and it would be very convenient for my work with the Rose City Chamber Orchestra, who are based here, and the OES which is not exactly next door, but Portland is the nearest major city.

However all of those rational reasons seemed insignificant compared to the simple shock to my senses when I finally escaped the clutches of the travel industry yesterday afternoon on my arrival here. The sheer joy of being in a place that smelled nice and looked good was almost more than my frayed nerves could take.

No need to sigh sympathetically here, but we finished the session with the BBC on Tuesday evening just in time for us to grab a quick celebratory drink before racing home so I could pack. My bus from Cardiff to Heathrow left at 1:50 AM, which meant leaving home at 1:15. Yuck! Given that the whole previous week had been a bit of a mad dash and that Tuesday’s work on the Nielsen was especially grueling (albeit rewarding!), I felt nothing short of awful as I began my journey.

Of course busses, even those of the slightly posher variety which carry the jet-set crowd to and from the airport, seem all to have a very specific smell in common. Yes, that one…. In all of bussing’s long history, they’ve been unable or unwilling to shield us from that smell.

Then Heathrow…. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think Heathrow airport is a place humans should be in at all. I can’t think of a single good architectural or design choice that has been made there. It’s claustrophobic, airless, noisy, dark, and feels like a prison. People should not be expected to stand in line for a half hour before anyone from the airline shows up, which happened. There’s really nothing like showing up at 5 AM to a line of hundreds of people to sour your mood.

One other thing that sours my mood- self check in kiosks. Surely these things are a terrorist’s best friend. More to the point, they always seem to freeze or crash or to eat your passport, so the airline still has to have a surly staff member stood next to each one telling the poor passenger who to get their seat assignment.

After Heathrow, O’Hare seemed like an oasis of calm. Actually it was hell, just a better designed hell. It was one of those United Airlines days, where all flights are delayed because of “weather,” when it’s not raining, not foggy, there’s no lightening, no wind and no atmospheric disturbance of any kind.  I was lucky- I got my flight rebooked at the international arrivals desk, where I only waited a minute or two. At the main United terminal, it was lines of hundreds and hundreds of people. One lady ran over another lady and left her bleeding on the floor with a broken nose. It’s amazing how people will start to behave if you pen them in like animals at the slaughterhouse.

Anyway, this is not a travel horror story. I got here, only 3 hours late, and so did all of my luggage. I can’t complain.
The point is that here in Portland they took me on the shuttle to pick up my rental car, and when I got to the parking lot, I could smell pine trees and fresh-cut grass. I could have cried. Even around the airport, there is landscaping and green space. You can see out of the city and into the mountains. After spending so much time in places where human well-being is treated as a joke, it’s amazing to find yourself in a city which takes such pride in being a healthy and pleasant place to live. The leaves are changing, and the streets are alive with color everywhere. People actually seem happier here. I’m off now to have the best cup of coffee money can buy before heading off to rehearsal in Pendleton. It makes a difference!

Share

No attitude adjustment needed

Posted on by
Reply

This post from Helen Radice is a nice post-script to my piece last week on the rhythms of work. I’m afraid Allan Bennett has it completely wrong. There are always maybe one or two cancers in an orchestra who will exploit every possible loophole to get out of work. I know of one violinist who has managed to have some “illness” every time his children are off from school for about 15 years. These people are a tiny, tiny minority. I would say that generally, musicians (both contracted and freelance) are about as dedicated a group as you’ll ever find. I’ve seen friends and colleagues risk life and limb, even walk out of their own hospital rooms to get to a gig.

Also, check out this post at NobleViola. Who says orchestral musicians take music for granted- all they want is the chance to be their best. When the conductor or the repertoire makes that impossible, of course they get discouraged.  This is powerful stuff. Orchestra musicians get awfully frustrated at things that get between them and their best, and outsiders could easilly mistake their frustration for lack of desire. Nothing could be further from the truth.

“Well, this past week we learned that our new concertmaster of two years, Amy Schwartz Moretti, was leaving at the end of the season to become Director of the Robert MacDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. This was a stunning blow to many in the orchestra. Truth be told, I don’t think anyone really expected that Amy would stay as a ‘lifer’, but two years was a remarkably short time to have someone of such talent in the chair (even by her own admission – she was intending to stay longer than this, but the opportunity arose, and after much agonizing, she took it) and clearly she had much more to offer the orchestra and the community than the great things she’d already brought in her brief two year stint with us.
What is interesting to me about this is the pre-announcement vs. post-announcement state of the orchestra that I have observed. The beginning of this season started pretty auspiciously for us – the playing standard was quite high even after our long summer break (approx. June 5 to August 25) and our first run of subscription concerts and rehearsals the previous week were notable for the high spirits of the orchestra and the high standard of playing from nearly every position in the orchestra.

Then, the announcement. Poorly timed, I think, at the inception of the first rehearsal of our next classical series. The rehearsal was pretty much a wash – many stunned faces, lots of tears and depressed looks at the break, and stoic professionalism for the rest of the rehearsal.

Now, it feels like our game is off. We have been shaken to our core, which I wouldn’t have believed possible before this, but the swagger is gone, and the customary self-doubts that are endemic to our orchestra have started to resurface.”
c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

Share

Concert energy

Posted on by
4

What makes sense about conducting is that you are really in the best position to evaluate what the musicians are doing as they play. 

What doesn’t make sense about conducting is that you are in the worst possible position to evaluate what you are doing as the musicians play. At least the musicians can hear themselves, if not how they sound in the context of the whole group. On the other hand, the conductor is the only person in the building who doesn’t know what he or she looks like when they are conducting. 

Of course, there are other things that are extremely difficult for the poor conductor to judge. It occurred to me after my concert on Saturday that every time I conduct a Sibelius symphony in concert I am extremely, extremely tired afterwards. This could mean that it is very emotionally intense, draining music, it could mean that it is music that requires a degree of physicality and theatricality to bring to life, or it could (I’m reminded of Strauss’s comment that conductors should never sweat) mean I’m working too hard. 

I think it is a matter of common sense, physical survival and good etiquette that the conductor should “save something” for the actual concert. However, it’s not helpful if the conductor suddenly transforms from David Banner to the Incredible Hulk when the audience shows up. I’ve seen conductors whose rehearsal demeanour was way too chilled out, who could turn a rehearsal of the end of the Rite of Spring into a big nap-fest and those who just beat the poor orchestra to death in the rehearsal with too much intensity, exhausting everyone even rehearsing a Haydn minuet. There was one young conductor I often watched who used to only rehearse the really, shall we say climactic, bits of pieces- musicians always said they felt dirty and somehow violated at the end of his rehearsals…. 

Likewise, there are conductors who keep you thinking they’re going to really turn it on at the concert, but their idea of turning it on is smiling when it’s over, and there are those who go completely berserk. Some of the most famous disciplinarian, by-the-book, rehearse-every-dot-and-dash-by-rote-till-it-is-%100-predictable conductors were notorious for going off on mad flights of fancy in concerts and causing huge train wrecks. Then there are the ones who, whether on purpose of due to nerves, actually chill out a lot in the concert. Players who have thrilled to the energy of rehearsals look up and see nothing but dishwater in the concert.

Most, of course, strike a pretty good balance, because the one that don’t do so don’t get work so they don’t stay in the field. It has always seemed to me that you can’t just decide to “emote” in the concert and have anything good happening. Your whole approach to the concert should be a result of how you feel about the music when you’ve freed yourself from the practical concerns of keeping track of mistakes, planning what to do next and watching the clock. Rather than turning it on, you should be just tuning yourself in to what you believe about the piece.

Anyway, I know I couldn’t have conducted the end of Sibelius 3 at the level of intensity we did it on Saturday more than once in a day without seriously harming myself. Did I give too much in the concert? Not enough in the rehearsals? Was I in the Goldilocks zone, getting it just right? I don’t know. The other funny thing about conducting is that you never get unbiased feedback- the people who like you or want something from you come racing up to tell you you were wonderful, and those who don’t like you probably just work in secret to get you fired. At least the audience clapped long and loud, and the orchestra really outdid themselves. Still, when you have to get up at 6 AM the next day to go to another rehearsal for another program in another city, you can’t help but think “surely I could have worked a little less hard….” 

 c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...
Share