Kenneth Woods- a view from the podium

 “Conductors question scores for a living. Actual conducting is something you just have to do to share the answers you’ve found to the questions you’ve asked.”

Practical questions about music are important (and fun!) to answer.

When a real music lover tells me he or she has no interest whatsoever in the practical, technical issues of performance, I always feel I should try to change their mind. They’re probably the kind of people who always watch the “making of” feature on their dvds, so why be scared off by trying to understand how music works? It’s less scarey than trying to understand how pyrotechnics work.

So today we return to the practical issues of score questioning. You might want to make sure you’ve read episode one and David Hoose’s comment before proceeding.

I learned (through the much undervalued experience of humiliation) how important they can be when I took my first conducting final exam. We were to conduct the first or last movement of Brahms 1 and Der Freischutz Overture (the overture was to be memorized) with piano. I’d never really tried to analyze a symphony, let alone a Brahms symphony, right down to its DNA, and what I discovered completely and totally blew my mind (I can still remember the afternoon I did most of the work on my old sofa in my apartment, what the light was like, when the fire truck drove by- I’ve never looked at music the same way). I got so excited I decided I would do both movements from memory as well as the Weber.

Well, that was all fine- I conducted my heart out and got through everything without falling apart.

Then the professor (Chris Zimmerman) started asking some questions to test my knowledge of the score.

I was actually looking forward to this bit!

He started by asking me to begin somewhere random, then he stopped me and asked what came next. I happily answered something along the lines of “the second theme enters on the third beat in inversion, while the bass completes the statement of the same theme in augmentation, which prepares the arrival in the new key on the downbeat, which has the third of the chord in the bassline and a suspension which is not resolved until the next bar.”

“Okay,” he said with great patience, “but who are you going to point at?”

I had no idea! I’d been so busy learning the music I completely forgot to learn the score, and I couldn’t have helped an orchestra to get through it. I had done the work needed to understand the music, but not to make it happen.

So, a good practical question might be- “who comes in next?” This might be quickly followed by “why that instrument/section at that moment?” Another practical question might be “what are they playing?” by which you could be asking “what notes are they playing?” “What rhythm are they playing” At a more enlightened level you might ask “what motive or theme are they playing?”

Where does that motive come from? Is it related to other ideas? Has this material appeared before? Is scored differently this time? What are the dynamics? What part of that instrument’s range are they in? What else is going on at that moment?  What happens next? Is there something interesting about the harmony at that moment? How loud do they play? What is the articulation? Are they doubled? Is it an imitative entrance (that is, does another instrument or voice play the same or very similar material before or after it)?

One can see that a simple, practical question quickly leads to all kinds of other, more artistic questions. Back to my early final exam- I thought I had learned the music and not learned the orchestra, but the orchestration is a vitally important part of the music, not just a posh suit the composer uses to make the music look and sound slick. It is full of keys to finding thousands of new “why’s.”

On the other hand, once you’ve asked all these questions about your little 2^nd clarinet entrance on beat 3, it might be good to ask another practical question, such as “what do I do with all this information?” In other words, how do the answers to all those questions influence the way in which you look at, point at, breathe with, smile at, scowl at, invite, ignore or entice the player while at that moment of the score. Do you feel there is something you’re going to need to tell them verbally?

There are an endless array of practical questions you can look into that speak specifically to technique.

For instance, there might be a built-in technical challenge that you will have to address. Woodwind instruments all have different intonation tendencies, especially at the extremes of their registers. It is hugely helpful to know what the tendencies are and to be able to anticipate problems and come to rehearsal with some ideas about how to address them.

There is moment at the end of Till Eulenspiegel by Richard Strauss that is always a problem for intonation (for those of you with a score, it is the fourth bar of figure 40). It’s actually the moment in the piece when Till lets out his dying scream as he is being executed. It is a very dissonant chord, played by the flute, both oboes and cor anglais and piccolo clarinet (Strauss specifically asked for D clarinet, although almost everyone plays it on E-flat clarinet, which is slightly smaller, and maybe a bit easier to play in this very high register. Chances are the problem would be worse if you could find a D clarinet), over a sustained g-flat in the contra bassoon, bass trombone and tuba. You’ve got instruments in a register where they tend to play very sharp (just because of the acoustics of the instrument) playing with instruments in the same register that tend to play flat (for the same reasons), and the inherenet tension between instruments in a low register (the tuba, bass trombone and contra), where everyone tends to play low, working with instruments in a high register, where things tend to go up (except for the poor clarinet players) with nothing in between to join the two. 

I’ve only heard it in tune once, but, of course, no one knew the orchestra better than Strauss- he was one of the greatest orchestrators who ever lived and a very practically minded conductor. He must have known- check that- WE CAN SAY WITH REASONABLE CERTAINTY THAT HE KNEW it would be almost impossible to tune.

Why did he write it this way knowing that? See, back there already! Maybe he wanted the moment of Till’s death to sound as grotesque and agonizing as possible? As an old man, he did often say that if he had known violinists would eventually be able to play the first page of Don Juan perfectly he would have made it more difficult. Stravinsky said the same thing about the bassoon solo at the beginning of Rite of Spring.  

At the end of the day, I would suggest that all the practical questions one asks of the score boil down to issues of “what.”

What happens next? What is interesting/important/awkward/problematic/cool about it? 

For every what, there are at least five why’s.

It may sound backwards, but I actually think that all questions of “how” are not practical, but artistic. Next time, I’ll try to get to grips with some common issues of “how?”

 Finally, just to quote from David- “‘Why’ is the answer.”

“What” is a tool for getting us there.

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

 One of my first “official” conducting teachers told us all that “conductors study scores for a living. Actual conducting is just something you get to do for fun as a reward for the studying.”

It’s a point of view I took to heart and have often repeated to both students and to music lovers who are interested in understanding just what a conductor does, but I’ve recently become frustrated with the term “score study.” Maybe it’s because I never took to “studying” in school- I never had the patience for, say, repeating pages of my chemistry notes out loud until I memorized them in school. I always felt that if I understood something, then I could remember it, and if I didn’t understand it I wouldn’t remember it, no matter how often I repeated it, copied it out, re-read it or whatever.

As I thought about this linguistic problem, it also occurred to me that I actually spend very little time “studying” scores the way an American student is taught to study for tests, drilling, repeating, repeating, repeating. What was I doing with all that time?

So- on to the new model….

I would like to suggest that “conductors question scores for a living. Actual conducting is something you just have to do to share the answers you’ve found to the questions you’ve asked.”

Yes, I toyed with “analysis,” and any number of other words, but for me, the most productive work on scores comes when I ask the best questions.

Yes, you heard it here first- Score Questioning 

So, what are the best questions?

Well, for some conductors, there is only one question to ask.

One conductor I learned a lot from when I was getting started was Pascal Verrot, who was a regular guest at the Round Top Festival, where I spent many happy summers. When I first worked up the courage to ask him for a conducting lesson he said that he has only one thing in mind (not that) when he “studies” a score, which is- “why?” He claimed to never work on memorizing things. For every detail in the score and not in the score, his goal was to understand why- why did the composer make the choice he or she did, why did they know to make that choice and why does it work?

I’ve got to hand it to Pascal- that was, hands down, the best piece of conducting advice (even better than “one is down”) I’ve ever had, and every friend and student I’ve passed it on to (who didn’t already know it) has come back to me and said it transformed not only their method of learning a score, but also their ways (and mine) of communicating with an orchestra in rehearsal. Players don’t like to be lectured at and tend not be interested in hearing all the little factoids one has discovered hunched over the score at home, but they don’t like to be in the dark either, and if you can show them with real experimental evidence gathered in the rehearsal laboratory why you’re doing it a certain way, it makes a big difference, both in terms of how much they get out of the work and what the audience gets out of the performance.

Nonetheless, the pragmatist in me isn’t %100 convinced that that is the only question you need to address. Maybe it’s helpful to look at all the other questions (maybe they are only subservient to “why?”) as falling in to one of two categories. On the one hand you have all the nuts and bolts, practical questions and on the other hand you have all the artistic, philosophical ones.

More of those in the next episode.

UPDATE- Be sure to read David Hoose’s comment, which is even cooler than this post before moving on to episode 2.

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

So this is where I went to work over the weekend-
 

Pretty sweet gig, eh????

  

These photos are of the interior quadrangle of the University of Glasgow, home of the Kelvin Ensemble. (Of course, speculation is wide-spread  in Pendleton that I am only posting pictures of these beautiful venues like the U of G and Menuhin Hall to nudge the good folks there towards movning forward with plans to restore and re-fit the Vert Auditorium. Hmm….)

The Kelvin’s are a student-run orchestra that are now celebrating their fifteenth year in existence.

One subject I’ve been considering taking up on this blog is the lengths musical people will go to in order to play the music they love. For most musicians, the need to play is so strong that they will endure hardships that few others would tolerate, including poor or non-existent pay, miserable working conditions, anti-social hours and so on.

That subject will have to wait, but the Kelvin’s are a great example of another obstacle that musicians will overcome- the absence of a group to play in. In this case, fifteen years ago a group of students took it upon themselves to found an ensemble that would better meet their musical needs. Of course many amateur orchestras are essentially self governing, especially in the UK, and this continuum goes right up to elite professional bands around the world like the LSO, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Berlin Phil and Vienna Phil, all of which take their artistic direction from the players. The Rose City Chamber Orchestra in Portland (where I’m affiliated), was also founded and is run by the players.

Interestingly, in a player-run orchestra one can see what happens when musicians themselves have to make tough decisions about work conditions, repertoire, scheduling and budgets. In my casual observation over the last few years, I’ve seen that player-run groups like the London orchestras smaller bands like Rose City will take on schedules that would never be tolerated by player-committees at “traditional” American orchestras, school run orchestras or broadcasting orchestras, and, in fact, would never be suggested by their managements.

No exception this week with the Kelvin Ensemble. When they sent me their schedule of rehearsals for this program, I was genuinely surprised. They wanted triples on every day I was to be there! Not just two separate sectionals then a full, but three full-orchestra calls in a day.

This is all the more remarkable because these are students who might be finishing their medical studies or practicing for juries or involved in research projects. Whatever they commit to over the two weekends of rehearsals with the orchestra, they still have to fulfil their academic commitments. You can imagine the back aches, bleeding lips, sore hands and swollen chops, not to mention the sheer noise fatigue.

Well, needless to say, by the end of this past weekend (weekend no. 2), we were all absolutely shattered, but less so than the day before. I think that as we get deeper inside the music the struggle to grow becomes more mental and spiritual and less physical. Also, over the many long hours, we all begin to get to know each other- I start to know what certain players need from me, and they start to know what they can expect to see when they look up, and what I expect from them. Gradually, everyone’s rehearsal dance becomes more graceful and more effortless with practice.

Obviously, the player-run model has a lot going for it, but it is also fraught with dangers. The traditional board-run orchestra has the great advantage of providing a built-in connection to the larger community through the directors, who also are responsible for helping to insure a basic level of financial support and partnership. Musicians tend to be wanderers by professional necessity and rarely have the ties to the community needed to raise money and build audiences. In the most successful player-run orchestras, funders and supporters have been willing to support the orchestra’s work while ceding decision-making power to the musicians, and the results are generally spectacular. Will more American orchestras ever reach the point where a board of directors is willing to become a board of supporters or a board of investors? Will player-run orchestras develop the skills to build bridges into their communities? Certainly, the London orchestras have shown the musicians can be incredibly shrewd and realistic in understanding their markets, working with funders and sponsors and in building ties with their audiences.

Clearly, the Kelvin Ensemble survives and thrives both because they have created a self-sustaining culture dedicated to some strong core values that is strong enough to survive the frequent turnover a student orchestra always has, and because the University continues to support them in modest but very important ways. Universities tend to be worse even than boards at wanting to control what happens on their campus, and music departments are often the most control-freakish body on campus after the athletic department. By allowing this ensemble autonomy, the university has allowed a group to come into being that is now one of the jewels of the campus, and as the Kelvin’s turn 15, the whole university should be celebrating.

As a side note, I’d encourage you to watch Greg Sandow’s series of video interviews with orchestra musicians on the Polyphonic.org, most of which deal extensively with the question of musician ownership of the orchestra’s decision-making and artistic-planning process. Click here to see his interview with Fergus McWilliam, hornist of the Berlin Phil, where McWilliam talks at length about their rehearsal process and how they choose music directors and intendants.

UPCOMING CONCERT

Kelvin Ensemble, Glasgow

15th Anniversary Concert –
Saturday 2nd December 2006, 7.30pm –
Bute Hall, University of Glasgow

Conductor: Kenneth Woods
Soloist: Veronika Toth (viola)

Tommy Fowler - 15th Anniversary Commission “Repezzatura Barocco”
Walton - Viola Concerto
Dvorak - Symphony No.8 in G, Op.88
To reserve tickets for this concert please contact Louise Hamilton
additional concert information at info@kelvin-ensemble.org
Kelvin Ensemble press release–

The Kelvin Ensemble is pleased to announce our December Concert for 2006. Kenneth Woods is conducting the orchestra for the first time, and we look forward to an excellent performance, with talented viola player Veronika Toth joining us for the Walton Viola Concerto.

It is a particularly exciting year for us as it is the 15th Anniversary of The Kelvin Ensemble.

Founded in 1991, the Kelvin Ensemble is the entirely student-run chamber orchestra of the University of Glasgow. The ensemble is as much renowned for its independence, enthusiasm and innovation as it is for the high calibre of its public performances. Under the guidance of professional conductors, the Kelvin Ensemble allows students from all faculties to produce both classical and modern music to the highest standard and has also won numerous awards for its pioneering work.

Should you wish to attend a rehearsal, arrange an interview, or request complimentary tickets, please contact: Harriet Whitehead, Publicity Manager, tel: 07791 397985, email: harrietwhitehead@hotmail.com

Also, if you are interested in supporting our future music either by becoming a sponsor, or a Friend of The Kelvin Ensemble, please visit our website for more details: www.kelvin-ensemble.org.

My colleagues at the Kelvin Ensemble of Glasgow asked me if I would be willing to write program notes for our performance of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 8 next weekend (Saturday, December 2^nd, 7:30 PM, Bute Hall, University of Glasgow). I always like reading notes by the performers, so I was happy to do so.The results follow.

On a personal note, Dvorak 8 was the first score I ever went out and bought and subsequently tried to analyze. We had played the work in my youth orchestra under the guidance of James Smith, a truly great musician and orchestral trainer. I’d always been interested in conducting, but the transformation James had made in the orchestra working on this piece for his first concert was too compelling for me- I had seriously caught the bug.

Only a little more than a year later, it was Dvorak 8 which almost turned me off to conducting and orchestra playing for good, when I played it on my first concert with the Indiana University orchestra program. In spite of the fact that the IU band was the most talented group of musicians I’d ever sat in, the concert was dreadful, the rehearsals awful and the whole experience completely depressing. One got the feeling that the whole school thought of orchestra playing, orchestral music and conducting as a complete joke, an impression that only got stronger during my four years there, although that mindset that has now changed there for the better.

I’m still using my old score of the 8^th, and it is interesting to look at my faded markings, especially in light of my recent essay on score marking. Although I really didn’t know what I was doing and had never had anyone explain it to me, I think I did okay- maybe we take this whole stick waving business too seriously. Seriously, I think the real lesson is in how much about study I was able to learn from having rehearsed the piece under a truly great conductor.

Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony, written over just less than a month in 1889, is a classic example of a piece of music in which a simple and direct exterior hides a very sophisticated and multi-layered interior.

It is a work that is often described as “sunny” as well as “songful,” “warm,” and “optimistic,” and, in many important ways, it is all of those things. However, it is also his most harmonically and structurally ambitious symphonic work, his most modern, and beneath its sunny exterior are moments of great pathos and even grotesquerie.

Dvorak himself said that in this piece he wanted “to write a work different from my other symphonies, with individual ideas worked out in a new manner.” Dvorak’s intentions would have been clear to his contemporaries just from the title alone- Symphony no. 8 in G Major. No major composer since Haydn had published a symphony in G Major- perhaps because it was considered a key more appropriate for folk music and song. Of course, Dvorak’s intent was to write a symphony of folk music and song, so for him G Major was the perfect choice.

The symphony begins with a hint of darkness to come, with a long, lyrical and melancholy melody played by the cellos. His later Cello Concerto was final proof that no composer ever understood the cello better than Dvorak, but in this symphony the cellos carry so much of the melodic weight that they take on the role of something like a narrator or a Greek chorus. At each key moment in the symphony, it is the cellos who tell us where we are. Interestingly, this is a role the cellos would reprise in the next G Major symphony by a major composer- Mahler’s Fourth.

These early bars are full of the ambiguity that will haunt the symphony- the title page tells us that it is a symphony in G Major, but this is music in G minor. The tempo marking says “Allegro con brio,” but, written in cut time, this opening tune could be in Andante. Is it a slow introduction? Is the entire symphony to be a voyage from dark to light?
The flute quickly provides some answers, with a simple, triadic melody that is very squarely in G major- the first of many tunes in the symphony that will be notable for their childlike directness. It could be a folk song, especially a children’s song. 

The first movement of this symphony is the most elaborate and complex symphonic movement Dvorak ever wrote, a huge span of musical architecture anchored to the three occurrences of the cello theme from the beginning- a melody that he never significantly develops or modulates. It ends in raucous good spirits and blazing sunshine.

The Adagio is very much a piece of Nachtmusik- the G major sunshine gives way to C minor austerity. Musicologist Michael Steinberg sees in the key and structure of the movement a clear homage to the slow movement of Beethoven’s Eroica, only in this work Dvorak actually begins in the wrong key- E flat Major- before moving to the “real” key of C minor a few bars in. Beethoven does the opposite. At the heart of the movement is a Maggiore episode built around another of the children’s songs that make up so much of the symphony’s soul. Dvorak’s orchestration in this movement is particularly vivid and evocative, and, much more sparse than Dvorak’s earlier slow movements.

The scherzo is in G minor, and begins with a long soulful melody which is built entirely of descending scales set in descending sequences- hardly the stuff of a naïve, upbeat symphony. The second theme is also made entirely of descending lines, only now Dvorak uses a chromatic scale, which only intensifies the sense of darkness in the music- it is a melodic gesture used since Bach to symbolize falling tears. The Trio couldn’t be a more dramatic contrast- this is the most childlike of all the children’s tunes in the symphony. What does it mean that Dvorak brackets it with the tears of the trio?

The finale, which begins with a bracing fanfare in the trumpets, is made up of a series of wild variations on another children’s tune initially stated, you guessed it, by the cellos. The theme’s first eight bars are a summing up of everything in the symphony so far- an ascending triad (the same notes as the flute theme in the first movement) and a descending sequence. After another raucous climax, the original version of the theme returns one last time for another series of variations, again led by the cellos. Now the music has turned deeply inward and profoundly bittersweet. Though staying firmly in major, this is Dvorak at his most heartbreaking- one gets the feeling that Dvorak is facing the prospect of letting go of something very dear to him in this music.

Perhaps there is a more personal reason for the use of all these melodies which so powerfully evoke childhood and naivety. Dvorak himself, only twelve years earlier, had been forced to bury three of his own children within in months of each other. Like Mahler (who’s own G Major symphony was itself a meditation on the passing of a child- surely Dvorak’s symphony was a model for him), Dvorak’s associations with the music of childhood could only be conflicted. However, unlike Mahler, Dvorak was always determined to face the most painful loss with hope, whether in the Stabat Mater, the work in which he most directly faced the death of his children,  the Cello Concerto, in which he faced the death of the love of his life, Josefina,  or here, in the Eight Symphony. Having said goodbye for the last time, the music storms back to life, and ends in the highest possible spirits.

 c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

This Saturday, the Surrey Mozart Players and I had the privilege of being one of the first orchestras to perform in the nearly brand-new Menuhin Hall, a beautiful 300-seat concert hall that just opened its doors in January. It’s always nice to test drive a car you can’t really afford, and this weekend was no exception.

The orchestra’s regular venue is the Electric Theatre in Guildford, which has a lot going for it, including a lovely bar, restaurant and patio area, nice backstage amenities and a performing space that feels both intimate and spacious. What it doesn’t have is particularly nice acoustics. I often feel that when people build “multi-purpose” venues that will house spoken-word theatre, music and miscellaneous events, what they mean is that they will build a spoken-word theatre and let others use it, but that the acoustics will be incredibly hostile to acoustic music.

No such worries at the Menuhin Hall- musicians can hear each other with effortless clarity on stage, and from the audience, listeners can hear an incredible depth of detail. It’s not actually the most flattering space- there is no ubershlage of reverb to coat the sound and hide our sins, but it is a venue in which you can hear every player onstage from the audience. I think it would be perfect for solo piano recitals, lieder and chamber music.

It feels smaller than its 300 seats, and the Haydn 99 we played was probably about as big an orchestra as you’d want in there- I think a Beethoven 5 would be pushing its sonic capacity.

Among the first class facilities are two fantastic pianos- a beautiful Steinway and a stunning Fazioli which Bobby Chen used for the Mozart A Major. Just before our rehearsal a team from Sony were trying out the space and the pianos, so maybe we’ll be hearing some interesting recording projects coming out of there soon.

One thing about this building that  I really appreciated about it was the air of serenity within the hall- it feels like a place as suitable for meditation as for performance, something I’m sure Menuhin would have approved of. A great hall can be a place of healing, not just an entertainment veunue- audiences come both for the music, but also for contmplation and relaease from their everyday concerns.

Although it’s sat right on the side of the M25, one of the busiest highways in the world, the setting feels far removed from the madness of London. I’m sure they’ll be doing a brisk trade in coming years, and I know the SMP look forward to returning soon.

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

From ”Essential Reading,” November 19, 2006 
 

The Concert with Kenneth Woods  And Bobby Chen Piano

The American conductor Kenneth Woods offers a mature and thoughtful reading of another giant in music, namely Mozart.

Working without baton, Kenneth Woods opened the evening with the Don Giovanni sequences for woodwind ensemble.

Assembled in front of the podium were a selection of musicians from the Surrey Mozart Players, a great little band well led and making good sounds. Without set, costume, wigs or Proscenium, we were propelled into a condensed version of the adventures of the controversial figure Don Giovanni.

Maestro Woods reflected in a few words the significance of the Don and the impact the opera had on Mozart’s life as his wrestled with his political leanings, whilst so dependant on the very society he was questioning to support his wife and a growing family. Woods described a life and professional existence not so unfamiliar to the experience of many working musicians of today.

Moving to the Concerto played on a magnificent Fazioli piano highly recommended by Chen, there was a sublime combination of skills of the conductor Maestro Woods and the Pianist Bobby Chen as the three movements evolved. Kenneth Woods keeping a tight control over the tempo but allowing the pianist to dazzle and the orchestra to shine.

Again, a short explanatory introduction by Kenneth Woods, relaxed and informative, taking us into a world where Mozart lived and breathed and where wonderful artists such as Chen and Woods demonstrate that these works of genius are in safe hands.

As a footnote to the Haydn Symphony No. 99 which was played after the interval …

…..It rocked……
 
 
  
 

At a late hour, post concert, a few last minute thoughts on Haydn (again!). 

With 104 symphonies to choose from, it would be easy to think that there is such a thing as a “Haydn Symphony.” That is, it musicians and audiences seem to think that there is a general “Haydn Symphony” sound world, that one can refer to when those two words come up. Even more specific is the idea of a “Haydn London Symphony:” here we have a body of works from one, very specific period of his life that we feel even more confident lumping together. 

How impressive is it that when one tests those assumptions about what makes a “Haydn Symphony” against experimental reality, one quickly has to recognize that the only given in a Haydn Symphony is that there is no such thing as a “Haydn Symphony.” 

I’ve just been lucky enough to do two Haydn, London, E-flat Major symphonies 7 days apart, and the differences are fascinating. So many of the London symphonies have some kind of a gimmick, and the “Drum-roll” has two- the drum-roll itself and Haydn’s cyclical use of the “horn fifths” motive through out the symphony. 

99, or as I like to call it “The Un-subtitled,” has no gimmick- which makes it an altogether different beast. 

At this point, I’d call your attention to this wonderful comment from David Hoose and this very apt description of the late symphonies as “a thriling ride, amazing lines, but an engine that none us could understand. In fact, its mechanics are so sophisticated that we can even forget that there is an engine–any engine–beneath the hood. So smooth, so quiet, and effortless seeming. The inexplicably complicated engine and mechanism can fool you into thinking nothing’s going on at all. But, of course, we’re wrong.” 

99, perhaps because it is free of all the tricks and gimmicks is one of the most extreme examples of this style of symphony. Certainly conducting it tonight felt very much like David’s apt description of a musical super-car. 

I had a few “wow” moments on my way to becoming a Haydn nut. One of those was at a music festival many years ago. The “student showcase” night was the most extraordinary epic, including Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children, three premieres by very good student composers, the Varese Octandre and the Schoenberg First Chamber Symphony. Just before the Schoenberg, a group came out and played one movement of a Haydn piano trio, and, having spent literally hours both performing and listening to 20^th Century music of high complexity, it sounded like, by far, the most modern music of the night. 

In the ten + years since that night, I’ve never stopped hearing Haydn as contemporary music.  

If the world was a reasonable place, and our society was one that had a well-rounded sense of values, then all orchestras could rehearse Haydn to their heart’s content.

Haydn’s music is so spectacularly good, so amazingly fresh, so outrageously original, so endlessly surprising, so completely unpredictable, that when one is working on it at even a respectable level, it’s hard to imagine why you’d ever want to bother with another composer.

In fact, Haydn’s music is really almost too good to perform. In any case, it is probably too healthy to perform.

Healthy? There is nothing better for an orchestra’s playing that to rehearse a Haydn symphony (and the same is very much true for string quartets). This is so true that having to actually work toward a performance begins to get in the way. How wonderfully all the world’s orchestras would play if only our governments would pay for us to rehearse one Haydn symphony each year for as long as we felt it was productive.

We’ve been working very hard on Haydn 99 with the Surrey Mozart Players this week. The orchestra is on great form. The players came in to the first rehearsal incredibly well prepared, and read the piece brilliantly. Nonetheless, the more we work on it the more I think we wish we had ten more rehearsals instead of just two. The rest of the program consists of two of my very favourite pieces of all time, yet I’d happily cancel them both (or even cancel the entire concert) just to have the luxury of digging in to this piece as deeply as possible.

What is fascinating about this music is that the more work you put in to it, and the better you play it, the more obvious it is to everyone in the room that we could do more on it. At the first rehearsal it feels like we’ve hardly got to worry about anything with the piece- it is all idiomatic, and accessible, at the second rehearsal, I’m just sort of figuring out how far we could go with the piece with the benefit of the score, and at the third rehearsal the whole band seems to be realizing just how much there is to work on. Just about the time you have to go onstage and perform, everyone seems to know how much work there is still to do. I’ve written before on how studying a Mahler symphony can feel like taking the best conducting lesson ever- rehearsing a Haydn symphony in detail feels like the best orchestra-ing lesson ever.

Just think- after this week, I only have 91 numbered Haydn symphonies left to perform! And I’d happily forsake performing any of them, if only the world would let me really freakin’ rehearse them.

Is it possible for some music to be too perfect to waste on an audience? Maybe we should make the audience come to the rehearsals so they can begin to know what it is they’re hearing in the concert.

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

PS- When I was 19 (and completely stupid), I thought Haydn’s music was boring crap, when I was 25 I thought it was pretty great, now I think it is mind-shatteringly brilliant. How will I feel about it at 65?    

Some random pontifications taken from recent podium chats….

On Scott Joplin-
The history of 20^th Century popular culture is really the history of American popular music, and the history of American popular music is really the history of black music. The musics that dominate today’s airwaves all over the world, whether it be hip-hop, rock, pop or funk, it all springs from the same sources. Rock gave us hip-hop, and jazz gave us rock, but it was ragtime that gave us everything, and it was Scott Joplin who gave us ragtime.

Ragtime laid down once and for all the basic rhythmic vocabulary of American black music, and in the 107 years since Joplin published Maple Leaf Rag, we haven’t actually added much.

The simple fact is that Scott Joplin is the single most influential and important American composer who ever lived. What greater testimony could there be to the power of art to change the world than the simple fact that a black man, born in one of the most racist pockets of the South just a few years after the Civil War could change the entire world forever.
I challenge anyone to find a bar of any Joplin rag that could be more perfectly constructed.

Ragtime begot jazz, which begot rock n toll, which begot hip-hop. It’s enough to put you off the theory of evolution.Nevertheless, was there an American in the 20th Century who did more to change the world?

On Benjamin Britten

Britten’s “Les Illuminations” is one of those masterpieces that is just enough off the beaten path to really hammer home that there are far too may great pieces of music for any one person to get to know them all in a thousand lifetimes. Rimbaud’s poetry has its own seductive musicality- he was as fascinated with the sound of the word as he was with the meaning of the word. It’s hard to imagine that there could be a musical setting of these poems that doesn’t lose something of the magic of the texts, but Britten manages to create a series of miniature musical landscapes that actually enhance the musicality of the language.How must the French feel to know that the greatest musical setting of French poetry in the 20th Century is by an Englishman?

On Britten and Haydn

It might seem like a coincidence that we’ve programmed Britten’s Les Illuminations alongside Haydn’s Symphony No. 103. However, there is an aspect of Britten’s music that might not be obvious to the listener that links these two composers.
When one sets about preparing a performance of Les Illuminations, or any other Britten work I’ve done, you can’t help but be amazed at the extraordinary craft that has gone into each work. I can’t think of a single piece of his where there was a more elegant way to express what he wanted. So many composers, even many of the greats, are content to write the music and leave it to the performer to sort out how to bring the ideas to life. Britten always finds the simplest, most elegant, most perfect way of achieving his musical aims. There are big challenges for the performer in all his pieces, but there’s never a moment where the performer feels that he’s been left to clean up after the composer, and never a moment that is any more awkward than it has to be. Haydn is one of the few composers who share this quality, and this is all the more amazing given how prolific he was. How could someone write so much, and have each work be so polished, so perfect?

On Haydn

We tend to think of Haydn as a comfortable, conservative, middle-class, middle-of-the-road composer.In fact, it’s not hard to make the case that Haydn was the most innovative, most radical and most creative composer who ever lived. After all, he not only invented and defined the three most useful and widely imitated instrumental forms in classical music (the string quartet, the modern piano sonata and the symphony), but in each genre he anticipated almost every innovation later composers would come up with. We often think of Beethoven or Schumann or Tchaikovsky or Mahler as composers who greatly expanded the range of what one could do in a symphony, but Haydn did it all- they just did it louder and for longer.In the “Drumroll” Symphony, no. 103, Haydn is toying with the same constructive device Tchaikovsky would use in his Fourth and Fifth symphonies and that Mahler would use most obviously in his Sixth- a recurring motive that returns at key moments throughout the symphony. In this case it is the horn fifths, which most obviously open the finale, but which also occur in significant spots in the first and second movements. If Stravinsky had done the same thing, critics might have called his use of the technique subversive- suggesting he was making fun of Romantic composers’ fascination with Fate motives and the like. I can’t help but find some of that same wit in Haydn’s early use of the technique in this piece.

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

UPCOMING CONCERT

Surrey Mozart Players
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Menuhin Concert Hall, Menuhin School of Music
Stoke d’Abernon, UK
7:30 PM
Mozart (arr. Triebensee)- Harmonie Suite from Don Giovanni
Mozart- Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major
            Bobby Chen, piano
Haydn- Symphony no. 99 in E-flat Major

The Surrey Mozart Players are delighted to be one of the first orchestras to appear at the brand new Concert Hall at the Menuhin School, which has been praised as one of the most significant new performance spaces to open in Britain in recent years. The hall has been written about in all the London papers, and in BBC Music Magazine and the Gramophone.

Mozart himself wrote for a ‘Harmonie’ (a group of wind instruments) in the second act finale of Don Giovanni, and Joseph Triebensee, the son of an oboe player in Emperor Joseph II’s group, arranged items from the opera for this combination.
 
Bobby Chen, a former pupil at the school, plays one of the composer’s best loved piano concertos, No. 23 in A major.  Written in early 1785, and in a radiant key, it displays hints of darker shadows and tragic depths. Chen will be performing on the hall’s brand new Fazioli piano.
 
Haydn visited London twice towards the end of his life, and Symphony No. 99 received its first performance on 10th February 1794, six days after his arrival on his second visit.  It contains one of the composer’s noblest slow movements and a vivacious finale.

Endurance sessions of comparative listening are not for everyone’s taste, but, aided by sufficient quantities of libations and good company, it can be great fun, and certainly illuminating.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of taste-testing, listening to a few cool bits of each version to see how they might stack up, but, with very few exceptions, a musical performance is not something that benefits from a quick taste before spitting out.

I’m reminded of one session with my sister (also a musician) many years ago when we were both working on the Enigma Variations. Over the course of several hours we listened to every recording I had, every recording she had and a couple from the library that neither of us knew.

To our credit, we listened to each complete performance, but in the comparative atmosphere, it is easy to hear only facets of each performance rather than the whole thing. It becomes instantly apparent that the woodwind intonation on recording y is not so hot, or that conductor c likes to take time for deceptive cadences or that the brass on disc z are particularly hot. You can see who does the softest opening of Nimrod, who does and doesn’t use organ in the finale and so on.

Interestingly, one disc did stand out completely from the pack. Although we had, to say the least, had spirited differences of opinion on every other recording, we quickly agreed on one thing- it was almost without “facets.” The theme was done much more simply and “straight” than any of the others, there wasn’t a huge variety of interesting colors, nothing seemed particularly interestingly shaped or moulded. It was definitely not my favourite orchestra playing. I’d say it was no nonsense in the extreme.

However, when we got to Nimrod and the first major arrival of that movement, we both felt something big, something cosmic happen, like the grim reaper himself walking right over our graves, and the same thing happened in the finale- a big, cathartic “wow” moment that no other recording had been able to deliver or even really hint at. We both came away with the impression that this was the only conductor who both knew and could put accross what the “Enigma” in the variations was.

Once we’d heardthe whole thing, we could both look back and, as musicians, see what the conductor was up to- the approach seemed so logical seen from the reverse. By downplaying the episodic quality of the piece, he was able to intensify the overall, cumulative effect of the work where it counted most. What might have seemed at first a matter-of-fact approach to phrasing was in fact an intentionally un-sentimental one, and this is a piece that benefits from a certain stoicism.

Frankly, all the other performers we’d sampled sounded like students by comparison (and there were some very distinguished recordings in this category). I’m usually quick to defend interpreters who like to take note of the trees and to smell the flowers and gild the lilies, but the evidence here was clear that there was a big price to that approach- none of the others were able to make the whole piece arrive with anything like the same degree of power.

It would have been easy to miss the point with this recording- we could have been put off early on by the not-so-super-refined orchestra playing or the slightly brusque treatment of some of the early movements. If we’d been slightly distracted at the key moments, we might have missed the point entirely. The recorded sound is not fantastic.

What’s scary about this is that two professional musicians who know the piece well might have missed out on the lesson had we not been lucky enough to follow it all the way through under the right listening conditions. If we had just sampled the performance, it would never have made either of our shortlists. We both learned something from the experience about our own listening.

It is fashionable these days to say that anyone can enjoy music, and that is true to an extent, but there is more to music than enjoyment. Listening can be an art form, and we can get better at it with help and practice. Copland even wrote a whole book on how to listen to music.

It’s a difficult subject to broach with the casual listener- nobody wants to be told they’re listening wrong, but the point is not that they’re listening “wrong,” the point is that they could be getting more out of listening to music- that they could be enjoying it more. I get the feeling that a lot of listeners who eventually give up on concerts do so because they’re frustrated at not being in on some big secret- if we can help them to develop the tools to understand why they respond to music the way they do, I think they’d be listeners for life. In fact, I’d say that once anyone learns some basic listening skills (including learning how to develop your listening skills), they’ll always have music as part of their life.

Most of all, it’s worth pointing out that unease is an important part of any artistic experience- if a performance or a piece is aggravating you or making you unsure of what’s going on, it may be a good sign, but the only way to know for sure is to keep listening and to hold off judgement until the end (maybe to the end of the fifth or sixth listen). The point is not that the performer or the composer benefits from your hard work and patience, but that you benefit from theirs.
 

I’ll be accepting guesses for which recording of the Enigma Variations I am talking about via the comment function for a few days before I reveal the winner.

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

I had a moment yesterday that reminded me of why I used to volunteer to staff public radio fund drives when I was 15. A moment when you just happen to be in your car at exactly the right moment and catch a bit of music or a snippet of discussion that changes your whole outlook for the day.

While driving to rehearsal last night, I caught the last 30 seconds of this report, when the commentator, who I assume was Joseph Horowitz (although I’m not sure of that), said that, looking back, Toscanini’s war-time concerts made in the wake of his much-publicized stand against Fascism were the high-water mark for classical music awareness, popularity and relevance in America.

This remark hit me with an almost physical impact, as it spoke directly to a concern that I have had for a long time now.

There are very sensible and sane reasons why orchestras are non-political organizations. First, it is illegal for a non-profit organization to participate in party politics. Second, orchestras don’t want to alienate anyone on political grounds. Also, our very delicate system of funding means that we need to be exceptionally careful that we never create a bad feeling between orchestra and donor, and religion and politics are the two best subjects to alienate people with.

Nevertheless, surely there is a line somewhere between politics and conscience. Surely their has always been a point at which works of art do stand for values, or do serve as a voice of conscience. Perhaps now, when classical music is less central to the social discourse of our time than ever before, it is worth re-examining the conventional wisdom about the avoidance of engagement with issues of the day?

In the war years, Toscanini was not the only classical musician deeply engaged with the human and political issues of the day. Shostakovich, Copland, Walton, Ullmann, Messiaen and many others composed music that was deeply connected to the events of the day. Murry Sidlin’s recent “Defiant Requiem” project celebrates the protest performances of Verdi’s Requiem in the Terezin internment camp.

Is classical music simply to become inoffensive sonic wallpaper? Are we going to kill ourselves with caution?

John Adams’ “On the Transmigration of Souls” has become just about the only recent work by a major composer to enter the repertoire that deals directly with events of our time, and yet a memorial, important though it is, is an altogether less controversial thing than a commentary. It would have been one thing for Toscanini to mourn the victims of war, and another entirely to come out and say  openly that Fascism was evil, which he did. Adams’ work is a powerful meditation on loss, and he himself describes it as “a musical space for reflection and remembrance, of meditation on an unanswerable question.”

And yet, if art can’t answer questions about the tragedies of the day, can’t we at least ask some? Shouldn’t there be areas of basic human concern where a stand on principal is a uniting, rather than a dividing action?

The Oregon East Symphony was recently approached by a local attorney who made a generous offer. He offered us a full concert sponsorship, which he was going to give in honor of Article Three of the Third Geneva Convention, which stipulates that “Noncombatants, combatants who have laid down their arms, and combatants who are hors de combat (out of the fight) due to wounds, detention, or any other cause shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, including prohibition of outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment. The passing of sentences must also be pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples. Article 3’s protections exist even if one is not classified as a prisoner of war.”

I never thought I would live to see these values become fodder of party politics.

Our board felt they could not accept his donation as a matter of law.

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

Upcoming Concert
 
Lancashire Chamber Orchestra
Saturday November 11, 2006
7:30 PM
St John’s Church, Altrincham

Program-
Mozart- Overture to “Cosi fan tutte”
Britten- Les Illuminations
            Nicola-Jane Kemp, soprano
Haydn- Symphony no. 103 in E Flat Major “Drum Roll”

Biography
Nicola-Jane Kemp, mezzo-soprano 

Nicola-Jane Kemp studied piano at Chetham’s School of Music, won a Choral Scholarship at Girton College, Cambridge, and studied singing at the RCM and opera at the RSAMD with an award from the Equity Trust Fund. She has been studying with Margaret Hyde and Ludmilla Andrew.

Nicola-Jane made her concert debut at the Barbican singing incidental music from Beethoven’s ‘Egmont’ and at the Purcell Room with Bach’s Cantata 51 ‘Jauchzet Gott’. Specialising in the coloratura repertoire, she made her operatic debut at Sadlers Wells Theatre in London singing Edwige (Robinson Crusoe) for British Youth Opera. Roles which followed have included Pretty Polly (Punch and Judy) by Birtwistle for Music Theatre Wales, Oscar (Un Ballo in Maschera) for Belcanto Opera, Konstanze (Die Entführung) for The London Opera Players, Queen of the Night (Die Zauberflöte) for the Académie Européenne de Musique d’Aix-en-Provence, Music Theatre Kernow, Central Festival Opera and Garden Opera (also singing Papagena), Cinna (Lucio Silla) for Opera Anglia, Zerbinetta (Ariadne auf Naxos) at St John’s Smith Square, Lakmé for Belcanto Opera and Adele (Die Fledermaus) in concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall for Palace Opera.

She has sung in two New Year Galas at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and sang ‘Jauchzet Gott’ again at the Festival International d’Aix-en-Provence. She has sung ‘Carmina Burana’ with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and made her debut at The Linbury Studio (Royal Opera House). She sang ‘A Mind of Winter’ by George Benjamin with the Orchestre Léonard de Vinci in Rouen, France and was the soloist for the Jubilee concert in 2002 at Chatsworth House, singing for an audience of 10,000. She has recently made her debut on BBC Radio 2 “Friday Night is Music Night” and will return to Chatsworth house this year by popular demand.

Other plans for 2006 include New Year Viennese concerts in Cairo and Alexandria and concerts throughout the UK.
 

In part two of my halftime show, I want to have a quick look at some of the repertoire I’ve been working on since the season got started.
                                                                                                   
Popular as a few of his works are, I can scarcely think of a composer (other than Mendelssohn) who is more under-rated than Dvorak. Unlike Mendelssohn, Dvorak had a longer career and had the opportunity to develop his voice in more ways, and to explore other genres. While they both excelled in symphonies, chamber music, concerti, overtures and choral music, Dvorak was also one of the very greatest opera composers of all time. If you want to be amazed, check out Dmitrj, which you’ve probably never heard of, let alone heard. Hard to believe that there can be so many huge, amazing works by a repertoire composer that are never produced. Anyway, late in his life, after the last symphony and the cello concerto, Dvorak turned to a new kind of symphonic poem, one inspired by Czech myth and folk poetry. These are among his most forward looking works, and in many ways anticipate many of the innovations of Janacek. Of all of them, the Noon Witch, which we did in KCYO, is the most modern, the darkest and the most rewarding- after all, what other composer could make infanticide fun?

I’ve been thinking a lot about skeletons this fall, and I don’t mean the many skeletons in the many closets of the music world. We hear the skin of music- colors, tunes, and dynamics- most readily, but there is more to music than that. Rachmaninoff’s 2^nd Symphony got me thinking, because the skin and the skeleton are so different, at least at first glance. When one encounters this piece for the first time, it is hard not to just drown in the melodies, and like the man who fell in the vat at the Guinness factory, who wants to be rescued when you’re drowning in something so good? Once one gets past the luxurious, heartbreaking tunes, you quickly discover that it is one of the most contrapuntally rich and intricate works in the repertoire- I’m always reminded of my friend’s description of the score looking like “thousands of inky spiders” were crawling over it. Perhaps this is because the piece was written for Taneyev, who was the most contrapuntal of all Russian composers?

Yet, beneath this constantly shifting, interlocking and overlapping surface, there is a skeleton, and what a beautiful set of bones it is. The scale of the work is massive, but what makes it work (and what makes any cut in it an act of musical murder) is that everything is grounded to a design. Like Bruckner, there are bass lines in this piece which extend for several minutes- giant cantus firmi that hold these massive spans together. Like Bruckner, there is an inner austerity, a relentless structural intensity and lack of sentimentality that makes the piece deeply, deeply satisfying to study and perform.

It’s a rare treat to get to do the same piece twice in close succession, especially to do a thorny work like the Nielsen Flute concerto twice in three days with different orchestras and soloists. As I’ve written elsewhere, Nielsen didn’t seem to care if the piece entertained or annoyed, so bringing it to life in a compelling way (it will never be satisfying in the way Rachmaninoff is) is a huge challenge. Working toward a solution with two such different yet equally marvelous soloists was fascinating, and both succeeded in getting this subversive piece to reach our audiences.

Coming back to the same piece is great. Immersing yourself in a single composer, especially if it is Sibelius, is heaven. Doing four quite substantial Sibelius pieces (Spring Song, Finlandia and the 3^rd and 5^th Symphonies) in quick succession was great, especially sitting at my desk going back and forth between the 5th symphony and the 3^rd .  For those of you who know and love the 5^th, but don’t know the original version, I can’t tell you how interesting it is to hear how the piece evolved with the revision. Revisions are messy work- Bruckner sometimes would have been well-advised to leave his original scores alone, and Stravinsky’s revisions were mainly intended to keep this works under copyright. Mahler only revised orchestration, never (with few exceptions) changing the music. To improve a work is not easy, and often performers return to original versions as being more natural and daring, but the revision of the 5th is a huge advance over the original.

Having studied the Rachmaninoff at the same time, it was doubly interesting to see what different solutions Sibelius was finding for building a symphony at almost the same moment in history. When one finally gets a window into how he finally reached the final form of his pieces by studying the different versions of the 5^th, you can see that the process was not easy- he didn’t know the structure of the piece when he started working with the ideas. When you listen to the piece, you get the opposite impression, which is that, from the first note, the ideas grow and develop organically in the only way they possibly could. Where Rachmaninoff seems to have built the entire inner structure of a building and then covered that inner frame with a beautiful and fascinating surface, Sibelius gives you the sense that he’s planted a seed and let it grow, or set in motion a series of events and let them unfold. Perhaps he’s taken you to some remote spot and said- here, there will be a storm, wait and see what happens. The music unfolds as a long string of cause and effect, and only at the very end do you see that he always knew where he wanted to take, or, in the case of the 5^th, that, after incredible struggle over 5 years, he figured out where the music wanted to take him.

I’ve also written elsewhere about Gershwin’s American in Paris. Also on that concert was what I can now admit is one of my least favorite pieces- Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s more that I don’t really respect it, because there’s not a whole lot of music in it. On the other hand, I had a blast doing it- are we allowed just to do a piece and have fun without it touching us deeply as human beings?  

As the conductor who brought Hindemith to the rodeo capital of America, I think some people might thing I have exceptionally serious tastes, but both this year and last, I’ve tried to start the year off a the OES with a lighter concert, and it has been fun. Light music is not easy to play well- Strauss waltzes or Suppe overtures can show an orchestra’s limitations in a very unforgiving way. Likewise, accompanying a piece like Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen can be a huge challenge- the orchestra has to be incredibly flexible and stylish, and, unlike Hindemith, everyone knows when the tiniest thing goes awry. If I have choice between doing a silly concerto like Paganini or a Sarasate showpiece or doing a silly orchestra piece like the Rimsky, the concerto will always win out because the challenge of coping with the soloist is such a blast.

It was no challenge to cope with Daniel de Borah in the Prokofiev 2^nd Piano Concerto, challenging as that piece is on every level. It never ceases to amaze me that there can be pieces like that which even few musicians know. What a juggernaught of a piece, and pianist.

It’s been a great run, and I’ve enjoyed every bit of it, but while rehearsing Finlandia the other day with the loudest (but very good) tuba player I’ve ever heard, I thought, wow, I might be getting noise fatigue. I’ve hardly done anything this year that wasn’t on a huge scale.

Fortunately, recalling my friend Michael Steinberg’s words on Sibelius, I’ve been called to a leaner life. In November, I conduct two Mozart concerti (the fourth violin concerto and the great A Major piano concerto), two of Mendelssohn’s best works (the 5^th Symphony and the Melusina Overture), and two Haydn symphonies (the 99^th and 103^rd). Am I expecting a flood, programming two-by-two? In any case, I’ve loved the rich sauces of Rachmaninov and the intense flavors of Sibelius and the spice of Gershwin, but now I’m up for musical steamed fish and broccoli for a few weeks.

Plus, there’s nothing more modern than Haydn….

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods