Kenneth Woods- a view from the podium

By the official tally, this is my 400^th post on Vftp, a milestone I can only gawk at in astonishment. Have I really wasted so much time in the last 18 months?!?!?!?

The blog idea was originally suggested to me by the harpist of the OES (and founder of Harp Specturm), Joyce Rice. Although I could see the benefits to the orchestra and to me, I was a bit hesitant to take it on, and knew so little about blogs and blogging that I couldn’t really see the point. Blogs were something I’d heard discussed and had been described to me as “online journals” where people could share the details of their lives. I was not, at that point, particularly web-savy-I didn’t even have a website! Now we have the top-ranked conductor website on Google….

As it is, the journal aspect of blogging, which is what I thought of when Joyce spoke to me, is still, in many ways, the least interesting for me. What I have learned, is that the basic medium of blogging, with the power of linking and subscriptions and indexing is an amazing new force. I figured it was a very good sign when the mainstream press (even the mainstream music press) started complaining about blogs. It’s about time someone challenged their hegemony, whether in politics or musical politics.

What finally got me going here was the need to make something special happen in Pendleton around our first performance of a Mahler symphony. I was looking for a tool to get something going, and I found one. I was quite stunned at how fast we built a local readership of symphony fans, and musicians, as that concert approached.

The immediate result of that first series of posts was a strong audience response to our first Mahler at the OES, but I found a second benefit in it. The experience ended up reminding me of a seminal experience in my musical life. Over ten years earlier, my piano trio, the Taliesin Trio, was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Rural Residency Grant. A big part of our job as ensemble-in-residence in Union County Arkansas (at that time, the poorest county in the continental US), was school visits and concerts. Early on, we were given a rare chance to do a full-day workshop with a group of children of about age 6-8. In a moment of profound chutzpah, we chose to make the prime focus of the day the Shostakovich E minor Trio. We spent the entire day working with these kids, and talking to them, as simply but as honestly as possible about the music- how it’s put together and what it says.

The next day, we had a formal performance which included the Shosty. It was an amazing performance, if I do say so. I think we all felt that the work we had done to learn to express verbally what we felt about the piece had added a layer of depth to our performance. The adults at that concert hadn’t heard the rap we gave the kids, but they certainly felt the effects of it.

I’ve written a lot of program notes over the years, and almost always speak before at least one piece on concerts, but the Mahler 2 blogs opened up a new way of writing and thinking about interpretation, and, as with the Shosty so many years ago, I felt that part of what happened in that concert was informed by that process. It almost doesn’t matter whether anyone had read those notes, or whether they’re interesting or definitive, what matters is that somehow the process of trying to articulate my feelings about a piece took me deeper into the music.

To me, that’s still the most useful aspect of blogging- it gives me medium for that work. I suppose in that sense, it could be looked at as a pretty selfish endeavour, but the ever-increasing readership tells me that at least some people are enjoying reading those posts and hopefully, as with the audience in Blytheville, even if you don’t hear or read the rap, maybe you feel it in the concert because the investment of the performer pays off.

One thing I learned early on, but still have to remind myself of, is that it’s not just my old drinking buddies that read this thing- intelligent people I’ve never met read it (not that my drinking buddies are unintelligent). Some have become friends, others have helped me in amazing ways. In November of last year, I had an email from Gramophone magazine asking if they could make Vftp their featured blog for the January issue. It turns out I was recommended to them by their resident Mahler expert, Peter Quantrill, who I’d never met and had no idea was reading. I really do appreciate all the folks out there who’ve linked to me, especially those early on who gave this such a big boost. A special huge thank you to Jessica Duchen, who was probably the first really well-known blogger and critic to link to me. THANKS Jessica- all of you should buy her novels!

Of course, one can only be self delusional to think that all those folks out there reading the blog that I don’t know about actually like it. My basic editorial policy at Vftp is “try not to piss people off,” but every once in a while, I can’t help myself, even though I do live in the ultimate glass house. Sometimes, you just gotta throw those stones. I can think of one critic and one conductor and one “opera” singer who probably wouldn’t have liked everything I’ve said here. I can’t help but wonder if any of them have read about themselves here. Sorry if I hurt any feelings….. Still, who makes up phrases like “pure tone?” Does anyone try to play with “impure tone?”

I also have to bear in mind that there are people who will take anything a conductor says as proof positive that we’re all bastards and morons and frauds. Every so often, I get a nice vitriolic email, but I suppose the best ones are the ones they send to their friends “can you believe what that moron Woods says?”

The thing is, I’ve always had to accept that there are plenty of topics I’d love to discuss here that I can’t. Here are a few things you won’t hear much about on Vftp—

1-       Politics. My friends know that I’m a very politically active and interested person with very strong views on world events and political trends. Especially in these strange days, there’s so much I wish I could say to the world at large, but I have a responsibility to the orchestras I work with not to do or say anything that would drive away listeners or supporters who disagree with me, and I also feel that as musicians we have a responsibility to bring music to everyone, not only those who share our worldview. Please, read Glenn Greenwald every day.

2-       What “really” happens in rehearsals. I don’t want anyone I work with to ever worry that their efforts in rehearsal are going to become fodder for the blog. Rehearsals are a private environment where we all ought to be safe to learn.

3-       Reviews (by me). I’ve bent this rule occasionally, but at the end of the day, who am I to comment on another musician’s performance

4-       Music politics. There are some big stories out there, some downright outrages and some heartbreaking wrongs in the music world that need righting, but I want to keep making music, which means, for now at least, I can’t go there.   

Other than the fact that I can’t always say everything I’d like to here, I guess my main frustration is that I don’t get that many audience members coming here other than the hard core fans and fanatics. More often they come here after a concert, which at least means they’ve enjoyed the show, but it would be nice if this could be a stronger tool for getting people to the concert in the first place. Maybe we need to have a separate blog at the orchestra that is specifically targeted to the interests of local audiences so that I don’t scare them off here with wonky discussions of musical technicalities.

There have been some truly unforeseeable uses of this space- especially when the OES office famously burned to the ground last spring. The response to the orchestra’s plea for help through this blog was really touching, and made all the difference in the world to the orchestra surviving the year. Amazingly, it was donations from all over the US (and the world, with people as far away as Australia and Israel chipping in) that got us through. Thank you EVERYONE who donated cash, music or just wrote in support. You saved an orchestra.

There are only so many hours in a day, and I couldn’t rationalize continuing to blog if I felt it was taking away from score study time. As long as I feel like, on balance, it helps me sharpen my thoughts about performance to talk about music, I’ll keep doing it. However, 400 posts represents a LOT of time, and there are other things I want to accomplish in life- I’d like to write some books, I’d like to compose more and I want to do more recording. I’ve got some great podcast projects for this blog in the works- maybe you’ll see fewer daily posts in the future so I have time to assemble some interesting audio and video projects.

Anyways, thanks for reading this, whoever you are. And remember, always fight the powers that be.

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods 

Gabriel Faure (1845-1924)

Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande

Possibly no single literary work after Romeo and Juliet had such a prodigious impact on the world of music as Maeterlink’s symbolist drama, Pelléas and Mélisande. Within a few years of its publication in 1892 the play had inspired the creation of four genuine masterpieces by some of the leading composers of the time- Fauré, Debussy, Sibelius and Schoenberg, a tally challenged perhaps only by Goethe’s Faust.

Each of these composer’s response to the drama tells us something about them as men as well as musicians- Sibelius fascination with the natural world comes through in his eerie depiction of the sea and the park,  while Debussy found in it a text through which he could attempt to exorcise the ghosts of Tristan and Isolde and escape the shadow of Wagner, and Schoenberg saw in it a deeply compelling character study of Golaud as a true tragic hero- destroyed by jealousy and then overcome with remorse.

Fauré’s was the first of the four musical responses to the play, written in 1898, and in many ways his incidental music (composed for a production of the play at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London) is the most quintessentially French take on the drama. In Fauré’s incidental music, everything is expressed with sublime understatement and refinement. Where Schoenberg finds high drama and Sibelius finds dread and despair, Fauré evokes longing and mystery.

In converting the incidental music into a concert suite, Fauré excerpted the two longest dramatic scenes, Golaud’s discovery of Mélisande in the forest and the death of Mélisande, and the shorter, lighter scene of Mélisande at the spinning wheel. Amazingly, the most famous movement in the suite, the Siclienne, was originally written as part of unpublished incidental music for Le bourgeois gentilhomme , and  has no direct relation to the drama, even if it’s gentle mood seems of a piece with the rest of the suite.

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

Next week, the Surrey Mozart Players kick off their season (more on that soon). As the Strauss Romanze is something of an oddity, the orchestra asked if I would write some notes for the program.

Richard Strauss- (1864-1949)

Romanze for Cello and Orchestra in F major, op 13 (1883)

Cellists are often reminded by our violinist and pianist colleagues of just how small our solo repertoire is in comparison to theirs. In our defence, we are often quick to mention that our Dvorak concerto is better than either of theirs, and that we also have the best Schumann concerto.

However, cellists have only themselves to blame for not recognizing the many wonderful pieces that haven’t made it into the repertoire. Such a work is the Strauss Romanze in F major heard this evening. Few composers ever wrote so much and so well in their old age as Strauss- one has only to think of Metamorphosen, the Four Last Songs and the Oboe Concerto (to be heard on the next SMP concert). However, equally few wrote so much and so well in their teens– when the nineteen year-old Richard Strauss set to work on this piece he, already had several masterpieces under his belt, including the Cello and Violin Sonatas and the Horn Concerto no. 1. While the Horn Concerto has become a staple of the repertoire and the two sonatas are at least well known, the Romanze nearly disappeared from the repertoire for over 100 years.

Its earliest champion was the cellist Hans Wihan, who was also the dedicatee of the Dvorak Cello Concerto.  Wihan, to whom Strauss dedicated the piece, seemed to understand the key to musical immortality- he championed new music. The piece shows the young Strauss as an inventive melodist and a master-orchestrator.  After over 100 years of neglect, this gem of the Romantic era is finally becoming known again

-KW 

A big Happy Birthday to Sir Colin Davis, who is 80 years old today.

He’s had a remarkable career, having managed to hold a major position in London almost without a break for forty-five years, going from Sadler’s Wells to the BBC to Covent Garden to the LSO.

For someone who has been so successful, it’s perhaps even more impressive that he has been so popular while remaining so stubbornly himself. The composers with whom he ha made his reputation- Berlioz, Sibelius and Tippett are even today not as popular as Mahler, Brahms and Shostakovich. Just think how much less popular they would have been without Sir Colin’s advocacy.

When I toured the IU campus as an auditioning student in 1985, the Dean pointed with embarrassment to the statue of Sibelius alongside those of Mozart and Beethoven on front of the music building. “The building was built in the 50’s, when people still thought of Sibelius as a real composer” he chuckled snidely. Can you believe I went there after that remark? And yet, in the 60’s and 70’s, when Sibelius’s music was not taken seriously at all, there was Colin Davis, performing and recording all the symphonies.

Likewise Berlioz– who was even more ignored fifty years ago. Symphony Fantastique has always been popular, but Davis dared to record EVERYTHING, and has pointedly made a case for works like Les Troyens and L’Enfance du Christ that most people thought weren’t worth looking at.  

Even in Mozart, he’s been an iconoclast. He’s stuck to his guns, following his intellect and intuition in pursuing his own approach to Mozart’s music, steadfastly refusing to be bullied into compliance by the Birkenstock crowd. I don’t always like his Mozart, but I admire his scholarship, his intensity and his courage.

And, if I had to pick one recorded performance to celebrate his birthday with, it would be the excellent video of him doing the Mozart Requiem in Munich. In his hands, the piece sounds like an existential struggle between life and death, which is exactly what it should sound like.

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

 …deserve what you get

As my musical life has taken me back and forth around the world, I’ve noticed that certain religious orders and sects place a special emphasis on the value of classical music, for which we can all be grateful.

Given this, one quickly finds that each of these denominations  have their musical quirks and sub-culture. This group won’t tolerate a female conductor under any circumstances, that one dislikes overtly emotional music and this one won’t play atonal music, while the same three groups might also exhibit exceptional work ethics, purity of intonation or beauty of sound respectively.

In my experience, there is one church whose members all seem to suffer the most appalling disregard for rhythm- they literally seem to have never produced a musician who can play in time with accurate subdivisions, in spite of producing instrumentalists of a very high technical standard who are generally very “musical” if you can separate “musical” from any coherent sense of rhythmic organization.

Anyway….

I was at a chamber music festival some years back and was playing the Schubert C Major String quartet and the other cellist was a member of this denomination, and, in spite of his great sound and good hands, had no sense of rhythm at all.

It was a tough week to say the least- his attitude was also a bit snooty, which left the rest of us with less patience for breaking out the metronome for his benefit in rehearsal than we might otherwise have had. However, we worked hard, and worked him hard, and by the time we got to the concert, things were looking good.

However, on the night, when we got to the middle section of the slow movement, all hell broke loose. There’s a long, loud, passionate sturm und drang section with the 1^st violin and 1^st cello playing in octaves while the other three players churn out a relentless ostinato. Other cello guy totally lost the plot- he couldn’t line up his triplets with the syncopated rhythm in the inner voices. The 1^st violinist and I were so exasperated we both went rather red faced with rage. The passage is so loud and the lines so long, the bow distribution is completely unforgiving. With the tempo wobbling, one of us would crack, and there was also an increasing likelihood that the whole thing would fall apart.

She and I started banging our heads like 16 year-olds at a Metalica concert to show the pulse. She glared straight into his eyes like the emissary of death and you could see her mouth moving with viper like precision– “one-two-thre-four-five-six!” and so on.

Well we didn’t stop, and the audience seemed oblivious to the close call. Needless to say, it was a little tense backstage….

A week later, I got a CD of the concert, which I waited some months to listen to. I nearly skipped the passage, but made myself sit there and listen.

Amazingly, all of that anger and intensity and drive had turned the passage into something really memorable. Yes, he wobbled a bit in the first bar, but the sheer furious power of the rest of us holding him, refusing to let it crash, made for an awesome effect. That passage sounded not only better than the rest of the performance, but also sounded the best I’ve ever heard it.

Strangey, I’ll have (and have had) many better experiences playing that piece, but it’s likely I’ll never be in a performance of that section that sounds that good again…

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

It is with great sadness that I just learned of the death of Milton Stevens on July 30th, who had been the principal trombonist of the National Symphony for the last 29 years. He was 64 years old.

I met Milt through the National Conducting Institute, during which he presented his intonation seminar “Tune it or Die.” As a former quartet player and someone who’s been obsessed with theories of intonation for many years, what I most enjoyed about the session was the pedagogical directness with which he was able to lay out to the class mixture of simple and sophisticated concepts. One can get mired in theory so fast with discussions of intonation, that one never registers the practical applications- with Milt, everyone came away with some fresh practical tools for solving the tuning problems inherent in all music.In rehearsals at the NSO, he was always the perfect colleague, and also someone who was always interested in what the cover conductor was hearing from the audience. Like any great brass player, he could make a grand racket when called for, but he also showed great concern for the sound of the entire orchestra and the role the brass section played in establishing that sound.

Last time I saw Milt, the NSO was playing Schumann 3, which has one of the most ferocious and exposed first trombone parts in the repertoire. It can humble anyone, and parts like that don’t get easier as you get older and Milt had been in the orchestra 28 years at that point. When one of “those” solos comes along, many players like to keep their heads down during the week and not talk too much about “the big solo,” but one of the highlights of that week of covering for Leonard was a long chat with Milt about Schumann’s trombone writing, the benefits of different types of horn in his music in general and that piece in particular, and the technical and tuning issues of that famous passage. It was hugely interesting and helpful, and typical of his enduring passion for what he did. And yes, he played the fourth movement solo very, very well.

One of the nicer guys you could ever meet in this business, and someone who always seemed to treat people with respect. A lovely guy.  I’ll always think of him when I’m screaming “tune it or die!” at the brass section….

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

The day had an unusually early start, and there were nearly six hours of driving before my rehearsal had even begun….

Of course, it would stand to reason that the gig with the longest commute would have the latest stop time, and  that rehearsals would be on Fridays, which always promise the worst traffic of the week.

The first miles are quiet, but then it’s straight through the center of a bustling town center, full of the well-heeled and well-lubricated out for a night on the town, and in the road. For a few anxious moments, the road looks like a video game- dodge the revelers and win a prize!

Once to the road, all looks good. The ominous-looking status-update signs looming over the M6 for once offer good news- clear sailing to the M5 junction! I’ll be home by 1:30 at this rate!

For a few precious moments, all is good in the world of Ken. Messiaen on the stereo (his music always sounds best late at night). When is someone going to pay me lots of money to conduct, even record, his music????

However, my optimism soon proves to be premature. “M5-M6 Junction Closed” suddenly appears on one of the signs. WTF????

Normally, this would be followed by a sign instructing the unlucky driver in a detour, but mile after mile, all I see is the same message- “M5-M6 Junction Closed.”

My mind races. I know Birmingham less well than any of the major British cities. I can try to go overland and connect to an A road , then cut back to the M5, if it’s open further down, or I can go all the way around the city, which promises an hour’s delay at least, with traffic at the airport always a problem, even at funny hours.

Still, I’m forty miles off… Perhaps things will clear off? Perhaps I’ll get some indication of a detour?

No, the miles disappear and the only message is the same message. I call the AA- they also confirm that, as they say in Maine, “you can’t get there from here…”

Now only ten miles from certain disaster- the M6-M6 Toll junction is just ahead, when uncertain disaster strikes. For the first time in an hour there is new information on the sign of doom- “Accident ahead, right two lanes closed.”

My inner monologue explodes in a cacophony of profanity, which my inner voice of reason tries to calm with logic. “It’s late, there won’t be many people along here, we’ll just slow down a bit and go round…” We slow, and everyone gets over and we quickly form a queue and begin to crawl, and then to stop. It’s not two lanes closed, it’s all three..

We sit for a moment, then people get crazy and start pulling out into the empty lanes. Suddenly the scene becomes like a sequence in a Mad Max movie. Otherwise temperate and reasonable people are slashing in and out of lanes, honky, gesturing, screaming, even as ambulances whiz by. I can feel myself becoming caught up in the bloodlust and road rage. Does he really think I’m going to let him in? I bet if I watch the brake lights on that truck, I can get the jump on her….  

Then, all movement stops. Gradually, people cut their engines. I even shut down Messiaen. I’m close to the front now- I can hear the engines running on the cop cars and ambulances and the odd guy on his cell phone. My thoughts turn back to the rehearsal. I’d decided to leave a nasty passage for intonation to next week. Should I have taken it apart tonight? Sometimes a problem like that sorts itself out, and if you try to tackle it too early, you just ruin everyone’s confidence. On the other hand, this spot is inherently challenging- I think the sorting may be inevitable…

We sit. We wait.

Finally, we start to move…..

Hope swells in my bosom. Then, there it is again “M5-M6 Junction Closed.” Still no detour information.

Then, there it is. The junction. Closed. It’ll be around Birmingham the long way. Add another hour to the delay for the wreck, it’ll be a beer at Vftp Headquarters around 4 AM….

Then, a miracle, just at the end of the mile long slip road, a guy in a yellow jacket is picking up cones. I look- there’s a gap. Dare I? I catch his eye, toot the horn and point…. Can I? He waves me through.

It’s the small victories that count the most.  

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

It’s been a quiet, rainy afternoon at Vftp Intl Headquarters.

I’ve mostly been perched at the piano going through the score of Schubert’s Fourth Symphony (in C minor, “Tragic”).

It’s a piece I’ve been wanting to do for some years since I covered it in Cincinnati in 1998 and fell in love with it. It’s rarely done, and it tends to get a bad rap. I think many commentators dismiss it as Schubert’s youthful and not-quite-successful take on Beethoven 5, but it’s a very different, and very Schubert-ian piece. Schubert loved and revered Beethoven, but unlike Brahms and Schuman, he never felt he had to answer the same questions that Beethoven did, he was unafraid to be his own man. Schubert Four rocks. It will kick you apart. It stands 18 feet tall, and bench presses Miami. The introduction to the first movement consumes over 200 pounds of raw meat every day, and hunts in a territory the size of Arkansas.

Anyway, all day long I’ve just been sitting there at the piano and thinking about all those famous chromatic third relationships we learned about in music school. This piece is full of them, sudden drops from E-flat to C-flat major and the like.

The thing is, we all know Schubert used that relationship all the time- one of my teachers even called it the “Schubert modulation,” but I’m fascinated, still, by what it meant to him. Why did this one key relationship obsess him in so many pieces and in pieces of all different moods? Was it a motto, a signature, a reference to an early song? Did he just think it sounded cool? Did his first harmony teacher tell him never to do it?

Of course, the beauty of a unique part of a composers voice is that there’s no simple answer, any more than we’ll ever understand what Shostakovich’s signature use of three rhythms as the backbone of almost all his music meant to him.

What I do know is that this relationship sits there on the page in piece after piece, context after context and dares you to riddle out its meaning. Even as you know it’s an unanswerable question, Schubert calls you back in, as if to say “come on mate, the answer is right in front of you….”  

I’ve always enjoyed life in Wales since moving here a few years ago. Cardiff has a nice mixture of urban stuff in town with proximity to lots of natural beauty.  However, my wife worries that one aspect of Welsh life poses as significant threat to my long-term health.

This is the way I tend to turn redfaced and start ranting incoherently when, it seems like daily, someone on the news refers to the latest antics or good deeds of one of the two famous young, female “opera singers” from Wales.

“But she’s never sung in an opera, she’s never won and audition, she’s never coached a role….” I start to stutter at the mention of the girl with the “voice of an angel” or classical Barbie (some prefer “warbling Barbie)….

How happy was I today to read this quote from Kate Royal in BBC Music Magazine?

”Opera is a tag people latch onto without seeing the whole picture. Some people think it means singing loudly with a wobbly voice. But I can’t believe in an ‘opera’ singer who doesn’t sing opera on the stage. A three-minute aria is not opera. Many of these so-called opera stars cannot sing without a microphone. I was gobsmacked the first time I saw Die Walkure: how did those singers project over a huge orchestra and fill an opera house? If you are involved in opera you have to relish the challenge of taking on a role, forming relationships with the cast and entering into the drama- you forget there’s no amplification!”

Of course, Kate’s just suffering sour grapes because she doesn’t have the glamour and good looks of today’s favourite ‘opera’ girls…..

opera singer- Kate Royal 

‘opera’ singer- KJ    

or, ah, maybe not…..

In any case, it’s the SINGING that counts! Trust me, you’d never listen to someone singing sharp and warbly for an enitre Wagner opera and think- “well, at least she’s hot,” and a great singing actress can convince an audience of her overwhelming sex appeal (if the role calse for it) regardless of her shape or age.

The stereotype of the nitwit singer is a bit like the stereotype of the egomaniac incompetent conductor. Actual sightings are rare, but the stereotype is so ingrained that all verified sightings of nitwit singers are reported to the world.

Like many conductors, I have built a list of singers I know and trust. When I moved from Cincinnati, a singing mecca, to Oregon, it took me a few years to rebuild that list from scratch, but now I have a network of people whose singing I love and whose opinions I trust. We just had a late cancellation of a soloist for Mahler 4 at the Oregon East Symphony. In such a situation, you can be assured I do not start calling agents and conductors- I call singers in my network. They’re the ones who know voices, attitudes and skill sets, and they know that our working relationship is founded on mutual trust and respect, so they’d never steer me wrong. Within 72 hours, the problem was solved. No small feat when I’m 5000 miles away and can’t audition anyone.

One thing you’re not likely to hear me say often is “wow, the Vaughan Williams was amazing!” It’s not that I dislike his music, but I often feel there’s not enough structure, rigor and purpose to sustain his musical thoughts in long forms in spite of his incredible ear for color. I’m sure I’ll get it some day. However, a few days ago, I came out of a concert saying just that after hearing James Gilchrist sing “On Wenlock Edge” with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Afterwards Tadaaki Otaka (who was conducting) and I were chatting about it and it was the first thing he said to me-“wasn’t the Vaughan Williams wonderful? First time for me, but such a beautiful piece.” Both he and I were stunned at Gilchrist’s singing- so musical, so intelligent and so natural. He’s apparently got a new recording of the piece out which is doing very well- no. 20 on the classical charts (Classical Barbie is no. 3, however). I don’t see how a recording could begin to do justice to that kind of communicative immediacy, flexibility and command, but you may want to check it out anyway. It’s Vaughan Williams French-iest piece. Fanstastic stuff. There’s always been a slightly snooty tone associated with the phase “English tenor,” but having heard Gilchrist and Mark Padmore both this month sounding amazing, I think we can put that old prejudice to rest.

However, we can’t hide from stereotypes, and I have to say that this post from Michael Hovnanian made me laugh out loud. I know we’ll miss Pavorotti, and the guy could flat-out sing even if he didn’t read music (and he was an opera singer, not an ‘opera’ singer, no question), but a bit of perspective might not be such a bad thing admidst all the hyperbole about the “greatest tenor of the last fifty years.” Wasn’t there some other guy who sang, like, a thousand roles in eightly languages from memory named Flamingo? King-Kong versus Godzilla. You gotta love it…..

The other night in rehearsal we read through Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta for the first time. As it turns out, I have a conductor-colleague in the orchestra, and he came up to me afterwards to talk about the piece, which we’re both very fond of. He made the point that it is one of those pieces that is really harder to conduct than to play, and I would agree. It’s sort of a concerto for conductor- I’m hoping to use it at the conducting workshop next summer.

This got me thinking- almost none of the standard audition or workshop pieces for conductors fall into what I would call the “very difficult to conduct” category. I suppose that’s good- if they’re so hard, then the students or candidates may not be able to do anything. 

I looked back at the repertoire I had to conduct for the American Acdemy of Conducting at Aspen the summer I went there. 

Mozart- Overture to Die Zauberflote
Mozart- Violin Concerto No. 5
Mendelssohn- Midsummer Night’s Dream, Overture and Incidental Music
Berlioz- Roman Carnival Overture
Mendelssohn- Symphony No. 3 “Scottish”
Dvorak- Serenade for Winds, Serenade for Strings, Cello Concerto
Beethoven- Symphony No 7
Tchaikowsky- Symphony No. 5 

Nothing too hard there. 

My first “assistant “audition was- Gershwin- American in Paris 

Mozart- Magic Flute Overture Johann Strauss Jr- Fledermaus Overture 

Beethoven- Symphony no. 5 

Again, the Fledermaus is tricky to do well, but not that hard if you know the style well. 

Rite of Spring is supposed to be hard to conduct, and L’Histoire du Soldat even harder because of their mixed meters, and in the case of L’Histoire the use of mixed meters superimposed over a regular time signature. The real problem with those pieces is that if you screw up, everyone screws up. What’s easy about them is that you can learn them at home with a metronome- you don’t need an orchestra to figure out the problems with. 

More problematic are pieces that involve a mixture of complex of unpredictable rhythms, tempo flexibility and give and take with solo players. Concertos can be the toughest, but so can a piece like Galanta because of all the tempo changes. If you don’t have the orchestra absolutely watching you like a hawk and trusting you completely, you can’t begin to make the piece happen.

So, here are some really hard pieces to conduct that I’ve come across- 

Kodaly- Dances of Galanta 

Nielsen- Flute Concerto (I’m sure this is harder for the conductor than the soloist)

Chopin- Either Piano Concerto 

Dvorak- Cello Concerto (strangely, most cellist conductors don’t find this hard, because we know how it goes, but I’ve seen enough disasters to add it to the list)

Schumann- Cello Concerto (one of my best friends in the business claims that cellists are too in love with our sounds to play in rhythm, but see Dvorak above…)

Sibelius- Symphony no. 3 (the last movement is so difficult that many conductors just leave out most of the difficult bits, like all the tempo changes, lifts and stops) Mahler- Das Lied von der Erde (the coda is the hardest thing ever for the players, and you have few chances to help them as you beat a very slow “one.” Very demanding and unforgiving) 

Debussy- Jeux and Iberia Copland- Short Symphony (much worse than Rite or any Stravinsky) 

Click here to listen to a short excerpt of me conducting the Kodaly from a recent broadcast. This was the first time I’d done the piece and we almost no time to rehearse. The piece now seems a lot less challenging having done that…. 

I’ve been back in rehearsals for just over a week.

Without taking any unusual care over diet…. 

I’ve lost a little under 9 pounds…  

This post is part two of a group that began here. 

I’m currently in rehearsals for a performance of the ever-popular Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. 

I doubt there’s any classical fan reading this who hasn’t heard this beloved warhorse many times- in fact, there’s no doubt that Ravel’s version has long since eclipsed Mussorgsky’s original piano piece in popularity. Out of the entire piece, of course, the last movement is the best known- “The Great Gate of Kiev.” 

However, this very well known piece offers us a interesting example of the simple challenges of reading music. Perhaps after thinking about this example, you might conclude that you’ve rarely heard the notation for this music read accurately. 

If one looks at a page of the score, you’ll quickly see that there are lots and lots of grace notes. Grace-notes are one of the most troublesome bits of standard notation, not because their meaning is imprecise, but because their meaning is flexible. 

Other kinds of notes, crotchets, eighth-notes, whatever you like to call them, all express mathematical relationships to the unit of pulse. In the Great Gate, the rhythmic language is quite simple and foursquare, so all of the rhythmic relationships are easily figured out by the players and conductor.  

Grace-notes, on the other hand, express a duration of time that can only be read given the context that they are in. In classical music (Mozart and Haydn), we have elaborate rules for knowing when a grace-note is on or before the beat, and what it’s duration is. In this music you quickly learn that a gracenote does not simply mean to play the note as quickly as possible. 

On the other hand, very often grace-notes should be played very close to the beat and very fast, so often that many musicians forget that is not always the case. 

The problem in orchestra is that often we play them so fast that they are no longer heard at all. 

So how does one know how fast to play a grace-note? As fast as possible? If that’s wrong, how are we supposed to know that it’s wrong? Surely this is an example of the limitation of notation?

Nope, sorry. The problem in “Great Gate is that the orchestra version is a transcription, so the performers are reading the notation out of context. Notation creates context, so notation out of context loses some of its clarity. If one goes back to the piano version, you can see that the pianist has to jump and reset the hands in a new block chord after the grace note, so the grace note has to be played before the beat and not very fast. Most orchestras play these notes either so fast they’re not heard at all, or even worse, on the beat (this is a mis-reading of Ravel’s indication to play the grace-notes down bow in the strings near the end. Musicians look at those down bows and think “aha! he wanted those on the beat,” but what he wanted was for them to be really, really loud so they would have a similar prominence to what they have in the piano version). 

Ravel could easily have omitted the grace-notes altogether as his not limited to having on one person to play all the notes in the chords, and, when you don’t hear them in an orchestral performance, you wouldn’t know you were missing out on them. However, if you look at the score, for instance the last two pages, you can see that he took a great deal of care to transcribe the grace-notes in the piano version as honestly and imaginatively as possible. He knew they were an important part of the original, so HE MADE THEM AN IMPORTANT PART of the transcription. (In fact, there’s a lot of important harmonic information in the gracenotes. At first Mussorgsky just uses them to lay down an e-flat pedal, but later, the harmonies move in the grace-notes).

If one knows or has even played though the piano version, you won’t be tempted to play the grace-notes any faster than a fairly broad eight-note, not the thirty-secondish note you usually hear. You’ll also know that, as the writing gets more massive and the leaps in the piano part get bigger, the grace notes must get slower and heavier. 

Have a listen first to a decent performance of the orchestral version, then visit Evgeny Kissin’s piano performance. Do the fast, largely in-audible grace-notes in the orchestral performance still seem like an accurate reflection of the notation?

…. notation? *

Back in Music History class we all learned how philosophers used to differntiate between “music of the spheres” and “practical music.” The now-quaint terminology masks a somewhat interesting and important differentiation that is actually an important part of any musician’s relationship to music.

The original concert of “music of the spheres” came from imagining the mathematical interplay of the movement of celestial bodies as expressing an idealized form of music expressed as pure mathematics, or pure mathematics expressed as music. This idea later evolved into a broader concept of a “pure” form of music that exists in the realm of concept, not in performance. If one thinks of “spheres” music as being that which exists in your inner ear, in your imagination as opposed to the “practical” music one hears ringing in space, then maybe it allows one to see music notation in a different light.

In America, by and large, when young people are taught to read music (which they are only done grudgingly), they are taught to read notation as instructions for physical action- “when you see a note on the bottom line, that’s first finger on the g-string… that’s half note, so you hold the note for two counts.” Even at the conservatory level, many students never look at a piece of music without their instrument. There is only limited training in learing to read music as an internal process.

However, perhaps notation should really be a road-map to hearing the elusive “music of the spheres.” Perhaps we should look at it as a visual representation of the concept of music, not a set of instructions for how to execute a performance of music. So many performers are quick to point out the “limitations” of notation as license for subjective performances, but if one is only used to reading notation with an eye to knowing what to count and where to put your fingers, you’re going to miss a lot of the information.

I once heard Barenboim say (in the Great Conductor’s series of video) that (and I paraphrase) music on the page doesn’t exist until it is played. I might suggest that actually, Beethoven’s music is more honestly represented on the page, maybe even perfectly represented on the page, and that the only limitation  of his notation is our ability to read it as well as he could. 

The other day, I said that “composition is analysis.” Today, I might well say that “composition is notation.” Of course, what I really mean is that “classical” composition is notation, but after all, so much of what makes art music unique- counterpoint, developing variation, subtle and multi-layered use of harmony as both a coloristic and structural device, control of tone color- all of this vocabulary could not have evolved without notation. Any of us can hear a tune in our heads or plunk out a melody at the piano- a composer, on the other hand, can notate a self-contained work of art. The art is in the notation, not in coming up with the tune.

Next time, I’ll look at simple example of  a case where it seems as if notation fails us, but it is really us who fail it…

In the meantime, I’m braced for some strong words from those for whom I haven’t perhaps made my point clearly enough. It’s not that music cannot be created without notation, or that music created without notation is somehow lesser in value. It’s just that we gave up the distinction between songwriting, improvisation and composition sort of in the name of political correctness. If composition has been divorced from notation, then how we do we talk about the process in a way that reconnects creativity, craft and the act of creating a re-performable, self-contained work of art that CAN be experienced silently (and, in theory, in a purer form than in performance)? If we can connect to that concept, perhaps we can get more out of notated music?

*and cognitive science, or so I am told….c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

This arrived in my inbox this morning. Well worth checking out if you need a one minute time waster today.

It’s amazing how realistic the animation is- everyone is moving perfectly in synch with the music and everything’s going in the right direction. The only problem is maeastro Darth, who is out of time with much of the music and often going in the wrong direction.

Of course, some orchestra musicians will remind me that  such a detail only reinforces the stunning realism of the film.  

Anyway, I prefer his baton to what I’m using- I can’t even cut off a simple hand with mine.

I don’t watch a lot of TV, and have gone long periods of my life without having one attached to anything other than a VHS or DVD player, but I do watch the odd cooking show when I’m chilling out.

In spite of my initial misgivings about the sanity of anyone who would market themselves as “The Naked Chef,” I’ve since become a fan of Jamie Oliver, who is very popular here in Britain. His crusade to reform school food has made him something of a national hero (as an aside, the bits of Supersize Me that deal with the behavioural impact of processed, high-fat, high-sugar school lunches on student behaviour and achievement is even scarier and more worrying than finding out what happens to a man who lives on McDonalds for a month).

Jamie’s latest series has him bumming around scenic bits of Italy trying to get close to his culinary roots. In the episode I saw, he went to a monastery with the oldest herb garden in the world, and one of the first libraries of recipes ever collected. When he arrived, he discovered the monks living on frozen and canned foods, having completely forgotten their rich culinary heritage. Even the herb garden was dead.

The fearless Jamie decided that since he couldn’t study cooking from anyone there, he would teach them how to cook again, and to re-connect to the beauty of good food. Throughout the episode, he talked about food and eating together as his religion, and of the almost spiritual importance of the quality of what you put in your body.

The monks seemed to really take to this, and Oliver’s point was exceptionally well made- bringing back real food to this old monastery did seem to bring back a sense of community and joy.

However, at the end of the episode, I had to cringe and cringe hard. The lesson on food having been taught, Jamie told the monks that, although he found their music “beautiful and all that,” he wanted them to hear his music. So he replaced their chants for a moment with music he said was all about love, a pop song that he connects to his wife. The song was by The Cure (my old band mate and top pontificator Doug Hildebrand famously said of them, that “sometimes The Cure is worse than the disease.”)

Now, I don’t want to demean the importance of another couple’s “song,” but as I listened to the mechanized, plasticized and computerized groove on this song, I couldn’t help but think I was listening to the musical equivilent of Jamie’s dreaded nemesis, the Turkey Twizlzer. Although the monks were for some reason using a Casiotone type electronic keyboard instead of the organ for their services, they’re musical traditions had stayed close to the values Jamie espouses about food- real music, made by real people that is connected to who they are and where they’re from.

All this got me thinking- there is a growing ethos about food in both Britain and the US, which, while still perhaps in the shadow of horrible chain restaurants and ready meals, is a powerful market force. This outlook is so close to the ethos of classical music (I’ve written on this subject before), that we ought to be looking at how we can help people like Jamie appreciate the honesty and freshness of real music, played live in a room on real instruments, fresh and direct without a computer processing, sampling or market testing.

The difference between The Cure and Brittany Spears is just like the difference between two corporate, pre-fabricated, frozen and pre-packaged forms of restaurants. Cure is to BS (Brittany Spears) as Fridays is to McDonalds. Surely a chef, of all people, should know that the Cure’s long-since brand-name-franchised sound (they’ve got an industrial patent on pre-fab-corpo-angst) is no more honest or fresh than a frozen fish finger. Come on Jamie, get your music fresh from the local musicians!

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods