Today, we turn to another question from the mailbag, from our friend Bob in New Jersey- a very fine amateur violinist I know from around and about. He writes-

Hi Ken. I enjoy reading your blog. The bit about “transference” and first rehearsals caught my attention. I’ve noticed that, in the various amateur groups that I’ve played in, the first rehearsal sets the tone for every subsequent rehearsal. And it’s usually evident after a few bars of playing whether the group is a promising one, or one that will continually struggle. And speaking of struggling, why can’t more musicians count? It’s one thing to struggle with counting the clarinet part of the slow movement of the Brahms quintet, which I have seen bring some very good amateur clarinettists to their knees. I am referring to tasks such as dividing a quarter note into triplets or sixteenth notes – a task which I have seen musicians fail at, over the span of multiple rehearsals. It’s difficult to understand the trouble when these problems can be so easily corrected by briefly practicing in front of a metronome. Do you encounter similar problems at the professional level? Do I take counting too much for granted because of my engineering background? And have I provided inspiration for future blog postings?

Dear Bob-

I think the phenomenon you describe is one that can be detected at all levels of ability in many parts of the world. It’s a pity, because if there was one musical skill I could teach or have taught to every young musician it would be the basics of rhythmic subdivision and how to apply them when playing.
However, I think that, in America at least, this is the result of an even more fundamental failing of our system of musical training. The sad fact is that for most young would-be musicians, they don’t receive any systematic musical training, only instrumental/vocal training. All of our early musical training comes through the prism of an applied performance area, so any modest amount of training in musicianship (remember your piano teacher yelling “count Ken! One-and two-and, one-and two-and…”) is limited to whatever level of skill (probably not much) you’ve built up on your instrument.
I was talking to a colleague who I admire tremendously a couple weeks ago, and he made the point that most of the students in his orchestra (one of the best student orchestras in the world) are really there because they love playing their instruments, much more than they love playing music. He feels it’s partly his job to encourage them to develop a passion for music separate from their instrument.

Anyway, I see all the time in orchestra and chamber groups instances where we have huge ensemble problems because someone is so fixated on playing their violin well, that they completely forget to play with their colleagues. We become so obsessed with doing that pinky thing our teacher taught us, that we don’t count.
Counting shouldn’t be something one does simply to avoid making a mistake like coming in at the wrong time- it is not a prophylactic process. Counting should be the enlivening force of all of our music making. Counting is half (singing the other) of our inner soundtrack, and I really encourage all my students to train their inner metronome not only to measure time accurately, but in character. Counting with a louder internal voice when the music is louder, a more threatening one when the music is full of menace or a more tender one when the music calls for it.

Otherwise, to the extent we have any inner soundtrack at all, it’s just of the “singing in the shower” variety. No harm in that, except that playing an instrument is hard, and managing those difficulties is bound to screw up your time without some inner monitor keeping an ear on things. Heck, most people can’t even sing in the shower in tempo if they reach for the soap, let alone play the viola.
I completely agree with Bob about the extent to which the first minutes of a first rehearsal can tell you a lot about the prospects of a new group being any good. There’s always a sigh of relief when you settle in and realize things are clicking- life would be grand if it were always so. Hah! Even at the highest levels, there are whole religious denominations that seem to abhor accurate rhythm. Travis- you know who I’m talking about.  However, you may have many instances where you have to make a bad or troubled group work, and it helps to have a bag of tricks to get a group. Some of those involve managing the damage that transference does to your own playing, while the rest deal with getting the best out of a poorly matched group.
Sometimes, the best trick is working at incredibly slow tempos with a loud metronome clicking eighths or better-yet 16ths instead of quarters. That kind of slow, quasi intonation work can do wonders for rhythm.
Bob- I don’t think you take counting too much for granted at all, but I think you hint at a good fundamental point. A good musician has to be not only a poet, but an engineer as well. Our slightly narcissistic society has taught us that emotional self-expression is the our right as musicians, but a bit of humility to deal with the nuts and bolts is essential in making that music making honest and communicative. Subdivision isn’t a straight-jacket that keeps us from freely expressing our musical instincts, it is our very heartbeat itself- rhythm is life, as anyone who’s had heart trouble will tell you.
Thanks again for the note, Bob. We’ll see how many more blog posts I can squeeze out of this comment.

Dear readers- please keep writing!

KW

From the Herefored Times-

Champagne and cake in the interval turned the Hereford String Orchestra’s fiftieth anniversary concert in Shire Hall last month into a full-blown party. The orchestra’s sizeable string forces were augmented for the occasion by a full complement of brass and woodwind, and no less than three conductors. Proceedings beganwith Wagner’s majestic Mastersingers Prelude in a performance most memorable for the fearlessly Teutonic playing of the lower brass. Released from the challenge of making themselves heard in such company, the strings then came into their own in an accomplished account of Britten’s clever (and misleadingly titled) Simple Symphony, after which the orchestra’s former director, violinist Nic Fallowfield, played Dvorak’s Romance for Violin and Orchestra with an expressive eloquence that was underpinned by some elegant orchestral accompaniment under the direction of Hazel Davis.

The second half was devoted entirely to Brahms’s Symphony No 2. This ambitious undertaking was pulled off with considerable aplomb, much credit being due to the conductor Kenneth Woods’s obvious affinity for the work and his ability to convey his intentions to his willing subjects. The performance had real drive and was especially commendable for the beautifully judged timpani and some excellent solo horn playing. The string sound was fullsome and the woodwind played with forthright agility.

 

RTWTH

The sad tale of Rachmaninov’s First Symphony is one most music lovers are familiar with through program notes for his infinitely more popular Second Piano Concerto.

The story is simple- the young Rachmaninoff was so devastated by the failure of his first symphony, which had been a complete fiasco with audiences and critics, that he fell into a deep depression and was unable to compose. Finally, he met an inspirational psyco-therapist who used hypno-therapy to cure him, saying again and again “you will begin work on a new piano concerto. It will progress quickly, and will become a huge success.”

Of course, he did, it did and it did, and music history lived happily ever after. The errant young composer had seen the error of his ways and changed course, writing one of the most enduringly popular works in the literature.

But what of that poor symphony into which the young man had poured his soul? S.R. never allowed another performance during his lifetime, and the work was presumed lost until it was reconstructed from the set of orchestra parts used for the premiere.

I never gave the symphony a whole lot of thought until one day I was talking to my graduate advisor at CCM about what piece I might do my conducting lecture recital about. He suggested Rak 1.

“You could analyze the piece, see if you can come up with a reason while it was such a failure- probably that crazy ending- then perform it. Maybe you could even write another ending and save the piece for future generations.”

I suppose the idea of proving why a piece was a failure seemed like a bad preface to a concert, but in any case, I did my lecture recital on the Mozart Requiem (a piece I’m returning to with the OES for my last concert with them as Music Director in April).

The years passed, until last winter I was tossing around program ideas with the leader of the WSO, Mark Lansom. We were both keen to do a Russian program, but everything I wanted to do they’d either done or was too expensive to rent. “What about Rach 2,” I enquired. I’d just done Rach 2 with KCYO and was seriously in love with the piece.

“No, we just did it, but you could do Rach 1,” Mark offered. Well, I had gone and listened to it once and flipped through the score when I was considering it for my lecture recital, and it seemed attractive, doable and I’d never done it. This might be my only chance- people don’t usually ask you to do famously unpopular works.

When I finally opened the score last summer, I got a real shock. It had almost none of the qualities that made me love the 2^nd Symphony so much- none of the amazing counterpoint, none of the miraculous voice-leading, and almost none of those great Rachmaninoff tunes. I was worried I’d just programmed a turkey.

Well, turkey or not, I was stuck with it, and got to studying, and soon I fell in love with it. It may even be a better piece than the 2^nd Symphony. It is certainly a different piece- you have to experience it separate from your expectations of later Rachmaninoff to fully appreciate it.

Perhaps an apt comparison is with Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony- withdrawn under mortal threat for being too long, too dark and too experimental, the much more accessible Fifth that followed it proved to be his most popular piece. Shostakovich’s ironic subtitle, “A Soviet Artist’s Humble Reply to Just Criticism” was taken as sincere for many years.

Then, in the 1970’s, as Shostakovich’s many close friends and collaborators began to move to the West, and later as the USSR fell, it became clear that Shostakovich himself never thought of the Fourth as a failure or a wrong path- he changed out of necessity. Modern consensus today is the opposite of 30 years ago- the Fifth used to be the correction to the mistake of the Fourth, but today the Fourth is the pure, the hones, the real, and the Fifth is the expedient, the compromised, the necessary.

What both views miss is the fact that Shostakovich was a genius, and could write as a genius in any style- the Fifth and Fourth are both masterworks, and only a genius could say for certain which is the better of these two very different works.

Likewise, I think for the first two Rakmaninov symphonies. While the Second has that magical synthesis of melodic genius, perfection of contrapuntal craft and feels like a complete journey towards catharsis, the First has a more sophisticated formal design- it’s actually one of the most interesting cyclical symphonies I’ve ever studied, and a huge, overpowering force of energy.

Like Shostakovich 4, Rach 1, shows us a glimpse of the composer he didn’t become. The Rachmaninoff we ended up with was still melancholic, but never again was he the angry modernist he was in this piece. While most of his mature music shows the profound influence of Tchaikovsky, the First is permeated with the dark violence of the best of Mussorgsky (we’re opening the concert with Night on Bald Mountain).

On the final page of the score, Rakmaninov left the following dark inscription- “Vengeance is mine: I shall repay.” I think the ending of this piece is one of the great tragic finales of any symphony- a real symphonic cataclysm of Shakespearean proportions. I’m glad I didn’t succumb to writing a new ending!!!

Not long ago I reminded readers how welcome questions are on this blog. Fortunately, a couple of regular readers took the bait, although it has taken me until now to sit down and write a response.

The first batch of questions come from conductor Teresa Metzger Howe- an alumni of the 2007 Rose City International Conductors Workshop, and someone who’s work impressed all of us there that summer.

Teresa writes-

As always, great to read your thoughts, Ken. You encouraged questions from the audience, so here are a couple. I’m a recent reader and haven’t gotten through all your old posts, so my apologies if you’ve already dealt with these nuts and bolts questions. Also, my apologies if these are “duh!” questions. Here goes:
1. When you guest conduct, who provides the bowings? The orchestra in their usual way or do you bring in bowings?
2. When you have a schedule that is stacked up pretty tight, when do you score study for the program you’ll be doing AFTER the rehearsals you’re presently in?
Cheers,
Teresa   Continue reading →

The concert went well, but it felt treacherous from the podium for much of the way- a bit like driving on ice. Sometimes one has to make up for a slight shortage of rehearsal time with a bit of extra mental power behind the baton- fortunately, it sounded good even if it felt tough. On the other hand, the very end of Brahms 2 was damn exciting, and solid as a rock.

“It wouldn’t have been that exciting if you hadn’t yelled at them like that,” offered one observer of the afternoon’s rehearsal after the concert.

She was right. I’d lost it a bit in the rehearsal when half the first violins crashed in on the penultimate chord the third time in a row.

“Watch! If you do that tonight, I’ll storm off the stage before the last note,” I warned them. We didn’t try the passage again. My friend had said the power of that moment was that nobody in the orchestra was sure if I meant it or not.

Continue reading →

Our visit to the Cambridge Symphony ended on a high note- this was their first concert of the new season, and they’ve made a concerted effort at “re-branding” the orchestra, with new brochures, programs and website. The efforts paid off handsomely, with a full house in attendance, in spite of the bitter cold weather. Fortunately, our audience was spared the chill we’d experienced the previous morning in rehearsal. The orchestra played their best in the concert- it’s an interesting group, full of rather brilliant people, mostly professors, deans and students from MIT and Harvard. They made us feel welcome and appreciated. Thanks and congrats, CSO!

How sad, then, that we had to miss the after-concert party…

As happens all-too-often, I had to thread the scheduling needle for this program between other gigs, and I had a rehearsal with the HSO the day after this Sunday evening concert. Of course, when flying from American to Britain, one loses a day, so leaving on Monday for a Monday rehearsal was not an option. Instead, we had to catch the last flight of the night from Boston to London, which meant leaving the second the concert was finished. Getting on a trans-Atlantic instead of sipping champagne at a reception was always going to be an anti-climax, but as it happened, we had the misfortune of flying BA with a child.

Here begineth the rant…..I’ve generally had reasonable treatment on British Airways as a solitary professional person traveling by myself. However, and apologies to my colleague I’ll see this week who works for them, on the basis of our travels with them as a family this fall, British Airways are the least family friendly company in the world. Traveling on BA with an infant is a nightmare of incompetence, lies, arrogance and frustration. I never imagined that the central challenge of my life in a concert week would be attempting to book a “bassinet” seat for my little son. Phone calls, emails, on-line check in… we followed the company’s instructions to a “t” and on this, as on all four of our previous flights with them, ended up with nothing but trouble, stress and frustration, with never an apology in sight (although, strangely enough, the actual flight crews are generally much kinder and more helpful than their ground counterparts). Suzanne had flown over with Sam on her own for this concert, and her treatment at Heathrow was shambolic and disgraceful- how anyone could be outright mean to a mother of an 8th-old travelling on their own is beyond me, but it seems to be standard operating procedure there. I like to keep the tone positive, but if you are thinking of taking your young children on a BA flight, think again. Here endeth the rant.

Fortunately, we made it to Heathrow on time and made our way to Hereford for my evening rehearsal for the HSO 50^th Anniversary Concert. I’m sharing the program with 2 other conductors- I’m just conducting Brahms 2^nd Symphony as the second half of the concert. Now, I have to say that playing the Brahms Double the day before conducting Brahms 2 (albeit in a rehearsal) is kind of my idea of the good life, even if it involves going without sleep for 36 hours.

I did Brahms 1 in April with the OES, and managed to check out quite a few recordings and DVDs of the piece (something I only do AFTER I’ve learned the piece), as well as reading a couple of books and revisiting the score. My preparation for Brahms 2 has been a bit more compressed, but I did manage to check out some recordings, many of which were part of “sets” that I’d already checked out for Brahms 1.

My comparisons of a number of conductor’s pairings of the two works led to a rather surprising conclusion- very few conductors can do both pieces well. I found this surprising because I think of Brahms, perhaps more than any other major composer, as really only having one “style.” His early, middle and late works are all written in manifestly the same voice and language, and require more or less the same tonal palette from the performers.

However, the personalities of the pieces vary widely. I think the Beethovenian drama of the First needs a conductor with the balls and gravitas to take the music by the throat and shake it about a bit, while the Second needs more of a Zen-like calm trust in the music- a conductor who is confident enough to let the piece unfold without too much meddling or manipulation.

Not surprising then, that conductor A, who brought me to tears with his epic First sounded so ponderous, overblown and artificial in the Second or that conductor B, polished but utterly forgettable in the First weaved pure gold in the Second.

A careful survey of the many recordings of the Brahms symphonies also makes one fact painfully clear- we conductors do some stupid shit. It’s no wonder players shake their heads in despair. How can a conductor who has managed ever turn of phrase and tricky transition in one movement do something so perverse and bizarre in the next one? How can you get to the final 40 seconds of the Finale of either Brahms 1 or 2 without a single miscalculation, then botch the ending so badly that the listener has to hit “rewind” just to see if he or she misheard it? How frustrating for the poor musicians who’ve played so well for 45 minutes to see their hard work go up in flames.

Take conductor “S,” someone I admire a lot (and the favorite conductor of my man EK). His first movement of the 2^nd is as good as they come- luminous orchestra playing, effortlessly paced, spacious, warm, glorious. It’s the kind of deeply cultured and unique orchestra playing one almost never hears any more. However, after a marvelous opening, the 2^nd Movement becomes a gross caricature  of “slow music fast, loud music slow” and the Finale a twisted inversion of that “loud music fast, soft music slow.” Of all the bad ideas of all the conductors out there, this all-too-often heard idea of treating the opening of the Finale of Brahms 2 as some kind of Adagio introduction, then taking off like the Keystone cops at the first forte has to be one of the, er, stupidest and silliest sounding things I’ve ever heard. It is my opinion that doing so sounds absurd, but more to the point, it is exactly the opposite of what Brahms wrote. “S” is not alone in this madness, I’m just baffled that someone who in the 1^st movement could be the epitome of taste could adopt so absurd a path in the Finale.

Finally- for the curious, Brahms 2 is one of those works which seems to invite the possibility of an over-arching set of tempo relationships for the entire piece. This is the sort of thing one can find in plenty of classical works, and this is, after all, his more classical symphony.

Allowing for the fact that a tempo in Brahms is really a range of tempo, one can find a set of tempi where one bar of the first movement equals one beat of the second movement (dotted half=quarter/dotted quarter). The first and third movements end up being almost identical tempi (quarter=quarter), and the bar of the first movement can also be the same as the bar of the Finale (dotted half=whole note).

It’s not something that needs to be plotted out with metronomes and adhered to pedantically (Beethoven loved these kinds of relationships, but always took care to make them slightly imprecise when using metronome markings, ie “a little more than twice as fast as the preceding section.”). On the other hand, I think that the concerts where you come away thinking something like “crikey, that movement was way too slow” are the ones where we’ve left that neighborhood for at least one of the movements. It’s probably the First movement that sees the widest range of tempo choices- it’s music that can be felt and conducted in either three or one, but I think that if you’ve picked a tempo that can ONLY be felt in one of those pulse units, you’ve probably left the neighborhood.