Kenneth Woods- a view from the podium

12 Tone music is dead.

Yeah, right….

Given the fact that the stats, email and the comment page tell me that my rather arcane post on tonality from Saturday is one of the most read and discussed posts I’ve ever done here, I would say that this music still has almost unlimited power to inflame, incite and challenge the imagination…

I’ve been finding myself gradually creeping intuitively towards a new path that I find helpful in better understanding serial music, which is that I want to be more honest and thorough in understanding what it isn’t and what this language doesn’t do, and in doing so, perhaps I, as a performer can better understand what it is and how it works.

The very fact that nothing in music gets people so fired up as serialism is still, for me, one of the most important arguments for its relevance. That power of fascination is at the heart of so much art since 1900.

Anyway…. I just wanted to come back to tonality a bit more. Everyone who has seen it remembers the original Star Trek episode with the parallel universe, where Kirk finds himself in the cosmos with the ruthless Spock and the barbaric Federation, right??? The idea is simple- placed in another universe, the same things (Kirk, Spock), exhibit a nature contradictory to their behaviour on a familiar one.

This is the essential attraction of tonality, of keys, of tonal centers. A key is a universe- move the same note or the same interval to another key, and the same material has a different meaning. A leap from g to c in C major means something quite different than in E minor. What about the same two notes in E-flat major? Same pitch set, same interval, same interval vector, but place it in a different universe, and it means something different, which means our expectation of what might follow it will be completely different. Whether the composer chooses to fulfil our defy our expectation, the ability to create expectation, and quite sophisticated expectation at that, is about as powerful a compositional tool as one could ever have, and I’m not sure that serial music, whether that of Schoenberg or Boulez or Dallapiccola or Webern really has kept that tool in the tool box.

Remember, one of the early ideas in serial music was that to liberate music from the restraints of tonality, one should generally avoid intervals associated with tonal arrival and expectation- avoid thirds and sixths in favour of seconds and sevents. Tritones are good, but they can never resolve inward to thirds! It’s been called the liberation of dissonance, but it could also be called the elimination of expectation.

I  tried to talk on Saturday about the how the elimination of tonality makes it hard to organize forms on a large scale. The obvious example is progressive tonality as found in Mahler- one could not begin to construct a form on the scale of the Second Symphony without keys. The keys are the form in that piece, and how amazing that in a symphony in C minor, he’s able to wait an hour and ten minutes before giving us our first cadence in the relative major of E-flat!

The example I gave above shows the problem of creating phrases and rhetoric on a much smaller scale. Haydn and Wagner might be the greatest masters of playing with expectation in tonal music. I’ve written here many times about the fallacy of Haydn as the ultimate arbiter of normality- again and again we here people say, “normally, in, say, a Haydn symphony, the music would do this,” but Haydn almost never does what one expects. He is simply without peer in creating expectation then suspending it. Both Haydn and Wagner play with my example above in remarkably similar ways. Play the two notes- G and C, then make the audience wait, perhaps interject a commentary in another voice. Their expectation may be that this strong rising fourth surely implies C major, and that therefore, we are establishing a tonic, but any number of things are possible. Perhaps Haydn repeats those two notes again. Perhaps the audience assumes this is a way of reiterating the strength of that implied tonic? Then, after a third repetition, we might finally get a chord, but not C major, try B7! The C over the B7 creates a wonderful, very dark b9 chord, and then you can just walk down by step from the C back to the G and resolve the B7 to E minor. Wagner would do the exact same thing but resolve the 7th chord deceptively….

Now, just think about how that harmonization would shape the audience’s expectation of what they will hear next anytime they hear a fourth in that piece! The composer may NEVER AGAIN harmonize that interval in the same way, but once heard like this, all future expectations in the music have to be changed!

In the 20th C. it became fashionable to refer to common practice music as music in which certain rules limit the composer- Chord A or Interval X “have” to resolve to Chord B or Interval Y. The Liberation of Dissonance, Debussy, the musical history of the entire 20th C all mean that Chord A can now go anywhere, that Interval X can go anywhere. The problem is that, within stylistic boundaries, that’s always been true. Chord A was always free to go just about anywhere, but that first, generally speaking, it created an EXPECTATION in you, the listener, that it would go to Chord B.

Haydn makes you think that what goes up must come down, but then shows you that what goes up may turn left.

In its obsession with avoiding the cliché, in avoiding the predictable, serial music risks losing the possibility of the unpredictable. If you cannot generate expectation, you cannot unleash surprise.

Boulez, who as a performer has become just an ardent a champion of Mahler and Bruckner as he has been of Nono and Stockhausen, once said “Classical tonal thought is based on a world defined by gravitation and attraction, serial thought on a world which is perpetually expanding.” I would respectfully say that he has slightly missed the mark in his description of tonality. It might be more accurate to say that classical tonal thought expresses the relationships of different tonal worlds (as opposed to a single world), of nearby planets and distant galaxies and the ways in which their movements and behaviors are dictated by gravitation and attraction- the gravitational pull between D and A major are very different from that between D and Bb Major. But then, I come back to the idea of parallel universes, because if keys were merely worlds, then the laws of physics in each one would remain the same- in every world, what goes up comes down, but in tonal music the expectation, the very laws of musical physics, change depending on what key you are in. The what goes up must come down in C major, perhaps, but in A flat, what goes up may well keep going up or turn right or boil or solidify….

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods 

PS- Equal temperament sucks!

12-tone music is popping up all over the blogosphere lately, or, that is, discussions about it- how all those empty halls for performances of Beethoven symphonies were actually caused by Milton Babbitt and about how so much insipid monotonal neo-pasctichio music is actually a deeply personal response to the traumas of having studied with someone who knew Berio.

Elaine Fine recently wrote a quite thoughtful and perceptive piece on 12-tone music and music reservata, but it still left me feeling like something was left out.  

Of course, a lot of these things read like group therapy. It seems that 80 years on, people are still mad about the longstanding tradition overblown rhetorical flourishes begun with Schoenberg (this new method will insure the supremacy of German music for the next 100 years) to Boulez and Stockhausen. Word to the wise- don’t take these things to seriously. Public pronouncements from composers are a great tool for getting noticed, and hopefully getting their music played more often, but you don’t really believe what Stravinsky said about Beethoven and Gounod, do you? You don’t really believe what Debussy said about Wagner or Saint-Saens, do you? He copied too much from both of them for that to be true. People like to talk about how the serialist bullies dominated academia in the 60s and 70s, but didn’t Piston, Creston, Diamond, Schuman and Hanson all have academic positions in the US? As with everything, at all times, don’t believe all the hype.

However, nothing I’ve read lately seems to have captured what the real problems are with atonal music and the real strengths are with tonal music. To read most commentary, the problem with atonal music is that it is ugly and the strength of tonal music is that it is pretty. People like pretty music and don’t like ugly music. Those planet-raping modernist “composers” such as the diabolical Berio like ugly music and don’t like pretty music, which is why they write atonal music.

To quote Richard Taruskin: Balderdash!

I actually think one of the liabilities of much tonal music, especially the very best like Haydn and Schubert is that it is too pretty for modern ears. Especially for the young, emotionally intense crowd that we’re trying to attract, 20 seconds of Haydn can just sound like background music for a tea party. All the sinister wit and deep pathos, warmth and irony is completely missed- they find it just as incomprehensible as many others find Stockhausen. Noise music, atonal music, electronic music- all of these demonized modernist idioms- have all long since become mainstays of popular culture in rock, rap, dance, techno and movie music, while voice leading, modulation, tonal centers and structural chromaticism have long since been excised from the tool box of the popular song-smith.

No, ugly and pretty have NOTHING to do with it. I know, some of you reading think I’m wrong, and that you really cannot stand the abrasive cacophony of “modern” music, and you’d rather have a tooth pulled than listen to 10 seconds of a mature Schoenberg Quartet. Trust me, you’re wrong- you actually do like that sound, you just don’t know it yet, because you have not made an emotional imprint of that sound-world.

The real strength of tonal music has nothing to do with how pretty it is, or how harmoniously all those overtones ring in a triad, because the strengths of tonal music are apparent in modal, quartal and highly chromatic music. The amount of dissonance doesn’t seem to matter. What tonal music has is tonality, which is to say tonal relationships.
Tonality is possibly the most powerful tool ever invented for creating musical form, and it is no surprise that long forms grew out of an era in which composers were discovering ever more powerful expressions of a wider range of tonal relationships.

Tonality is all about relationships between keys. In our modern world, it is easy to see the classical voyage from tonic to “not the tonic” and back to the tonic as a bit too neat and tidy for a world of genocide, nuclear weapons and Dick Cheney. However, tonality doesn’t mean that you always return home, it means that tonal areas have specific relationships to each other, and that these relationships have intrinsic emotional meanings and resonances.
Whether it’s the magic and mystery of Schubert’s third relationships or Mahler’s metaphysical understanding of the myriad meanings of progressive tonality, Beethoven’s life and death struggle to get from D minor to D major or the simple perfection of a binary form tonic-dominant-tonic dance movement, tonality gives composers an unbelievably powerful tool for creating compelling musical architecture.

Musical architecture, form, structure- these are all rather cold sounding words. In another art form you could call these story, plot or even just meaning. Meaning is what brings people to art- when a listener gets to the culmination of a work and can feel the cumulative impact of everything they’ve heard so far, whether it’s a Beatles song or a Berg opera, that is the point at which their brain really begins to latch onto and bond with the sound world, the pretty and ugly, of the piece. If you’ve never felt the form of a piece of atonal music, your brain has never then gone that extra mile to imprint and internalize the rhetoric. Form is metaphor- tonal relationships give music the chance to express patterns of nature, of life, of distance and loss, of return and release. Tonality is the most flexible and powerful tool for expressing tension, for expressing distance,  and for creating a musical landscape as infinite, four dimensional and complex as the world we experience and try to understand in our daily lives.

This is not to suggest for a second that atonal music lacks form, but to point out that tonality (not prettiness) is the most powerful tool for creating and expressing form. In its purest form, 12-tone music eliminates that hierarchy completely, making all pitches equal, and only the order of pitches has meaning- the prime form of the row replaces the tonic.

The problem of form in serial music is one that many composers have meditated on and worked at for nearly a century with hundreds of spectacular successes. Some have resorted to sneaky forms of tonality- Boulez’s Messagesquisse, the subject of my DMA lecture recital, has a very clear tonic pitch of e-flat and a very clear dominant of a- natural, the first two pitches of the set SACHER (eb-a-c-b-e-d) the piece is based on. There are thousands of other ways of expressing form, but tonal relationships are such a simple and powerful tool, one does away with them at one’s peril, and if one does away with that tool without realizing the value and the power of the tool you’ve given up, then you’re really in trouble. I’d like to do a post on Berio’s Les mots sonts allés, which expresses in a very short time span and incredibly powerful and relevant form. Stay tuned….

NOW- hear some more hideously ugly, despicable music of Berio, that lout, that vile killer of all things beautiful. This is KW conducting a performance of one of the folk songs with Patricia Rozario from a recent broadcast. Listen carefully and you’ll get a sense of just how much he despised melody!

c.2007 Kenneth Woods

I’m enjoying a fairly quiet day between concert sequences- Our redneck Mahler 4 is now history and tomorrow rehearsals start up for the Rose City Chamber Orchestra performance on Sunday. Later today I’ll take the evening to study and make sure I’m focused on the right Haydn symphony.

It was a really great weekend in Pendleton- lots of new faces, as always, and old friends on hand, and I was really proud of the orchestra. In the end, we had (predictably) very little time to rehearse the Haydn 59, but I thought they played it with great precision and spark. For those of you who were keeping track, yes, I did make up a completely false story about the genesis of the work, and yes, it seems about %20 believed me in spite of my best efforts to make clear that I was telling tales.

Interestingly, nobody but me seemed to notice that the Haydn and Mahler have first movements built on repeated pitches. I love funny overlaps like that….

Mahler 4 is one of those works that stays with you after the concert- my small talk was way off par at the post concert party, because I kept feeling myself drawn back in to the piece. Really, the piece is like a long seduction- gently drawing you into another world, making you forget yourself and your surroundings more and more until all you are aware of is this vision he’s created in the lied. It’s not , by any means, a romantic seduction- his purpose is metaphysical, not physical…. I’ll miss working on it- it’s certainly one of my favorite scores of all time.

A special shout out goes to the cello section, who everyone feels were absolutely superb. They get the silver spur award this week. Also, Redneck Mahler props to Esther Mae Moses, our soprano, who was magnificently eloquent and understated in the finale.

We now seem to have accrued quite a number of conductors in the orchestra- quite a change from the old days there. I’ll have to start really looking both ways when I cross the street and maybe hire a taster when I’m conducting Mahler in Pendleton from now on….

Again, I want to thank the Kinsman Foundation, who continue to support the Redneck Mahler project.

Now, I’m enjoying the better coffee of Portland (we still miss the Pendleton Coffee Bean out East), and looking forward to a week of Schubert and micro-brews with friends. Still nursing a sore back and a bit of fatigue, but with perfect weather on offer, I’ll pick up quickly. 

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

It’s generally accepted that if you want an orchestra to improve, you should rehearse and perform a great deal of Haydn and Mozart. True!

However, one thing I’ve been surprised at is what an effective orchestral etude Mahler 4 is. Perhaps it’s not surprising, since stylistically it’s his most classical work, but I think there are other reasons as well.

In particular, Mahler’s dynamic and articulation requests are so detailed and unusual that it forces everyone on stage to examine and think afresh about every aspect of their playing. With every possible variety of swell, lift, accent, sforzando, diminuendo and staccato on offer, and a mark on almost every note of the piece, players can’t simply descend into habit. Everyone has to think extra hard about how they use their air or their bow, or the markings don’t happen, and then I nag them.

The natural reaction of musicians under pressure is to adopt a triage approach- it’s easy, almost automatic, to say “this is so hard, so I have to leave out those dynamics or not try so hard to make a phrase so I can play the notes in tune.”

The problem with this is it always has an affect other than the one intended. The more you do what the music demands the more aspects of the sound you are attuned to, which means your sound, your intonation and your rhythm improve. Mahler 4 takes players about as far in this direction as a piece can while still maintaining a rather transparent, classical texture.

Still, every few minutes I can see there’s someone who seems to be thinking “this marking is wrong. Mahler couldn’t have meant that.” Well, there are a number of mistakes in the parts, but odds are, whatever is causing you to wrinkle your brow in confused disdain is exactly what the great man wanted, and I can pretty much guarantee is version is cooler than yours or mine would have been.

All this, and we’re doing Haydn too!  

Friday morning and I’m moving a little slower after a long rehearsal last night. We’ve now got about %95 of the out of town players here, so we’re starting to get a good sense of what the issues are going to be this week.

The Fourth may be the hardest Mahler symphony to rehearse even though it is far from the most technically difficult. It’s the piece in which Mahler seems to have announced himself to the world as a great contrapuntal composer. The vast majority of the piece is made up of overlapping, independent motivic cells and themes, and there is almost no doubling in the work. That means the best way to rehearse it is for everyone to really know it, because the piece lives or dies on how vividly each gesture is characterized. Absent that characterization, there’s not much a conductor can do but resort to coaching solo players or single sections, something that leaves much of the orchestra sitting around.

Of course, the conductor’s first job is to show as much as possible of the detail and characterization with one’s hands. Even here, though, there are problems because Mahler asks for so much independent dynamic detail that in showing a forte to one section, you can easily confuse the section next to them that are marked pianissimo.

Ah…. Pianissimo.  An orchestra’s pianissimo is the tangible manifestation of the musician’s shared musical conscience. Players can hate being nagged to play softer, softer but once the sound really clicks, you never have to ask again (at least for that concert). I could feel that progression throughout the evening last night, but we’re still not there. A real pianissimo from an orchestra is a beautiful paradox- everything gets softer and starts to disappear and in doing so, the room becomes more electric.

I was listening to the documentary “Remembering Mahler,” which follows on the CD I have of Mahler’s piano roll performances (including the last movement of the Fourth Symphony). In interview after interview, musicians who had played for Mahler 50 years earlier talked about the force of his personality, his musicality, and how he towered over Toscanini as a conductor and a man, and how he always let rehearsals out early….

Hey- we had a very polite, professional email from Breitkopf about the lost Bruckner. Still no word from Schirmer…

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

Yes, composition is analysis. 

Let’s start by remembering I didn’t say composition is only analysis.

Take for a moment Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, which I wrote about here.

If one sits down and carefully analyzes the piece in its final form, you can’t help but be struck by how logically and organically it is constructed. The large scale structure of the piece seems to be a perfect reflection of the small scale structure of the individual ideas and motives. You get the sense that Sibelius had a complete, organic design for the work from the first note to the last.

However, when one then turns to the earlier versions of the piece, particularly the first version, you can see that, in fact, Sibelius struggled for many years to find that organic perfection which is the hallmark of the finished piece. Far from having had the plan for the work from the beginning, Sibelius struggled for some years to find a form that was right for the material he was working with. That process is analytical in nature- just as a theorist or a conductor may dissect the musical ideas of a work to figure out how the relate to each other in a finished work, many composers work in a similar way in the sketch process- generating melodies, phrases and large structures from the musical DNA of a few notes.

This was Beethoven’s main working method- beginning with quick notes of a musical idea or motive, which he then began to work out – not necessarily in the context of the form of the work. Motives become phrases which become periods. In one work he might have begun with the big picture- symphony in c minor, perhaps. In another case he might have simply begun with a theme and taken up the challenge of figuring out what he could do with it. The classical example of that method might be the works based on the theme of the last movement Eroica Symphony, which also include the Finale from Creatures of Prometheus and the Variations and Fugue for Piano, op 35.  Go here for a short excerpt from an essay by Elliot Forbes showing some examples of Beethoven’s sketch process in the first movement of the 5^th Symphony.

As I mentioned yesterday, it’s Mahler 4 which is on my desk right now. I’d like to save the bulk of my discussion of this piece for a little later, but let me just point out that Mahler composed the song, Das himmlishe Leben, which became the finale of this symphony about eight years before he composed the rest of the work. In fact, he long intended it to be the finale of the 3^rd. As a result, we have in the 4^th a symphony that was not composed from beginning to end, but from end to beginning. Mahler had to essentially dismantle his finished work (the song) into it’s component parts so that he could create three movements that seem to culminate in the finale. For the listener they do culminate in the finale, but the music was not written that way.

Virtually every theme and motive in the first three movements of the symphony has a connection to the musical material of the finale, sometimes very explicit and easily audible (i.e. the music of the opening bars of the symphony in the flutes and sleighbells appears to return in finale at Figure 3, although we now know Mahler extracted the opening from that passage), and sometimes more subliminally (in addition to his lifelong obsession with the perfect fourth, this symphony shows an obsession with the rising major sixth, which is the first interval of the melody of the song).

For all that we hear the 4^th Symphony as inspiration, and as a voyage from beginning to end, from a child’s view of the world to a child’s view of heaven, the work was written from end to beginning. That process was primarily analytical, and, like Sibelius in his 5^th Symphony, Mahler (who had, after all been thinking of this song as a final movement of a symphony for eight years and had, in essence, tried to write the 3^rd Symphony with this song as a finale), knew when he’d finally succeeded at the end of the summer of 1900. Just as the process had been analytical, so it was an analytical impulse that told him when the work was finished- when the micro and macro elements of the piece were perfectly balanced and related, and when he had found a way of working out his musical ideas that was true to the ideas themselves.

And it is this idea I leave with- it is a cliché to speak of a finished work as somehow true to a composer’s vision. However, what really makes a piece work is when the finished piece is true to its materials, when the composer has found a context for the ideas that is true to their nature. When someone other than the composer analyzes a piece of music, we are trying to understand that truth, to understand why the music does what it does. When the composer builds a work from analysis, she or he is trying to understand what the music needs to do.

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

Copyrighted material by other authors is reproduced here without profit for educational purposes only, under the fair use guildelines of relavante copyright lawy and will be removed on request.

Sometimes the best lessons come to us when we haven’t had enough coffee.

I’d been working late on the score of Mahler 4, which I’m conducting in October for the first time in three or four years. I’d been doing we we’re trained to do- analyze everything and try to create a vivid and detailed aural picture of the music in my head as I study. In other words, I’ve been trying to connect what I see to what I hear.

When I came back into my study this morning, however, I just saw the score still open on my desk and for a second I simply saw it as a page of sheet music, not as part of the first movement of Mahler 4.

What really struck me was the contradiction between what I was looking at and what I know the piece sounds like. I would guess that a non musician would look at those pages and assume that they were looking at a very complex, severe and intense piece of modern music. I would think that someone who knew Mahler 4 but didn’t read music would never guess this was the score to it. After all, Mahler 4 is supposed to be his simplest symphony, the most Haydn-esque, the most childlike, and the most classical.

And here is the issue- sometimes the very sound of the music can be the biggest barrier to getting close to the actual meaning of the music.

The Fourth is Mahler’s simplest, most Haydn-esque symphony, the most childlike and the most classical, but when so few of us understand Haydn, how can we understand what it is to be Haydn-esque. Mahler understood Haydn very well.

In Haydn’s music, simplicity is serious business- the simpler and more innocent the theme, the more elaborately and creatively he works with it. Mahler is much the same- for him childhood is the most serious of subjects, and innocence is the most complex of states because of its very fragility. Even in this symphony, which is life as seen through the eyes of a child, innocence is constantly under threat and true, stable and permanent innocence is only attained in the life after death of the final movement.

Looking at the page instead of thinking about what it sounds like tells you a lot about just how complex and conflicted this first movement is. As with Haydn, simplicity is the most serious business for Mahler. I’m also reminded of the end of Das Lied von der Erde, where the simplest sounding music in the entire work is actually the some of the most rhythmically complex and technically challenging music ever written by anyone. Well played, one would never guess at the ferocious difficulties, but they are part of the emotional complexities of the music.

Simple is never simple.

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods 

I’ve had a couple of friendly nags for a report on my last trip to Pendleton to conduct Mahler 1 with the OES.

What do you say about a 10 day trip with 16 rehearsals and 6 concerts with two different orchestras rehearsing or performing in 8 different venues? What do you say about a week when your orchestra decides to buy and build a new hall? What do you say about a week when you order a new mobile recording set up for your final concert that never shows up? What do you say about a week when you find out one of your new flautists parents own a recording studio and will bring their gear and record the concert for free? What do you say when you’ve seen your oldest possessions rotted, burned and coated with mould? What do you say when you’ve had two reporters watching your orchestra’s every move for the last five days? How do you paint a picture of some of the kindest and most dedicated people in the world? How do you describe how irritating it is dealing with flakes and weasels? How can I explain just how exciting it is to meet new friends while working on such fantastic music? How do I tell you how sad it is to watch an old friend crumble under the stress of repeated personal tragedies?

One day you’re taking a cello in for an expensive refit that makes it sound like crap. A few weeks later, you find out the new guy in the violins is a wonderful violin maker who fixes everything that’s been torturning you for just $20.  

I found a lost guitar and lost an iPod. I had my picture taken about 2,000 times. I did four long interviews for two newspapers. I discovered a new coffee house, and walked through the wreckage of my now-burned favourite coffee roaster.

I heard what happens when a great brass player conks. Not pretty- thankfully, it was just in a rehearsal. He too had been the victim of an instrument repair gone wrong and ended up swapping instruments with a colleague.

I went through the whole weekend terrified that one guest player in a prominent seat was going to completely collapse- they’d obviously been struggling with issues for ages. They held up, barely, but that is the most stressful thing of all for a conductor- when you really don’t know what’s going to happen when it is someone’s turn to play.

I helped set up mics and schlepp platforms. I drove a giant pickup truck.

I recorded a cool podcast with the youth orchestra that will come out soon.

We had someone sight-read the 6^th horn part to Mahler 1 in the concert. Don’t ask why. He nailed it. The guy next to him told him he was the loudest horn player he’d ever heard. Cool. He’s the one in the middle of the top row (Erik). On his left (your right) is Ed, who is also our rehearsal conductor. Center of lower row (RED hair) is Michelle, our Exec Dir, next to her are Peter, our principal, and Rebekah, who rocks. They all rock.

The orchestra took over the town. There were musicians in every bar, restaurant and shop. I told one friend it was starting to feel like a festival and he corrected me- “dude, it is a festival.” A great deal of beer was consumed. A great deal of food was eaten. Tom spent 6 days cooking for the reception after the concert.

We postponed a brass sectional for 10 minutes because it took 70 minutes for a local joint to make 5 sandwiches.

I asked the trumpets to “make it greasier,” and told the strings they had to be acidic when the music is Hassidic. We worked on the “voice of god” sound in the low brass.

I got called a bastard by one of my best friends. She got a “damn right he is” from another one of my best friends, and I’m not mad at either of them (this is because I still don’t think they really mean it).

I was told I was a miserable slave driver and way too nice within 6 minutes.

Number of times the local paper published the date and time of the concert- 3. Number of dates and times published- 3.

Number of correct combinations of date and time- 0.

5 violin players told me they either filled up or cried outright when the horns stood up in the concert. I did, too. Does this picture make you emotional? Maybe you need the sound track….

At 7:52 on Saturday night, just in the midst of a rehearsal of the 3^rd mvt. (figure 10), the orchestra made the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard them make. It’s a funny feeling when you know you’ll never top something that almost nobody heard.

I was both sad yet encouraged to hear two new musicians express how they feel like most of their musical life lacks meaning and passion, which they found in Pendleton. We talk too much about economics and not enough about why we do this- our first constituency ought to be our fellow musicians. When we have a chance to do what we love, audiences can hear and feel the difference, and that’s what they want more than anything in concert- that physical, tangible tingle. Maybe it’s good to remember that much as we prize our relationship with the community, it is their privilege to listen. Our first duty is to each other.

There was a great three-hour bluegrass jam session at the party after the concert, complete with bass banjo, accordion and the world’s champion fiddler. 

A big thank you to Saul Cline at the Tacoma Symphony for helping us find some last-minute extras.

Thanks Michelle, Christina and Phyllis for weathering the storm.

Cheryl- sorry I missed city council! Just remember, wise words sometimes fall on deaf ears.

Clint- thanks for donating the music.

John- thanks for the schlepping, the setting up, the tearing down, and for coaching your colleagues in the percussion section.

I’m really glad everyone practiced.

To our last minute newbies- thanks for taking a chance on a gig that involved eight hours in a car to work with an orchestra and conductor you had never heard of for about half what you’d make at home. Hope it was worth it.

To our long-term veterans, regulars and friends- what a wild, bizarre, cool, depressing, exhilarating, crazy, stressful, relaxing, inspiring, exhausting, dramatic, pedestrian and fun trip we’ve found ourselves on.

I think it was  a pretty hot concert. By Sunday, the whole fire thing seemed like a bad dream that was quickly fading from everyone’s memory.

We’ll try to post some audio highlights next week, if possible.

UPDATE-

Suzanne tells me I’ve gone noticeably more gray this month. Ain’t that life.

 Also, a nice comment on Rebecca’s blog here 

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

Photos by Will Perkinson.

UPCOMING CONCERT

Lancashire Chamber Orchestra

Saturday, March 17, 2007

7:30 PM

Christ Church, Lancaster

Mozart- Eine Kleine Nacht Musik

Beethoven (arr. Mahler)- Quartet  in F minor, op 95 “Serioso”

Vivaldi- The Four Seasons

   Kate Birchall, violin

KW notes- First time I’ve ever conducted Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in its entirety!

Disclaimer- It is the middle of the night, the author is extremely tired and has had a couple of post rehearsal beers…..

Nonetheless…

I want to try to capture my state of mind after this evening’s rehearsal. Sometime this weekend, prompted by Suzanne, I was trying remember the last time I heard a live performance of Das Lied von der Erde (it seems to be the least popular Mahler work these days).

As it turns out, it was at one of the biggest music festivals on earth, with the “festival” orchestra conducted by one of the music directors of a major US orchestra and two very famous soloists. What hit me only at the moment that I was digging up this bit of history was that this performance, for lack of a better word, sucked. It was sloppy, it was one-dimensional, and, most importantly, it didn’t “arrive.”

I’m not sure how helpful it is in the week of a major concert to be reminded of just how difficult the program is….. Of course, the Schoenberg orchestration we’re doing is even harder and more exposed and unforgiving than the original. Harder and more exposed than the original I heard massacred at that festival at @$&$n Festival…. The Song of the Earth is one of those pieces that haunts you- I’ve had a handful of moments this week when, even after a long period of preparation, I’ve finally grocked something in the score and felt myself welling up with tears.

You can’t help but feel Mahler’s vulnerability and mortality in this music. So- challenging music, intimidating music, and emotionally wrenching music. Oh, and, yes, there’s a lot of it. A thirty minute finale. Six movements. About five hundred tempo changes… Great….

We get four rehearsals (and there’s another piece on the program). In 2007, that’s what you can get out of the nicest, best, most committed musicians unless you have mountains of money to throw at things. We get about five minutes to rehearse each minute in the piece, but that doesn’t include breaks, or time spent tuning. We get four rehearsals- three with the singers, but they really only mark on the day (as they should!), so that’s two with them (maybe four hours allowing for breaks and the other work on the program)…

Here I am at one in the morning, dress rehearsal just hours away, going through my notes from rehearsal and I realize that, daunting as this project is, Mahler the composer and Mahler the performer knew what he was asking, knew what we needed and even seemed to understand what sort of performing world we were going to be dealing with. Maybe he dealt with the same problems. I’ve written many times about his detailed way of marking the music- when you’re trying to put together a piece like this on a short timeline, you realize, there is no other way.

It’s easy to look at the poems, and the circumstances of his life and think that it’s him we should be feeling compassion for (and we should), and yet it is the great man whose broad shoulders carry us all forward, even as we’re haunted, daunted and in awe of this music.

 Sunrise brings the day of the show, but we still have one rehearsal, 25% of all our time together, to work on this. How many minutes of rehearsal, how many minutes of Mahler…

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

It’s probably no coincidence that the two most popular composers of the 20^th Century, Shostakovich and Mahler, are also the two whose autobiographies are most intimately associated with their work. However, although their musical work may have been shaped in part by the external circumstances of their lives, it is also important to remember that both of them wrote a great deal of music for reasons that transcended the events and influences of their day-to-day existence.

The biographical story of Das Lied von der Erde, or The Song of the Earth is well known. We are told that Mahler wrote the piece in response to the news that he had a fatal heart condition, and that the final song in the cycle “Der Abschied,” or “The Farewell,”was, in effect, his farewell to life itself.At the beginning of 1907, Mahler was probably the most famous and successful musician in the world. He had been the music director of the Vienna Court Opera for 10 years, a record which still stands 100 years later, and he finally become well-known as one of the great composers of his time. However, the never-ending anti-Semitic attacks in the press and within the opera house that he had always dealt with drove him from the job in May of that year. In June he and his family went to their summer retreat Maiernigg, but within days of their arrival his oldest daughter, Maria, had contracted scarlet fever. Mahler was devastated by her death. During the last stages of her illness a doctor examined Mahler himself and found that he had a heart-valve problem that, in those days, was invariably fatal. Throughout most of his adult life, Mahler had used the summers to walk in the mountains and compose, and for him the two activities were inextricably intertwined. He often said that he did all of his composing while hiking, and that the time at his desk was the purely clerical and technical work of writing down what he’d heard in nature. Under doctor’s orders to avoid exertion of any kind, and in shock at the loss of his daughter, his creative output was completely stalled.In October of 1907, the poet Hans Bethge published The Chinese Flute, the collection of free translations of ancient Chinese poems that Mahler used as the basis for Das Lied von der Erde. The working year of 1907-8 saw Mahler going to New York to start a new professional life. When he returned to Europe for the summer of 1908, he was faced with a mixture of familiarity and strangeness. The long walks, which had been so central to his life for so long, were now strictly forbidden, and so he feared he would be unable to compose, but as the summer went on, he found his muse returning. By late July, the individual songs had begun to come to him, starting with the second “The Lonely One in Autumn.” Within the amazing period of six weeks, he’d completed all six songs, gradually moving from the idea of a song cycle into the new world of a song symphony.

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods. 

Any regular reader of this blog will have realized that I, like many people, like the music of Gustav Mahler. A lot….It has occurred to me this week, however, that I could make the perverse case that, much as I am totally thrilled to be doing Das Lied von der Erde this week, it may actually be more fun to rehearse Haydn than Mahler….Of course, there are advantages to doing Mahler. Generally speaking, and not casting aspersions on anyone here, there are some instrumentalists in the world who think they can sight read Haydn symphonies, which is an almost completely inaccurate notion. Almost nobody makes that mistake with Strauss and Mahler. Mahler’s music seems to bring the best out of musicians everywhere I go.

This is just a quick reminder to any readers in the Pacific Northwest this weekend that the Rose City Chamber Orchestra will be performing Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in the Schoenberg reduction on Saturday, Feb 3 at 7 PM at the Colonial Heights Presbyterian Church in Portland. I’ll be conducting, Brennen Guillory will sing the tenor songs, and Kathryn Alexis Hamilton will be our mezzo. We’re only half way through the rehearsals at this point, but I think it’s likely to be a very good and very special concert- certainly we’re lucky to have two really first rate singers who are just right for this music. It’s a strong orchestra, and everyone has been working their hearts out in preparation for this show. Come to this concert!!!!! I’m serious, don’t miss it, you’ll love it, lot’s of wonderful musicians have worked very hard to organize it and prepare it, it’s some of the most fantastic music ever, and you’ll regret it for the rest of your life if you could have made it and don’t. Burn your tickets to that other orchestra. Cancel your dinner reservations. Abandon your children. Lock the poor dog in the back yard. Tell your parents you can’t come to supper because you have an infectious disease. Tell your children you’ve only been going to school plays to be nice, and it’s time for mommy and daddy to do something they enjoy for once instead of suffering through the endless burden of looking after them. Miss this concert, and you may need special counseling for months or years as you attempt to come to terms with the regret, the guilt and the sense of emptiness that comes with missing an opportunity to be a part of something of truly historic importance. You may have missed Woodstock and the Kennedy assassination, but you can be there for Mahler in Portland. Book your flight right now- this is just the reason to use all those frequent flyer miles you’ve been saving.

Also on the program is the world premiere of Snapshots by Oregon native and LA resident, Chris Thomas. It’s colorful, humorous, clever and fun.

The Rose City Chamber Orchestra first came into being in Spring of 1998. A small group of musicians, who felt that their artistic needs were not being met in the greater Portland community, decided to venture out on their own and establish a small chamber orchestra together. The goal of the musicians in the Rose City Chamber Orchestra was (and continues to be) to achieve the highest quality musical experience to be enjoyed by both performers and community. The “premiere” concert was performed by the orchestra on April 5, 1998 and conducted by Tim Hankewich, former conducting apprentice for the Oregon Symphony, and now Assistant Conductor for the Kansas City Symphony. The “premiere” concert was a huge success, and the Rose City Chamber Orchestra was well on its way to becoming one of the most talked about and most highly respected chamber orchestras in Portland and the region. The Rose City Chamber Orchestra is unique because the orchestra is run by the musicians themselves. All members of the Rose City Chamber Orchestra are empowered in all decision-making processes to the extent that each individual wishes to be. Those decisions range from the conductors engaged to the music performed. Everyone has a voice.

I do hope some of you will join us.

Ken