Kenneth Woods- a view from the podium

I’m a bit sad that the ferociously intense schedule here at the Ischia Festival has made it impossible for me to write more often, as it has been a very interesting and memorable week.

First, for all my friends who had thought about coming here as participants, I can only say that you should definitely come next year if you can. Spectacular views, fantastic food, a friendly and laid-back atmosphere and luxurious facilities- what more could you ask for.

We had our first concert last night- piano trios by Malcom Arnold and Jukka Linkola and the great Mozart Piano Quartet in E-flat, a masterpiece I was playing for the first time (actually, all of the pieces were new to me). Neither the Arnold nor the Linkola are “great’ works, but they are good fun- attractive, exciting and effective. I actually think it was very good programming on Aldo’s part, because it made for a nice, short concert and really put the Mozart front and center, where it belongs.

I’ve coached a lot of repertoire with a lot of new friends- the Brahms C minor Piano Quartet, a Devienne Trio Sonata, the Brahms Clarinet Trio (with two different groups), the Prokofiev Overture on Hebrew Themes and the Shostakovich Piano Quintet, among others. I was actually a little concerned that there were too many groups playing too much repertoire for the number of participants, but, although we will definitely scale it back next year, it seems to have worked out fine. The participants are all so passionate about music that there seems to be no end to their hunger for playing and discovery.  

Speaking of discovery- I think the most memorable moment of the week so far for me was coaching the Intermezzo from the Shostakovich Piano Quintet with a group of musicians who were getting to know the piece for the first time. I can still remember playing that movement with tears streaming down my face at the Clock Tower festival two years ago, so I wasn’t too surprised at the reaction of the players to playing it for the first time. One of the violinists later said that the piece “was like a revelation. I couldn’t breathe or really see for a couple of hours afterward….” That’s how music should affect people.

It’s also been fun to discover some new colleagues like Aldo, David and Peppe (our pianist/director, violist and clarinetist respectively). They’re all great musicians, as is my old friend Byron, who I’m thoroughly enjoying playing with again after a break of over a decade. We haven’t had a lot of time for chitchat, but somewhere in the “so what are you doing the rest of the summer” conversation, one of them told me of the most unusual recital I have heard about in a long time…. He’s doing a very heavy duo program (Messiaen, Mozart and Brahms) at a nudist colony in Idaho. Yes, the audience will be naked! Clothing is very much optional for performers as well. I’ve never turned down a recital gig I could do, but……

Day one of my visit to the Ischia Chamber Music Festival is nearly over. I swear, I do not seek extra adventure and uncertainty simply to keep the blog more captivating for readers, but some days it does seem as though someone in the producers’ office of the series that is my life is contriving to keep it interesting.

Today’s plotline is only mildly suspenseful at least so far. I arrived last night after a very long journey. I gripe often in these pages about airlines poor treatment of instrumentalists, but EasyJet, to my compete surprise, were completely professional and polite in dealing with me and my cello yesterday. Unfortunately, we were delayed about 45 minutes on departure from Stanstead, which meant that once I arrived in Naples I had about 40 minutes to get through customs, pick up my bag, grab a cab, cross Naples, buy a ticket and board the last ferry to Ishcia.

My bag seemed take ages to arrive, and then my heart sank when I walked out of the airport and saw a huge line for taxis. Thankfully, the line moved quickly- I was probably 70^th in line, but within 10 minutes I was in a cab, which left me with about 18 minutes to catch the ferry. “Molo Beverello!” I cried to the cabby. “Presto, Presto!” When I told him how much time we had, stepped on it, and we rocked through Naples and eye-watering speed to the port.

My host had told me to negotiate a cab fare of 16 euros, but I’d completely forgotten to do so in my panic, so it was 35, at which point I also realized I’d only taken out 45 euros at Stanstead because I was getting a cash per-diem here. With 2 minutes to spare  I sprinted (there are few sights more undignified than that of a grown man “sprinting” with  a cello and a suitcase) up to the ticket booth, only to see a hand-written sign “sorry, no credit cards today.”

With only 10 euros left, I assumed I was, as they say, screwed. I asked if there was a cash machine, and he just laughed at me. “How much one-way?” I asked in broken Italian.

”9,84.” My heart exploded in joy, I was going to make it to Ishcia with 14 cents in my pocket.

Today started quietly- I met some of my colleagues and had a very tasty lunch, but then there were worrying rumblings of ill-tidings. Byron, our first violinist, is trapped in Paris by a transit strike. I’ve been a union member most of my life, but sometimes you can’t help saying “fucking unions!” especially when Brahms and Schnittke are at stake. As the day went on the news became worse and worse- from a delay of a few hours, it could now be a day to four days.

We read the Brahms and Schnittke without him. The Brahms is so empty without the first violin, it wasn’t very satisfying, but the Schnittke rehearsal was actually quite useful.

I had suggested the Schnittke because I remembered enjoying playing the 2^nd movement, but I hadn’t listened to it since that performance. As I’ve been studying and practicing the whole piece this week I’ve decided it is a great, great, great piece. It seems like Schnittke has fallen out of the repertoire in the last few years since his death. I remember hearing Gidon Kremer and the Kremeratic Baltica play the Concerto Grosso the night Schnittke died- at that moment it felt like the whole world knew the greatest composer in the world had died. As I was working on the score yesterday, it hit me that I haven’t heard a performance of any Schnittke in a couple of years.

The String Trio was written to celebrate the 100^th birthday of Alban Berg. Schnittke’s penchant for integrating styles from different historical epochs is perfectly appropriate for a memorial to Berg, and this trio’s mixture of baroque dances with intense dissonance is both effective and an appropriate memorial to another great composer. I’d say it is a great score for young composers to study- his string writing, apart from one annoyingly impossible doublestop, is both idiomatic and distinctive, and he really achieves a parlando vocabulary of articulations.

I just hope we get to hear it with Byron soon!

By the way, the food is impossibly good.

Somehow, no matter how many times I’ve been here or how many advertures and surprises those trips have held, there always seems to be some shock, some moment of divine cognitive dissonance on my arrival to Pendleton, Oregon. Perhaps the nearby Blue Mountains cast some benign field of energy, perhaps the town sits in the center of a sort of Bermuda Triangle here in the wilds of Eastern Oregon, and maybe it is simply that I always get here exhausted….

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It was an interesting juxtaposition of concerts for me this past weekend.

On Saturday, the Surrey Mozart Players returned for our second visit to the Menuhin Hall. Our concert last year was the source of grave trepidation because we had no idea if our regular audience would follow us there and it is a very expensive hall. However, we got a decent crowd and the orchestra so enjoyed the venue we decided to return. This year we took a tiny bit of a chance on repertoire, unknown Kodaly and Haydn, who should be box-office but usually isn’t, to balance out the ever-popular Schumann Piano Concerto (which shouldn’t be popular but is, in spite of the fact that it is so inward looking).

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UPCOMING CONCERT-

Lancashire Chamber Orchestra

Sunday, January 20, 2009

7:30 PM

Altrincham Grammar School for Girls

Mozart- Overture to “Die Zauberflote”

Beethoven- Piano Concerto no. 4 in G major

Ivan Hovorum, piano

Beethoven- Symphony no 5 in C minor

Thoughts from Ken-

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I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time, as I think it’s probably a useful thing (based on my experience of seeing some very gifted people shoot themselves in the foot) to go on record with some tips for soloists who want to have long and successful careers. I’ve hesitated a bit because I didn’t want to write too soon after working with anyone who might think I was writing this as a reaction to their work!

Also, any number of my most valued colleagues will quickly recognize one or two things on this list that they don’t do, so the first rule is this—fun collaborations are the name of the game. If you play well and are easy to work with, nothing else really matters.

I tend to work with a lot of very bright young soloists who are bravely out there trying to make it in a brutally competitive field. What I fear is that some of them are making mistakes they don’t know about- what a pity that one would spend all those years practicing to lose opportunities for lack of common sense. I realize some of this may sound condescending in print- my apologies in advance! 

Readers may recognize a great deal of this post if they studied with Dorothy Delay. I’m not really her biggest fan on a musical level, but nobody understood the business better, and I learned a lot from watching her coach young soloists for many years at Aspen and Cincinnati.

So, how to be a soloist in 11 easy steps….

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How could it take me so long to stumble upon this gem in the New York Times- “A Little More Sweat, Maestro.” ?

Who is the sweatiest conductor? Answer below! (Photo assembly from the New York Times)

It has long been postulated that the aerobic benefits of conducting were the key factor in the unusually long lives and careers of conductors like Monteux, Stowkowski, Wand and Sanderling. My own feeling is that once you know what it takes to develop a really first rate and long-lasting career, you wouldn’t let something as pedestrian as death stop you working.

But, I can certainly testify that for me, conducting, especially big repertoire, is a workout. An Elgar, Sibelius or Mahler symphony is bound to be exhausting and calorie burning work….

My favourite quote from the Times piece is this on the merits of “conductorcise-”

“And it is low impact and requires no skill, making it easy for people who are older, very overweight or chair bound.”

I doubt you’d find many orchestra musicians who disagree with that…

Sweating maestros is a topic one can discourse on at length. I sweat a lot in concerts and some in rehearsals, which actually puts me in the moderate-to-light sweating end of the conductor/perspiration continuum. [Venue is important- I always feel totally dehydrated after an evening in Guildford’s Electric Theatre, and I might has well have done the Sahara run as conduct the Wilmslow Symphony in Wilmslow Leisure Centre last month. My suit could have driven itself home after that concert]. There are some conductors who begin to sweat from every pore the second they open a score, conductors who cannot rehearse without a towel(s), conductors who regularly splatter the front desks of the strings in every rehearsal. If your principals are bringing umbrellas to rehearsal, try less coffee beforehand. Most conductors wear black to rehearsal for two reasons- it makes the baton easier to see, and doesn’t change color when soaked with sweat. I would say that more than half of professional conductors change shirts at the break in rehearsals.

Without doubt, London musicians have the most interesting and broadminded takes on conductor sweating. I recently heard one of the major London orchestras referring to a very famous and sweaty conductor as “the self-basting pig” a cruel, but cruelly funny nickname. Of course, the maestro would be deeply hurt to learn this, but could take comfort in the fact that his career choice, which “is low impact and requires no skill, making it easy for people who are older, very overweight or chair bound,” means he’ll be racking up lovely fees when they’re all in their early graves….

Answer- This is tough competition- three of my favorite conductors. Although David Robertson is shining the most brightly in this picture array, research has shown that James Conlon sweats just a little more than his peers in this lineup. None of them is on the extreme end of the perspiration spectrum (and Abado sweats less since his cancer problems caused him to become economical in his approach), although Conlon may enhance his sweating performance by being the only maestro in Cincinnati who had his own espresso machine in the dressing room.

In rehearsals, the orchestra had sounded like Jaguar fresh from a tune up- all effortless perfect handling, pure power and explosive speed, and the night was a glamorous one, with one of the great living pianists waiting in the wings for Mozart and Ravel concerti. The usually slightly-too-large hall was packed to capacity.

In those days the orchestra was still hungry, with everything to prove to the slightly more famous ensembles to the North and South, but we knew we could keep up- especially in this repertoire. We were hungry.

The crowd fell silent as the lights came down and the extra 800 or so in attendance gave that first bit of applause at the entrance of the concertmaster an extra bit of depth and power that you could feel sat on the stage. After a long-ish tuning, we fell silent and the maestro let that silence settle into delicious expectation for a moment before entering. I think even the old ladies in the top balcony could have heard that tiny, discreet squeak of the stage door opening and the first footfall of the conductor onto the stage floor.

The auditorium erupted- this was his crowd, he owned the room, and they welcomed him like a hero. Across the stage in what seemed like three steps, he hopped onto the stage and in a moment lifted his hands and gave an up beat- he hadn’t warned us, but we knew to expect the unexpected and were ready, and in one glorious whoosh, we unleashed the torrid opening of Strauss’s Don Juan.

You could almost sense the “wow” in the audience. There are nights when it feels like the audience is clapping during the piece even when they’re silent, when you can feel the ebb and flow of their energy, feel the effort they are making not to cheer.

Our MD could be counted on for a very Italiante Don Juan, and the many urban legends about his own escapades with the ladies only added another wrinkle. Don Juan’s theme out of the way in a single breath, we moved from seduction to seduction, adventure to adventure in ever higher style. Another conductor down the road used to say that maestro had mojo coming out of his mojo, and in this kind of music, it was particularly true.

The orchestra was in the zone, which has a way of making time bend. Like the great baseball hitters who say that on a good day the ball looks a foot wide and seems to be going 10 miles an hour, the treacherous first bar of the piece felt like a slow rehearsal- we all felt like we had plenty of time to grab his upbeat, breathe, look at the concertmaster, place the bow and spring into action with eyes, ears and brains all in synch. Then, as the piece goes and we hit our stride, it is as if time begins to telescope. Minutes feel like seconds, and whole episodes feel like a single phrase. The piece flashes by as if in a dream- there’s no time to be nervous, no time to make mistakes.

All too soon we’re in the amazing, decadent world of the coda- “Out, then, and away after ever-new victories as long as the fiery ardors of youth still soar!” cries Lenau’s Don, and so to do we onstage.

Then comes the moment when, having generated the storm of all storms, “a beautiful storm that drives me on,” the music suddenly stops on a dime- expectant silence hangs in the air. We all look up, unblinking. Three counts- boom, wait, ONE! then a last statement of the opening theme.

But wait, what do we see?!?!? Time bends again and we can see the maestro has forgotten something. Rather than releasing his arm into a neutral, passive flow after BOOM for the “wait” he’s immediately reloading the energy. Oh god…. Is he…

There it is— boom, TWO!

“…but we knew to expect the unexpected and were ready…”

With one mind and one set of eyes the entire string section responds in perfect synchronization to the maestro’s flub. We play those first seven notes with the same effortless ease as the very opening, all that remains is for the woodwinds and brass to join us on the half note and take it home.

And here, disaster strikes. The woodwinds have seen what has happened and joined us at the top of our run, but the brass have just kept counting. They enter on the original schedule, a beat behind the rest of the orchestra. It is impossible to describe the sound that ensues. Suffice it say that it’s greatest merit was it’s brevity. Finally, “it has subsided, and a calm has remained behind.” Yes, a calm, but not calm.

“All my desires and hopes are in suspended animation; perhaps a lightning bolt, from heights that I contemned, mortally struck my amorous powers, and suddenly my world became deserted and benighted.”

Never in any of our careers has a G.P. been so welcomed. Maestro holds it an impossibly long time, waiting for the tremor in his baton to stop. Just before he brings us back in, he mutters the only word I’ve ever head a conductor speak in mid-concert…

“Shit….”

We resume our doomed tread to the double bar, hoping that we may yet salvage something of the evening.

“And yet, perhaps no— the fuel is consumed and the hearth has become cold and dark.”

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods 

I’m just grabbing a bite of tasy polenta before my final recital rehearsal this afternoon.

After about 40hours in transit, I finally made it to Pendleton yesterday morning, fresh as a daisy. Nipped up to the office and grabbed my axe and managed a tidy 45 minutes of personal practice before hopping in the car for Tri Cities.

Sheila and I were rehearsing the rather enormous church she works at. It’s a nice piano and things sound impressive in there when you walk through the sanctuary, but I’d completely forgotten that there is a horrendous dead spot right where the piano sits. As if my poor brain didn’t have enough to cope with, it seemed to take about 25 minutes to get used to the feeling that my sound was coming from down the hall….

In any case, rarely have four hours flown by so quickly, and we didn’t even play the whole program. I then stumbled back down to Pendleton, arriving just before rehearsal with the orchestra, but in time to read some memos on my desk. I’m a pretty chilled out guy, in my opinion, but one thing I read really sent me over the edge of despair. I try to look at all things work related as solvable problems, and I’m sure this all was, but I was not pleased to have the aggravation of  something that I knew would not be conducive to a good night’s sleep.

Beethoven 8- what can I say???? We’ve got serious work to do, but damn do I love that piece.

Sure enough, woke up grouchy from the memo and with my back giving me extensive and specific feed back on it’s impression of the value of intercontinental travel. Coffee in hand, I finally got behind the cello and tried to start lining things up. I always find that the first day back from being out of shape or the first day on a new cello is the easiest because you’re mostly working on instinct. Day two is usually tougher, and the first few minutes were a bit frustrating to be sure, but after about half an hour of long tones and thinking about the art of sitting, things came around. The rest of the morning flew by.

It’s one of the many ironies of my life that giving up the cello, or at least setting it aside to conduct, has made me love playing it, and probably made me play it better than I can remember.

I’m expecting a few fouls to be sure, but recitals are wasted on our student years, when we’re all too insecure and stressed out to enjoy it…. Show time is 7:30 at the Pendleton Art Center. Tix a the door, and receipts all go to musician compensation for the band.

Show time is 7:30 at the Pendleton Art Center. Tix a the door, and receipts all go to musician compensation for the band.

Speaking of bands… They were just playing one of my favorite Doobie Brothers tracks on the stereo here. Back in the 70’s, the Doobies were  considered a pretty good band. If they were at their peak now, they’d look like the greatest band of our times…. I wanna play some funky dixieland, pretty mama, gonna take me by the hand…. I mean, what more can you say?

From the “life’s little hassles” file….

Just as I was posting my last blog, I looked up and saw the last thing any weary traveler wants to see AFTER a trans-Atlantic, which is “flight cancelled” next to the last leg of your journey….

I’m a little bummed out, but it could have been worse. The earliest they could have gotten me to Tri Cities was tomorrow at 11:30. The problem was that I had a rehearsal in Tri Cities at 11, and my cello is in Pendleton, which is 70 minutes away. To get in to the airport, drive to Pendleton and back to Richland would have meant completely missing the rehearsal which is our only working rehearsal for this recital other than the run through in the hall tomorrow.

Shit….

In the end, I got them to re-route me to Portland tonight and on to Pendleton at 7:30 tomorrow. I’ll make the rehearsal, but will have lost the time tonight to get reacquainted with my US cello. It’ll probably be straight in with Sheila.

Pianists change instruments all the time, but string players almost never. If pianists had to cope with intonation, they’d be a lot more neurotic than they already are (god, there’s a thought….).

Anyway, I don’t mean to whinge, but why does everything always have to come down to the wire?!?!!?!?!?

For those young conductors out there… Word to the wise- it’s just as important to know the airline schedules as your scores. The agents did not seem to know about this possibility until I told them about it….

It also seems a bit perverse to make a trip to Portland that doesn’t involve seeing any of my friends, drinking any beer with said friends, or offer the possibility of Stump Town coffee in the morning. 

Let just hope the flight tomorrow goes on time. 

There are plenty more books to be written about musicians and pain. It’s easy to forget when you see people on stage in penguin suits and evening gowns that music is a form of athletics, and your body can take a beating.

I’ve been comparatively lucky with pain over the years. I had a spot of tendonitis my first year in college caused by trying to change everything about my playing while practicing five times as much as I ever had. Since then, I’ve been lucky to have very body-wise teachers, especially Lee Fiser, who was a genius in teaching body awareness.

Some of my friends have not been so lucky, and the medical establishment is often painfully under-equipped to deal with the injuries musicians suffer. As a result, I’ve seen many friends and colleagues get bad advice early in the onset of physical problems which meant that things continued to get worse, sometimes, tragically, to the point of being career ending. I’ve also seen a few friends go through some truly ghastly surgical procedures, not to get back to playing, but just to be able to brush their teeth without pain.

For some years, my one area of concern has been my back. Cello playing can take a toll on tall guys when we sit in chairs that are too short, and it’s easy to twist your torso a bit. In my case, my early years in rock bands meant way too much reckless heavy lifting, so I’ve had a an intermittently recurring back injury for about 15 years.

Back problems for conductors are not to be trifled with, because when standing and waving your arms, your core muscles are put under a lot of stress. Karajan had such terrible back trouble for the last 12 years of his life (following a skiing accident) that he told his biographer that his tombstone should read “he died in great pain.” Celibidache had similar problems late in his career, while Mikko Franck has been confined to conducting in a chair since about 19 years of age because of a spine condition.

Fortunately, my back injury was never anything like that. It was something that would flare up about 3-4 times a year for a week- I’d be uncomfortable, occasionally miserable, but functional.

Last night I felt it coming on again, and, although I was not pleased, I was not panicked. After so many years, something like this becomes something you are accustomed to working through. By bedtime, however, I was concerned that it was probably the most acute discomfort I’d ever had from this. Then, around 4 AM I woke up in back spasms. Really, short of childbirth, kidney stones and having your arm ripped off by a blunt-toothed Bengal tiger, I can’t imagine anything more painful. Within an hour I was in such misery that I called Northwest to see if I could change my flight- because this is pre-existing condition, my travel insurance doesn’t cover it, and I thought it likely I would need medical care.

It took me about 90 minutes of struggle to get out of bed so I could wake my host to ask him to get the ibuprofen out of my suitcase- there was not question of my bending over for it. With those ingested, I decided to walk around the block and see if anything loosened up. I was reminded of Tim Roth’s performance in Reservoir Dogs- the sort of gurgling/screamtalking/moaning sound he makes throughout that film was something I always thought was cool but not realistic, until I heard my self making it over and over today.  In my 5 AM condition, I couldn’t have traveled anywhere without help, my hope was that with a few pills and a stretch I might either able to get myself on a flight home to Cardiff, which meant canceling our concert this week, or perhaps even tough out the gig. I’ve never missed a conducting gig for illness or injury, including checking myself out of a hospital in 2001 just to conduct a concert, but I couldn’t have conducted this morning to save my life.

As the morning progressed, the Portland network kicked in and I was able to get an appointment with a respected osteopath. His manipulation didn’t seem to help much, in fact I partially blacked out standing up from the exam table, but he prescribed bountiful quantities of pain killers, muscle relaxants and homeopathic remedies. He’s at least cleared me of a slipped disc or anything spinal, but I would still seriously swap this feeling for the Bengal tiger experience. Once this blog post is up, the plan is to try to sleep all day then hope the pills will get me through rehearsal.

The doc was sweetly concerned that I might not be musically at my best on a maximum dose of muscle relaxants, but that’s a chance I’ll have to take. I do have fond memories of playing for David Zinman when he was doped up for kidney stones- it was the only week I’ve ever seen him be uniformly pleasant with people…..

Anyway, watch this space….

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

A few things I’m smiling about this week-

1-       Any time you can do Haydn symphonies in consecutive weeks, life is good. How is it that the even the classical music world doesn’t seem to realize just what a badass he was! His music is never what it seems- the simpler it sounds, the more ingenious it is. This week it is no. 59, the Fire Symphony. Nobody seems to know why it’s called the Fire Symphony, but we needed a fire symphony for the opening concert of our fiery symphony. My current plan is to make up a blatantly false story about the work for my pre-concert lecture. Attention world, musicological fraud is being planned even as these words are written

2-       Pendleton is place you can get things fixed. This town has the best tailor on the planet- someone who can fix anything, not just do the easy and profitable jobs. We also have a great leatherworks master craftsman named Claud Smith. His shop burned down in the fire last year, but he’s back in business and is currently working on my briefcase, which nobody in the UK seemed able to fix.

3-       Our principal percussionist and stage manger John continues to be a mensch. Having decided the orchestral sleigh bells sounded too much like Leroy Anderson, he’s gotten actual sleigh bells from an ACTUAL SLEIGH. They’re covered in horse hair and about 100 years old from the look of it, but they sound fantastic, and look way cooler than the bells on a stick you usually get.

4-       My long-suffering Pendleton cello is really playing well now, almost as good as ever and is completely recovered from the crappy repair job done on it last winter. I’m making myself a promise to play a lot more cello in my next decade than I did in this one.

This reminds me- a cellist in New Mexico emailed me last week asking for help with artificial harmonics. My advice- don’t ever play a piece with artificial harmonics!

Seriously, here’s what we’re all told about these when we first come across them… “You play the lower-notated pitch by pressing down firmly with your thumb, then touch the upper pitch, usually a fourth above, lightly with your fourth finger.” Here’s my trick….. Ignore everything they taught you. Play the lower pitch with your thumb as lightly as possible. If you use the fleshy part of the thumb, you don’t need to even push the string to the fingerboard. Then, don’t be too tickly with your fourth finger- make sure it’s wedded to a clear spot on the string. So, rather than a thumb that’s 100% down and a fourth finger that’s %1 down, go for a thumb that’s 51% down and a fourth finger that’s maybe %30 down. You’ll find you can shift much more easily and the hand doesn’t get tired and shake. Also, make sure your right wrist isn’t cocked back but straight so that the fourth finger doesn’t have to stretch.

Sorry non-cellists. Boring stuff!

What is making me not smile?

1-       The rather good new coffee house at Hamley’s (NOT as good as the old, incinerated Coffee Bean, and not nearly as good as Stump Town in Portland) has taken to playing god-awful corpo-country music very loudly all day, every day. Background “music,” how do I hate thee…..

2-       The keg of TG at one of the few places in town that serves it is off and probably won’t be changed before I go. People- I only get this beer for a few precious weeks every year!

3-       Schirmer…. 

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

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