I’ve always been fascinated by the varied intersections of music and technology – some (potentially) successful, some less so.
This one definitely goes into the former category. Those of you who skip over these tech-heavy blog posts, please don’t skip the opportunity to check this out. For one of the most interesting interactive experiences, click here to go to “The Wilderness Downtown”, an interactive film featuring the track “We Used to Wait” by one of my favorite bands, Arcade Fire.
I really, really encourage you to spend the 4 minutes doing this little bit of of interactive online art, because I think it’s extraordinarily well done. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, and you’ll be impressed, even if Arcade Fire isn’t your kind of music (I think they’re fabulous, but, hey, chacun a son gout.)
Did you do it? A pretty complete and beautifully done interactive experience, huh?
For those of you who don’t have 4 minutes, here’s what happens; essentially, you enter the address of your childhood home, which then, using images from Google Earth, becomes a part of the music video. A figure runs through an anonymous landscape which become interspersed with pictures of your childhood abode, from above and from street view.
Two thirds of the way in, you have the opportunity to write a postcard to your younger self (while the music and other video components are still running). But the interactivity doesn’t end there, as you then have the chance to “send” your postcard, which then may be printed on the Wilderness machine (website), appear in the tour background visuals for Arcade Fire, or be sent to another Wilderness Downtown user at random. And you can respond to that random postcard you receive.
So what’s been created here? Certainly an interactive artistic experience in which something dear to you (your childhood home) is interpolated into a music video, which creates an immediate emotional experience for the viewer (and it doesn’t matter if your childhood home elicits positive or negative memories – there’s bound to be an emotional response either way).
Then interactivity is taken to another level by asking you to write this postcard to “your younger self” (which essentially is asking you to share an insight), which you have the option of sharing with the Wilderness Machine community at large (connecting with those who share your interests – in this case, Arcade Fire. Or really cool videos in general). And then, the final touch, that postcard could be shared with thousands (by being projected during a live show) or with an individual (randomly selected), who may choose to respond to you (opening up a dialogue).
By my count, this project covers all the touchstones of a successful intersection of art and technology – the inclusion of a whole lot of people, the emotional response, the personal connection, the creation of and communication within a community. I find that many creative solo artists and indie bands have found unique and tangible ways to include their fans in their artistic process.
How can we translate this kind of 21st century-think to the symphony orchestra business??
The Times of London has the words I lacked four days ago. Their website is behind a paywall, so I can’t link you to the review. Ordinarily, I respect paywalls, but since most of you reading this couldn’t buy a copy of The Times if you wanted to, I’m reprinting Hilary Finch’s review of Prom 57 below…
Prom 57: Minnesota Orchestra/Vänskä at the Albert Hall
Hilary Finch
Last updated August 31 2010
What a stamping and a stomping and a whistling. The Prommers simply wouldn’t let the Minnesota Orchestra go. This was the second of their sold-out pair of Proms, and close to 6,000 punters wanted it to go on for ever. Hundreds in the audience will have known Osmo Vänskä’s take on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Minnesotans through their best-selling Beethoven cycle on CD, so there was an air of expectation. Nothing, though, can ever prepare a listener for the dizzying momentum of the first movement, when a conductor such as Vänskä is energising the orchestra with his entire body and honing the cutting edge of the musical argument until it all but draws blood. And then, with the tip of his baton, drawing out the finest thread of an oboe or clarinet line which, somehow, you’d never heard before.
The Minnesotans’ pride in Vänskä and in themselves is now palpable. And when this fuses with a conductor’s long-considered yet ever self-regenerating understanding of a score, then the air is electric. The second movement all but levitated in its cosmic dance, minutely held back here and there to touch on a moment of cosmic earthiness. And in the Adagio molto cantabile, song led easefully and inevitably to the oratory of the finale, with the bass Neal Davies reawakening the music to joy. Not a hint of sententiousness here, nor in the following long lines of arioso: Vänskä kept every instrumental voice on a taut rein.
When the BBC Symphony Chorus finally burst out, their every syllable was sharply marked. Vänskä treated the voices very much as orchestral forces: no mouthing of words from the podium, for this was not, for once, word-led. Rather, the chorus propelled and upheld the swirling, stratospheric voices of a particularly well-matched vocal quartet, with Davies joined by Eric Cutler, Charlotte Hellekant, and Helena Juntenen.
Earlier, Gil Shaham made a swift and welcome return to the Proms after his Barber Concerto, to substitute for an indisposed Lisa Batiashvili in a sentient and beautifully shaped performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto.
I have only three things to add:
1) I took special note of the fact that, rather than yelling “Bravo!” at the conclusion of a great performance, the Brits seem to favor “Hurrah!” and I like it. A lot. Can we get behind this, Minnesota? I want to hear some hurrahs this fall.
2) Many of us in the orchestra were perplexed when the BBC Symphony Chorus was summoned to the stage for the first half of the concert, which consisted solely of Gil Shaham’s rendition of the Berg Concerto. Asking around at intermission, I was told that the chorus was onstage for this decidedly non-choral piece for the sole reason that they’d asked to to be there. Apparently, the chorus members who had listened to our rehearsal with Gil on Saturday morning had been so taken with his playing that they simply had to experience the live performance.
3) Finch’s description of the ovation we received at the end of this concert is entirely accurate, and four days later, I still haven’t gotten over it. The Prommers were so, so good to us on both nights of our weekend stand at the Albert Hall, and in particular, I found myself captivated by a woman in the front row of the standing room mosh pit on Saturday night. She was roughly my age (mid-30s,) wearing jeans and a pink t-shirt, and I think that she and the man she was with must have been friends with one of the Proms’ most easily recognized regulars, since he had willingly shifted over from his usual dead center front row position to accommodate them. She was utterly engrossed in the music from beginning to end, and obviously knew the Ninth well enough to anticipate the big moments - her eyes would close and her head would fall back just before each explosion of chorus and orchestra – and she was a joy to watch as I sawed away at my part. When we laid into the very last orchestral tutti at the end of the Finale, there were visible tears in her eyes, and within a bar or two, there were tears in mine as well, which I just managed to blink back before my stand partner could see them during our curtain call.
It was a special night in a very special city, and I’m glad Hilary Finch was there to find the words I couldn’t. And no, this isn’t the post on touring press that I promised this morning. Stay tuned…
For our hardworking staff and stage crew, tours are essentially an exercise in waiting for something to go horribly wrong. A cargo truck transporting our instruments and wardrobe trunks from one city to another could have an accident. A musician could absent-mindedly leave her passport in her violin case and then put her case in the cargo trunk (despite the numerous reminders throughout our schedule books reading “NEVER PACK YOUR PASSPORT.”) Or something even more unforeseen could occur at any given moment, requiring an emergency scramble by the people whose responsibility it is to get us from place to place on these trips.
The last day of our tour really was all about the support staff. Yes, we played a concert at Amsterdam’s near-acoustically-perfect Concertgebouw, and yes, it seemed to go awfully well. But to write about that would definitely be burying the lead. So instead, I’m going to write about the day that Beth Kellar-Long, Kris Arkis, Kari Marshall, Leah Mohling, Mele Willis, Michael Pelton and Bob Neu had.
For Beth, our operations manager, the day began with a 3:30am wakeup call. This was actually planned – one member of our tour staff always flies ahead of the larger group to each new stop, there to gather room keys, schedule changes, and hotel information for everyone in order to expedite the check-in process. This staffer will also add newly published reviews and any important information we need to know to a large easel that gets set up backstage at each new venue we come to. The easel also holds seating charts, rehearsal orders, and all the info that we’re used to seeing backstage at Orchestra Hall. On this tour, it also held two separate announcements that a member of the tour party was leaving the tour immediately due to a death in the family. (One of those leaving was our lead stage manager, Tim Eickholt, so the crew was already working a man short, with assistant manager Gail Reich stepping into the lead role.)
Beth was on a plane to Amsterdam by 7am, three hours ahead of the rest of us. About 15 minutes earlier, personnel manager Leah Mohling had stationed herself in the lobby of our Edinburgh hotel to begin collecting luggage from each member of the tour party. This would be sorted into color-coded groups and loaded onto buses for the trip to the airport. By the time we reached our Amsterdam hotel several hours later, things appeared to be running as smoothly as ever. They weren’t.
The trouble began when a member of the tour party forgot that our procedure at airports is to collect our luggage as it’s unloaded from the bus we rode in on, then check it ourselves before proceeding to the gate. By the time it was discovered that she had left all her stuff on the curb and proceeded through security with just her hand baggage, our staff had almost no time to recover it. They managed to locate and check the forgotten bags in time for the flight, but in the rush, several other members of the orchestra didn’t get checked in for the charter to Amsterdam in time for their bags to be loaded. So right off the bat, someone was going to have to spend a large part of the afternoon tracking the luggage that would have to come in on a later flight, keeping in mind that a) there aren’t a whole lot of direct flights between Edinburgh and Amsterdam, and b) most of us were only going to be in Amsterdam for about 20 hours, and some of us would be there for a whole lot less than that.
Speaking of which, I think I mentioned that not all of us would be playing the Concertgebouw concert. Since the repertoire for this last night of the tour (Mozart’s A Major Violin Concerto and Beethoven’s 7th Symphony) requires a less than full-sized orchestra, arrangements had been made to send 9 or 10 musicians home directly after we arrived in Amsterdam. One of those making an immediate connection for Minneapolis was our principal trombone, Doug Wright. Now, Doug’s a family man, so naturally, he’d been picking up little souvenirs to bring home to the kids as he traveled. One of those souvenirs, as it happened, was a replica of an old World War II machine gun bullet strung on a necklace.
I should pause at this point to make it abundantly clear that Doug is not an idiot. He was well aware of what airport security was likely to think of a bullet on a string, and had every intention of disclosing it immediately and asking what the best course of action for getting the souvenir back to America might be. Still, since the bullet was not a real bullet, and was hollow inside, he would have preferred not to put it in his checked bag if possible, lest it get crushed en route.
So, upon arrival in Amsterdam (the bullet made it that far without incident,) Doug cleared passport control, retrieved his bag, and went to check in for his Delta flight home. Holding up the bullet to the person at the check-in counter, he asked, “Is this going to be a problem if I have it in my carry-on?” No problem at all, he was assured.
It was at the gate that things went south. After completing the usual security interview (which is always quite thorough in Amsterdam,) Doug’s bag was pulled off the X-ray line for additional search. Upon discovering the bullet, the security apparatus more or less swung into Defcon 1 mode. It was pointy, Doug was told, and that makes it dangerous. Also, for all they knew, Doug could be some sort of terrorist MacGyver, capable of fashioning a crude gun out of in-flight magazines and crushed pop cans. Or something.
Yeah, whatever. Can he play trombone?
Doug, being a non-idiot, immediately recognized the futility of argument, and told the security team to go ahead and confiscate the bullet, so that he could get on the plane. No, no, he was told. At this stage, they were required to get “the military” involved. I kid you not. And please note that this occurred several hours beforethose two guys were arrested at Schiphol.
“The military,” as it turned out, consisted of several very large men in fatigues carrying extremely large guns (actual guns, not the kind Doug was plotting to construct from magazines and pop cans to fire his fake bullet and destroy America.) They arrived forty minutes later and began a whole new round of questioning. By the time they were through, Doug had missed his flight. Returning to the check-in counter to rebook, he was told that there would be a “changing fee,” but seeing the look of commingled shock and rage on his face, the agent hurriedly said, “But I’ll waive that in this case.” Doug was booked on a flight leaving the following morning, just ahead of the rest of us. I’m not clear on who paid his hotel bill for the night.
It was roughly around this time that violinist Julie Ayer had her purse snatched on one of the trams that run throughout central Amsterdam. Her passport was in the purse. Julie had brought her husband Carl (a retired MN Orch violinist) on the tour, and they were planning to spend a few days in Belgium after the final concert. Once again, the tour staff were sent scrambling to find a way to get Julie a new, expedited passport. (It was very fortunate that this happened in a city with an American Embassy, where they have the apparatus to handle such emergencies.) Again, nothing our people don’t know how to deal with, but when you’re trying to maneuver 120 people around a foreign continent, every little crisis sets you back a few hours.
As a final insult added to injury, our staff couldn’t even afford to relax once we were on site for the concert, since the Concertgebouw is such a confusing maze of corridors and staircases that we needed staffers at nearly every turn to direct us to our wardrobes, instrument trunks, dressing rooms, and the stage. (The maze is so disorienting that even the staff were briefly fooled – violist Richard Marshall and I followed a set of signs directing us to stage left, only to find ourselves emerging onto the floor at stage right.)
Somehow, though, they all got through it, and remarkably, Beth Kellar-Long was still awake and vertical when I reached our hotel bar about an hour after the concert. (By the way, if you ever find yourself at the Schiphol Hilton, you should be aware that a Jameson on the rocks will run you a solid €8,75 ($11.20), and that they won’t tell you this until after they’ve poured it.) In fact, the whole tour staff was there, enjoying a well-earned decompression from a truly hellish day on the job. And the really remarkable thing about it all is that most of us in the orchestra could well have made it through the entire day without having the slightest inkling that anything was amiss. That’s the sign of a seriously great staff.
I’ll have one more post about the tour later in the week, addressing the one aspect of things I’ve been deliberately avoiding – the press. But for now, I’m just happy to be home, and looking forward to getting reacquainted with the State Fair…
This is going to be a quick post, because it’s been a very long couple of days, and quite honestly, I need a drink. But despite my blatant attempt to jinx tonight’s concert, we all made it to Edinburgh on time and, after grabbing a bite wherever we could each find one, gathered at the stunningly beautiful Usher Hall for a quick touch-up rehearsal. Touch-ups are just 30 minutes long, and end only 45 minutes before the concert begins. They’re not meant for heavy work, just for fixing spots that have gotten rusty, or clarifying passages that we haven’t been unified on in a previous concert.
That, at least, is what touch-ups are for on a normal tour, where we play much of the same music from night to night, all of it well-rehearsed. But as I mentioned last week, this is no kind of normal tour. It’s short, yes, but every single night so far has consisted of completely different repertoire, with the exception of the Barber we’re leading off with. And though we put in a lot of hours at home a couple of weeks back getting the music in our fingers, that was many, many days ago now. So our touch-up rehearsals are more like mad scrambles to relearn how a soloist plays a particular passage, or who we should be listening for at some exact moment in one of the symphonies.
We’re a little underrehearsed, is what I’m saying, and yet, for the last few nights, the slight terror that comes with knowing you aren’t 100% sure of what’s going to happen next has been working pretty well for us! Beethoven 9 absolutely sizzled last night in London, despite the fact that (I kid you not) we basically only had time to rehearse the last movement on the day of the concert. Tonight, Alisa Weilerstein’s Elgar concerto was the piece we were sweating – it’s full of rubato and dramatic tempo shifts, and it can be hard to hear the soloist from within the orchestra and again, there was a large chunk of it that we just didn’t have time to rehearse tonight. But in concert, I thought it came off beautifully, thanks mainly to the fact that Alisa is just a beacon of confidence up there. Following a soloist is a lot easier when that soloist enjoys leading the way, and she obviously does.
Technically, Beethoven’s 7th was underrehearsed, too, in the sense that we haven’t actually played the whole thing through since Winona, back in July. But that piece is very much our calling card at this point, in our fingers the way English is in our mouths, so there was no need to worry what would happen on the second half. It was just ready, aim, fire, and watch the sparks fly. The crowd at Usher, in addition to being unusually attentive, was visibly involved in the performance, and I saw one young woman in the third row tear up several times at the power of the music. The sold-out house brought Osmo out for five curtain calls, and we played our encore – a somewhat obscure Slavonic Dance by Dvorak – for the first time on the tour.
We’ve got an early morning ahead of us tomorrow – a 7am luggage drop in our hotel lobby, followed by a 10am flight to Amsterdam, where a few musicians will head immediately for home while the rest of us check into our hotel and get ready for another touch-up rehearsal at the Concertgebouw. Hard to say what we’ll feel uneasy about in tomorrow’s concert, but you can bet there’ll be something.
By the way, this is likely the last you’ll hear from me until we’re back stateside later in the week. I’m not expecting to buy Internet access in Amsterdam (free hotspots don’t abound in Europe like they do in the US) and it’s likely I’ll be too busy to write in any case. But I’ll post some sort of overall wrap-up once I’m back home…
I don’t really have words for it right now, which I think we can all agree is unusual for me. Let’s just say that it was a night to remember, and I hope you had the chance to listen in. If not, the BBC’s got you covered here and here with an archived stream of our second Proms concert in as many days, which will be available until next Saturday. I haven’t listened to it, myself. I may never do. For now, the memory is enough.
I’ll try to have some coherent thoughts later, most likely after our Edinburgh Fest show tomorrow night. But, as Osmo would say, no guar-antee. I’m not sure I’ll ever have words for what this night meant to me.
Late Update, September 1: A UK critic found the words for me. They’re here…
You know that feeling, when you’re concentrating deeply on the task at hand, really focusing hard, and then suddenly a rogue thought, completely unrelated to what you’re doing, jumps into your head and refuses to leave? Like maybe you’re watching your kid perform in the school play, and just before his big moment in the spotlight, your brain chimes in with, “Did you let the dog out? No? Great. He’s probably peeing on the carpet as we speak.” It’s an unsettling feeling – nothing you can do about it but let it sit and fester while you finish whatever it was you were about.
So, anyway, last night, we were midway through the scherzo of Bruckner’s 4th at the Royal Albert Hall. Things had been going pretty well thus far in our first Proms concert (Prom 56, in the BBC’s parlance) – Alisa Weilerstein had torn up the Shostakovich concerto, and obliged the cheering audience with a vigorous Bach encore, and Bruckner was sailing right along – and then, just as I finished a run of triplet arpeggios and brought my viola down to my knee, it hit me. The tickets. The two free passes that had been set aside for me as a thank-you for doing the BBC’s pre-concert Proms Plus event, and which I had promised to collect from the box office and hand to Dolly and Chris just outside the stage door at 7pm sharp. Those tickets.
I had utterly forgotten about them.
There was nothing I could do at that point, of course, and as if to give me a bit of extra time to contemplate my idiocy, the universe arranged for one of principal cello Tony Ross’s strings to snap just as we were finishing the scherzo, and rather than go on without him, Osmo turned to the crowd and announced that Tony, who always has spare strings with him onstage since he breaks an unusual number of them, would just be taking a moment to change one, and they should talk amongst themselves. I slumped in my seat, and tried desperately to scan the massive hall for Dolly and Chris. Since I didn’t even know where my reserve seats were located, it was futile.
Tony had his string replaced in short order, and the Bruckner was back underway. The brass were in excellent form – trombones in particular, from where I was sitting - and what sometimes seems like a slightly overwrought finale sailed past in relatively short order. The audience’s applause was nothing overly rapturous at first, but it built and built, until the whole room was stamping and clapping in time, demanding an encore.
Now, we are carrying a single encore on this tour, but it’s unlikely that we’ll use it much. The three symphonies we’re playing are all barnburners, tough acts to follow, and in most situations, you wouldn’t want to cheapen the impact of something as weighty as Beethoven’s 9th or Bruckner’s 4th with a showy display. And even with the crowd bringing Osmo out for a fifth bow, we’d been instructed by the BBC that tonight was not the night for an encore in any case – it had been a long program, well over two hours, and the Beeb really is the final authority on what gets played at their festival. So Osmo took his bow, then grabbed concertmaster Sarah Kwak’s hand and led her off the stage. It’s actually a great feeling, leaving an audience wanting more. The BBC knows what they’re doing.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, my friends, who are clearly as resourceful as I am forgetful, met me at the stage door after the concert. After several attempts, they’d managed to pick up the tickets that had been left in my name and make it into the hall for the bulk of the concert. Phew.
We’re back at it this morning with what will probably be a frantic rehearsal of Beethoven 9. We’ll be meeting the BBC Chorus for the first time (Osmo’s been working with them for several days,) and re-acquainting ourselves with Gil Shaham and his dazzling Berg concerto. Then, in the afternoon, it’s off to London’s Fulham neighborhood for me and two other violists, there to witness an honest-to-God English Premier League match between Chelsea and Stoke City. I’m told that we’re sitting in the visiting fans’ section, and the BBC crew I worked with yesterday warned me very seriously that not only does this mean we must avoid cheering even quietly for Chelsea, we’d better not be caught wearing blue. Duly noted. The Brits take their sport seriously.
I’ll try to get a new entry up before we depart for Edinburgh tomorrow morning, but if I can’t squeeze it in, you’ll hear from me again after our Sunday night concert. Happy weekend, Minnesota! Try to stay cool…
Addendum: Star Tribune reporter Graydon Royce has been tagging along with the tour, and he has a story in Saturday’s editions with great audience reax from last night’s concert. The accompanying photos by Strib photog Jeff Wheeler are also outstanding.
It’s another dreary morning here in London, but the unspeakably perky BBC One forecasters tell me it’s bound to clear up later today, and stay at least partially sunny for the better part of what Brits know as Bank Holiday Weekend. Not that the rain’s been preventing me from getting out and enjoying one of the world’s great cities, but it’ll be nice to stop wringing out my pant legs every time I come indoors.
Speaking of my wanderings, a friend and I happened into the unexpectedly fascinating National Portrait Gallery near Trafalgar Square last night, and were amused to be greeted in the atrium by a full bar and a DJ pumping out deliberately innocuous rock music. Apparently, UK museums have caught onto the same strategy for luring 20- and 30-somethings that the Walker Art Center employs regularly at its Walker After Hours parties, and while the Portrait Gallery gathering lacked the Walker’s impressive numbers on this particularly rainy night, those in attendance were clearly having an excellent time amid the photos and paintings of UK luminaries. (I had to stifle a laugh as I watched one particular college student, who had ignored the sign advising us to set our drinks down before entering the galleries, attempt to slam down the remainder of his cocktail before it was taken away, as he was led out of the Early Tudors room by an unfailingly polite docent.)
I’ve just got a few minutes to blog about today before heading off to our first rehearsal at the Albert Hall, which I can actually see from my hotel window, a leisurely six block walk away. I’m guessing that we’ll spend the bulk of our time on the Bruckner this morning, though we’ll probably have to save enough minutes for a nearly full run-through of Alisa Weilerstein’s Shostakovich concerto. Mainly, this rehearsal will be about re-familiarizing ourselves with the acoustics of the massive performance space, and also reconnecting with each other after nearly a full week apart. (Because of the hectic schedule of the Proms – a new orchestra every single night of the week – our stage crew couldn’t load our gear into the backstage area until early this morning, so even if we’d wanted to rehearse yesterday, there would have been nowhere for us to do so.)
Still, this kind of quick prep and instant recall is what they pay us for, and the rep on tonight’s program isn’t nearly as taxing for most of us as tomorrow night’s Berg/Beethoven 9 extravaganza will be, so we’ve got a pretty decent chance of making a good showing. After the rehearsal, I’ll dash off to central London for a quick lunch with an old college friend who practices Maritime Law in the UK these days, then dash back to the Kensington High Street to prepare for my appearance on BBC Radio this afternoon, just prior to the start of our Prom. It’ll be a hectic day, but with any luck, a memorable one.
Speaking of radio, I mentioned a few days back that both of our Proms concerts would be live on Minnesota Public Radio, and that you could also catch the pre-concert BBC broadcast online. So here, for those of you interested in listening in, is the complete list of live web streams and radio broadcasts that will be available to those of you back in the States later this morning and afternoon:
All times listed are US Central Daylight Time (UTC -6)
11:45am BBC Proms Plus Pre-Concert talk, with BBC’s Martin Handley, MPR’s Brian Newhouse, and yours truly, streaming live on BBC Radio 3’s website. The program is 45 minutes. (Excerpts of this conversation will be an intermission feature of the radio broadcast of tonight’s concert.)
1:30pm Minnesota Orchestra, live at the Proms. You can stream this from the same BBC audio player, but if you’re in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, or the Dakotas, you can catch it in HD radio quality on the classical music stations of Minnesota Public Radio. (99.5fm, KSJN in the Cities, or find your local station here.) Brian Newhouse hosts, live from the Royal Albert Hall. Program to include Barber’s Music for a Scene from Shelley, Shostakovich’s 1st Cello Concerto with Alisa Weilerstein, and Bruckner’s 4th Symphony.
The same broadcast info will apply for Saturday’s Proms performance, featuring Berg’s Violin Concerto with Gil Shaham, and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, featuring the BBC Chorus. I won’t have time to blog again until after tonight’s performance, and depending on how drained I am, I may leave it ’til tomorrow morning. But I promise some new content by the time you wake up on Saturday. (Probably not the video I was hoping for, though – internet connection here has been agonizingly slow, when it works at all…) Enjoy the concert!
Looks like Sam will be dealing with jetlag as he and the Orchestra begin their week across the pond; I’m coping with my own jetlag, having returned from a two-week visit to my mother in Hawaii this past weekend. Easing myself back into the working-from-home drill that takes up much of my summer (a lot of the planning/producing/arranging for concerts in the upcoming season takes place in the summer months), I’ve been catching up with industry news as well, including the continuing crisis at the Detroit Symphony.
The DSO contract expires on midnight Sunday, and last-minute bargaining talks are scheduled for Friday, although given the hard line that both sides have taken, hope for agreement seems slim. This particular article (and most I have read) focus on the DSO management’s “Proposal A” (which would reduce salaries by 28%, withdraw from the American Federation of Musicians’ pension plan and alter work rules by making certain non-performing duties part of the job) and the musician’s counterproposal (a 22% pay reduction, continuing with the AFM plan and a joint musicians’ committee/executive board job performance review of orchestra management.)
Neither paycut is a pretty scenario, but at least both parties seem to agree on the point that player salaries need to be dramatically altered. There’s been chatter about the proposed changing of work rules to include non-performing elements (such as teaching); musicians are concerned that shifting the focus away from pure performance, even for a relatively brief period (it’s capped at 3 weeks per musician per season) dilutes the musical product of the ensemble.
While there’s an element of truth, doesn’t it seem to be more about perspective than anything? After all, those most strongly voicing their opposition are established players. These days, conservatory graduates are as likely to receive some training in teaching, public speaking and scripting and producing educational concerts as they are to take lessons and orchestral repertoire class. The expectations of a young musician entering the job market is markedly different from those of past generations; what might seem extraneous to older career musicians is a presumed given for many just entering the profession.
But what really interests me about the ongoing conflict is the relative silence about “Proposal B”. Here it is, as outlined by the Detroit Free Press:
Management Proposal B (comes into play if players don’t accept some form of proposal A by Saturday)
• Replace 52-week structure with 36 guaranteed weeks (including three paid vacation weeks). Optional work offered beyond 33 weeks paid at incremental rate based on revenue generated by the work.
• Salary: $70,200 (year one); $72,000 (year two); $73,800 (year three). New hires paid $63,000, rising to $66,600 in year three.
• Pension similar to proposal A.
• Eliminate seniority pay and tenure. Implement comprehensive performance review.
Now, wait a second. This proposal would essentially reduce the actual season by a huge percentage, and if additional pay is based on “revenue generated by the work”, it would never assure any set amount. And then look at the last point: eliminating tenure and seniority pay. This is huge. Essentially, Proposal B completely takes away what a full-time orchestra employment represents; assured pay and job security. Why aren’t more people talking about this?
Perhaps the very existence (or threat) of Plan B is meant to bully the musicians’ committee into agreeing to some form of Plan A. But what if bargaining comes apart and all that’s left on the table is Plan B? It would utterly change the landscape of our profession – it represents a completely altered model of what constitutes an orchestra – and it would set precedence for other ensembles in similar situations to do the same.
But then, here’s the painful question: if Plan B is sustainable from a practical financial point of view, is that such a bad thing?
Well, the good news is that we made it across the pond, safe and sound. The bad news is that I got about 45 minutes of sleep total on our flight over, and it’s raining in London and isn’t expected to stop until Friday. (I know – shocking.) Fortunately, I did remember (at the very last minute) to pack an umbrella, so I’m prepared, and will shortly be heading out to forestall future jet lag by walking around the city instead of napping. I always seem to adjust to a new time zone best by refusing to acknowledge that my internal clock is in a different country, and just waiting until it’s properly time to sleep before I allow myself to.
That having been said, I’m not feeling terribly coherent just at the moment, so rather than babbling senselessly at you, I’m going to direct you to last Friday’s me, who was plenty alert and chatty with Minnesota Monthly’s Tim Gihring. He’s got an abbreviated transcript of our conversation up over at MNMO’s site, and while there’s not a lot there that won’t be old hat to regular ItC readers, hey, it’s fresh content. I’ll attempt to have some fresh thoughts of my own up tomorrow afternoon…
The last couple of days have been a whirlwind of the sort of mundanities one must see to before leaving the country for a while: mowing the lawn, doing the laundry, insuring I’ve packed extra viola strings and contact lenses, explaining patiently to the credit card company that yes, that charge from a London internet company is legit, and oh by the way if you freeze the card the first time I use it in Europe like you did last year because you tried to call but my phone doesn’t work over there, we are going to have issues.
But anyway, I seem to have things pretty well squared away with several hours to spare before our red-eye flight to London this evening, so I thought I’d lay out a few of the specific challenges and potential highlights of this little weekend jaunt. Every tour has some unexpected moments, and I gather that a good-sized gaggle of the local media will be traveling with us, so there’s a good chance some of those moments will be documented. I’d never run the risk of jinxing things with specific predictions, but here’s a general list of observations about the week we’re about to have.
Challenge #1: 3 cities, 4 concerts, 4 concertos, 3 symphonies, in 4 days. Yes, we’ll have a bit of time to get our bearings after we arrive in London around noon on Wednesday, but starting Friday morning, it is on, people. We’ll rehearse Friday and Saturday mornings, but time is pretty limited, so we’ll definitely need to be on the ball to pull off polished performances after having not played together since last Friday night.
And once we wrap up the Proms, the real chaos begins. We’ll split our touring party into two groups Sunday morning for the quick flight north to Scotland, but that means that a good chunk of the orchestra won’t touch down in Edinburgh until 3:55pm, a mere 2 hours before our scheduled touch-up rehearsal at Usher Hall. Throw in what I recall to be about a half-hour’s drive from the airport to the city center, the fact that one of Edinburgh’s two football clubs has a match scheduled for right around that time not far from our hotel, and the general fact that the entire city is a madhouse during festival time (there was an hourlong wait for a cab ride when we played the fest in 2006,) and you just know somebody’s gonna barely make the scene in time. (Again, not predicting. Just saying we have a history with these sorts of things.)
For those coming late to Edinburgh, they’ll have to avoid getting attached to the place, because a mere 16 hours after they arrive, they’ll be back at the airport for our early flight to Amsterdam. (And nine musicians who don’t have anything to play in the final concert of the tour will split from the group on arrival in the Netherlands, and immediately board a flight home, thus saving the cost of nine hotel rooms.) That afternoon, we’ll be bussed to the Concertgebouw (we normally stay nearby, but our normal hotel couldn’t accommodate us this time, so we’re staying way the heck out by Schiphol Airport, which, if memory serves, is actually in Belgium,) grab a bite to eat wherever we can find one, then play one last touch-up rehearsal before the 8:15pm concert.
(Why 8:15, you ask? I’ve no idea, and I’ve long since given up trying to understand why European venues have the start times they do. My first international tour with this orchestra included one concert that started at 10:30pm local time.)
Challenge #2: I mentioned that I’m making an appearance on BBC Radio 3 prior to our first Proms concert on Friday. Ordinarily, this sort of thing doesn’t intimidate me. I’ve worked in radio, I’m not intimidated by microphones or (most) audiences, and when Brian Newhouse asked whether I’d step in for this gig, I agreed immediately. But since then, our CEO, Michael Henson, who is British and quite well acquainted with the traditions of the Proms, has been regularly making some downright scary noises about what I’ve gotten myself into. Noises like: “Oh, you’re doing a Proms Plus? Very nice. Best be sure you know your history. They take those events quite seriously, you know.” Or the other night, when I asked him whether the suit I was packing was, in fact, the proper attire for the broadcast, or whether perhaps the pre-concert talks were a bit more dressed down, and Michael recoiled. “Oh, no! Definitely not less formal than a suit!” Leaving me to ponder whether some guests show up for these things in full white tie and tails.
Potential highlight: The Proms are definitely the most high-profile concerts we’ll play on this mini-tour, but I’m actually almost more excited to play the Edinburgh and Amsterdam concerts, because that’s where we’ll be playing the symphony that seems to be fast becoming our calling card: Beethoven’s 7th. Not only is it one of my favorite pieces in general, it seems to play to all our strengths as an orchestra, as well as Osmo’s strengths as a conductor. The tightly wound but sprightly first movement, the lower string-heavy second, the scherzo that gives the horns a true moment in the sun, and the finale that just goes hell for leather from the first moment to the last – it’s everything we love to do, and lately, Minnesota audiences have been going absolutely crazy for it. It’ll be fun to see whether we can recreate that level of intensity abroad.
By the way, if you’d like another way to follow the tour, our Outreach Coordinator, Mele Willis, has put together a fantastic educational site that will go live Wednesday morning is live now. You can get to it here, and if history is any guide, Mele will have a great mix of audio, video, and written travelogues to share. I’ll be trying to squeeze in a few multimedia moments as well, if quality broadband connections allow.
But for now, I need to pack a few more items (like this laptop) and grab a last stateside bite before heading off to the airport. I’ll talk to you from London…
