The Listening Room: Structure and Substance

Posted on
Jan 24 2012
 by Sam Bergman

This is the second post in this month’s edition of The Listening Room, our discussion of music that composer Judd Greenstein finds meaningful, inspiring, or just plain good. For earlier Listening Room posts, click here, and add your own insights to the discussion in the comments section below…

Today, Judd talks about two of Witold Lutoslawski’s seminal works, and why they’re so uniquely able to engage us as listeners even without adhering to standard rules of Western tonality. Here’s Judd…

In his most avant-garde period, Lutosławski’s works are often very challenging and can feel a bit “cold”. They often explore structural and formal concerns, working out the different possibilities of this new technique of “controlled aleatory“. There are some fantastic pieces from this period, but it was only in the 1970s and 1980s that his harmonic brilliance, evident in his early works, was brought into dialogue with the formal and textural language that he had by then perfected.

This marriage led to the absolutely brilliant pieces from his late-middle period. The music is not at all “tonal” in a traditional sense, but his control of voice-leading, counterpoint, and harmonic motion come through in a personal and extremely emotionally resonant language that’s all his own. From this point on, Lutosławski uses only extremely simple, clear, and memorable musical motifs as his building blocks; if you’re listening carefully, you can follow the “story” of these motifs as they move forward through each piece, gathering meaning as they go.

The Symphony No. 3 is the high-water mark of this style. It is patient, clear, and beautiful on its own terms. I consider it perhaps the greatest Symphony since Beethoven (and yes, I’m aware that there were quite a few great symphonists writing music between the 1820s and the 1980s.) You have to check your expectations at the door in listening to this music. It’s not going to be as immediately approachable as was Steve Reich’s music, nor as lush as Messiaen will be when we get to that in a later installment of The Listening Room. Its often sparse and the harmonic language will be challenging — but the ideas are so clear, and the sounds so beautiful, that you really can follow the story and will enjoy the “characters” you meet along the way.

This exceptional recording, produced magnificently and conducted by a great orchestra with a conductor (Esa-Pekka Salonen) who is not only a Lutosławski champion but a very good composer in his own right, captures the drama of the work and has some of the best “sounds” that I’ve heard in a Lutosławski recording. As with Reich’s Tehillim, the end of the Symphony No. 3 is one of the best in the literature; suddenly, a new harmonic world emerges around a suddenly-lush texture, unlike anything we’ve heard before in the piece, recontextualizing everything that’s come before. It almost demands that you listen to the entire work again, right away, to hear how the work unfolds when you know what’s coming.

The Symphony No. 4 is one of the last works that Lutosławski wrote, and represents the final period of his creative life, where he largely moved away from aleatory and wrote with an incredible efficiency — not quite late Brahms, but in that direction. This Symphony is a humbler piece of music, though more directly passionate; there’s less space between the notes, and more big melodies and dramatic flourishes, all in a shorter timespan. This is one of the late Lutosławski works that I always suggest to conductors that they program, and if there’s a Lutosławski resurgence in this country, it might well start with this fantastic piece of music.

Tomorrow, the conversation continues as I ask Judd about the baggage that we as listeners bring to music that challenges convention, and we highlight some reader contributions to the discussion. Speaking of which: the comments section is just waiting for you to join in...

Posted in The Listening Room, audience participation, composers | Leave a comment

The Listening Room: The Embraceable Modernist

Posted on
Jan 23 2012
 by Sam Bergman

It’s time for this month’s edition of The Listening Room, in which our MicroCommission composer Judd Greenstein selects a recording he loves and invites you to have a conversation about it. We’re going to change things up a little this time around, spreading out the discussion over more posts and more days, rather than hitting you with everything Judd has to say right up front, so check back each day this week for a new post.

You can join the discussion at any point in the comments, and feel free to bring up points that Judd and I haven’t touched on – if some good side discussions develop, we’ll include them in future posts. You can get this month’s recording from Amazon by clicking the image at the top of this post, or on iTunes by clicking here. (Yes, we’re asking you to pay for the recordings we feature, but seriously? This one is $2.99 – you can probably afford that.)

Since Lutoslawski isn’t as familiar a name to many American listeners as he probably should be, I asked Judd to kick things off with a little background on who this composer was, why his music is important (or at least worth listening to,) and how he came to the particular compositional style that defines both him and his era. Here’s Judd:

Witold Lutosławski is the greatest symphonic composer you’ve never heard of. He is a towering giant of the late 20th century, a “composers’ composer” whose music exists on an island unto itself, truly original and deserving of more imitators than it has received. His more-famous Polish countrymen, Penderecki and Górecki, each have established their place in the symphonic repertoire, Penderecki as a lingering legacy of his confrontational early works, with their radical approach to texture and color (as well as, it must be said, their controversial titles), and Górecki for his spiritual, almost mystical scores that manage to be directly beautiful without dipping back in the well of Romanticism. Of those two, Górecki is the better composer, and has a number of excellent works, but even he doesn’t hold a candle to Lutosławski.

From the CD I’ve chosen for The Listening Room, I want to focus on the two Symphonies, Number 3 and Number 4. The four Symphonies of Lutosławski mirror his life’s progression as a composer, which roughly mirrors the arc of European modernism as it progressed through the Cold War, from the 1940s through the beginning of the 1990s (Lutosławski died in 1994). In the early part of his career, he wrote folk-influenced works for standard instrumentation, highly suggestive of late Bartok. Some of Lutoslawski’s great works of this period, particularly the Concerto for Orchestra and the Paganini Variations, are his most-performed pieces today, by far — even though he had three more periods ahead of him. This is typical for composers who had an early, “populist” period that preceded their move toward modernism, and usually is a tool for classical institutions to claim that they’re programming more “modern music”. (Yes, I’m calling you out, orchestras — we see what you’re doing!) [Guilty. I'm pretty sure the Concerto for Orchestra is the only Lutoslawski we've played since I've been in the orchestra, and Sarah conducted it. - Sam]

As the political climate shifted following Stalin’s death, Lutosławski was exposed to more radical styles; hearing John Cage’s Concerto for Piano was a big influence, as it suggested a way forward using “aleatoric” techniques — what we might call “chance” operations. For Lutosławski, unlike Cage (who embraced chance as a philosophical guidepost), aleatoric procedures were useful in very controlled circumstances, embedded in a highly structured, formal context. In his scores from the early ’60s onward, instruments would only sometimes be directly synced up with each other. Instead, they’d be cued at specific moments, but left to their own devices, playing exactly what was on the page, but not lining up directly (note-to-note) with the other players. This did two things:

1) It created textures which would otherwise be extremely difficult to notate, and which varied more from performance to performance than those in a completely-notated piece.

2) It gave each player a lot more freedom in their performance, since they didn’t have to line up directly with anyone else. Think about dancing by yourself versus dancing with a partner — neither is necessarily better or worse, but you have a lot more freedom in the former, right?

Tomorrow, Judd talks specifically about Lutoslawski’s 3rd and 4th symphonies, and the distinct periods of the composer’s working life. For now, if you’ve listened to the disc and have thoughts or questions, fire away in the comments…

Posted in The Listening Room, audience participation, composers | 2 Comments

Acadia

Posted on
Jan 17 2012
 by Judd Greenstein

When I was in graduate school at Yale, much of my time studying composition was spent with Ezra Laderman, the elder statesman of the composition faculty and one of the most open-minded composers that they’ve ever had at that institution. The man fought in World War II and wrote a symphony while stationed in Frankfurt. He came back to the States and, in comparison with, you know, being at war, the silly aesthetic “battles” (pun fully intended) of the late 20th century were simply not interesting. Oh, how I wish other composers had seen things through that lens. Laderman wrote whatever he felt like writing — concert music, jazz, film soundtracks, and whatever else, in whatever style — and did so with a meticulous craft and attentive ear. He brought that breadth of experience to his role as a teacher and never once tried to stop me from pursuing any of the crazy (for Yale) directions that I wanted to try.

One great piece of advice he gave me was to never tell the audience what a piece was “about”. He relayed a story in which a woman had come up to him after a performance, thanking him for writing a piece that so perfectly captured the sprit of mourning that she was in, having recently lost a loved one. He thanked her for the kind words, even though (as he told me), the piece had nothing to do with mourning, or death, or anything of the sort, at least not in his mind or in the narrative that he considered central to the piece. Sometimes, it makes sense to explain the origin of a work, especially if the work is written for a special occasion, and you want the audience to understand the connection between the abstract musical ideas in the composition and the concrete ideas concerning the occasion. But normally, music — even music with words, but especially music without — is highly abstract, open to many interpretations, conscious or otherwise.

The abstraction of music is both its strength and its weakness. We live in a culture where linear thought and concrete ideas are privileged over abstraction; art is defended as a means, not an end, useful in its ability to strengthen “real” skills, be they math scores or pattern recognition or the ability to communicate as a team. Nowhere in the defense of art is a defense of abstraction, of the need for non-linear thinking, and the beauty that comes when objects are neither “true” nor “false”. It’s not just art that suffers when we try to fit everything into a binary; many great texts, from the philosophy of Rousseau to the American constitution to the Bible, all contain inconsistencies to be resolved, not through choosing one way or another, but by learning to thrive in that underlying tension, to discover a truth that would never be known if one demanded a more facile “truth” that excluded the other position entirely. Abstract art is the purest form of non-binary thinking and creation, as there aren’t merely tensions between a binary, but different “truths” or even “ways of knowing” that work in many, many directions. When we bring ourselves and our histories into a work of art, the truth of the work is dependent on our own perspective as much as on the work itself. Therein lies the strength of abstract art, and the key to how it communicates so directly: by demanding that the viewer/listener build his or her own pathways of meaning, there’s an avenue already in place between the content of the work and the areas of emotional need that the viewer/listener brings to the table.

With all that in mind, there’s a lot (relatively speaking) at stake as I try to explain the title of my new work for the Orchestra, Acadia. There’s no linear narrative, except perhaps a very, very simple one that you’ll hopefully be able to follow without my explaining it. I don’t want to tell you too much, because I think it’s a work that can have many different meanings for different people. I don’t even know what it’s going to mean to me when I hear it — the process of writing and the process of listening are totally different creatures. I’ve been in dialogue with my imagined future-self, listening to the performance, and giving feedback from the perspective of the listener. But that’s hardly the same as the actual experience of hearing a piece live for the first time. If I’m not sure how I’m going to feel, or what I can take from the piece, why should I bring you down any specific road? Wouldn’t that be the most irresponsible thing I could do?

So I’ll just tell you a few things, and leave it at that. The word “Acadia” refers to the French colonies of the 17th and 18th centuries in northeastern North America, today comprised of mostly the Maritime Provinces of Canada, with small pieces of Québec and Maine. The “Acadians” migrated down to French territories in Florida and then the Louisiana Territories, where they mingled with other inhabitants and gradually came to be known as “Cajuns”. I first heard the term “Acadia” in the context of Acadia National Park, where I spent a few incredible days camping with a good friend, a long weekend that turned out to be a pivotal time — literally, in the sense of a pivot — in my life. If I were to break my life into two sections, the first part would end in that Acadian weekend, hiking in hills on the edge of open ocean, exploring the southern tip of that land that stretches along the coast, upward to the Arctic. Acadia no longer exists, as a territory, but lives on as a place, marked by a distinct topography and climate (for a little while longer, at least), a gateway between the Atlantic ocean and the Northern Forest of Canada and New England, sparsely populated with people who are distantly French or Wabanaki, identities receding into history like the name itself. Few words are as magical to me or feel more central to my life. And so, for a commission that means as much to me as any I’ve ever received, I wrote this piece with that word in mind, a pivotal word for a composition that may mark the end of something, or the beginning. It is written for the Minnesota Orchestra, of course, and for the Inside the Classics community, with special thanks to Sam and Sarah for making it possible, but also bears a dedication to my friends Matt Wessler and Sharon Wong, and their daughter Harriet, who are tied up in the weekend that this piece remembers, and commemorates, and buries, perhaps in the woods of New England or perhaps at sea, allowing the future to come as it comes, beholden to no ghost or memory.

Posted in composers, inside the orchestra, microcommission, new music, philosophical musings | Leave a comment

Behind the Microphones

Posted on
Jan 17 2012
 by Sam Bergman

As you may have heard, our latest CD came out last week – it’s the first disc in what will eventually be a complete set of the Sibelius symphonies – and the team from BIS Records also spent some time shooting some video of the recording sessions last June. They’ve woven some of the footage together into a nice little montage to promote the disc, which should be particularly interesting to those of you who only picture orchestra musicians in full white-tie-and-tails regalia.

Yes, Osmo is wearing a soccer jersey. For some reason, he was wearing a lot of those to rehearsal last spring/summer. (They do breathe very well, I suppose.) By the way, you can buy the disc here, or download it on iTunes if you prefer. I’m biased, of course, but having listened to it a couple of times now, I think it’s awfully good.

Posted in recordings, shameless self-promotion | 3 Comments

Lost in Translation

Posted on
Jan 15 2012
 by Sam Bergman

Musicians are forever making up lyrics to go along with famous bits of music. This is partly because we’re incorrigible class clowns who never grew up properly, but mostly because, on your 138th trip through Handel’s Messiah, it helps you stay focused if you can remember the alternate lyrics to There Were Shepherds.

(Now you’re curious, right? Fine: “There were shepherds imbibing in the fields, drinking scotch over the rocks by night.”)

There are a few pieces, like Messiah, where a single set of lyrics is known far and wide, but it’s far more common for individual interpretations to become legend within a single city or ensemble. One former MN Orch violinist had some truly epic words to go with the first half-page or so of the last movement of the Sibelius concerto, and I once worked at a summer camp with a guy who had scripted more or less the entire Mendelssohn octet with lyrics so filthy that I can’t think of a single sentence I can reprint here.

But I have to say, British comedian Rainer Hersch has pretty much cornered the market on this little game. Who knew the Queen of the Night was on Ecstasy?

Brilliant. And presenting the lyrics in play-by-play fashion definitely ups the comedic value exponentially. Actually, hearing Hersch calling the Queen’s big number as a live event reminded me of one of my very favorite old PDQ Bach bits…

I’ve been laughing at that Peter Schickele voiceover since I was 8 years old. My favorite part is the flustered, incredulous overreaction to the six-second oboe cadenza in the development. And I’ve been waiting my entire career for a horn player to kack that particular note in the exposition – it hasn’t happened yet, but I carry a bright yellow penalty flag with me at all times just in case it ever does. (Any self-respecting horn player would, of course, have me killed for throwing the flag, but it would be worth it.)

And hey, as long as this post has become a generalized music/comedy mishmash, let’s wrap it up with Victor Borge and some Muppets, shall we? Happy Monday, all…

Posted in fun, opera | 1 Comment

What Should Be vs. What Can Be

Posted on
Jan 11 2012
 by Sam Bergman

Last weekend, the Minnesota Orchestra stood on our stage alongside six talented young composers and applauded the incredibly diverse, exciting, and new sounds they had brought to the culminating concert of our 11th annual Composer Institute. Members of the audience (which looked to be around 1200 strong) who I spoke to afterwards were almost blissfully excited by what they’d heard, and eager to tell me how much they appreciated the orchestra’s willingness to undertake such an event. There were huge smiles throughout the evening all around the hall, and the audience, which crossed all age levels, was genuinely engaged by both the music and the composers’ personalities as they were each interviewed for Minnesota Public Radio’s live broadcast of the event.

I expect much the same experience for the premiere of Judd’s MicroCommission piece in March, and for that matter, I’m hoping that we manage to extract a similar level of engagement and enthusiasm for our Inside the Classics concerts later this month, which will use the music of John Adams as a jumping off point for a broader discussion of where American concert music has been going over the last half-century or so. Plenty of past experience has suggested to me that, presented in an engaging and entertaining way, new music is anything but audience repellant.

But…

I know. There shouldn’t need to be a “but” in this discussion. That should be the end of it – I’ve just presented a solid case that orchestras should quit shying away from new music, that we need to be engaging with contemporary composers and bringing them the exposure they need to be embraced by the wider world. Hell, I wrote a massive 3-part series of posts last spring outlining exactly how I think we as an industry should start doing this. Why does there need to be a “but” at the end of this?

Well, because of Zachary Woolfe. Woolfe is a talented music writer who has emerged as quite the advocate for new music in the last couple of years. He writes regularly for the New York Times, the New York Observer, and probably a hundred other publications I don’t know about. I like his writing, I follow his Twitter feed, and I agree with a lot of what he has to say about new music.

Having said all that, Woolfe leveled a blistering attack at the New York Philharmonic (and its music director, Alan Gilbert) in the pages of the Times this past week that went seriously off the rails and became a hatchet job when it could have been something far more constructive. Early on in the piece, which was written as a reaction to Gilbert having recently received an award for commitment to new music, Woolfe sounded the usual alarms that have become de rigeur among new music partisans who can’t believe that symphony orchestras in the 21st century still build our seasons around Beethoven and Brahms:

“No one advocates precise allotments of contemporary music. (Maybe people should.) All we want is an orchestra that is genuinely engaged in its city and culture. A sustained, all-out dedication to new music is a necessity to keep the Philharmonic from becoming an exercise in nostalgia.”

Fair enough, I guess, though every one of those sentences is highly debatable if you want to start defining terms like “city and culture,” or discussing just how much of the culture that Americans choose to consume could be defined as “an exercise in nostalgia.” Still, I’m more or less on Woolfe’s side at this point. He goes on to make specific criticisms of a couple of the Phil’s less-daring programming choices that get trumpeted as showcases for “contemporary” music even when they’re plainly not. I’m still with him.

But then, just when I’m waiting to hear Woolfe’s grand solution to the eternal conundrum of how you a) program new music alongside the classics on a regular basis, while b) also maintaining a solid track record of helping younger and perhaps less broad-based composers get their music heard, and c) convince huge numbers of people in your city to support all this with their ticket-buying dollars and donations…

…he cops out. No, that’s too vague a description. He completely, utterly, without the slightest hint of sheepishness, abdicates all responsibility for establishing a real world case for his rant. Here’s one of the final paragraphs:

“I understand what Mr. Gilbert means when he speaks of wanting to avoid a sense of responsibility in an endeavor that should be approached with enthusiasm rather than obligation. And I recognize the myriad difficulties of creating a season and the many constituencies he must try to please.”

He understands nothing of the sort, or he wouldn’t be content to devote all those column inches to a screed on the Phil’s artistic obligations, only to duck out of the argument the moment that his ideas actually have to acquire a grounding in the fundamental fiscal realities of running a symphony orchestra that employs hundreds of actual people. The only attempt he makes to establish that his vision for a new music-heavy orchestral future is even remotely possible is the now-clichéd weak feint in the direction of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Look, I’d love to believe that Woolfe’s demands regarding new music could be met by today’s symphony orchestras, and the moment I see a concrete plan for implementing them, I’ll be right behind him, shouting to the rooftops about it. But there is no such plan, and it’s not the New York Phil’s fault that there isn’t. From what I can tell from 1200 miles away, the Phil is making quite an effort to make new music a part of what they do, but I will tell you from personal experience: it is not nearly as easy as those outside the orchestra world love to make it sound.

That Composer Institute concert I wrote about at the top? The one that drew something like 1200 people? We’ve been promoting the hell out of that for five years now, and it still draws around 1200 every year. For a one-off performance on a Friday night, with most tickets selling for way less than we charge for Beethoven, in a hall that seats 2450. Those ItC concerts I mentioned? With 2/3 of our series for the year built around 21st-century music? I couldn’t be more excited about them, but they won’t come close to selling the way our Dvorak/Ravel/Stravinsky season sold last year.

I’m not for a moment suggesting that Zachary Woolfe should stop nagging the NY Phil (or any other orchestra) about deepening their commitment to composers living and working today. I’m not saying that it’s his responsibility to write a business plan for every idea he wants to throw out on the table.

But sometimes, Horatio, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. When you close a generally well-argued treatise by implying that all this would be possible if everyone else in the music world would just work at it a little, you undermine your entire argument. We’re working really hard. I promise you we are. But there are a million little “myriad difficulties” working against us every single day, and no, Mr. Woolfe, you haven’t begun to recognize them.

Posted in new music, stirring the pot, the business of music | 9 Comments

The Listening Room: A Lot of Lutoslawski

Posted on
Jan 9 2012
 by Sam Bergman

Later this month, (specifically, the week of January 23,) we’ll be kicking off another installment of The Listening Room, a project we launched with Judd here on the blog in November. Basically, TLR is like a book club, only with music. Each month Judd picks a specific recording, we all buy it (yes, we’re asking you to pay for the music if you want to participate, but recordings cost pennies these days, and given how much work goes into producing them, we don’t think it’s too much to ask) and listen to it, and then we get together with Judd to talk about the music.

So without further ado, here’s this month’s featured disc:

This is a Los Angeles Philharmonic recording of works by the legendary Polish composer, Witold Lutoslawski. I say “legendary,” but what I really mean is “legendary within the world of professional musicians,” because sadly, Lutoslawski is one of those composers who just doesn’t seem to show up on the radar screens of the average concertgoer, despite the fact that his music is a) at least as accessible as your average Stravinsky ballet score, b) incredibly evocative and distinctive in style, and c) just a blast to perform live. I don’t know why his music isn’t performed more by big American orchestras, ours included, but since it isn’t, this may be your first time hearing Lutoslawski, and if that’s the case, you’re in for a treat.

There are two symphonies and a work for baritone and orchestra on this 1994 disc, and the MP3 version is going for $2.99 on Amazon and iTunes, so joining the Listening Room conversation this month probably costs less than your daily Caribou Coffee fix. Jump on board, send your initial thoughts to me by e-mail (sbergman[at]mnorch.org) if you want, and Judd and I will kick off the conversation on Monday the 23rd…

Posted in The Listening Room, audience participation, composers | 6 Comments

Are Strads Just A Status Symbol?

Posted on
Jan 4 2012
 by Sam Bergman

If you’re an NPR listener or a regular reader of various high-end newspaper arts sections, you probably saw the story that’s been kicking around over the last couple of days. According to some researchers (at least one of them a well-known violin dealer,) a collection of professional musicians assembled for a “double-blind study” were unable to detect the difference between some 300-year-old Stradivarius violins and other well-made but modern instruments.

On the surface, news like this warms my heart. As great as the old Italian masters were at crafting some of the finest string instruments the world has ever known, I’ve always resented the way that collectors have driven their price so sky-high that pretty much no musician can afford them. I’ve also heard plenty of excellent modern instruments, including a few that I felt stacked up awfully well against their ultra-antique rivals. Overall, I tend to consider Strads, Guarneris, and the like to be great if you can get one, but generally overrated as a concept.

Still, something about this “double-blind study” struck me as odd. As I said, I’m very open to the argument that the best modern instruments are just as good as the best old Italians. But that doesn’t mean that they actually sound the same as each other. As part of NPR’s reporting on the study, correspondent Christopher Joyce offered up an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto, played once on a Strad and once on a fine modern instrument. He then challenged listeners to pick the Strad, offering up the correct answer at the end of his report.

And here’s the thing: I nailed it almost instantly, even over the radio. And judging by my Facebook feed, which has been deluged with friends reposting the NPR link over the last 24 hours, so did pretty much every other professional string player I know. I might have had more trouble had the excerpt Joyce chosen been something other than the Tchaikovsky, but that piece, starting as it does in the lowest register of the violin, immediately shows off the depth and projection that define the sound of the Strad. The modern fiddle sounded great, and I thought it was even better than the Strad at various points during the excerpt. But it didn’t sound like a Strad.

Of course, NPR never said that this was one of the Strads used in the study (it probably wasn’t,) and since the participants in the study were playing the instruments, not just listening to them, that makes a difference. (If you’ve never played a string instrument, you’d be stunned by how different they sound when they’re an inch from your left ear.) Cellist Steven Isserlis, never shy with his opinions, penned an interesting counterpoint in The Guardian, in which he questioned whether all the instruments used were in proper adjustment, and asking the all-important question of who, exactly, were the musicians involved in the test. Composer Marcus Balter and critic Alex Ross discussed the matter over Twitter, with Balter pointing out that “All [the] testers were young violinists, and the test was in a hotel room.”

None of this actually matters in the real world, of course. The monetary value of fine instruments isn’t set by any objective measure of quality – it’s set by a combination of supply and demand and the shadowy world of auction houses, instrument dealers and collectors. Furthermore, every musician has his/her own tastes, and not every player is a good match for every instrument, no matter how well-made. I once spent a few weeks playing on a Testore viola that made me want to never play on anything else again, and I once played a Guarneri del Gesu that I couldn’t begin to get a decent sound from. They were both great instruments – one just fit me better than the other.

In the end, I think Isserlis nailed the central problem with this whole discussion: “I am delighted if modern makers earn the recognition they deserve; but in order to make this happen, it is necessary to have a much more comprehensive test – and it is not necessary to belittle the magical genius of Stradivarius and his very few peers.”

UPDATE, 1/6: One of the participants in the study has posted an interesting account of the experience at Norman Lebrecht’s blog.

Posted in girlfriend please, musical dorkery | 9 Comments

Coming Attractions

Posted on
Jan 2 2012
 by Sam Bergman

Happy New Year, all! I’m emerging from my holiday coma just in time for what is shaping up to be possibly the busiest month of the 2011-12 season. The orchestra jumps back into what some of us like to call “real” (read: non-Christmas) music later this week with our annual Composer Institute, which I’ll definitely be writing more about as we get into the rehearsal process. I’m not sure whether the folks at NewMusicBox have tapped one of the participating composers to blog the experience as they have in past years (I’ll update this post with a link if such a blog shows up in the coming days,) but for now, you can read a bit about the participants on our CI page, and enjoy this clip from one of them… (Update, 1/4: NewMusicBox just went live with their CI blogger, and by a remarkable coincidence, it’s the composer whose music appears below, Hannah Lash.)


Folksongs by Hannah Lash

After the FutureClassics concert wraps up on Friday night, we’ll dive into a furious two-week charge through seemingly most of the notes Brahms ever put down on paper with a couple of dazzling soloists,and then we’ll wrap up the month with our next round of Inside the Classics concerts, which I’m even now scrambling to finish scripting. It’s a daunting month, especially coming right after a two-week layoff and a solid month of Christmas programs, so we’ll need to kick ourselves into gear as an ensemble incredibly quickly.

In other news, I got just about the best Christmas present imaginable a week or so ago, when the final and complete score for Judd’s world premiere dropped into my inbox! (I know, I kind of buried the lead on this post – sorry about that.) I’ve commissioned music before, but the feeling of getting your first look at a new piece written especially for you just never gets old. Paging through Judd’s 187-page magnum opus, doing my dead level best to not just look at the viola line (we string players have terrible tunnel vision when it comes to orchestral scores,) I got almost giddy. Not just because it looks like a fantastic piece, which it does, but because this, finally, was the tangible evidence of what we (meaning all of you who donated to the MicroCom Project) just accomplished. It’s an incredible thing to have banded together to do, and I can’t wait for you all to hear the results in March.

Speaking of March, this is looking quite a ways out (and I’ll be sure to post reminders closer to the date,) but I’m also very excited to announce that the awesome Kate Nordstrum (the presenter responsible for bringing so many fantastic musicians to the Southern Theater over the past several years) has put together a showcase concert of New Amsterdam Records musicians at Bryant Lake Bowl the night before our MicroCommission premiere – Judd’s music will be featured along with pieces by Nico Muhly, Bill Brittelle, and Composer Institute alum Missy Mazzoli. (Also, my pal Nadia Sirota will be performing, and she’s worth the price of admission all by herself!) BLB’s a small venue, so you’ll want to get your tickets fast once they go on sale in February.

And speaking of Judd, there’s going to be plenty of him this month, as well! As with our first set of ItC concerts in November, Judd will be here for the Adams concerts at the end of January: we’ll be talking to him during the first half, he’ll meet up with MicroCom donors at intermission of both shows (those of you who donated will be getting an e-mail about that soon,) and four of my favorite colleagues in the orchestra will be putting a bow on the evenings’ festivities with a performance of At the End of a Really Great Day, a transcendently beautiful work for flute, clarinet, violin, and cello.

We’ll also be getting started shortly here on the blog with the next installment of The Listening Room, which this month will be focusing on a recording of two symphonies by the great Polish composer, Witold Lutoslawski. Details coming soon, as well as a tweaked format that we hope will make the conversation more accessible and easier to participate in.

Oh, and have I mentioned that every seat to every classical or ItC concert is 50% off at our online box office right now? Truth. But I’m told it ends after tomorrow, so you’re gonna want to get on that.

Posted in composers, microcommission | 2 Comments

Whip It Good.

Posted on
Dec 18 2011
 by Sam Bergman

This evening, the orchestra wraps up what has felt like about a year’s worth of Christmas concerts, and thanks to this week’s split schedule, I actually played my last Sleigh Ride earlier this afternoon, and will be relaxing with a book and a beverage while some of my colleagues play the last actual show of the month tonight.

Speaking of Sleigh Ride, that omnipresent Leroy Anderson classic seems to show up on nearly every holiday program we play, regardless of who put the program together or what the ostensible theme of the concert is. Other songs of the season might have their haters, but it seems like pretty much everyone loves Sleigh Ride. And why not? It has a catchy tune, jingle bells, a big brass windup, whinnying horses, and the crack of a whip!

Or, actually, generally not the crack of a whip. The whip cracks that dot the landscape of Sleigh Ride are pretty much always played by a percussionist holding a slap stick, two flat pieces of wood hinged together at one end that create a gunshot/whip crack sound when slapped together. This is partly because a slap stick is way easier to time accurately than a whip, and also because musicians who sit in front of percussion sections stubbornly refuse to allow occasional whip injuries to be added to the list of acceptable workplace risks.

That having been said, our principal percussionist, Brian Mount, loves a challenge, and he’s also probably bored to tears with Sleigh Ride at this stage of his career, so this month, he’s been wandering around Orchestra Hall with a 5-foot bullwhip, and beginning with our Time for Three concert a couple of weeks back, he’s been doing his dead level best to deploy it in performance. I’ll be honest: it wasn’t a high-percentage shot the first couple of times he did it. But the crowds went nuts for the sight of a completely deadpan, bespectacled musician sending a 5-foot whip shrieking across the stage, and in many cases, a flubbed crack that drew laughter would lead directly to a mighty ovation when he hit the next one perfectly.

Brian is also a natural-born ham, and like most orchestra musicians, he tends to view the last concert before a vacation week as an excuse to take a few risks in the service of amusing his colleagues. So this afternoon, as we wrapped up our final Scandinavian Christmas concert with yet another Sleigh Ride, Brian emerged from the back of the percussion section carrying his whip, walked straight up to the podium while we played the introduction, removed his jacket and tie, stretched a few times, and then treated the audience to a full view of his skills…

Okay, he did flub one later on. But by this time, the audience was in his back pocket. He sat down on the edge of the podium as if sulking, drawing more laughter, then finished off the piece with a flourish.

Well played, Mount. (And my thanks to harpist Ann Benjamin for shooting the footage while hiding behind her instrument!) Maybe next year we can combine this with the Santa Lucia procession and snap a few candles off heads…

Posted in fun, holiday music | 6 Comments