Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dominant 7ths?

July 31st, 2010 by Sam

Obsessing over food and where it comes from seems to have become this era’s answer to previous nationwide fads like blogging in the early ’00s, Bill Clinton’s sex life in the ’90s, and  chasing the almighty dollar in the ’80s. I’ll admit, I’m an unashamed participant in this foodie thing. I bake my own bread, tend a good-sized backyard vegetable and herb garden, and probably spend almost as many hours cooking as I do playing music in an average week.

I also, and here’s the shameful part, am totally addicted to the Food Network. I can’t really figure out why, since I’m all about learning and perfecting new ways of making food, and the Food Network as it exists in 2010 is primarily about watching minor celebrities eat food that someone else has prepared, usually either on closed sets that you’re not invited to, or in restaurants hundreds or thousands of miles away from where you live. Sure, there’s still a smattering of shows where knowledgeable people actually show you how to cook things, but they’re few and far between. Strangely, this does not seem to have dampened my interest in the channel even a little bit. I really have no excuse for this – it is what it is.

The other night, I was writing a blog post while watching an episode of one of the most polarizing shows on the Food Network. It’s called Diners, Drive-Ins, & Dives, and it’s hosted by a frost-tipped hipper-than-thou California freakshow named Guy Fieri. (For some reason, he pronounces his last name “Fietti.” I’m assuming this is an attempt to sound Italian. It doesn’t.) There are foodies out there who despise Guy Fieri. They hate his laugh, they hate his catch phrases, they hate his hair, and they particularly hate that his show celebrates big fatty slabs of American-style comfort food – heavy on the meat and dairy, please – at a time when most of the foodie culture is centered around rediscovering healthful eating and worshiping Michael Pollan as a minor god.

Figure 1: Why Foodies Hate Guy Fieri

I am not one of these people, partly because I just don’t get that worked up about other people’s eating habits, but mostly because I don’t see any reason that Guy Fieri and Michael Pollan can’t coexist. Pollan is all about balanced diets, sustainable agriculture, local and seasonal eating, and weaning America off our factory-farmed, high fructose corn syrup-soaked, genetically modified supply chain. Fieri is all about guilty pleasures, sustainable agriculture, local and seasonal eating, and weaning us off the endlessly generic and tasteless fast food chains that have replaced mom-and-pop diners across the US. (No, really, he is. Go read this if you don’t believe me.) That’s a lot of common ground, and let’s face it, Michael Pollan probably enjoys a tasty burger on occasion, too, so…

Yeah, I know. Music blog. Not food blog. Get to the point. Fine. In a minute.

See, there’s pretty obviously a disconnect right now between the hardcore world of seasonal-eating, corn-fed-beef-eschewing foodies who know what kohlrabi is, and the larger American society where most people want to eat healthier and have no interest in destroying the environment just so they can have a cheeseburger, but don’t have the time or inclination to devote huge chunks of their lives to changing everything about their food supply. (There are various class, race, and geographic issues at play here, of course, but in the interest of not boring you to tears, I’m not going to get into them just now.)

I see a very direct parallel between the food disconnect I’ve just described, and the gulf that exists between hardcore classical music lovers who refer to Beethoven String Quartets by their opus numbers and have definite opinions on Karajan vs. Bernstein, and the wider populace that, for the most part, has nothing against classical music, but doesn’t have the time or inclination to obsess over it and consequently feels completely alienated by the clublike atmosphere that pervades its core audience. And while I don’t think there’s a blessed thing wrong with knowing Beethoven’s opus numbers, I worry that the primary exposure most outsiders get to classical music these days is the same kind of exposure they get to the idea of a sustainable food system: that is to say, earnest, overly intellectual pleas and lectures from upper middle class white folks who shop at a coop, adore NPR and Al Gore, and get a CSA box delivered to their house every week.

If I’m right, that’s a shockingly limited demographic of advocates, and, I believe, one which doesn’t begin to represent the broad swath of people who actually come to Minnesota Orchestra concerts every week. And in the same way that I think the local/sustainable food movement will only really gain traction in a global way once it allows a whole lot of non-purists in the door, I think classical music needs a whole lot more advocates whose exhortations sound a lot less like this and a lot more like our friend Emily Liz from a couple of weeks back.

Figure 2: Nobody cares what this guy thinks anymore.

We’re living in the age of Ultimate Word of Mouth, where a lot of the cultural and intellectual discoveries we make come from hearing or reading someone else’s enthusiastic endorsement in some far-flung corner of the internet that we happen to frequent. Restaurants, rock bands, video games, and orchestras sink or swim based on how many well-connected people we can get to talk us up, not just to friends and neighbors, but to the much wider circle of Facebook friends, blog readers, and Twitter followers.

A lot of that sort of thing is beyond our control as performers, of course, except to the extent that we generate interest by visibly and audibly giving our all every time we step onstage. (No small consideration, since far too may orchestra musicians still seem to think looking bored or irritated while performing is okay.) But other industries are way ahead of us in using the good will and enthusiasm of our existing fans to draw in new ones, and like Guy Fieri making a point of visiting a greasy spoon that grinds its own grass-fed beef and tops it with locally made cheese, we could do a lot worse than welcoming in as many non-experts as we can find, and finding out what it takes to connect with them on a deeply personal level.

Posted in audience participation, food, marketing, state of the art | No Comments »

Austerity Measures

July 28th, 2010 by Sam

An article on budget cuts, layoffs, and salary cutbacks in Portland, Oregon’s arts scene this past weekend was a sad, if unsurprising, thing to read. This is happening all over, including here in Minnesota, of course, and while those of us here like to talk a good game about how much worse things could be if we weren’t lucky enough to live in a place where so many people care deeply about what we do, the frightening reality is that, based on everything we know from past downturns, the arts will be one of the last sectors to fully recover.

So yeah, we’re cutting, they’re cutting, everyone’s cutting. But hang on. There’s this guy Michael Kaiser – runs the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., became a legend in the arts biz by dragging orchestras and dance companies  back from the brink and making them solvent again – who’s running around the country telling everyone that we’re doing this exactly wrong:

You can’t save your way to health. You don’t get healthy by getting smaller, by doing less… [Also,] focus on today and tomorrow not yesterday. There’s no time for blame. When things are bad many people sit around talking about where it went wrong. That’s not healthy.

Hm, okay. I guess that’s more or less what Joe Dowling was saying last week when he told MPR that it had been a mistake to cut the Guthrie’s rehearsal schedule to save money this past season.  Still, that kind of broad pronouncement is easy to make in a speech, but harder to implement in the real world. If you’re not supposed to cut your way back to fiscal stability, but you have 33% less in your endowment than you did last year (and everyone else is in the same boat,) how can you possibly survive as an organization?

You have to plan your art. Most organizations plan their art too close to event. You need to plan four and five years out. First, you can make art better if you take more time. Second, you can do a better job fundraising. “I listen to the funder, find out what do they like to fund. I have a menu of five years of projects, so I can choose best event for funder.” Finally, “It helps me to educate my audience to want to see something that is not so accessible. I’m excited about projects that are transformational. But this requires some education of the audience. And with time, you can educate in advance. Creativity has been beaten out of so many arts organizations. Planning ambitious work four years out, creating big vision is what’s needed.”

Now, that makes very good sense, and it’s also demonstrably true – Kaiser will be happy to reel off the evidence for you. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. What he’s talking about is a wholesale shift in how we run our industry, and a much higher level of competence than a lot of arts leaders currently have, quite frankly. (Please note that I’m not talking about a lack of passion, or commitment. But the sad truth is that far too many American arts managers are thrown into the deep end of a very big pool without ever having been taught anything more sophisticated than the dog paddle.)

Another hard truth is that, when arts leaders who are competent and do have new ideas start talking about massive systemic change, a lot of the people who work under them (orchestra musicians, say) get very, very nervous, and even angry. Because change is scary, and to be perfectly honest, it’s very hard without the benefit of hindsight to tell the difference between a leader who’s genuinely trying to do something fantastic and new that will benefit everyone in the long run, and one who’s just in way over his/her head and has started babbling about “unsustainable business models” when what s/he really means is “My job is way too hard, so you’re all going to have take massive salary cuts to make it less hard.” (The orchestra world is littered with the carcasses of ensembles that cut and cut and cut in the name of some sort of ill-defined “transformation,” then discovered too late that they’d cut themselves out of all relevance to their community and ceased to have a reason to exist.)

Throw in the additional wrinkle that most large non-profit arts boards are made up of very wealthy and generous people from the decidedly for-profit world, and you have a recipe for combustion when times get tough. Since for-profit companies exist to make money, and to preserve capital, it can be very difficult for people used to that world to remember that cultural groups exist for entirely different reasons, and that they therefore need different strategies to weather fiscal storms. Likewise, it’s easy for those on the receiving end of a board’s largess to forget that we quite literally wouldn’t have careers without their continuing generosity. It’s a very understandable disconnect, but it does lead to a lot of frustration on all sides.

Chaos is frequently the enemy of progress, and my take on why so many orchestras, in particular, flounder in tough times is that too many of us don’t find a way to pull on the oars together when we need to most. Faced with a crisis, some musicians dig in their heels and insist everything will work itself out, some managers see an excuse to make the massive cuts they’ve been wanting to impose for years, and some board members feel caught in the middle of it all and eventually do what they would do at their for-profit firms – find the route with the least apparent risk and set a course down it.

But if Michael Kaiser and an increasingly audible chorus of others are to be believed, that less risky route might actually keep us with our heads barely above water for far longer than we can afford.

Posted in money, state of the art, the business of music | 1 Comment »

Ending radio silence

July 27th, 2010 by Sarah

Can I just say, it’s been a manic few weeks. I had 11 days away (which included 6 concerts with two orchestras of 3 different programs), a couple of days at home to rehearse and perform with Josh Ritter; meanwhile there comes a call from the NSO about their American Playlist concert (which I was slated to conduct in a few days) – John Mayer wants an orchestral chart for a Bob Dylan song, could I crank one out? In 48 hours?? – which I did, and after a quick 3 days in DC I was back home to rehearse and perform a premier of a jazz/orchestral with Evan Christopher and the Minnesota Orchestra last Friday and now…I’m in Maine for a week at a music festival to work with my favorite duo, Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson.

Yup, July tends to be a oddly jam-packed and tiring month. As I catch my breath here in my room in Waterville, ME, listening to an epic thunderstorm raging outside, I’ve finally uploaded from my phone a video I took while at the New Hampshire Music Festival a couple of weeks back. The program for the evening was an interesting combo: Ives/Three Places in New England (v. 2); Copland/Appalachian Spring; Beethoven/Piano Concerto #5.

Morgan came to find me after the concert; she’d been assigned to usher the first of two evening performances, and liked it so much that she switched with a friend and came back to usher the second night as well. As she put it, “The first night I was just going to stay for the first half, like we’re supposed to, but I ended up staying for the whole concert because I wanted to hear more.” I’ll let her do her own talking:

Morgan

It was a thrill to encounter a first-time concertgoer who exuded such enthusiasm and had, self-admittedly, become a classical music convert. Which was a potent reminder to me why every performance matters; there are those out there encountering orchestral repertoire for the first time in their lives, and it’s contingent upon myself and my colleagues in the orchestra to make the music come alive.

Posted in Uncategorized, contemporary culture, philosophical musings, state of the art, the young people | No Comments »

A fashion must-have

July 22nd, 2010 by Sarah

It’s been a busy 10 days. I’ll get around to an actual post this weekend, but in the meantime, I wanted to show you my newest fashion accessory obsession, from AMBUSH.

Posted in composers, fun | 5 Comments »

No, Thank You.

July 19th, 2010 by Sam

I read a lot of reviews. And I mean a lot. Not just reviews of concerts I’ve played in, but concerts by other orchestras, by string quartets, by new music ensembles, by pop stars, hip-hop collectives, theater productions, and all manner of other performances. It’s a weird tic I developed while spending eight years being paid to curate such stuff for ArtsJournal.com, that indispensable daily aggregator of arts news. I left ArtsJournal when I added Inside the Classics to my duties, but I’ve never gotten out of the habit of at least scanning every review I come across.

Without going too far down the road of negativity, I’ll just say that music criticism really isn’t what it used to be. Many critics today, battered from all sides by an unfriendly economy, increasingly twitchy musicians and the PR folks who work for them, and a wider American public that doesn’t really see any need for Expert Opinion on anything anymore, seem to have either decided to live on the path of least resistance (praising more or less every concert that isn’t a total debacle,) or lapsed into a perpetually cranky tone that implies that they are the last line of defense against the cultureless barbarians at the gate. It’s kind of sad, especially since those of us who make our living in the arts really do owe a debt of gratitude to the news organizations that still deign to cover us. (Yes, City Pages, I’m still looking at you. Cute head fake and all with having your theater critic write up a couple of blog posts about classical music right after I slammed you, but it’s been nothing but silence since May…)

Anyway. I bring all this up because this past weekend, the orchestra made our annual pilgrimage to Winona, Minnesota’s rather miraculous Minnesota Beethoven Festival, there to close out the summer for them with Osmo conducting the 4th and the 7th, which just happen to be my two favorite Beethoven symphonies. We’ve been doing this for three years running now, and while Winona is quite a haul from the Cities, I’ve always loved making the trip. The people who pack the middle school auditorium for our shows are always so excited to be there, and so gracious to us. They literally treat us like celebrities, and while that kind of unearned adulation normally makes me seriously uncomfortable, the folks in Winona are so sincere that I just want to hug them all.

Most years, after we play Winona, I find myself scanning a few reviews from southern Minnesota papers who sent reporters to the concert. They’re pretty much always unfailingly polite and full of praise for the home state’s biggest band, and almost always indistinguishable from the hundreds of other reviews I read every year. But this year, I’d noticed that there was a violinist from Eau Claire who was posting blog reviews of a number of the Beethoven Festival concerts. And that she could really write, not a skill that many musicians are known to possess. I wondered whether she’d be at our show.

She was, of course. And while I’m pretty much the antithesis of an emotional guy, I have to admit that I teared up while reading her description of the concert we played yesterday…

I’ll try to remember little bits and pieces to give a vague idea of what it was like, but honestly I was rendered rather speechless. There was power suffused with delicacy – extraordinary dynamic range – palpable commitment on the part of everyone onstage, from the strings to the brass to the woodwinds to Maestro Vanska – elegance – earthiness – charm – passion. Passion above all else. These musicians were so excited to share their love of the music with us, and the electricity in the hall proved that the audience was just as excited to hear it as the orchestra was to play it. It was such a special feeling to communicate with these extraordinary virtuosos in that intensely personal way. I wish I could tell you more than that – give you more details about what exactly I loved – but I really can’t. I was too carried away by the joy and power of the sound. There is nothing to say except this is the pinnacle of our art. This is why I love music. This is one of the greatest experiences a human being can have.

Wow. That’s just… that might be the greatest compliment I’ve ever been paid in my 30 years of playing an instrument. Not to mention the most eloquent. I’m sort of speechless myself.

Emily wrote that she thought of approaching some of the MN Orchers she saw heading out after the concert, but was afraid that she’d either come across as hopelessly smitten or tongue-tied…

I’ll have to resort to thanking them online. Hopefully some member of the orchestra will read it and understand the profound awe and gratitude I’m trying to convey.

I read it, Emily, and you can bet I’ll make sure everyone else does, too, when we get back to work tomorrow morning. The awe and gratitude runs both ways – as lucky as you and others in the Upper Midwest might feel to have us around, we feel twice as lucky to have you. And please – keep writing. You’re astoundingly good at it.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Why I Love Minnesota

July 17th, 2010 by Sam

The radio silence around here this week is due to it being one of the busiest times of the year for both Sarah and me. By tomorrow evening, I will have played 15 services (a service is either a rehearsal or a concert, at least two hours each) in 6 days, prepared and performed nine different full-length pieces (plus a pops concert with the awesome Josh Ritter) totaling around 7 hours of music, and generally logged more hours at work than at home. It’s actually been a lot of fun – busy weeks are chaotic, but exhilarating, and hey, weeks like this are why they pay me, right?

So anyway, Friday had been another very long day at the office, and I’m biking home from that night’s concert, exhausted, and think to myself: I’ve earned a treat. Saturday morning rehearsal or no, I’m stopping in at my favorite neighborhood dive bar for a couple of beers before heading home. Which I proceed to do.

I’m sitting at the bar with my Surly Furious, and because there’s nothing else to do, I start chatting with the burly guy on the barstool next to me about, you know, whatever. The Twins’ new ballpark, why local breweries are putting so many hops in their beers these days, etc. Dive bar small talk. Somehow we get onto the subject of grandparents, and he mentions that his grandpa, currently 91 and starting to slip away a bit, lives out on Lake Minnetonka. I say get right out of town, my grandparents lived on Minnetonka for decades until my grandpa started to slip away. So we’ve got that.

Then he tells me that his grandpa and a lot of other guys basically built the town of Excelsior way back when, and I tell him I’ve always liked that town, sort of frozen in time as it is, with it’s own little bustling downtown and all. I mention that I’m a musician, and I play a concert out in Excelsior every fourth of July. He realizes this must mean I’m in the orchestra, and I say yes. He says that he and his mom have been going to the Minnesota Orchestra together on a regular basis ever since he was a kid, and he just loves it, even though his wife never wanted to go – she’s more into clubbing and dance halls – until this one concert a couple of years ago that she loved.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised at this point when I run into people all over Minnesota who not only don’t grimace when I mention that I play classical music, but actually talk about the last time they came to the orchestra. But I can’t help it – I didn’t grow up in a place where seemingly half the population goes to plays and museums and orchestra concerts. Heck, half the population of my hometown pretty much never left their own houses at night!

So back to my friend at the bar. I go into my usual musician/ambassador mode, chat about a few concerts he’s been to, and tell him to come up and say hi the next time he’s at the hall. He says he’ll try to recognize my face in the crowd, and just to get it out there, I tell him to scan the brochures in the lobby, because I have this concert series I do with one of our conductors…

Instant recognition. Instant. Not only does he know exactly who I am as soon as the words are out of my mouth, but as it turns out, he’s been to at least four of our Inside the Classics shows. He even has the musical vocabulary to describe Sarah’s conducting style, and it turns out that show his wife finally liked was our Mendelssohn show from the 2008-09 season. He went on and on about all the stuff he loved from various shows, from the Baldwin sisters singing a Fanny Mendelssohn song to our performance of the swashbuckling Mendelssohn Octet to Mike Gast playing part of a Mozart horn concerto on a beer funnel.

Anyway, his folks live about a block away from me, which is why he was in the neighborhood, but dude. Talk about your only-in-Minnesota coincidences. Nice end to a chaotic work week…

Posted in all music is local, audience feedback | No Comments »

You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby

July 11th, 2010 by Sam

Via my good friend Kate Holzemer (and the several hundred other musicians who seem to be passing this around on Facebook) I’m pleased to link you to this classic Time Magazine article from 1966 on the fab new trend of, well, um…

…oh, just read it:

Lady musicians are having a heyday. The Cleveland Orchestra now has 11, the San Francisco 17, the Houston 25 and the American Symphony 44. Trombonist Betty Glover, 43, adds class to the brass of the Cincinnati Symphony; Helen Taylor, 24, plays a mean English horn for the Houston Symphony. The rare bird in the Los Angeles aviary is Barbara Winters, 28, who, to produce the needed penetrating sounds from her oboe, must pit her trim 120 lbs. against male fellow oboists who average a burly-chested 200 Ibs. To maintain the exceptional breath control necessary to control her contrary instrument, Winters swims and works out daily at a gym. “It leaves me almost no time for social life,” she says. “I’d hate to think what I would do if I were married.”

Oh, good lord. My parents always told me that the ’60s were all about equality and progressive thinking. Guess not…

Orin O’Brien, 31, the newest member of the New York Philharmonic, scurried into Philharmonic Hall one rainy night last week and, ignoring the musicians’ locker room, got dressed in a washroom… Miss O’Brien, who is as curvy as the double bass she plays, does not mind. On tour, the men make up for it by falling all over themselves to carry her bags, and save her a seat on the bus.

As curvy as the bass she…? Wow. I’ll have to try that one out on our new female bass player and see what she thinks of the compliment. Though I think I’ll be sure to try it at something slightly greater than arm’s length. (Ms. O’Brien is still plying her trade with the NY Phil, by the way.)

As casually offensive as the author’s language seems today, the really bad stuff is all from male musicians who clearly think they’re being reasonable and acting in the best interests of working women.

Lady-Killer Zubin Mehta, 30, who appreciates a well-turned ankle as much as a well-played musical phrase, has different reasons. He has enforced a limit of 16 women in his Los Angeles Philharmonic, because “a woman’s life in the orchestra is not as long as a man’s; she is just not as good at 60 as a man is at 60…” Most musicians agree that women are all right in their place—just as long as that place is not the first desk, a position that gives them authority over the other players in their section. When that happens, egos get bruised… The majority of conductors avoid such problems by refusing to promote women to the first desk.

Ugly, ugly, ugly. And once again, this was in 1966, not 1926! No one’s ever accused symphony orchestras of being on the cutting edge of anything, but I’ll admit, this article took me aback. I was born a decade after it was written, and I’ve literally never met a musician who admitted to believing that women were anything but the absolute equal of men on the concert stage. (I have met more than a few who still seemed to think that making unsolicited passes at the attractive ones was somehow okay, but that’s a different issue. There are creeps in every line of work.)

For the record, the first female musician appointed to the Minnesota Orchestra (nee Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra) was Australian violinist Jenny Cullen, hired by the MSO’s second music director, Henri Verbrugghen, in 1923. And I’m sure that the men of the MSO reacted to the hire in a completely calm and professional manner…

…or not.

She got the job only because she was having an affair with the boss. At least, that’s what the men said — even though the boss was fond of saying she looked like “a shy vegetable.” They alleged that [Cullen] had violated immigration laws and union rules… They threatened to shut down the season.

Sigh. Shoulda seen that coming, I guess. I can, at least, report firsthand that no such sexist garbage attended the hiring of our Ms. Hicks as the orchestra’s first female staff conductor several years back. In fact, if memory serves, her selection from an impressive crop of finalists (all the rest of them male) took about ten seconds of deliberation for those of us on her audition committee. (Yes, I was on Sarah’s audition committee. Funny how life works.)

The Time article makes note of the Boston Symphony’s innovative use of screens to hide the gender of auditioning candidates from those passing judgment. It was, of course, exactly those screens that eventually allowed women to become the nearly equal (by numbers) force that they are in today’s music world. By the looks of things, they’ll outnumber us Y-chromosomers on the concert stage within a generation or two. And when they do, well… I can only hope they’ll treat us a heck of a lot more kindly than we’ve treated them over the years.

Posted in orchestra culture, women in music | 3 Comments »

Keeping It Fresh

July 10th, 2010 by Sam

Earlier this week, I was having coffee with an old friend, a musician-turned-writer who’s in the process of doing some background research on the orchestral world. As we chatted about the various ups and downs of playing music for a living, she asked a question that I had to stop and think about: “With all the repetition over the course of a career – all the times you’re asked to play the same symphonies over and over again – are there great works, pieces that audiences the world over know and love, that you’d just as soon never play again?”

The question stopped me cold. My gut instinct was that, of course, this must be the case, there must be pieces that I used to love but am now tired of playing. I’ve got twelve years in the business at this point, ten with a single orchestra, so naturally, I’ve played most of the warhorses more times than I can remember. I could definitely name you more than a few pieces I’m none too fond of performing.

But as I considered how to answer, I realized that those pieces I don’t like playing are by and large the same ones that I never liked playing. They haven’t become tiresome through repetition, they just never suited me. And not only that, I told my friend, all the repetition has actually brought me to a deep appreciation of some composers that I didn’t think much of in my younger days. Richard Strauss’s tone poems, for instance, used to do very little for me, until I got to the point that the brutally difficult task of playing them became just routine enough for me to be able to sit back and take in the whole of the music.

There are certainly one or two works that we’ve played so often in recent years that I’m not exactly itching to play them again anytime soon. Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony falls into that category, but not because I don’t still enjoy the piece. It’s just that it’s very, very long, and the viola part is repetitive to the point of being actually physically painful in places. Ditto Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade.

My friend’s question was basically about the difficulty of keeping things sounding fresh over a decades-long career when there’s so much repetition involved, and there again, I often think that orchestral players actually enjoy a considerable advantage over other classical musicians in that area. Whereas a string quartet or other small ensemble usually spends its time touring, playing basically the same repertoire (selected from a list of pieces the group is currently well rehearsed on) from city to city for months or even years on end, we orchestra people stay home and play a new set of repertoire every few days. It’s very rare that we’ll play a single concert more than four times before moving on to the next one, so we’re constantly saying goodbye to whatever we’ve recently been working on. That speed of schedule alone goes a long way towards not allowing the music to become stale.

The bottom line is that no one wants to go hear an orchestra that sounds bored, so it’s our job to play every piece as if it’s our favorite. If you have to fake the enthusiasm every now and then, so be it. (Even Laurence Olivier probably phoned in a few Shakespeare scenes in his time.) But I was pleasantly surprised to realize that, if anything, time and experience have led me to enjoy more of the music I play, not less. Strange that it took a loaded question from a friend to bring it to my attention…

Posted in inside the orchestra | 1 Comment »

Happy B-day, Gustav

July 7th, 2010 by Sarah

For Mahler’s 150th, the Adagietto from the 5th Symphony, with Bernstein, who helped catapult Mahler from cult status to the mainstream in the 60’s, at the helm of the Vienna Philharmonic:

Posted in composers, orchestras not named minnesota | Comments Off

Youth repellent?

July 5th, 2010 by Sarah

“Classical music, opera, used to disperse teen loiterers”

I really hate news stories like this, mostly because they seem to confirm common suspicion that the young people are repelled by this old-fangled classical music business. And, not only that; in this specific case, at the London Public Library, it appears that this sensationalist statement is not entirely true. If you’re pumping ANY kind of music (and only two selections on endless loop!) through a tinny PA system, ANYONE would be repelled. It just happened that the area in front of the library was a popular hangout for teen smokers.

To me it seems another instance of attempting to prove a stereotype by forcing facts to fit thesis, not the other way around. Or is there any credence to this?

Posted in contemporary culture, music and psychology, the young people | 1 Comment »

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