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Archive for April, 2010

The Tetris Formation (& Other Important Information About Orchestras)

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

One of the questions that Minnesota Orchestra players are often asked these days is why we sit the way we do, with the second violins opposite the firsts and the basses on the stage right edge rather than the left. We’ve answered that one here on the blog at least once, but for those who desire a more complete (and completely hilarious) explanation of orchestra seating charts, Rainer Hersch has got you covered…

He’s definitely not wrong about the bar in the rehearsal area…

Hersch does entire concerts of music-based comedy, though for some reason he doesn’t seem to work a lot in America. (Perhaps we could change that, Ms. Principal Conductor of Pops and Presentations?) Anyway, here he is working some of his best material Down Under with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, who definitely seem to be enjoying themselves…

Posted in conductors and conducting, fun, inside the orchestra | 6 Comments »

Opera Twitter

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Yes, it’s time for The Omniscient Mussel’s third annual Twitter opera plot contest (which I also discussed a year ago).

The contest; to summarize any opera plot within the constraints of a Twitter post (140 characters or less).

One of my (non-winner) favorites last years frames “Aïda” as a collections of 80’s song titles:

Walk like an Egyptian. Who’s that girl? Let’s play master & servant. Every breath you take… Tainted love! I would die 4 U.

Happy tweeting!

Posted in fun, opera | 1 Comment »

Sondheim On Caring If You Listen

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

I’ve never been the biggest Terry Gross fan, but this past week, I happened to catch her conducting one of the best interviews I’ve ever heard. Her guest was Stephen Sondheim, probably the greatest musical theater composer of all time, and rather than just ask him the usual generic questions that people throw at theater types, Gross decided to get deeply into his musical education, his influences, and his distinctive compositional bag of tricks. She jumped into the deep end after playing a clip from the song “Opening Doors,” from Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along…

GROSS: Now, the producer sings: I’ll let you know when Stravinsky has a hit. He’s saying it sarcastically. Now, you studied with the avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt. When you studied with him, was your ambition Broadway, or was it more…

Wait. Sondheim studied with Babbitt? This Babbitt?

Huh. Who knew? Anyway, Sondheim admits that he was never very interested in writing concert music, but explains that Babbitt taught him how to analyze everything from Bach to the Great American Songbook from a nitty-gritty, compositional standpoint and gave him the knowledge base to start formulating his own sound as a composer. Gross follows up with a truly outstanding question:

GROSS: Can you give me an example of an insight you got from Babbitt studying, say, a Jerome Kern song?

SONDHEIM: One of the things we analyzed in detail, one of the songs, was “All the Things You Are,” which has a remarkable harmonic structure in it, which among other things consists of the fact that the tonic chord isn’t played until the end of the song, and it goes from a circle of fifths and then breaks the circle of fifths with a tritone, which echoes itself not only in the melody but also in the bass and defines both the key that the song is written in and the key to which it’s going, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I’ve actually reproduced that hour-long analysis he gave me to students I had at Oxford when I taught at Oxford. And it’s it’s as lodged in my mind because it is a way of approaching, when you are trying to hold a song together, how you hold it together harmonically and still make it fresh. Kern was a master at that.

Man. How often do you actually learn something new in a celebrity interview? I’ve known that song forever, and never had any inkling that it was that harmonically complex – and I’ve got a college degree in music!

Gross spends a huge chunk of the interview talking about highly technical musical tidbits like this, and teasing long, informative answers out of Sondheim with deceptively short, probing questions. She also leaves in a potentially embarrassing moment in which he corrects her for describing a song as “discordant” when she meant “dissonant.” That stuck out at me, because Fresh Air is a heavily edited show – it says a lot about Gross that she felt no need to trim out her mistake or Sondheim’s correction.

My favorite exchange in the interview comes when Gross brings up Milton Babbitt’s infamous position on audiences and new music…

GROSS: Now, Babbitt wrote atonal music, among other things. And he wrote a now-famous essay called “Who Cares if You Listen?” that was published in High Fidelity in 1958, in which he suggested that composers should withdraw from the public world to a world of private performance and electronic media and eliminate the public and social aspects of composition. Now, did that sense of principle, that a certain kind of music should just be uncompromising, kind of give you permission, in a way, to be uncompromising on Broadway when you felt like you needed to be?

SONDHEIM: I don’t think I’ve ever been uncompromising in that sense. I’ve always been uncompromising in terms of I don’t change something simply because somebody says oh, I can’t hum that.

GROSS: Exactly, right.

SONDHEIM: But no, but I’m interested in the theater because I’m interested in communication with audiences. Otherwise I would be in concert music. I would be in another kind of profession. No, I love the theater as much as I love music, and the whole idea of getting across to an audience and exciting them or making them laugh or making them cry or just making them feel is paramount to me.

The whole business of hummability, of course, has to do with familiarity. If you hear a tune enough times, you’ll hum it. You know, the first time I heard the Berg violin concerto, I thought what is this noise? And the third time I heard it, I thought oh, that’s interesting. And the fifth time I heard it, I was humming along with it.

And I remember being at the intermission of “A Little Night Music” when it first came out and hearing somebody say oh, that “Weekend in the Country” is such a catchy tune. Well, you know, very few people accuse me of writing catchy tunes, and of course it was a catchy tune. She just heard 11 choruses of it, and so of course she could hum it.

I’ve often said familiarity breeds contempt. The problem with so much music, particularly in those days, was that you went into the theater humming it. You know, if you hum something on first hearing it, it might be because it is so immediately memorable, but more likely, it’s because it reminds you of something else.

Wow. So that’s a near-perfect summation of a) why composers find audiences occasionally frustrating, b) why audiences find new music challenging, and c) why audiences and composers still need each other, all in about sixty seconds. And there’s more where that came from. You can listen to the full interview here…

Posted in composers, music education, new music | 2 Comments »

End of the piano as we know it?

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Or maybe not; check out Lang-Lang playing an encore after a concert with the San Francisco Symphony:

Posted in fun, music and technology | Comments Off

The Classical Blackout

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

So, I see that City Pages, Mpls/St. Paul’s award-winning alt-weekly newspaper, is out with its annual Best of the Twin Cities issue, and perusing the parade of winners (Garrison Keillor as best columnist? really?), I find myself left with the same question I have every year. In fact, it’s the same question I have every week when I pick up City Pages.

Where’s the classical music?

Seriously, people. This is a newspaper that calls itself “the arts and entertainment weekly.” I understand that it’s basically a hipster rag written by aging hipsters for other aging hipsters, and I get that Orchestra Hall isn’t exactly crawling with that particular demographic (thank God.) But that doesn’t stop CP from covering literally every other art form in town! They cover dance, they cover movies, they cover live theater, they cover art, and they cover every genre of music imaginable – except classical.

I really can’t overstate what a bizarre editorial decision this is. The Twin Cities has, literally, one of the largest and most diverse classical music scenes in America. We’re the only metro area in the country that sustains not one but two major orchestras, the Schubert Club is one of the most respected presenting organizations in the US, Minnesota Opera seems to be on a mission to make itself a nationally known company, the new music seasons that the Walker and the Southern put together are as good and diverse as any series I’ve ever seen, and the Cities are packed to the brim with good freelance musicians and ensembles doing any number of interesting things on a weekly basis…

…and yet, to City Pages, it’s as if this scene doesn’t exist. Thousands upon thousands of tickets sold every week to performances at the Ordway, Orchestra Hall, and any number of smaller venues, but to the cool kids over in the warehouse district, we’re apparently irrelevant. Not marginalized, not confined to an occasional mention or blurb – totally, utterly, 100% invisible and unreported on. And it has been this way for as long as I’ve lived in Minneapolis and, I’m told, much longer than that.

It’s not like this is a typical thing for alt-weeklies, either. The Boston Phoenix puts together some of the best classical coverage that city has to offer. New York’s Village Voice (also CP’s parent company) covers classical, and the New York Observer does some of the best classical stories of anyone in the Big Apple. The Cleveland Scene not only recognizes the existence of classical music in a city that doesn’t have nearly as much of it as we do, it wrote a series of scathing articles about accusations of nepotism at the Cleveland Orchestra a few years back that absolutely rocked the industry. (As far as I can tell, those articles aren’t online anymore, thus the lack of a link.)

Someone at City Pages (I’m guessing someone who’s no longer there, since nearly the entire staff has turned over in the last few years) obviously decided at some point that classical was too old, or too boring, or too uncool, to be worth the paper’s time. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that whoever this was had probably never actually bothered to attend a classical concert in Minnesota before making this decision, because dude, everyone knows classical music is for boring old people! (It’s worth noting that this hatred of classical doesn’t seem to extend to CP’s advertising department, which is only too happy to take our money every single week and run ads aimed squarely at the very demographic groups the editorial side obviously thinks could care less about what we do.)

Of course, there’s no shortage of classical coverage in this town. Both of our major dailies cover classical, as do MinnPost, Minnesota Public Radio, and plenty of other local outlets. But that’s not the point. By deliberately and permanently rubbing classical music out of existence in its pages, City Pages is perpetuating a weekly insult to one of the greatest – and most popular – arts and culture scenes in America. And it’s time someone demanded an explanation.

UPDATE, 7:15pm: MN Orch PR chief Gwen Pappas reminds me that the late, lamented Twin Cities Reader used to publish regular (and rather feisty) classical music commentary by David McKee. The Reader was shut down in 1997 when it wound up being owned by the same company that owned City Pages.

Also, MinnPost’s media guy David Brauer adds a few salient points of his own, and also does the journalistic legwork I don’t know how to do, getting us an actual response from City Pages editor Kevin Hoffman!

“We can never cover all of the things various constituencies want, but we try our best,” [Hoffman] replied, vowing, “you’ll be seeing more fine arts coverage this year in the Dressing Room blog, and we’ll try to include classical as a category in next year’s ‘Best Of.’”

Uh-huh. I’ll be looking forward to that one-paragraph “Best of” a full calendar year from now. Way to step up there, Kevin.

Further Update, 4/22: Hey, willya look at that? Just one day after I post this little rant and David Brauer calls CP for a comment, a preview of this weekend’s classical music offerings pops up on CP’s aforementioned Dressing Room blog! Now, granted, the item is filed under “theater,” the roundup is written by the paper’s theater critic (who, for all I know, may also be a huge classical music buff,) and it only covers the big dogs (MN Orch, SPCO, and MN Opera,) but it’s not nothing…

Posted in all music is local, stirring the pot, the media | 7 Comments »

The Well-Tempered Orchestra

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

Over at Slate, Jan Swafford has put together an excellent article on the history of tuning musical instruments. WAIT! Don’t go back to Facebook yet – I promise this will not be anywhere near as boring as that first sentence would suggest. Because as it turns out, there is no such thing as Perfectly In Tune, at least across wide ranges of notes, and over the centuries, musicians and the technicians who service them have basically developed one system after another to make nature’s imperfections as unobtrusive as possible.

This is the kind of topic that can send period music enthusiasts flying into a rant (which, believe me, you really do not want to hear, so consider this fair warning to choose your words carefully around such people. And don’t even consider asking what they think of A-440.) This is mainly because what sort of tuning sounds best to your ear depends in large part on what kind of music you like to listen to. If you’re a big fan of renaissance music, for instance, you absolutely need all the fourths and fifths to be perfectly in tune, which means that some of the thirds won’t be, but that won’t bother you so much, since there aren’t very many of them in renaissance music. On the other hand, if you love big Romantic symphonies, those thirds are just crucial, since triads are the basic building blocks of that era, and your brain won’t even notice the occasional slightly out of tune fifth. Fascinating stuff.

Of course, when we talk about mean-tuning, well-temperament, and other geeky intonation terms, we’re basically talking only about instruments which cannot be tuned on the fly, and have all their pitches fixed in one position – keyboard instruments, harps, and many percussion instruments. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. My viola has only four fixed pitches – my open strings – and I can even change those within a few seconds if I need to. I have no frets, either, to control where my fingers land for any particular pitch, so my intonation is entirely within my control (or lack thereof.) This is the major reason why a pianist who’s only been taking lessons for a few years will almost always sound miles ahead of a violinist with the same amount of training. There’s very little that bothers the ear more than out-of-tune music, and in a particularly cruel twist for parents of young musicians, correct intonation is one of the very hardest things to master on string, wind, and brass instruments.

Even at the Minnesota Orchestra level, intonation is something we all have to work on constantly. Yes, most of us are pretty adept at snapping our personal pitch centers around to keep the larger ensemble sounding in tune, but when there are, say, 48 people involved in a single chord, and some lone interior pitch isn’t quite right, it can be ridiculously difficult to decide whose fault it is, and which direction they need to go to fix it. (God forbid two people are out of tune.) We do try to self-police, for the most part, since no one enjoys the humiliation of having the conductor point out that it’s you – yes, you – ruining the moment, but sometimes you just have to take the whole engine apart to figure out what’s making that dang clicking sound, y’know?

Of course, it could always be worse. We could be in this orchestra…

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Shenanigans Fantastique

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

As I mentioned, we’re playing Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique this week, a meaty bit of core repertoire that usually makes for a relaxed atmosphere at work. While the challenge of learning a new or obscure score is exhilarating, there’s definitely something to be said for the comfort and security of plowing through music everyone in the orchestra already knows well. It gives us all a chance to let our hair down, not worry too much about what could go wrong, and just play hard.

That having been said, it also gives us time and space to goof off and needle each other, and that’s been going on more or less constantly this week, especially in my general area of the stage (which at the moment is the third stand of violas, dead center, right in front of the oboes.) See, there’s a moment in the Berlioz, right at the beginning of the beautiful, expansive third movement, when the english horn plays a mournful duet with an offstage oboe. The offstage oboe part is a major solo, so rather than hire an extra musician to play it, most orchestras prefer to have their principal oboe actually get up and leave the stage as the second movement is drawing to a close, play the offstage part, then reenter once the third movement is rolling.

This, of course, requires a bit of forethought in the stage setup, so that the principal oboe, who sits right in the middle of everything, has a clear path to the door. Our stage crew made sure to create the path, and naturally, several of us sitting near the scene of the exit have been doing more or less whatever we can to eliminate it by scooching chairs and stands around to confound John Snow on his way off or on stage. It’s not that we don’t like John – I think it’s safe to say that he’s one of the more universally beloved members of the orchestra. It’s just that musicians are all basically 12 years old, and messing with your friends is fun.

Of course, during actual concerts, we can’t really be setting John up to trip over something and ruin the performance, so with rehearsals over, we’ve settled into a new game of telling John before the concert starts what we think he should do instead of simply quietly gliding into the wings. So far, the following courses of action have been suggested:

Wait until the very, very end of the scherzo movement to leave the stage, and then, as the orchestra is revving up the coda, leap suddenly from the wind riser to the floor, strike a Superman pose, and sprint as fast as possible into the wing.
Stand up as slowly as possible, step off the riser, and then spend a good several minutes meandering blissfully around the orchestra before finally walking out the wrong stage door.
Begin the exiting process more or less as normal, but instead of heading to the open door, walk up to the wall of the stage and stop, then turn and try again with another section of wall, like some sort of oboe-playing Roomba.

Sadly, John – who is obviously allergic to fun – has failed to take us up on a single one of these suggestions. But we’ve got two performances to go yet, and I’m confident that he’ll see the good sense in my latest idea, which involves a jetpack and a zip line…

Posted in fun, inside the orchestra | 8 Comments »

“Dramatic cuts”

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

As the Honolulu Symphony attempts to emerge from its bankruptcy, the in-fighting continues. The latest development; reorganization plans will not only be submitted by the Symphony Society, but by the Symphony’s musicians and/or other parties as well.

The Symphony Society has already put together a 258-page analysis that recommends a drastic reduction in both the schedule and budget. Said analysis was created:

Using customized Web crawlers that collected data and documents from federal agencies and industry sources, analysts compiled extensive information on economic characteristics, organizational performance, community dynamics and other areas deemed relevant for understanding the symphony’s current problems and potential solutions.

Is it just me, or does this methodology seem to eliminate any human element whatsoever?

The conclusion? That the symphony’s financial woes were due to:

• A business model based on “an unrealistic and unsustainable” budget driven by a desire to compete with other national orchestras.

• Wages disproportionate to the number of hours and weeks worked.

• An oversupply of seats and performances.

• “Expectations that the Society is an employment agency or welfare department responsible for the entire financial well-being of its part-time employees.”

This makes me wonder about that aforementioned analysis, and what “federal agencies and industry sources” were consulted, because these bullet points seem to be talking about a widget factory, not a non-profit arts organizations, much less a symphony orchestra.

A budget driven by competition with other orchestras? Is this about pay parity with comparable organizations, or is the underlying implication that they were paying the musicians too much, or that too many musicians were on the roster (and let’s be clear here, the largest fixed cost (by a substantial factor) in any orchestra is its musicians)?

Now, I don’t think $26K (approximate base pay for Honolulu Symphony musicians for the 06/07 season, the last season for which I could find publicly available data) for a full season of work is too much compensation. In fact, given the incredibly high cost of living in Hawaii, you’d need a second job to make it work.

How about the “too many musicians” idea, which many boards and symphony societies have floated as a cost-cutting conversation? A simplified for-profit perspective on complex artistic criteria; change the personnel in an orchestra, and you change the type of music you can play/product you can produce. In the corporate world, if someone is laid off, the workload can be folded into someone else’s (or several others’) job description(s). Increased efficiency? Sure. But you can’t lay off a tuba player and expect a violinist to pick up the slack.

Speaking of product, let’s skip to bullet point three. Oversupply of seats and performances are two very different things. First of all, Blaisdell Concert Hall, the symphony’s home, seats nearly 2,200. Yes, it’s too big, and always has been, so if you want to call that an oversupply, I suppose that makes sense. However, the oversupply of performance makes me wonder. This assumes that a “performance” is a single, immutable product. Last I checked, Piotr Tchaikowsky is very unlike Peter Cetera, and while concerts of their music both graced the 08/09 season, they are entirely different products. Lumping all concerts into the category of “performance” and suggesting cuts seems to betray either a lack of understanding of the complexity of the product or a disinterest in differentiating within the wide span of both repertoire and types of performances.

Back to wages. And that whole “disproportionate to number of hours and weeks” business. First of all, this assumes the orchestral musicians work only during rehearsals and performances; ie, it discounts the individual practice time which, depending on the musician, can be substantial. Second, it discounts the nature of the work. I’ve held a variety of non-musical jobs in my life (and in fact spent a year contemplating a non-musical career path post-college), from translator at a Tokyo law firm to executive assistant at an ad agency. If I condensed what was required of me in the average workday to its very essence and finished it in an intensely focused manner, I could have left work before lunch every day. Imagine that a rehearsal is such a condensation of spread-out work, accomplished within an extremely compact time-frame. It’s a difference in perspective that’s hard to grasp if one doesn’t know what goes into the creation of the “orchestral product”.

Finally, “Expectations that the Society is an employment agency or welfare department responsible for the entire financial well-being of its part-time employees.” I think I’ve addressed the part-time employee issue. As far as being an employment agency, isn’t the responsibility of an employer to provide fair compensation to it’s employees for services rendered? Is the implication that the Symphony Society is providing welfare for a bunch of lazy, part-time-workin’ musicians?

Listen, I’m sympathetic to both sides (to a degree) here. Musicians are baffled at the way management attempt to utilize criteria for analysis based on business models that take not account of the complexities and particular needs of a symphony orchestra. Management simply wants to find a streamlined way to run a business that, frankly, has not been working, and is not working for orchestras across the country.

The simple truth, however, is that the world is changing, financial realities are changing, and audience attendance is changing – and that means the orchestra business must change. But for rational change to happen, orchestras need to be analyzed as complex entities unto themselves, with a unique set of parameters – and not in a manner in which they are directly compared to any other type of company or organization.

I’ve written before about the Honolulu Symphony’s woes before, and it’s heartbreaking for me to do so. It’s the orchestra I grew up with, the orchestra I soloed with as a young pianist, and the ensemble whose musicians have provided such high quality teaching and coaching to countless students. I, and hopefully many others, watch and wait for an announcement of reorganization in the near future.

Posted in orchestras not named minnesota, the business of music | 1 Comment »

Best Week of the Season?

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

It’s no secret, of course, that we in Minnesota are ridiculously spoiled when it comes to the arts. Week in and week out, there’s more to see and do in the Cities than any other comparably sized metro area in the country (I read a stat a few years back that said that we have the highest concentration of arts and culture events per capita of anywhere in the US save New York,) and the sheer breadth of the music and theater scenes, in particular, can even be overwhelming at times.

So with that in mind, I wanted to point out that this week, the week in which basically everyone in town is focused on the Twins and Target Field, also happens to be one of the most jam-packed music weeks of the season. In fact, if you’ll forgive me the audacity, I’d like to schedule your next several evenings for you, seeing as the Twins are playing pretty much all day games this week. (Also, my own concert schedule means I won’t be able to make it to most of these shows, so it’ll make me feel better to try to get the rest of y’all to go…)

That sound okay? Very good, then. Here’s what you should absolutely be hearing live in Minneapolis/St. Paul this week:

Wednesday, April 14 - Nico Muhly & Sam Amidon, Southern Theater, Mpls. I believe I’ve brought up Nico’s music before – he’s been the It Boy (okay, one of the It Boys) of the New York new music scene for a few years now, and despite his careful cultivation of a distinctly hipster-ish, outsider image, the mainstream of classical music has recently been waking up to what his synth-tinged, genre-busting style could do for us. His show at the Southern last season with violist Nadia Sirota might have been my favorite concert of the year, and this collaboration with indie songwriter Sam Amidon should be another memorable show.

Thursday, April 15 - Thomas Zehetmair, violin, with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Trinity Lutheran Church, Stillwater. First of all, can we talk about this program? Beethoven’s towering violin concerto, played by one of my favorite violinists in the entire world, and that’s the appetizer? Zehetmair’s theme for this ambitious concert is pairing late-Classical music with serious modernism from the likes of Anton Webern and Ernst Krenek. There’s definitely a right and a wrong way to mix the 12-tone crowd with the classics, but this looks very, very promising. The SPCO has been putting together the most creative and interesting programming of any group in the Cities (yeah, I said it) for several seasons now, and this looks like it could well be a highlight of 2010.

Friday, April 16 - Symphonie Fantastique, Minnesota Orchestra, Orchestra Hall, Mpls. Yeah, I know, I’m shameless. But the fact is that Berlioz’s hourlong masterpiece is one of those epic symphonies that somehow gets left off most lists of 19th-century greats, and it’s a crying shame. I mean, how many symphonies do you know of that take as their subject a lovesick artist in the throes of an intentional drug overdose? …well, exactly. It could have been one of the all-time overwrought flops, especially given Berlioz’s melodramatic tendencies. Instead, it’s absolutely riveting from start to finish, and it’s one of my favorite pieces to play. Oh, and as a bonus, both our guest conductor and piano soloist for the week are rising young stars making their local debuts. Be there.

Saturday, April 17 - Chick Corea & Gary Burton, Dakota Jazz Club, Mpls. Chick Corea is one of those extraordinary musicians who everyone should hear live at least once. Whatever you might think of jazz’s “electric fusion” era, Corea’s music was always a strong argument in favor of jazz as a living art form, looking forward rather than back, and he backed it up with some of the best chops I’ve ever heard from any musician of any genre. And Gary Burton? He only more or less invented jazz marimba. This could be an unforgettable evening of music.

Sunday, April 18 – Salome, Minnesota Opera, Ordway Center, St. Paul. I remember hearing Garrison Keillor tell a story years ago about the opera singer Eileen Farrell. Supposedly, Farrell was once singing the lead in Tristan & Isolde, when she paused in between arias, leaned down towards the conductor in the pit, and said, in full voice, “You know, this is really a very dirty story!” I’ve no idea whether that’s true, but I do know that Tristan and his girlfriend have nothing on Salome when it comes to dirty. This might well be the most profoundly disturbing opera ever written (though The Crucible might give it a run for its money,) as well as one of the most musically spellbinding, and the Minnesota Opera’s production has been getting some rave reviews.

So there you go! Your week’s all planned out, and there’s no need to thank me. Unless, of course, anyone feels like making an illicit bootleg of Zehetmair’s Beethoven and shooting me a copy…

Posted in all music is local, orchestras not named minnesota, shameless self-promotion | 4 Comments »