As we’ve wrapped up our preparations for this upcoming tour – packed the wardrobe trunks, mapped out the travel schedule, rehearsed the rep as completely as we have time for – I’ve slowly been coming to a realization that is as disturbing as it is surprising. In fact, it’s a personal revelation on par with the time I realized that I, a nearly lifelong Phillies fan, didn’t like Curt Schilling (who was a pennant-winning Phillie at the time,) and the time I was forced to admit that everyone else was right and I was wrong about runny egg yolks.
Wow, that was a hard thing to type out loud. And I may yet take it back. But as of this pre-tour weekend, I’m officially on the fence regarding Austria’s ultra-Catholic, hugely insecure, tremolo-addicted native son. Your support and good wishes will be much appreciated during this difficult time.
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.
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:
I’ve written before about the complicated dance between composers and performers, the composer’s need for constant innovation and desire for things to sound a certain way jostling against the musician’s existing skill set and desire for the instrument s/he plays to sound a certain way. So it was fun this week to discover a blog post on the same subject from the other side of the relationship. Here’s New York composer Kyle Gann…
One of the issues I deal with every day as a composer (every day I get to compose, that is), is the tension between what I want to hear and what’s “grateful” for the performer to play. I suspect a lot of us are in this boat now. It started with minimalism. There are a lot of postminimal pieces I love listening to, and then I open the score and see page upon page of streaming 8th-notes without rests, or multiple tied whole-notes for wind players, or intricate permutational passages within small ranges, and think, “Boy, I love hearing it, but I’m glad it’s not me who has to play it.”
It’s actually a great relief to know that composers do care about this issue (which is not to say that I really suspected that they don’t. Most of them, anyway.) But history is loaded with incidences of musicians publicly declaring this piece or that “impossible” to play – Beethoven, Stravinsky, and countless other composers heard it time after time – only for the piece in question to become completely standard rep within a generation. So if I were a composer, I think I’d be extremely suspicious that most musician complaints were coming from a stockpile of laziness.
Fortunately, Gann is far more enlightened (or less cynical) than I am…
[A] lot of my compositional technique has gone toward preserving the qualities I want from minimalism while giving the performers something graceful and rewarding to play. I’m writing a string quartet. My impulse would be to keep the players pretty much confined to one string for ten minutes at a time, but I want them to use the whole range of their instruments, not get too tired, and feel each phrase as something musical. So I’m wracking my brain to introduce frequent variety and gently nuanced phrases without introducing any drama, anguish, or climaxes whatever, anything that will disturb the placid, uniform surface I want.
Now, that’s fascinating to me, because this is exactly the kind of thing I never, ever think about when I’m listening to a new piece. I might think, “wow, that last part sounded really hard to play,” but it would never occur to me to wonder whether a composer had written a phrase a certain way just to give the performers a breather. It’s a much appreciated gesture, though: you simply would not believe how common repetitive stress injuries are among musicians, and as great as composers like John Adams and Philip Glass undeniably are, many of their scores look to us like carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis personified.
Gann goes on to talk about the limits of this approach with some of his current work, in which he’s trying to create new ways for live performers to create music based on electronica, which is by nature extremely repetitious. In the end, what he’s really pointing out is the very human limitations that can occasionally be placed on cross-genre experimentation.
It’s strange, when you think about it: Ligeti should have made electronic music, Michael Gordon should have been a rock star, and I should have made ambient music, but instead we pick up new paradigms in these areas and bring them back to torture string quartets and orchestras with.
He’s not wrong…
He’s joking, of course, and I’ve always said that I’d rather have a composer write whatever s/he wants and then be open to negotiation than to self-censor in advance just because s/he’s worried I’ll balk at what’s in my part. But as a performer, it’s great to know that composers really do think of us as human (and therefore breakable) collaborators, rather than just the machine that plays their music…
(By the way, be sure to read the comments appended to Kyle’s post. They’re all interesting, especially one from a faculty member at Haverford College in Philadelphia, pointing out that physical concerns are only part of the problem some musicians have with minimalist music: “…it’s not only the repetitive stress syndrome for both brain and fingers playing minimalist and post-minimalist music, but the lack of opportunity to make any meaningful artistic contribution to the music as a performer that is equally if not more off-putting.”)
Franz Joseph Haydn, in addition to being one of the more underrated great composers these days, was famous for the sense of humor he deployed in his symphonies. There’s the ubiquitous “Surprise” Symphony, of course, and the “Farewell” Symphony, in which the players leave the stage one by one as the music is going on (supposedly Haydn’s not so subtle way of requesting that his orchestra be granted vacation time.) Despite his status as one of the most prominent composers of his day, Haydn never took himself or his music too seriously.
I bring this up because we just got done with a week of concerts that concluded with my favorite Haydn gag – the finale of his Symphony No. 90. (Yes, 90 – the man wrote a metric ton of music, usually on insane deadlines.) Essentially, Haydn wrote a false ending into the symphony – a climactic flourish followed immediately by four empty bars in which no one plays anything, after which the strings sneak back in and keep going. It’s a clear attempt to trick the audience into applauding before the piece is over, and it pretty much never fails. You can’t avoid the joke even if you wanted to, since Haydn wrote in the exact number of beats he wanted to be silent after the head fake.
I’ve played the piece a few times, under conductors with varying levels of interest in the joke. (MN Orch violist Ken Freed once conducted it at the summer camp we both work at, and when the audience started applauding, he actually brought the orchestra up for a bow before continuing.) But I’d never seen anyone commit quite as fully to the impishness of the moment as Mark Wigglesworth did with us this week…
Did you notice how he actually started subtlely slowing down the tempo about 12 bars before the fakeout? Genius. And that huge yank we’re all doing with our bows was custom-ordered by Mark, too. Which might seem odd and unnecessary, since there’s no way the audience isn’t going to applaud. But there’s a reason for the extra dose of theatrics – technically, this second half of the finale has a repeat. No one ever takes it, since the joke’s already been made, and no one’s going to fall for it twice, right? Right?
Yup, we took the repeat. And Mark gave explicit orders that we were to sell the second head fake with everything we had, so as to create that wonderfully awkward moment you see above. Clearly, no one in the hall was actually fooled a second time, but if we were just going to hang there with our arms in the air, they almost had to go along with it. And besides, maybe that really is the end the second time around? …maybe?
Nope. And what I really love about this is that Haydn knew perfectly well that people weren’t going to be satisfied with just laughing for a moment at his joke – they’d definitely want to whisper with their neighbors about it for a few seconds. So for roughly 30 bars after the fake ending, nothing of consequence happens in the music. We’re essentially in a holding pattern while everyone gets it out of their system, and then we ramp up for the real ending, which you notice Mark was kind enough to signal to the crowd.
And the funniest (and most apropos) part about it, for me, was that this came at the end of a concert that had started with Wagner and Brahms, two of the least lighthearted composers in history, and fierce rivals besides. Nothing like giving your audience an hour of weighty, cerebral meat and potatoes, and then inviting Haydn to come and thumb his nose at everyone for dessert…
(Many thanks to MN Orch librarian Valerie Little for the camerawork…)
About once a year, our marketing staff sends around questionnaires to all the musicians in the Minnesota Orchestra designed to gather new and interesting info for our online bios. In recent years, they’ve begun adding personal “playlists” – our favorite concerts of the upcoming season – and something called “Fun Facts” to each of our bio pages. For the fun facts, we get a list of questions, and are allowed to choose which of them we feel like answering. (I think you actually learn less about us from our answers than you do by tracking which questions we choose to answer, and which we don’t.)
There’s one question on the list that I’ve never answered, for the simple reason that the answers that jump into my head when I see it are almost always deeply sarcastic. There are troves of research proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that 82% of the public is incapable of recognizing sarcasm when it is displayed on a computer screen, and those 82% tend to get very upset when they misconstrue sarcasm as serious opinion, and then I’m the bad guy. So I just leave the question blank, every year.
But this morning, as I was perusing my “fun facts” list and trying to decide which questions I could answer in reasonably non-sarcastic fashion, it occurred to me that I have a blog. And that I have frequently been sarcastic on the blog in the past, and have only rarely been savaged by angry commenters as a result. What better place to lay down my various answers to The Question That Shall Never Appear On My Bio Page?
Okay, so the question is this: Which composer would you most like to have dinner with? And what would you serve?
Pretty simple, and a nice cross-reference there by our marketing folks to the fact that musicians, as a breed, almost all seem to love to cook. (This is true – our orchestra potlucks are ridiculously gourmet, right down to the homebrewed beer and hand-rolled pasta.) Many of my colleagues have had no trouble answering it seriously. (I particularly like Matt Young’s answer.) But for some reason, every year when I read it, something like this pops into my head:
Bruckner. Not sure exactly what we’d eat, but whatever it was would take three hours to consume and leave you strangely undernourished at the end.
Yeah, I said it. Bruckner’s long-winded and lacks depth. Who wants a piece?
It’s a fun game, actually. How many other great composers can we unfairly disparage with food references?
Mahler. I’d serve a couple of hundred spinach puffs, but claim there were a thousand. Then I’d force-feed him foie gras for 90 minutes before smashing the dessert tray with a giant hammer.
Haydn. I’d prepare a year’s worth of food, but every meal would taste exactly the same.
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…
This isn’t a summer camp story. I just want to make that clear right up front, because I’ve written a few times before about the camp I’ve been going to since I was ten years old, and yes, this story is also going to partially take place there, and yes, I know that no one likes stories about someone else’s stupid summer camp that you never went to. But, as I said, this is not a summer camp story. Really. Promise.
…everybody still reading? Okay, good. As it happens, this is a story about Aaron Copland, arguably the preeminent American composer of the 20th century, and certainly of the century’s first half. And it happens to take place in the tiny town of Cummington, Massachusetts, which happens to be home to Greenwood Music Camp. These happenings will all intersect later.
The story begins with Copland, already a successful composer of concert music in the late 1930s, looking to break into the lucrative business of film scoring. Hollywood was well into its golden age at this point, and composers who could capture the drama of a cinematic epic without overwhelming the narrative were in high demand in Los Angeles. But Copland had yet to compose either his iconic Fanfare for the Common Man, or the ballet score we know as Appalachian Spring – the two works which, more than any others, would establish his signature sound as America’s sound. And Hollywood, for its part, was still in the thrall of Euro-style neo-romanticism. Film scores in this age were lush, richly orchestrated things, more redolent of composers like Brahms, Wagner, and Strauss than the spare, wide-open scores Copland was becoming known for.
Eventually, a score Copland wrote to accompany a documentary to be screened at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York caught the attention of the film industry, and he began to be tapped to score films with distinctly rural themes. (The music he wrote for Thornton Wilder’s omnipresent Our Town still has a home in 21st century concert halls.) But still, the pickings were slim, and as World War II drew to a close, Copland found himself with an offer to score what amounted to a propaganda film for the US government.
The film, which is actually awfully sweet and uncontroversial as propaganda films go, was called The Cummington Story.
It was set in a very real hamlet in an area of Western Massachusetts known (when it’s known at all, which is seldom) as the Berkshire Hilltowns. I don’t know how many people lived in Cummington in 1945, but I know that there were still only 978 souls living there at the 2000 census. (This is a town I’ve known like the back of my hand since I was a 5th grader, and that population figure seems shockingly high to me.) It’s a dot on the map, with a one-block Main Street, a hardware store, a ridiculously outsized annual fair, two churches (though one burned down a few months back – the one with the lovable pastor who works at the Old Creamery Grocery out on Rt. 9,) and, like I said, this music camp.
What made Cummington special, back when the government decided to make this film, was that it had been selected as one of the places that refugees from the war in Europe would be sent to begin their new lives. And in the wake of the horrific violence that had engulfed the world over the previous decade, it’s understandable that the feds wanted to showcase American generosity of spirit, etc. And what could be more American than relocating refugees not to some bustling, impersonal metropolis where they would blend into the background, but to a small, agrarian town in the middle of nowhere, where they would literally reenact the struggles of the pioneers as they attempted to rebuild some semblance of a normal life?
In the end, the film depicts a small triumph of the American “melting pot” ideal, and I have no idea whether it even remotely resembles what actually occurred in Cummington in the post-war era. I do know that the film garnered relatively little attention, and that Copland’s score never made it into the list of his works that still get regular hearings today. But a few years back, the director of Greenwood Music Camp, which sits on a hill overlooking “downtown” Cummington, happened across some mention of it, and began to look into the film and its musical history. She placed a call to the camp’s orchestra conductor, Ken Freed (who just happens to be a violist in the Minnesota Orchestra) to ask whether he thought a collection of 10-13-year-olds would be capable of playing the score.
It was a dicey proposition, to be honest. Copland’s music is full of leaping intervals and complex rhythms, not at all the sort of thing you hand to a young child and expect him to master in less than two weeks. But Ken agreed to try, and that next summer, the Greenwood kids spent an hour every morning scraping and squawking through The Cummington Story before trotting off to rehearse the Haydn and Mozart string quartets that were so much more in their comfort zone. About a week after camp started, they all gathered in the camp’s big performance barn to watch the movie. I would describe their reaction as something between bored and perplexed.
But word got around about what was being prepared up on the hill, and the camp’s director made a point of inviting everyone in town up for the concert. So on the day of the performance, a considerable number of Cummington residents squeezed into the barn next to the usual collection of parents, siblings, and friends that attends the camp’s weekly musical marathons. I’ll admit, I was nervous – like I said, Copland is not something you would ordinarily give to 10-year-olds, and Ken had been looking decidedly stressed all week.
I shouldn’t have worried:
Film credit: David Tartakoff
I doubt that The Cummington Story is what most of the kids who were at Greenwood that summer will remember about their time at camp. Most of them tend to remember their friends, or a particularly great piece of chamber music they played. Orchestra is something to be gotten through at that age – it’s only later that you come to appreciate the musical equivalent of a team sport.
But when they finished the Copland, and the audience erupted, I saw more than a few tears in the audience. I saw a look of immense pride (mingled with relief) on Ken’s face. And I watched, after the concert, as the townsfolk made a point of seeking out the director and thanking her for reviving this musical portrait of their home.
It’s a powerful thing, music. And it’s at its best in moments like that, when it reminds people of why we do what we do, why we live where we live, and why we value the things we value. I’ll never know whether Copland had these things in mind when he wrote The Cummington Story. But I know what it meant to me, and to the folks in Cummington, on that August night.
Even if you’re not a sports fan, it’s pretty hard to escape the hoopla that surrounds baseball’s Opening Day every spring. Especially this year, and especially in Minnesota, where I’m clearly not the only one dying for my first up-close-and-personal Target Field experience. Football may be more popular by some measures, and soccer remains the truly global sports passion, but it’s baseball that has captured the hearts and minds of America’s poets, artists, songwriters, and historians for well over a century now.
Speaking of which, I’ve always wondered why, with the huge swing towards programmatic music in the concert hall during the 20th century, we haven’t seen more American composers attempt baseball-themed works. Sure, there’s a fine line between clever and stupid when it comes to writing serious music about something that is, at its core, a game. And yes, the smothering quilt of nostalgic Americana that covers everything associated with The Game these days might make it difficult for a composer to maneuver without coming off as either trite or unpatriotic.
But how cool would a John Adams take on the bottom of the ninth be? (Minimalism in general would seem to be a natural match for a game that consists of a seemingly endless series of nearly identical events that slowly become a narrative arc.) Or a John Corigliano dramatization of the seventh game of a World Series? What could Tan Dun, with his East-meets-West pedigree, do with an American pasttime that has become a sensation across Southeast Asia?
There’s at least a bit of a history here. Robert Russell Bennett penned a Symphony In D for the Dodgers back in 1941, which Time magazine said “had much of the [team's] elusive, faunlike charm,” whatever that means. And various composers have taken a crack at setting Ernest L. Thayer’s classic poem, “Casey at the Bat” to music – Sarah and I actually performed Frank Proto’s version at a set of Minnesota Orchestra young people’s concerts last season. But compared with the number of novels, movies, pop songs, and poems that get written about baseball, us classical folk haven’t exactly kept pace.
Interestingly, one of my favorite essays about classical music was actually penned by a writer beloved by generations of American sports fans. George Plimpton, in addition to founding The Paris Review, authored a hilarious and eye-openingseries of books wherein he convinced professional sports franchises to allow his scrawny, unathletic self to join them on the field of play in an actual game, if only for a few minutes. What most fans of these tomes don’t know, however, is that he tackled the same challenge with the New York Philharmonic.
The short essay that resulted from Plimpton’s brief but heart-pounding turn as a NY Phil percussionist is almost exactly like his sportswriting: intensely personal, deeply respectful of the skill being displayed around him, and glinting with the patent ridiculousness of the whole enterprise. The complete essay is actually available online, thanks to Google, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Plimpton posits any number of comparisons between music and sports, but my favorite section is when he makes a deeply unsettling discovery about what makes playing a concert very, very different from playing a ball game…
“One of the terrors of orchestral music is that once it starts there is no earthly way you can stop it. It is utterly unlike sports where, if you think about it, the athlete has an almost God-like ability to stop time itself. The quarterback makes a crossed X sign to call time-out and everything stops. The batter steps out of the batter’s box and everything stops. An Olympic diver, poised on the board, can take her time, wriggling her toes and getting herself feeling just right before she commits herself to arch off into the water below.
“But in music, as soon as the conductor’s stick comes down, one is immediately put onto a treadmill that bears one inexorably up toward the moment of commitment and there’s nothing that can be done about it.”
Too true. But now he’s got me thinking about how much easier my job would be if I could call time out in the middle of a Mahler symphony. Gotta remember to talk to Osmo about that…
“A new book on how the human brain interprets music has revealed that listeners rely upon finding patterns within the sounds they receive in order to make sense of it and interpret it as a musical composition.”
You don’t say. Go on…
“While traditional classical music follows strict patterns and formula that allow the brain to make sense of the sound, modern symphonies by composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern simply confuse listeners’ brains.”
Okay, well, first of all, both of those composers died six decades ago, so they hardly qualify as “modern.” What the authors actually mean is “modernist,” which was a movement that burned brightly with composers (and considerably less brightly with audiences) in the mid-20th century. These days, the number of prominent composers still working who persist in writing modernist music can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
But I’m sorry, I interrupted. You were saying…
“In the early twentieth century, however, composers led by Schoenberg began to rally against the traditional conventions of music to produce compositions which lack tonal centres, known as atonal music.”
Now, there again, Schoenberg did not write “atonal” music. He created a new and complex system of tones and chord structures known as “12-tone” music. It involved all kinds of grids and math and chromatic doodads and such, but it is not, strictly speaking, atonal. Atonal means that you can just throw any combination of notes together and call it music.
Yes, I’m a nerd. But my point is that Schoenberg’s music is actually more strictly organized, from a pattern standpoint, than a lot of traditional tonal music. So theoretically, our pattern-seeking brains should eventually be able to detect those patterns and relax, once we’ve been conditioned to hear that kind of music. And as those of us who’ve spent a lot of time with modernist music will tell you, that does, indeed, happen, up to a point. Your brain will never mistake Webern or Berg for Mozart, but you do eventually get a bit of an aural handle on what’s going on.
“Research has shown that listening to music is a major cognitive task that requires considerable processing resources to unpick harmony, rhythm and melody.”
Uh-huh. Which is why listening to a Mahler symphony is mentally exhausting (but exhilirating,) while listening to a Lady Gaga song (or, for that matter, a Strauss waltz) is the mental equivalent of eating cotton candy. But this all seems pretty common sensical. Was there some actual, y’know, science in this scientific study?
“Using brain scanning equipment Professor Kraus, who presented her findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego on Saturday, said the brainwaves recorded from volunteers listening to music could be converted back to sound.
“In one example where volunteers listened to Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, when the brainwaves were played back the song was clearly recognisable.”
Oh, for the love of… yah. Great. Can we assume that the double-blind study confirming that Wagner had a thing for tubas is on its way?
