What Should Be vs. What Can Be

Posted on
Jan 11 2012
 by Sam Bergman

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

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

But…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Listening Room: A Lot of Lutoslawski

Posted on
Jan 9 2012
 by Sam Bergman

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

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

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

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

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

Are Strads Just A Status Symbol?

Posted on
Jan 4 2012
 by Sam Bergman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in girlfriend please, musical dorkery | 9 Comments

Coming Attractions

Posted on
Jan 2 2012
 by Sam Bergman

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


Folksongs by Hannah Lash

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in composers, microcommission | 2 Comments

Whip It Good.

Posted on
Dec 18 2011
 by Sam Bergman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in fun, holiday music | 6 Comments

Viola Overload!

Posted on
Dec 13 2011
 by Sam Bergman

Ever since I posted a video of our viola section playing my arrangement of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, I’ve been getting periodic requests from violists wanting copies of the parts. I’ve probably sent out about 30 copies in all, and I’ve heard some excellent stories of performances all over the place. But until today, I’d never actually had the chance to see anyone else perform the thing.

Enter my old pal Russell O’Rourke, a Princeton grad currently corrupting the viola studio of UMass-Amherst. The Amherst kids have taken things way beyond goofing around together – they have an actual, honest-to-God Viola Choir, which is a thing that absolutely should not be legal, but apparently is.

Aren’t they cute? (Russell’s the bearded, bespectacled one in the back row.) And so committed. Not entirely sure what that bit of stomping at the beginning is all about, but it does get your attention. (The idea of adding physical choreography to the fanfare sort of started this summer at the camp Russell and I both work at, but it never really came together too well, and I can’t remember what the thinking behind it was.)

There’s more, too. Here’s the same group playing a gorgeous arrangement of Nimrod from Elgar’s Enigma Variations, by Oregon Symphony principal Joël Belgique.

There’s even more at their YouTube channel, if you’re the sort of beautiful freak who enjoys this sort of thing. Though cello choirs are far more common (for obvious reasons concerning such niceties as tone quality and good taste,) there does seem to be a growing interest in violists getting together en masse and wreaking our particular brand of musical havoc. An all-star gathering of 48 London-based violists even put out an album a while back, featuring everything from Shostakovich to Percy Grainger to Duke Ellington (the Grainger being the rare work that was actually originally scored for massed violas.)

I suppose I could muse about the melancholy beauty of the viola’s middle register, or the lush character that emerges when string instruments play together by way of explaining the compulsion to put collaborations like this together. But let’s be honest: the real reason that we violists do things like this is that life is just so much more fun once the violinists leave the party.

Posted in drive-by viola solos, general awesomeness | 2 Comments

Bearing Witness

Posted on
Dec 5 2011
 by Sam Bergman

So there’s this high school out in Ontario, Canada, in a small city about 135 kilometers east of Toronto. The school has the rather clunky name of Peterborough Collegiate & Vocational School, but what it’s really known for is its arts education. Beginning in the 1990s, with the launch of a program called Integrated Arts, the PCVS has drawn creative kids to downtown Peterborough to augment their basic education with intensive music, art, and theater programs in a school that’s been around since 1827. (It’s also the only school located in the city’s downtown district.)

Times are tough, though, even in Canada, and this fall, the local school board voted to close down the PCVS at the end of this school year. Schools that focus on such supposed frivolities as art and music are always easy targets when the budget axe gets sharpened, and to the back-to-basics crowd, the fact that study after study has shown that kids who study music and art also test better in math and English is apparently of no consequence. We’ve even seen it happen here in Minnesota, where we value arts and culture like few other states in the union.

The PCVS kids and parents have been up in arms over the decision, of course. There were protests, packed school board meetings, and the Save Our School movement now has its own website laying out the case for a reversal of the closure decision. As best I can tell, it doesn’t look like they’re winning many battles, but they’re fighting hard.

I probably would never have heard about any of this, though, but for the fact that two teenaged girls decided that the best thing they could do for their school was to set up a couple of microphones and a camera in one of PCVS’s empty stairwells and, well, do this…

Their names are Kate Macdonald & Janelle Blanchard, they apparently call their duo Brown Meadow Bird, and their singing stopped me dead in my tracks this afternoon. Just a couple of Canadian teenagers in a stairwell, singing the way we all do in only our wildest dreams. It’s gorgeous, heartbreaking stuff, and yet there they are, just smiling at each other as they sing, smiling the way you do when you’re with a good friend doing something you love.

They posted the video yesterday, and by evening, alt-country star Neko Case herself (who wrote and sang the song, “Star Witness,”) had already seen it and sent out this Tweet to her 34,000+ followers:

A Neko Case tweet will put you on the path to viral status pretty quickly, and by tonight, Kate and Janelle had racked up more than 5000 views on YouTube. Whether their efforts will be enough to move the needle on a possible reprieve for their beloved school, I don’t know. But their voices make a pretty powerful argument for why schools like PCVS should continue to exist.

Posted in music education, the young people | 33 Comments

Evening Prayer

Posted on
Dec 2 2011
 by Sam Bergman

The orchestra has been playing Engelbert Humperdinck’s classic children’s opera, Hänsel & Gretel in one form or another for pretty much two solid weeks now, and I’ll admit, I wasn’t sorry to finish the last show of the run this afternoon. Orchestra musicians are used to a constantly changing stream of repertoire, and we rarely play a full concert more than four times before moving on to the next thing, so a two-week run (including six performances in the last three days of a stripped-down version for schools) feels like an eternity to us.

Still, if you’re going to do a long-running show, you could do a whole lot worse than our production of H&G. It’s become something of a Thanksgiving-adjacent tradition for us, and it just never fails to thrill audiences of all ages. The Baldwin sisters (longtime ItC fans may remember them making a cameo in our second season of concerts) have a little something to do with that, of course, as does the cackling, snorting Vera Mariner, who seems to make her child-devouring Witch a little more over-the-top and hilarious every time we remount the production. And then there are the astonishingly talented folks from In the Heart of the Beast, who bring larger-than-life magic to several important scenes.

But it’s Humperdinck’s music that gives this opera its soul. I know, I would say that, but honestly, the best measure of audience engagement I know is how quiet the room is, and I have never seen the Evening Prayer fail to make a packed concert hall fall utterly silent.

That’s Kathleen Battle and Frederica von Stade right there, and those simple harmonies, the soft murmur of the strings just supporting the vocals from underneath – it’s like a warm blanket over the entire audience, which is, of course, exactly what Hansel and Gretel, lost in the woods as darkness falls, are praying for in this scene. Humperdinck brings the rising third figure back, usually beginning in the violas, whenever a sense of calm and safety is called for in the opera. The last time it’s heard is at the beginning of the final scene, as a chorus of children formerly imprisoned by the now-dispatched witch sing, “We are saved! We are freed!”

It’s comfort food, sure, but it’s brilliantly orchestrated comfort food, and the string writing, in particular, is just masterful throughout the opera. And while I might be ready to move on for this year (to next week’s Messiah, which is another annual treat I don’t tire of,) I’m never sorry to come back to Humperdinck’s fairy tale world.

Posted in opera | 1 Comment

What are YOU lookin’ at?

Posted on
Dec 1 2011
 by Sarah

I frequently receive post-concert emails via my website, and while most of the time it’s people who want to discuss the finer points of the performance or to ask about my approach to a piece of music, I occasionally get one of those messages that has me scratching my head. Below, a correspondence following our Shostakovich concert:

Subject: Conductor’s Mane Distracts

Last evening (11/12/11) I attended a concert of the Minnesota Orchestra where Ms. Hicks conducted Shostakovich’s 5th symphony (“Inside The Classics” series). It was a great concert, a magnificent concert. Ms. Hicks is a brilliant conductor; however, her long hair swaying wildly is a distraction. A MAJOR distraction. She passionately and moves her head alot during the more dramatic moments of the symphony and thus her hair gets tossed back and forth like a frantic metronome. I can’t tell you how many times my concentration was annoyingly interrupted in the concert due to her hair. Advice: get a chic updo and give the audience the musical movement instead of the hair movement. If you don’t believe me, have someone sit in the audience and videotape Ms. Hicks as she conducts and tell me how one’s eyes gravitate to her hair. It reminds me of when one is in a bar or restaurant where multiple TVs are playing. You know the scene: as much as we want to give all our attention to the friend(s) we are with, our eyes are involuntarily averted to the TV images, over and over again. Ms. Hicks distracts the audience to involuntarily watch her hair flipping, swaying and dancing about instead of the real reason we are in Orchestra Hall – to hear the magnificent musical art performed by the world-class Minnesota Orchestra.

I don’t know how I feel about being compared to a TV in a bar, but I do know that I receive far more comments about my appearance than a male conductor would. There, I’ve said it. As much as we like to tout our enlightenment when it comes to gender equality, I know I’m being judged on slightly different criteria than my male colleagues.

Every now and then there’s some kind of uproar over concert attire, as we saw with the Yuja Wang-orange dress debacle this past summer. I’ve taken my fair share of critiques for what I wear onstage (for the record, and for those of you who have not been to one of our concerts, it’s usually flowy slacks and a sleeveless top); I think part of it has to do with the fact that women don’t have a uniform like men do, so we have automatic leeway, which makes some people uncomfortable.

I received some harsh criticism from a very unhappy gentleman in Raleigh, NC last year over the fact that I wasn’t wearing a jacket and baring my arms; I pointed out to him that the soloist I was performing with was in a strapless sating gown, but that didn’t seem to dissuade him from ranting about the “inappropriateness” of my attire! There’s no accounting for taste, I suppose. I discovered several years ago, after tearing a rotator cuff, that it’s much easier, physically, to conduct without the impediment of a jacket, or any sleeves at all. Why not do what’s most comfortable?

But this really was the first time I was criticized for something that is a part of my physical being rather than something I put on. I don’t know about all you ladies out there with lengthy tresses, but putting long hair in an “updo” (or up at all) for longer than an hour or so gives me headaches. It’s just easiest to wear it long. Again, a comfort thing. I couldn’t imagine anyone complaining about James Levine’s fuzzy halo impeding one’s view of the woodwinds, or Christoph Eschenbach’s bald pate reflecting the glare of stage lights, both of which I’ve witnessed.

While I appreciate that the audience is watching me some of the time, I would hope that they’re looking at the orchestra as well (and I will note that there are plenty of women in the Minnesota Orchestra who wear their hair down during concerts. And move their heads around, to boot. Just sayin’…). And, finally, I always feel like it’s a double standard; if I dress too conservatively, as I did very early on in my career (short hair, boxy suits), I run the risk of being called “dowdy” (yes, this did happen, believe it or not) – and when I embrace my femininity (long hair, fashionable attire), I’m deemed “distracting”…or worse. Long story short; a girl can’t win, so you might as well be comfortable.

Posted in conductors and conducting, women in music | 13 Comments

The Listening Room: Reich’s The Desert Music

Posted on
Nov 29 2011
 by Sam Bergman

This is the second of two posts kicking off the musical conversation we’re calling The Listening Room. If this is the first you’ve heard of it, click here to get caught up. Yesterday, Judd and I discussed the first work on this month’s featured album, Steve Reich’s 1981 masterpiece, Tehillim. Today’s post covers the other work on the album, Reich’s setting of poems by William Carlos Williams, titled The Desert Music. Add your own thoughts in the comments, and we’ll keep the conversation going for as long as there’s interest…

Sam: The Desert Music is also scored for voices and small orchestra, but it couldn’t be more different from Tehillim. Talk a little bit about Reich’s use of “phasing,” a technique he devised in which the same rhythmic or melodic figure is played by multiple musicians ever so slightly out of sync with each other.

Judd: Phasing is simple — take two recordings, and start them at the same time. Then speed one up slightly so that it begins to sound weirdly chorused/distorted, then gradually becomes discernible as an echo of the other. That’s phasing. Where it gets particularly interesting is where you phase musical elements that are able to take on different meanings when they are shifted in terms of their rhythmic relationship. If you take two recordings of Row Row Row Your Boat, and phase them, stopping the speeding-up each time the rhythms line up again, you’ll get a nice effect because Row Row Row Your Boat is a round, meaning that the harmonies line up with each other at regular intervals in the song. If you do the same thing with The Rite of Spring it might be interesting, but it’ll be cacophonously so.

What Reich winds up doing is doing this live, with different players playing the same instrument (type), so that you get this crazy mental effect of not being sure what is producing the sound. Your brain can also parse the melodic fragments he’s using quite easily, and you get very familiar with them, so it’s a way of having things remain the same, and familiar, while also changing.

In The Desert Music he doesn’t do the kind of gradual phasing that you hear in earlier works, but the interlocking patterns will often change in relation to one another in ways that come out of the earlier phase works.

Sam: The texts for The Desert Music are from poems by William Carlos Williams, who seems to be a very popular muse for composers. What do you think it is about his poetry that speaks to composers of our era?

Judd: He’s just an incredible poet. And he writes in a way that preserves the cadence of speech, which, for a certain type of composer, is very useful. The centerpiece of The Desert Music is the section taken from “The Orchestra”, with this famous passage:

Say to them: Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish.

That poem is really remarkable, and it’s equally remarkable that Reich, when commissioned by the Brooklyn Philharmonic to write a quasi-orchestral work, immediately went to a poem that seems to draw a parallel between the way an orchestra works together, and works with an audience, to the way that human society works together. (side note: I’ve never seen anyone mention this, but Williams was almost surely quoting Bertrand Russell there, from the end of an essay he wrote for the Guardian in 1952, two years before The Desert Music and Other Poems was published. It’s an incredible tribute, the Moses-like command to “say to them”, with Russell as the holy prophet. I don’t know if Reich was aware of that allusion when he set the poem but it makes everything even more interconnected.)

Sam: Reich gives very specific tempo instructions for each movement of The Desert Music, and I’ve even read that the different movements have tempo relationships, a specific number of beats per minute that line up in a 3:2 ratio. Obviously, rhythm and tempo are critical elements of Reich’s music, but honestly, would it really make any difference to the listener if a performance of this piece didn’t follow Reich’s exact tempos?

Judd: Music lives in the body. Would it make a difference if two notes were out of tune? The answer is yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Sometimes things being out of tune, or of different timbres and with different overtones, can be a good thing. I think you can feel when tempo relationships exist across different spaces of music — you at least feel the relative shift, if not the strict relationships — but it could well be that things move better when certain sections are a little faster or slower than Reich intended. I have to make enough of these decisions in my own music; I’m not going to try to pick apart Reich’s masterworks that way.

Sam: Fair enough. Let’s shift gears a bit – we haven’t talked much about the singing on this album yet. The vocal lines in both pieces are performed entirely without vibrato, which is a very unique sound, and one we seem to be hearing more and more of today. Is this just a stylistic preference, is it related to the rise of amplified performance, or is there a deeper reason that many composers are moving away from traditional operatic styles of singing?

Judd: Actually, you know what’s really a unique sound? Western operatic singing! It’s totally crazy that this is the basis for what’s expected in contemporary music practice, but again, you only know where you’re coming from, not where things are going.

Straight-tone singing makes a lot of sense in this vocal writing, which isn’t about the small inflections that might happen in a typical operatic aria, but is either about quickly-moving repeated notes (at the beginning and the end of the piece), or about long tones, held over moving lines. The former would be impossible with vibrato and the latter would be tricky. Plus, the vocal lines would have a hard time blending with the clarinets, vibes, and harmonics. The vocals are themselves also usually blending into a big chord that is held for a while, and not only does that sound really outstandingly amazing in straight-tone singing, but it might sound strange with vibrato.

That said, I don’t know that it would necessarily be “bad” to sing with more vibrato here, it just would certainly be against Reich’s intent.

One really cool thing about this recording is how the instrumental players really attack the lines at times — it’s not meant to be this cold, neutral, austere presentation. Listen to the last movement of The Desert Music, it’s like this orgy of wild violin lines, big crescendi, and even these awesome vocal slides that are very “pop” and totally wonderful when they occasionally happen.

This would probably be a good time to note that this recording is really, really good. I have a close personal relationship with the premiere recordings of both these pieces (I still remember hearing the end of The Desert Music on WNYC one night when I was home from college, the precise moment that I became a Steve Reich fan), but this recording is so meticulous and really elevates the pieces to new heights.

Sam: One of the hardest things for listeners who shy away from “new music” tends to be the lack of traditional Germanic melodic forms, and I never know quite what to say when someone claims that a work by a living composer has “no melody.” I hear melodic fragments all over Reich’s work, but it’s true that it’s very different from listening to something written in sonata form. I enjoy Beethoven, and I enjoy Reich, but I almost feel like I have to enjoy them with different parts of my brain. Is that true for you as well?

Judd: I think part of what’s happening here is that, to a lot of people, “melody” means “diatonic melody”. [ALERT: THIS WILL BE NERDY AND MAY MAKE NO SENSE.] There’s a really big difference between even triadic, relatively “consonant” harmonic writing, such as Reich’s or mine, that never (Reich) or rarely (Greenstein) uses tonic-dominant relationships — which, without getting into it, is the backbone of Western harmony from around 1500 to 1910.

Reich and I both move around much more by seconds and thirds — necessary when you’re holding a bunch of common notes in a pattern — and this means that there are going to be different kinds of melodies that emerge. My melodic writing, to my own ear, feels derived almost from plainchant. But all modal music has something of that quality — look at, say, Mongo Santamaria’s Afro Blue, made famous by John Coltrane. You could convincingly use that as an isorhythm in a motet, right? Maybe? Am I stretching things? It’s close, in any case.

But none of this has much to do with the kind of melodic writing that you get when there’s a big V-I move articulating the harmonic change. (Ed. note: V-I is the notation for music moving from a dominant chord back to the main tonic chord. More simply, it’s what your average, uncomplicated ending sounds like in everything from Tchaikovsky symphonies to pop songs.) It’s not better or worse, it’s just a different feeling. But the chord changes that happen in Reich are some of my favorites ever, and I have stolen them completely and thoroughly in my own writing.

So there’s Judd’s take on this remarkable CD from Alarm Will Sound and Ossia. What’s yours? Chime in down in the comments, and join us in January for the next installment of The Listening Room…

Posted in The Listening Room, audience participation, composers, microcommission | 3 Comments