pointing out the obvious

Rehearsing the "Flying Music" from E.T. last Friday, conductor Richard Kaufman stopped the orchestra at one point and turned to the bass section. "This is a bass soli," he told us, which was rather surprising since we weren't playing much more than pizzicato downbeats. He went on, "For John Williams, the bass section is the engine of the orchestra!"

This is always nice to hear, though from the bass section's perspective we're pretty much always the engine of the orchestra. If a conductor makes a point of it, we'll play louder and more assertively, and maybe further to the front side of the beat. As in most things a conductor asks for, there's no major transformation -- just a shift in emphasis, a heightened sense of importance. Maybe that will project to the audience, maybe not; in any case, the other sections of the orchestra will probably be more attentive to what we're doing, and so we'll be better able to contribute.

An analogy in last week's New Yorker caught my attention on a similar subject:

In his acceptance speech at the Convention and in the first debate -- his two big-audience occasions on foreign policy -- Obama mentioned cooperation but emphasized aggressive action much more strongly. In that way, the Obama campaign is like a symphony orchestra, with the need for international cooperation as the string section and the necessity for aggressive action as the horns. Both sections are always playing, but usually one or the other is playing louder. During the fall campaign, the horns have dominated the strings.

- "Worlds Apart," by Nicholas Lemann, October 13, 2008 issue of The New Yorker

As an orchestra musician, a lot of things about this analogy bother me -- the strings and horns are always playing? why is it just "louder", what about differences of articulation, tone quality, expression, etc.? and how about the different voices within the strings, not to mention the brass and percussion and woodwinds, what do they represent?

All that is just nit-picking, though, since I think it's a very effective analogy for what the point Lemann is making. We do balance our messages, and we'll change our focus, wording, and content for different settings and audiences. It's one of the most basic elements of human communication, so essential that we might not give it much thought. And it's also a good explanation for what a conductor does in balancing the orchestra -- he or she draws our attention to certain things, or minimizes certain others. Within any musical score, be it John Williams or Beethoven, there are countless details and possibilities for what might happen -- the conductor gets to imagine those possibilities and, with the cooperation of the orchestra, bring out the details that make the imagined real.

when in Rome, or Taranto

An article by Burkhard Bilger in this week's New Yorker magazine, "Spider Woman" (sorry, it's not online!) includes this paragraph:

The most notorious spider in Europe in [Jean-Henri] Fabre's time [(the late 19th century)] was the Italian tarantula, Lycosa tarantula. Named for the town of Taranto, on the southern coast, this was a large, fearsome-looking wolf spider -- no relation to American tarantulas -- whose bite was said to cause madness, melancholy, and death. A victim's only hope was to dance furiously for days on end, often accompanied by fiddles and pipes, until his body gave out and the venom wore off. Liszt, Chopin, and Mendelssohn later wrote music for stylized versions of these dances, which came to be known as tarantellas.

Apparently these creatures are quite rare today, and medical science has some antidotes besides furious dancing. If you're travelling to Italy though, it might be a good idea to keep some fiddlers and pipers nearby, ready to play non-stop tarantellas for a couple of days, just in case.

(BTW, thanks to Lydia Lui, a mean tarantella-playing fiddler in her own right, for elucidating the fair use statute for me in a recent comment. All of my guilty confusion is gone!)

musical short stories

Speaking of short fiction, the past couple of weeks have brought two great stories in The New Yorker, both about musician couples. Actually, in both stories the couple is half musician and half non-musician, and that is the source of a good deal of the tension and interest behind the stories. Last week's story was "The First Sense" by Nadine Gordimer, and this week features "On Chesil Beach" by Ian McEwan.

Thinking about the relationships and tensions in these stories, I suppose that all couples have dimensions where the two people cannot participate equally. Often it might be a consuming hobby, a sports addiction, or a religious devotion. We allow our partners to pursue their interests, even when they separate us, or make us feel alien and inferior. In the long run, those inequalities can possibly help a relationship, giving us a space apart and a way to assert our own identities. I love Nadine Gordimer's description of her office worker married to a cellist:

She was so much part of the confraternity of orchestras. The rivalry among the players, drowned out by the exaltation of the music they created together. The gossip—because she was not one of them, both the men and the women trusted her with indiscretions that they wouldn’t risk with one another. And when he had differences with guest conductors from Bulgaria or Japan or God knows where, their egos as complex as the pronunciation of their names, his exasperation found relief, as he unburdened himself in bed of the podium dramas and moved on to the haven of lovemaking. If she was in a low mood—the -bungles of an inefficient colleague at work, or her father’s “heart condition” and her mother’s long complaints over the telephone about his disobeying doctor’s orders with his whiskey-swilling golfers—the cello would join them in the bedroom and he’d play for her.

There is certainly an upside to having a one-musician marriage - not only does each partner have a separate outlet, but you don't need to fight over practice space. At the same time, it seems unfortunate to not be able to share in that "exaltation" of creating something together, those moments on stage which are the most profound of a musician's life. It's hard to imagine how a couple that does not share such a passion could ever function, as in McEwan's story:

Edward had never cared for classical music, but now he was learning its sprightly argot—legato, pizzicato, con brio. Slowly, through brute repetition, he was coming to recognize and even like certain pieces. There was one that she played with her friends which especially moved him. When she practiced her scales and arpeggios at home, she wore a hair band, an endearing touch that caused him to dream about the daughter they might have one day.

Both of these stories are very much about sex, and musicality seems to become a symbol for emotional intimacy and even sexuality - in Gordimer's, the cello's voice traces the arc of an extramarital affair, while in McEwan, the violinist Florence's "sinuous and exact" playing seems to promise sensual affinities which she doesn't in fact possess. McEwan writes probably the most horrifying description of a kiss that I've ever read.

You could say that neither of these stories is really about music - but they both use the symbol for the beauty and complex awkwardness of a human relationship. In a musical performance hundreds of people can hear the same sounds and interpret them completely differently - horror and ecstasy can coexist, just like in a relationship, even in those precisely, wordlessly rendered notes.

next weekend's Shostakovich: "We can hardly wait"

This is from a Talk of the Town piece that appeared in The New Yorker magazine of July 18, 1942, the week that Shostakovich's 'Leningrad' Symphony no. 7 was given its North American premiere by Toscanini and the NBC Symphony. (Mr. Belviso is Thomas Belviso, the orchestra's librarian):

At the time of our call, Mr. Belviso happened to have in his office an extra score of the first violin part. We opened its green covers with due reverence, noting that it was thirty-five pages long and seemed to be CNMPOHNR No. 7. Anyway, it was Op. 60, and the tempo markings of the four movements were in the orthodox Italian: allegretto, moderato poco allegretto, adagio, and allegro non troppo. Mr. H. Leopold Spitalny, the N.B.C.'s Director of Orchestra Personnel, happened in, and we asked him if he could describe the symphony for us, since he had read it. "Well," he said, "it starts with deceptive softness -- a roll of a single snare drum. But it ends, ninety minutes later, with all hell breaking loose." We can hardly wait.

- The New Yorker, June 18, 1942, p. 9; available in The Complete New Yorker

Interestingly, due to the intricacies of rental agreements and copyright law, we seem to be playing on those same green parts, or something very nearly as old. You can visit the New World Symphony website to learn more.