Deja Vu and the Colgrass triangle

Before tonight's performance of Deja Vu, his piece for four percussionists and orchestra, Michael Colgrass had some nice words of introduction. He was speaking via Internet2 from Toronto. He told a story about learning that he had just received a Pulitzer Prize for the work, back in 1977 - a young AP reporter called and, after he replied that no, he hadn't heard anything about it - asked for his spontaneous reaction! He said that he had always thought that prizes were like buckshot in a crowd; anyone can get hit. And that he thought his father would be pleased, since at that point he still didn't really understand what Michael Colgrass did for a living.

My favorite part of Colgrass' comments though, which I'm paraphrasing from my memory, was this:

I have never thought music was about prizes and recognition though. To me, it's about relationships, between a composer and performer, and the performer and audience. Within that triangle is where all the interesting and fulfilling aspects of music take place. And you, the audience, in many ways are the most important part of that triangle. So I thank you and I hope you enjoy this performance of Deja Vu.

As he finished speaking, I looked out on the audience and I could see many of them smiling and reacting positively - I really think it set a wonderful tone for the performance, which was completely engaging for me. I think I'll definitely steal Michael Colgrass' triangle idea, next time I introduce a piece to an audience!

Michael Colgrass has an excellent website with many writings - I especially enjoyed his "Letter to a Young Composer."

"Live from Miami Beach!"

This image was lifted from Critical Miami, which has covered the plans closely.

This week New World Symphony's musicians are unusually busy - preparing for a Shostakovich festival and concerts on Friday and Saturday, a master class with Yo-Yo Ma on Thursday, and a tour to New York's Carnegie Hall next week. It's hard to look beyond the next week when you have so much stuff to do.

The administration and staff are looking much further though, launching an ambitious project to build a new hall, designed by Frank Gehry. They've been planning the hall for several years, and occasionally inviting musicians upstairs to show off these fantastic blueprints and artist's renderings, like the one above. Last week, they brought the show and tell to the Miami Beach City Commission chambers, on 17th and Convention Center Dr., for a workshop meeting over a proposed $15 million grant. Tomorrow at 5 pm, the City Commission will meet there again and vote on the proposal.

As the Miami Herald reported yesterday, last week's meeting featured speeches by president Howard Herring, project manager Grant Stevens, and board chairman Howard Frank (the Herald mistakenly called him "Frank Howard"). The most illuminating speech, though, was by artistic director Michael Tilson Thomas, and wasn't mentioned in the Herald's piece.

MTT acknowledged congratulations for the two Grammy awards he had won the previous evening, then tied that into the larger missions of both the San Francisco Symphony (which received those Grammys for a recording of Mahler's 7th Symphony) and the New World Symphony. Both organizations are developing new relationships between classical music and the larger culture, and empowering their orchestral musicians to take an active role.

He described how the new hall would develop and enhance that role. He contrasted the Lincoln Theater, which for all its charm and history (music and porn, as Dan Wakin noted) is basically a "one-room schoolhouse." The new space would offer possibilities for broadcasting, multimedia, and engagement that we probably can barely imagine. He mentioned the use of video projections and Internet 2, and the dream of hearing "Live from Miami Beach!" all around the world. The design of the space is like a traditional concert hall turned inside-out, facing the community and the world through the use of new technology, and a very old tradition.

The whole presentation was really impressive - I was one of those NWS musicians packing the balcony with handmade signs - and it made me realize that what we do here does have a larger impact. Most of us won't be around in 2010-11, when the hall is slated to open, but I still came away thinking orchestral music might be about changing the world, not just earning a pension. When the hall does open, I'll definitely be tuning into my iPhone, VistaDoohickey, or whatever other newfangled gizmo is broadcasting that first "Live from Miami Beach!"

semantics

So many of the big political controversies these days seem to come down to linguistic battles - is it a 'surge' or an 'escalation'?; 'Stay the course' or 'cut and run'?; the 'Democratic' or the 'Democrat' Party'? Each ideology has its own lingo, and pretty soon, I imagine, they'll break apart into separate dialects, then entirely different languages, so that we can talk past each other without any danger of understanding what the other side is saying.

Okay, I'm kind of exaggerating the semantic debates. Still, it does all seem silly to me. In classical music we have our own linguistic battles, starting with that thorny 'classical music' phrase itself. It seems needlessly elitist, but then the alternatives like 'serious music' or 'Western art music' are perhaps even worse. It's too bad we can't strip all those pretentious connotations and pick some arbitrary new word.

Then there's the question of 'community engagement' vs. 'community outreach'. Outreach has gone out of style, maybe also owing to elitist connotations - the mighty orchestra reaching out from its ivory tower, bringing culture to the unwashed masses. This is supposed to be the neighborly, friendly and open face of the orchestra, so we don't want the term itself to sound snooty and one-sided. Then again, reaching out can be a gesture of openness and not condescension, as in reaching out to embrace someone. 'Engagement' sounds faintly militaristic to me, as though we need to set up our battle lines and launch raids into the community, hopefully capturing a few stray recruits to our cause.

If anyone has any suggestions for a new, friendlier term for what we do in the community, please leave a comment! I was impressed last week that someone helped me out with a definition for 'Marschartig' - though our orchestra didn't end up playing that song, it was still cool to know I have some brilliant linguists reading my idle thoughts.

education and emphasis

So much of performing is a matter of emphasis - how to distinguish one note from another, which voice to bring out of the texture, where to culminate a phrase. One of the very wise observations Robert Levin made in his Mozart wind concerto class last week was that 97% of phrasing is renunciation - it's deciding what can be said without emphasis, so that every syllable is not accented, and each note isn't smothered with excess meaning. And the really important moments have the weight and impact to capture our attention.

The past couple of days we have been performing education concerts to large crowds of elementary school students. Each performance lasted about an hour, and our conducting fellow Steven Jarvi tried to squeeze a lot into that time: from the names of all the instruments and their means of sound production, to principles of orchestration; the transformation of Pictures at an Exhibition from piano solo to orchestral piece; how a concerto works; and how much instrumentalists need to practice(!) Of course you never want to bore kids, but I've been wondering about what these kids will be left with, after the sounds of the orchestra have faded and they've forgotten the titles of all the pieces we played.

I think focusing on mechanical principles can be a very nice approach, but it has to get to something deeper to really resonate. It would be like going to the art museum and being shown a bunch of paint and blank canvas. You get an understanding of the materials and the challenges of putting them to use, but then you're left with so many questions. How were all those decisions made? Are these composers gifted with some kind of amazing intuition, or was there a process of experimenting and rejection involved? And if these things are all so difficult to play, why bother?

Hopefully the sound of the orchestra and the brilliance of the music we played will answer that last question, since it's very hard to explain satisfactorily in words! Steve Jarvi handled a lot of these questions very well. He asked the kids to listen for some specific things, connect the sounds and colors of several pieces and predict how instruments might be used. Even though his talk began on a very basic level, the basic wood and metal that makes up the instruments we play, he got onto some fairly sophisticated ideas. Still, I found myself frustrated by how much was not explained.

I think my own tendency in talking to audiences is to offer all the facts, ideas, and speculation I can manage to recall, sort of like those essay tests I used to take in college. I would squeeze as much from my memory into the little blue book as I could within the time limit, and hope that most of it was correct and relevant! I'm realizing that the much more sophisticated way, the Robert Levin way, is to have a few deeply held ideas and points, and express those with the utmost passion. The rest you let the audience figure out for themselves, or maybe just wonder and be curious until the next concert.

Perhaps that's not just the more sophisticated way, but also the more respectful way. You trust the audience to create their own thoughts, ideas, and impressions, and not just absorb the facts you've prepared to recite to them. And you trust your own musicianship, so that you don't need to be that know-it-all.

I think if I could have added something to these education concerts, I would have asked the kids to notice and think about how an orchestra uses silence. While we were playing the Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings, almost every pause and cadence seemed to trigger a burst of applause, which makes me think they not only didn't know what to expect but felt uncomfortable in their role as appreciative audience. Maybe some of these kids have never heard a work of music in which the sound stops for several seconds and didn't know how to react. I don't want to be the classical music ogre who glares at every misplaced clap, but to me it seems worthwhile to recognize that sometimes part of the canvas is intentionally left blank, and think about how that empty moment can affect us.

Of course, in music as in life, as in blogging and so much else, you have to pick the right battles. Maybe my silence idea would work well with a Bruckner symphony, though I'm not sure a bunch of 2nd graders could sit through much of that. Lately I feel like I have so much to write about, and so much to think and read and meditate about, and so little time to accomplish it all! I think maybe if I write every day, and use my time well, I'll eventually catch up with all my good intentions - but then I just seem to open up more possibilities I can never follow up. I guess at times like these, I should take Robert Levin's advice and renounce all the excess clutter!