Ascending Darkness...the Beginnings

(originally posted on Sympho’s blog)

Now that Sympho‘s Ascending Darkness is coming up (on May 8 in NYC), I figured I’d share something of its origins. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a concert in the dark, so this one has been on the slate for years now.

About a year ago, though, I was struck by how light/dark opposition might be stretched — in the concert context — into a land of conscious/unconscious thought, or awake/dreaming. That led to the “Aha!” moment that is about to culminate in Ascending Darkness (subtitled “Soundtrack to a Dream”).

In my mind (and my mind only, unless someone else is drawn there by chance), the dramatic arc of this concert is very much informed by the writings of Joseph Campbell – specifically “Hero With a Thousand Faces.” It’s a journey into the un- (or sub-) conscious, something akin to a quest. With that said, I think the only important thing to know going into a concert like this is that you have the opportunity to make it into your own journey, your own quest.

The music and lighting are designed to draw you into a quasi-sleep state — not that you’ll be out cold, snoring, but more like withdrawn from the outside and paying serious attention to things sonic. Once you’re there, each piece develops the dream further. Whatever associations or images you come up with along the way, they’re all valid. This is YOUR dream, remember? One of the interesting things to know about archetypal hero quests/dream journeys is that they all share the same broad-based sequence of events, regardless of culture or time period. Given that, it’s likely that the sequence of associations and images you experience during this concert will be similar to what others experience. Interesting post-concert discussion fodder, we hope!

Back to writing music for this. More soon…

What is it about Prokofiev 5?

So here I am, about to conduct Prokofiev’s 5th Symphony again, and I’m once again overwhelmed with emotion. It’s a difficult piece – not just to play, though there is that element. It’s difficult because it so successfully (for me, anyway) brings to life the tragedy and horrors of the Soviet experiment.

Written in 1944 (in one month!), it’s just about impossible for me to put myself in his shoes – I am the quintessential “first world problem” guy, worrying about things like, you know, whether the internet connection is fast enough and whether West Side Market’s banana selection will be ripe enough. On the other hand, this piece gets inside me, and I feel a connection to humanity, cutting through all that separates me from Prokofiev and from the entire Soviet people. I feel an intense sorrow, yet also resilience. In the third movement, which for me is the kernel of the symphony, I get a sense of the soul of Prokofiev, laid bare. This is one of the hardest, yet most rewarding, stretches of music to conduct or play, simply because it is so raw, so human. You have to embody (literally allow these feelings to possess your body) such pain, such sorrow, yet the nobility of the human spirit is always present, always buoying you.

If I have hopes for this performance, they are that the audience will get past the surface beauty of the piece (and it is compellingly beautiful!) and join the musicians and me in communion with a desperate people at a horrific time. Because by doing that we’re able to use Prokofiev’s strength (in the fourth movement) to ascend, to heal again. I’ve always wondered why his Fifth Symphony has such a hold on me, but I think that’s it: it encompasses the whole universe of human emotion, the entire human experience – the beauty and the atrocity, the love and the sadness. So I enter this concert with solemnity but also with joy, knowing the astounding road we all will travel in the space of 45 minutes.

What Does a Conductor Do? (Part 3)

So back to the old blogging board.  With the lady of the house having given birth to our second girl about a month ago, things have been somewhat hectic around here!  But in between soiled diapers, I’d like to try to sneak in the third and final post of the “what does a conductor actually do?” series:  namely, what does a conductor do in concert?  After all, this is where most of you have actually seen a conductor in action and are likely to do so again.  Because most of the hard work has already taken place by this point, it’s tempting to say that this part is the proverbial “icing on the cake”.  On the other hand, have you ever eaten a cake with the icing removed?  Not highly recommended…

[Note: to see what the conductor has been up to until this point, you can browse my earlier posts on studying the score and rehearsing the orchestra.]

In the broadest of strokes, the conductor’s job during a performance is made up of the following four roles:

First, to remind the orchestra of any details worked out in rehearsal that require such a reminder.  Many of these will need nothing more than a knowing smile, or a wink, or a small hand or facial gesture at the appropriate time.  (Note to beginning conductors: neither a wince nor a grimace following a player’s mistake are appreciated/tolerated by the musicians in the orchestra…)  This first part of the conductor’s job includes those very rare times when an orchestra actually needs a conductor to “beat time” very precisely.  (Most of the time – and this is rarely understood by laypeople – the orchestra can play together just fine, thank you, without being reminded where each beat takes place.)

Second, to help the musicians to “improvise”.  And by “improvise”, I’m not talking about jazz.  What I mean is that music is alive, not stagnant.  So just because a particular performance worked for yesterday’s rehearsal or concert, it doesn’t mean that the same exact performance will work today.  The audience is different, the acoustics in the hall are different, everyone’s moods are different, etc.  I know this is a bit hard to grasp, but just imagine if the actors onstage were required to give the exact same performance of Romeo and Juliet, day in and day out.  Highly frustrating, boring, and problematic, to say the least.  The same applies to orchestral performance, and the conductor is there to help guide the way.  Maybe we need to speed up a bit more there, slow down infinitesimally in that section, delay the crescendo by a beat, getting louder at a faster rate, etc.  All of that can be guided by a conductor, reading the mood of the orchestra players and the audience.

Third, to inspire the musicians.  Victor Hugo once wrote, “Music expresses that which is impossible to put into words, and cannot remain silent.”  There are existential issues at play in music, life and death confront one another, and the concert hall is ideally a place where an audience member and musician alike can contemplate the vastness and also the intimacy of the human experience.  A conductor’s ultimate goal in concert is simultaneously to inspire the amazing musicians in front of the podium to give the music their all and to maximize the effect the performance has on the audience.

How do you inspire musicians and an audience?  A valid question, but I’m going to sidestep it for now.  For our admittedly basic purposes, I’ll merely say that – as an observer – you need to pay attention to the conductor’s entire body, including facial expressions, to get an inkling of what’s going on.  I daresay most conductors would be at a loss as to how to explain how they inspire, except they might say they “become” the music and beam that signal as if their lives depended on it.

Fourth, to help any musician or group of musicians who are in need.  In a performance, you never know what might go wrong.  If there are 85 or so musicians onstage, chances are someone is going to have a bad day (more like a bad “second” or “minute” in this case) now and then.  The conductor’s job is to recognize the problem immediately (normally coming in at the wrong time, but it could really be anything) and shepherd that musician (or those musicians) back to safety, using easily recognizable combinations of hand and facial gestures.

Someone once asked me if conductors ever do things on the podium that are strictly for the audience’s benefit.  Another fair question.  The answer is no – not exactly.  If I do something to help the audience, it’s always going to be something helpful to the musicians as well – the two tend to go hand-in-hand.  For example, during a fugue, do the basses really need me to turn to them after five bars and give them a strong entrance cue?  Not really.  They could enter on their own, led by the principal bassist, so I suppose you could say that I’m showing this entrance for the audience’s sake.  However, I give the cue using a combination of facial expression with hand, arm, and body movements, telegraphing the regal, refined quality of sound the basses will be making, so it ends up helping the players too.

Let’s end this blog with a question about conductors I always get at cocktail parties:  “Why aren’t any of the players even looking at him (invariably the questioner is a sexist pig and does not add ‘…or her’)?”

Two words: peripheral vision.

What Does a Conductor Do? (Part 2)

Now that the Great East Coast Earthquake of 2011 (which I didn’t even feel, thanks to my San Francisco upbringing) has passed with little damage to my home or psyche, I can turn my attention to more important things, like blogging. So, without much further ado…

When you’re sitting in the audience, watching and listening to an orchestra play in concert, you’re witnessing the third part of a three-part process. We just discussed the first part (studying the score) in my last post. The second part is made up of anywhere from one to as many as four or five practice sessions, more commonly called rehearsals, that have taken place during the preceding days. Each rehearsal is 2 or 2.5 hours long.

It may come as a surprise to some of you, but a professional orchestra does not need very much rehearsal to play together and in tune. In fact, most of the top-tier orchestras out there don’t need ANY rehearsal to play together and in tune, especially if you’re talking about standard repertoire (say, Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5).

Now that you’ve recovered from your fainting spell, you may be asking, “How’s that possible, dear sir?” Part of the answer is sheer numbers. Each person sitting in the orchestra has played Beethoven’s Fifth 95 million times, under 102 famous conductors, and they just simply know how it goes. The other part is sheer excellence. Each person sitting on that stage is an incredible artist in their own right, technically formidable, experienced, and perfectly capable of making that mountain of decisions to which I referred in my last post and listening to everyone on the stage around them to fit in and contribute to the overall orchestral texture.

Is every orchestra out there that good? Of course not. But you’d be surprised how little rehearsal it takes to put together an acceptable performance, where everyone is playing their part more or less accurately and in tune, with more or less the right dynamics.

So, you’re probably thinking…why rehearse at all? And, haven’t you just written yourself out of a job? Valid questions, and I’ll answer hopefully in terms we can all understand.

Here is my frozen dinner response to these questions: it’s just not okay to subject an audience to an “acceptable” performance. The difference between a whipped-up, under-rehearsed performance and a great, spellbinding one is a bit like the difference between a Stouffer’s microwave dinner (no offense to the good folks at Stouffer’s) and a dinner at aMichelin-starred restaurant. At a certain level, both dinners are much the same: they contain food, they might even share many ingredients, they involve the application of heat to those ingredients, and they are eaten off of plates with cutlery. My point is this: the quality of the meal (and the concert) is all about how the ingredients are put together.

In the concert’s case, the bulk of the hard work of “putting it together” takes place during the rehearsals, led by the conductor. The musical score (i.e., what the composer wrote down) is equivalent to the recipe a cook might use. And the conductor, aided by the highly-skilled musicians in the orchestra, is something akin to the chef in our restaurant scenario. (An aside: did you know that the French term for conductor is chef d’orchestre? And their word for cook/chef is chef de cuisine…)

How a conductor runs a rehearsal is a very individual decision, and we can get into different styles later – perhaps in a different post. Right now, I want to clarify what both orchestra and conductor need to accomplish in the approximately 10 hours of rehearsal time allotted to them. These items come in five categories:

First is “ensemble”. Ensemble, in the most basic sense, is the lining up of all the notes correctly, so that everyone is playing their notes at the right time. As mentioned above, ensemble problems are rare, but they do occur. For instance, the acoustics onstage might make it hard for members of the orchestra to hear one another. When a woodwindor brass player is playing, the sound of their own instrument makes it REALLY hard (but most of the time not impossible) for them to hear anyone far away, even in the best of acoustic surroundings. Fixing an ensemble problem usually just requires everyone knowing what everyone else is playing, and how they fit together. Once everyone knows what to listen for, it’s pretty straightforward to put together.

[Blogger’s note: “ensemble” is actually far more complicated than playing the right note at the right time. It involves everyone agreeing on the length, shape, and color of each note they play together, among other things. For our purposes, though, I hope the above will suffice.]

Second is ensuring correct balances. This involves the dynamics, and dynamic hierarchy, I talked about in my last post. Basically, you need the audience to be able to hear everything everyone is playing, and the foreground instrument “voices” need to be featured more prominently in the resulting mix than the background or accompaniment “voices”.

Third is intonation. If you ask a woodwind or brass player what they think about more than anything else, it’ll be intonation, or being in tune with everyone around them. This is a hornet’s nest, and fixing intonation has the tendency to ruffle feathers. Why? Because everyone on that stage has years of experience, and they ALL know how to play in tune. It’s their job. However, sometimes it needs to be fixed, and it’s part of the rehearsal process. Depending on the level of the orchestra, it’s usually possible just to let the players sort out their own intonation difficulties. It’s only in very rare cases that a conductor is called on to be a referee. We’ll have a nerdier discussion of intonation some other time.

Fourth is the negotiation of any tricky spots, where sudden (or gradual) changes in tempoor dynamics require more than just a cursory glance.

Fifth – and actually most important of all – is phrasing. You can think of music just like any other language, and you can think of a piece of music like a book, or – even more aptly – like a play. Phrasing is all about the subtleties of the language: the pacing, the stresses, the detailed or broader level emotions and colors. Music has sentences, just like language: they’re called phrases, and they can be interpreted by musicians in much the same way that actors interpret their lines. Just as plays and novels grow to climaxes and then resolve (or not!), so do pieces of music – both on the “trees” level and on the “forest” level. This phrasing structure is also called the “architecture” of the piece. Some phrasing can be achieved by talking about it, but a lot of it can only be expressed by actually making the music, playing it through in larger chunks. This is where the magic happens, and where the orchestra musicians are counting on the conductor to be inspired and inspiring. Here is where the music comes alive, and our “recipe” is transformed into a living piece of music.

…which brings me to my last point for this post: a rehearsal is a mixture of playing and talking. Ideally, many items can be accomplished simply by the conductor and orchestra members interacting while playing. On the other hand, there are many things that can’t be shown, that need to be said out loud during the rehearsal. The preponderance of words will come from “the podium” (which is a really bizarre yet common way of saying “the conductor”), but – in a healthy rehearsal environment, at least – there will be questions from orchestra players who have an idea, or want clarification on an issue.

For me, and for many other people, it’s at least as interesting to watch and listen to the rehearsal process as it is to be at the concert. It’s fascinating to witness the palpable (and sometimes very exciting!) transformation from microwave dinner to haute cuisine. Try it sometime – highly recommended.

I could write an entire book on the rehearsal process, and I’m sure we’ll touch on various aspects of it later. But, for now, I trust this gives you enough of an idea to start with. Next time, we’ll talk about the performance, which is of course what most of you have experienced already.

What Does a Conductor Do? (Part 1)

So invariably, this happens. I’m at a party or gathering of some sort, and just as I’ve stuffed my mouth full of the ubiquitous cocktail peanuts, someone who’s found out that I’m a conductor will approach me and ask, “So, no offense, but what does a conductor do? I mean, it doesn’t even look like the musicians are watching the conductor!” At which point, I point to my mouth to indicate that I am somewhat indisposed.

So I thought I’d just get that question out of the way here, for those of you who’ve never had the occasion to meet an actual conductor. The answer is a long, complicated one, which people who’ve had one too many drinks may find somewhat “involved” (for lack of a better word). So, perhaps I should preface this blog by asking my readers to put their drinks down – at least until you’ve finished reading this entry!

So, for starters, a conductor’s work starts with the score, which tells him (or her, of course) what each instrument should be playing. Sort of. A lot of people have this idea that, once a composer has written down a piece of music, everything is taken care of. You know, that we just have to play what the composer wrote. However, the process is far subtler than that.

The score tells us which instrument plays what note (or pitch), when it plays that pitch, how long, and how loudly. In some scores, especially from the mid-19th Century onwards, the composer might even write in some words describing the feeling he wants to evoke. Sounds like a lot of information, right?

Well, yes – but hardly complete. You see, all of the information given us by the composer is approximate. Take pitch, for example. The “A” above “middle C” should be the same pitch in all cases, right? Wrong. In certain places at certain times, people have tuned their instruments lower than they do today, by varying degrees, up to about a half step. You can hear period instrument bands play at this lower tuning even today. If you have perfect pitch, listening to one of these performances (hearing Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony in B Major instead of in C Major, for instance) can drive you batty. If you don’t, no sweat. It’ll just sound like the Jupiter Symphony. Even if all the instruments in the orchestra are tuned to the same A, there’s a lot of pitch adjusting that routinely happens. Not a lot of laypeople know this, but if you play one note over and over, accompanied by different harmonies, you actually have to change how high or low the note is to remain in tune with the surrounding harmonies. The upshot? A written pitch is a very approximate suggestion. (Which is why most high school orchestras sound the way they do!)

Now, how about length? If a composer writes a simple rhythm (e.g., 4 quarter notes), can’t we all agree on how to play it? Apparently not – there is much ambiguity here as well. Is each quarter note held for its full value (as in a Brahmsian Adagio), or do we tastefully shorten each one and insert some space between the notes (as is generally accepted to be the custom in a fast Mozartian bass line)? If we can’t take length for granted even in the simplest of situations, how can we ever expect agreement in the majority of cases, where there are seemingly endless possibilities for just this one variable: how long should each note be?

Dynamics (how loud or soft the music should be played) are another case in point. In the majority of musical scores, the dynamics are given in relative terms. The musical termforte (or f) = “strong” in Italian, and we generally think of it in America as “loud”. (All the Europeans reading this are thinking, typical Americans…) But how loud/strong, exactly? The same goes for piano (p), mezzo-piano (mp), mezzo forte (mf), fortissimo (ff) and the rest of them. These are inexact terms, and the performer has a great deal of leeway in deciding how loud or soft to play at any given moment.

It’s hard enough with one player, but imagine a roomful of players, all with music markedforte – only some of them will have the melody, right? That means that those players will have to play louder, and those who are playing accompaniment and secondary parts will need to play softer. Of course, it’s never that simple, because there’s a hierarchy even within the accompaniment and secondary parts. So each player ends up playing a different dynamic, even though all of their parts (in this case meaning the sheet music off of which they are playing) say forte.

Oh, and there’s one other set of decisions that needs to be taken care of for every single note in the score: together, they can be thought of as the “shape” of the note. How does the note begin? Is it a sharp, biting attack? Or is it strong and solid at the start? Does it slowly gain steam? There are infinite possibilities, of course. Same goes for the end of the note. Is it held out strong until the end? Does it diminuendo, or die away? Does it crescendo, or get louder to a climax at the end?

I’m not even going to get into things like color, emotion, or other qualities. The main point I want to get across is that there is no way any two performances of any piece are ever going to be even remotely the same – especially if different people are playing it each time. There are so many ways to be different, even if you are “following the score exactly” as it is written. The great artists are those who can turn this incredible mountain of decision-making into a convincing, inevitable-sounding, organic whole.

So, the FIRST STEP of what a conductor does is to study the score, making unbelievable numbers of decisions about how to transform what the composer has written down into music an audience can hear. I can’t speak for other conductors, but as a part of this step I then create a multi-dimensional audio “image” in my mind – something that allows me to recreate and hear the piece on demand (if silently), exactly the way I feel it should sound.

My wife is cooking something delicious, which makes it very hard to concentrate. Plus, I think this is enough to digest for one posting. Next time I’ll go on to the SECOND STEP, which is the rehearsal process.

Beginnings

You know that Seinfeld episode when Elaine’s conductor friend insists that everyone call him “Maestro”? Don’t feel too bad if you don’t, but…that’s exactly the kind of nose-in-the-air snootiness that Main Street associates with classical music. I’m an orchestral conductor, and I’ve spent my life feeling a bit, uh, embarrassed by the fusty, slightly out-of-touch image classical music still manages to conjure up in the minds of most. It doesn’t have to be that way. All we need is a little information flow.

Like most areas of human endeavor, music becomes far more fascinating and approachable (not to mention addictive) the more you know about it. Kind of like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Sure, you’ve got it on your shelf – like a trophy – but have you read it? Come on, be honest… A little knowledge of relativity and string theory goes a long way when cracking the spine of that puppy. Same thing with music. If you go to a concert with no information, no conception of what this experience is about, one of two things could happen:

1) You could hear an amazing performance, recognize how amazing it is, and be hooked for life.

2) Something else could happen (confusion, boredom, sleepiness – come on, admit it, you’ve nodded off in a concert before!).

The truth is that scenario #1 doesn’t happen very often. Whether it’s because most performances are not amazing (I know, SACRILEGE!) is debatable, I suppose. However, let it be said – by me, at least – that an amazing performance is an absolute prerequisite for the kind of giddy schoolgirlish glee I suggest is possible when experiencing classical music. Amazing music played un-amazingly can be heartbreakingly annoying, if you know just how amazing (love that word, apparently…) it could be. And if you don’t know enough to be annoyed, well, that’s where the confusion, boredom, and sleepiness of scenario #2 come into the picture.

This blog aims to level the playing field a bit for those of you who didn’t graduate from Juilliard or have an epiphany while listening to Leonard Bernstein LP’s under your covers at age 5, shining a flashlight to read the back of that hilariously large, floppy insert. Those guys have already spent vast amounts of time amassing the information and life experiences that make classical music what it is for them.

And I’m not just talking about music theory and history here. I’ll also talk about things like the pecking order in orchestras and how much money they make. Consider it “office gossip”, if you will. I want to help you peek underneath the hood of the huge, monolithic beast that is classical music and give you some tools – tools that will hopefully allow you to access some of that giddiness and glee I promised above. Not to mention sadness, despair, pain, anguish, love, death, resurrection, and nirvana. The entire wealth of human experience is available to you. All you need is a phenomenal performance and some information.

And because I’m not just a conductor, but a soon-to-be second-time dad, husband, chocolate snob, inveterate home fixer-upper (my second calling, really), and “24” fanatic (even if the plot stays the same every season!), among other things, I’ll most likely be including posts that have nothing to do with music and/or conducting. I can only hope that you find these musings engaging as well.

So, without further ado, let the information flow begin!