The biggest musical news coming out of Baltimore these days has to do with one of the 10 biggest orchestras in the land—the Baltimore Symphony. Despite receiving perplexed looks from people outside the curved lobby windows of the Meyerhoff for a decision to remedy years of operating in the red by dipping into their endowment, the BSO has made a much bigger (and better) national impression this season, owing much, if not all of that to its new media maven music director Marin Alsop, the first female to front a major American orchestra. Despite a chilly initial reception from the orchestra musicians, which bordered on an outright revolt—nearly 90 percent of BSO players objected to a search process in which they felt that had little or no say—the orchestra appears to have warmed to the Maestra and her agenda, central to which is a commitment to new American music. Alsop, who also directs the annual Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in California, fancies herself a champion of the new and her programming—and the massive media offensive—for her inaugural season has certainly reflected that.
Among the notable American composers represented in Alsop’s first season included Baltimore’s own Christopher Rouse, Aaron Jay Kernis, John Corigliano, Joan Tower, the U.S. premiere of Steve Mackey’s Time Release, and John Adams, who in addition to being featured on one of Alsop’s programs, took the helm on a separate occasion to conduct his My Father Knew Charles Ives and The Wound Dresser. Perhaps as a way of reassuring audiences that new music is something to get excited about rather than fear, Alsop instituted the Composers in Conversation Series, an informal discussion with the composer featured on the upcoming program at the nearby intimate Theater Project venue. Alsop is a bridge builder and her push to broaden the BSO’s audience (and lure more season subscribers in the process) also included a few creative but questionable extracurricular programs such as CSI: Beethoven, a play off of the popular television program, which paired excerpts of Beethoven symphonies, scholarly research, medical and forensic experts, and even a Beethoven impersonator to supposedly unearth some of the mystery surrounding the composer’s death. And with the addition of cheap subscription tickets and new web content, including resourceful preview-the-concert and meet-the-Maestra videos, the BSO is taking giant steps in an effort to brand itself and its new leader as approachable and fun—a huge change from Temirkanov, who despite his brilliant command of some very meaty repertoire, was often portrayed as icy and old-fashioned.
So how do you follow an opening season like that? Not the way you might think. In her press conference announcing the BSO’s next season—streamed live online—one noticed that Baltimore’s new music champion seemed to have put less stress on the new, with the only living composers represented on her programs being Michael Daugherty, Joseph Schwantner, more of her perennial favorite Christopher Rouse, and the world premiere of a new violin concerto by Jennifer Higdon. Instead, Alsop is devoting much of the BSO’s 2008-2009 season to the work of one of her mentors, Leonard Bernstein, as well as trying her hand at more substantial repertoire that at first glance might seem to suit her traditionalist predecessor Yuri Temirkanov a bit more than a self-styled contemporary music crusader. Also sadly going the way of the dodo next season is the Composers in Conversation Series, which seemed to be a lynchpin in Alsop’s campaign to advocate new music in a town that has in recent years grown more accustomed to old war horses than young lions.
The greatest challenge for Alsop and the BSO next season will be living up to the hype that they’ve created for themselves. Much of the buzz this season had to do with novelty and newness, musical and otherwise, so it will be interesting to see how long the BSO can sustain that and if the immense momentum from Alsop’s first season will translate into a boon at the box office years down the road. Alsop is full of fresh and imaginative ideas, but what impact those ideas will have and if the public will continue to buy into them remains to be seen. But if one thing is certain, it’s that Alsop and the BSO have been the talk of the town this season. From the glossy monthlies to the mainstream media to the free alternative press, Baltimore has embraced the new-look BSO and expects big things. All there is to do now is to wait and see if they deliver.
This past July, I had the great honor of playing a concert on the Ocean Grove Summer Stars series with the phenomenal accordionist Lidia Kaminska and everyone’s favorite tech-blogging pianist Hugh Sung. We weren’t quite sure in the beginning how the unusual combination of instruments was going to work out, but I think it’s fair to say that after our first rehearsal we were all pleasantly surprised with the result. Though Lidia and I both played a couple of solo works (and a nice Bach transcription as a duo), the bulk of our program featured arrangements of Piazzolla that Lidia did especially for the group. And since we had Mr. Technology with us, we got some nice video of the concert. And a bit of shameless commerce, a few live recordings from our performance can be downloaded at Amie Street. Enjoy!
And the winner is . . . The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross! Scott Spiegelberg’s semi-annual listing of the top 50 classical music blogs (top 53 this time) is out and it’s no surprise that Herr Ross tops that list. SLN is honored to be included amongst the best of the rest coming in tied for 49th position with Elaine Fine’s Musical Assumptions. Well, Elaine, you can safely assume that it is not fine with me. I am an only child and do not know how to share. Therefore, I claim 48th place as my own. Mine.
The 21st century musician: “The model player is not just a technical whiz but also a musician who can converse with the public, meld into an ensemble, generate interesting programming ideas, schmooze with donors and teach.”
I’m in Roanoke, VA this weekend performing with the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra. In honor of Valentine’s Day, our program is titled Dance and Romance and features its fair share of saxophone. (Because what instrument’s more romantic than saxophone? Really?) Truth be told, it’s the most playing I’ve ever done on a single orchestra gig. Two by Bernstein—perennial favorite Symphonic Dances from West Side Story coupled with hidden gem On the Town—along with the amorousBolero by Ravel, in which I play both the tenor and soprano parts. I normally don’t have a problem with nerves on any concert I play, but having only 5 beats rest to put down the tenor and pick up the soprano and play both lines equally beautifully is seriously challenging my nervousness-free performance record. Not to mention having to have the perfect reed for three horns at the same time—actually, check that, because I need to have all four horns (add baritone) ready to go because of an upcoming concert in NYC. More on that later. I need to deflate.
Tim Page on Marin Alsop as she prepares to take the helm of the BSO:
“Right now, if I were asked whether I’d rather hear Temirkanov or Alsop in Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Sibelius, Shostakovich—in virtually any of the masterpieces in the standard repertory—I’d go for Temirkanov in a hummingbird’s heartbeat. But if I were asked who was more likely, over time, to bring in new audiences and board members, to win over Baltimoreans who may never have attended a classical concert, to help revitalize both the orchestra and the city in which it is rooted, Alsop might get the nod. These are important duties for a music director, too—especially now, especially here—and Alsop is nothing if not ambitious.”
After 30 years of study, Martin Jarvis, a professor at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, has concluded that some of J. S. Bach’s most famous works, including his Six Cello Suites, were not written by Bach, but by his second wife Anna Magdalena Bach. He points to the fact that the only complete manuscript of the Six Suites was a manuscript in Anna Magdalena’s hand as well as “the uniquely symmetrical nature of the work” as factors—musical and otherwise—supporting his claim. At least musicologists will have something new to discuss amongst themselves.
I’m sure the Boston Symphony didn’t mean to fan the flames with this announcement, but the orchestra will now be offering a free podcast that features video lectures about its two-year Beethoven/Schoenberg series. As reported in PlaybillArts, the short videos (one to five minutes for the concentration-impaired) will discuss important works by each composer and be illustrated with appropriate artwork as well as images of scores, video and music clips. Good idea. Will it help gather new disciples? Probably not. Who, besides people who already know about Schoenberg and Beethoven, are searching for them in the iTunes store?
Footnote: I thought a lot about composing an insightful riposte to thisexample of an attitude that isn’t winning classical music any new supporters opinion, but decided against it because rather than make people feel small for expressing their opinions, I think it’s important to listen to what everyone has to say—even if you don’t happen to agree with them. Plus, it’s a debate that’s already made the rounds (click here, here, here, here, and here to get up to speed).
Update: Patti Mitchell composes a thoughtful response to the comment cited by ACD.
Update #2: Thanks to ACD for clarifying his reasons for offering his honest opinion about a reader’s honest opinion and my TAFTO contribution, which was done, he informs us, in the spirit of “pointing out the truth” despite it being “a less than pleasant affair.” ACD holds that “if you fail to get ‘em very young, you mostly don’t get ‘em at all.” I can agree with that—to an extent. On a personal level, I did not grow up listening to classical music. I grew up listening to 1950s rock and roll, country music, heavy metal, progressive rock, and then jazz, before finally getting into classical music. Although I wasn’t exposed to classical music at a young age, I still turned out as a classical music lover. I guess I’m an example of why ACD includes the qualifier “mostly” in the statement “you mostly don’t get ‘em at all” [italics mine]. My question is, what does that mean for “most” people who were not exposed to classical music at a young age? Are they simply lost causes, who’ve been hopelessly corrupted by the ills of society? Should we just round them up and ship them off to an island where they won’t pass on their “iPod Generation” genes to any offspring so that we can (finally) begin to cultivate an appropriately cultured society? I think this has been tried once already.
Correction: SLN apologizes profusely to the wonderful visual artist Margaret Koscielny for wrongly attributing the comments below made by a reader to her.
TAFTO month is wrapping up over at Adaptistration so it’s about time I took care of some unfinished business. A reader posed an intriguing question in the comments section, and since my contribution is now collecting dust in the archives, I thought I’d bring these (very honest) comments to the fore here:
“[E]ven though I enjoy performing classical music as a vocalist and chorus member, I can’t say that I thoroughly enjoy classical symphony concerts as an audience member. Unless I am very familiar with the work being performed, I experience what feels like long periods of detachment until something in the music really grabs me. Often, this means detachment through an entire movement of a symphony!
“If it is like this for me, as a somewhat ‘educated’ classical audience, I find it hard to imagine how it might be experienced by the average potential audience member that we’re trying to cultivate. It’s one thing to experience classical music as a background experience while other things are going on, such as at home, in the workplace, or in a bookstore. It’s another thing entirely to face an orchestra and listen attentively for 90 minutes or more. I can’t honestly say that I usually enjoy the classical concert experience as fully as a movie or highly engaging (lots of patter) pops concert.
“If it feels like work for me, how can it be that enticing (i.e., generate repeat attendances) for most newbies?”
Huh. I think we can all sympathize with the reader’s comments. Listening to classical music, especially live classical music, requires a great deal of concentration, especially if the work being performed is unfamiliar to us. Live concerts don’t have a rewind button. Sometimes it’s hard to stay focused that intensely for long spans of time, like the duration of a symphony. And I’d venture a guess that even the musically “educated” among us have had those moments during a concert when we zone out—come on, admit it. Karlheinz Stockhausen would probably blame this on his comclusion that “our relationship to music has become highly superficial” (from The Art, to Listen). He’s got a bit of a point, and as Margaret points out, for a lot of folks classical music is often background music or simply a soundtrack for another activity, like dinner or romance.
(Irrelevant humorous story: during my last year of undergraduate education, I lived on the second floor of a two-story apartment building. Below my roommate and I lived a couple in their late 40s - early 50s. Translation: they came of age in the 1960s. Anyhow, I don’t think they were big classical music buffs—he drove a late-80s white Camaro, which was always parked diagonally across two parking spaces so as to avoid any possibility of little dents from other doors, and she liked . . . well, I don’t know what she liked although I’m pretty sure it wasn’t classical music. However, every once in a while a sweet smell would begin to waft up into our apartment and the stereo would start playing Ravel’s Bolero and then. . . They loved that tune. Like we didn’t know. Ahem.)
I think the fact that minds begin to wander during a concert is a byproduct of our culture. I asked Jihwan today if she had trouble staying focused during the BSO concert. Of course she did, she said: “Because I’m used to listening to fast-paced popular music, in which the tunes are short and have just enough things going on not to make people bored. But in classical music, it’s different. Usually classical music is long and has a much different level of technical detail. Being an uneducated listener, of course, it is hard to understand what part of the music is the best or what is not beyond recognizing general feelings like sadness or happiness or darkness.”
I’m not sure I have an answer to the reader’s question. It’s a conundrum—we love classical music but sometimes find it hard to sit through a concert. My sense is that even if we (or the newbie) aren’t able to concentrate on every little detail throughout a concert, there will be at least something that impresses itself upon us. Maybe that something will be a revelation to some. And maybe to others it won’t. But there’s the chance that someone could be particularly moved by that something, become addicted to that feeling, and then crave more. The prerequisite, of course, is an open mind. And if somebody takes from a concert just feelings of sadness or happiness, that’s great. Stockhausen thinks so too:
“If, after hearing a musical work, on listener says he “thought it was beautiful” while another says it was “too simple” and yet another found it “too long”—and so on—all this means is that listeners are exchanging calling cards, describing themselves, their own problems, their own abilities, their own taste. The music provides an opportunity for listeners to make statements about themselbes—and that is meaningful and important.”
