jump to navigation

the end May 24, 2006

Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, add a comment

Well, with the last titanic chords of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony ringing across the expanses of the Salem Armory Auditorium, my 10th season with the Oregon Symphony came to a close.  For three of my colleagues, it marked their final seasons with the orchestra, and after a stupendous amount of seasons, I must say!  Frederick Korman was our principal oboe for the last 28 years, Fred Sautter our principal trumpet for 38 years, and Patricia Miller served in our viola section for an incredible 55 years!  They have been an invaluable part of the fabric of our institution for many decades, and deserve accolades and recognition for their contributions and achievements.

Next season, we’ll have a new principal flute, oboe, and trumpet - three of the most important positions in the orchestra.  We’ve enjoyed two years already with our excellent concertmaster, Amy Schwartz Moretti, and look forward to many more.  The rate of change is dizzying, and will require some adjustment - the most pressing of which for me is easing my way from the ranks of the “young and new” orchestra members firmly into the range of “middle fart” - not quite to old fart, but getting there!

More later…

ma(h)leria May 20, 2006

Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, add a comment

We’re doing Mahler 7 this week, and I’m dazed and confused. I just can’t get my head and heart around this tough nut. I hadn’t even listened to the piece via recording all the way through until a couple weeks ago, as I was getting ready to do it. I’d heard a live performance in College Park, Maryland back in 1990 by the Toronto Symphony with Gunther Herbig and it didn’t make much of an impression on me then, as I remember. I don’t know why this is. I love nos. 1-6 and 9, but 7 and 8 leave me cold for some reason. Even the sprawling first movement of no. 3, almost a half an hour long, seems to hold more magic for me than the equally long corresponding movement of no. 7. It’s almost as though Mahler is trying out some new techniques which he abandons after the 8th is in the hopper. I’m reminded just a bit of Beethoven’s late quartets, with their episodic tendancies and emphasis on thematic development over overt melody. The logic seems more cogent in the Beethoven works, however, and the Mahler just seems to lose its way in almost every movement except the dark Scherzo. Ah, well - time to get a good book and relax. Only three more times for Mahler 7 and the end of my season.

UPDATE: My wife came to the concert on Monday night, and she’s a fabulous musician with one of the best ears I know, and a great lover of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony.  She said that she’s always seen it as a titanic battle between darkness and light, and that that is what dictates the necessarily schizoid structure.  After our final performance in Salem last night, I’m leaning in the direction of her assessment, and coming to like the piece more and more.

random thoughts about music May 11, 2006

Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a comment

Here are some thoughts that have passed through my head during the last couple of days of rehearsals:

a failure of imagination May 3, 2006

Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a comment

Next week, my orchestra begins rehearsals for John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls. With the release of the critically-acclaimed United 93 this past weekend and the Adams work on my music stand, my thoughts have returned to the tragic events of nearly five years ago. Today on the National Public Radio program Fresh Air, the guest was former Department of Homeland Security inspector general Clark Kent Ervin. In the course of talking about the response of the government to the attacks and the 911 Commission’s report, a phrase from the commission’s report was repeated several times, and it caught my attention:

“The most important failure was one of imagination.”

In fact, lack of imagination was so central to the failure to interdict the attacks that there is a subsection in the report entitled “Institutionalizing Imagination”. [1]

Studies link music education in children to improved academic achievement [2], and I think that one of the leading factors in this improvement relates to imagination. Music, of all the fine arts, makes the highest demands upon the imagination, in both of the participatory guises: performer and listener.

As performers we are called on to decipher symbols which tell us the length, loudness, tempo, and articulation of each note. Years of training help us to discern what is “in between” those notes, as it were, but much of the interpretive process that remains is left to our artistic imagination. If we’re playing a modern score, there is relatively little left to the imagination than if we are performing a solo sonata, partita or suite of J.S. Bach, where there is little indication of what lies underneath, with a minimum of instructions given by the composer.

As a listener, we have to make sense of sounds which may be foreign and/or distasteful to us, to concepts which we have not yet experienced, and take an abstract form and relate it to emotional concepts from our own emotional history.

The rigor of facing these dilemmas from an early age really do, I believe, give those who have had a musical education a real edge in reasoning and conceptual skills. By combining these skills with the increased aptitude demonstrated in other subjects, mathematics chief among them, we enable a generation of children to better take on the challenges that will face them in the future.

So, as September 11, 2006 draws closer, and there is much talk of the lack of imagination demonstrated by our government, industry, and citizenry - view it as a call to arms on behalf of a renewed dedication to arts education in our schools. We cannot afford not to take up this call.

1 http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Exec.htm
2 http://www.amc-music.com/research_briefs.htm