orchestral citizenship December 4, 2006
Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, 1 comment so farI’d gotten a couple really good responses to the semi-rant that I posted a couple days ago, and one of them came back to having orchestra members coming out to the foyer after concerts (it’s a practice that we instituted a few years back, but the number of players going out has diminished to nothing in the past couple months).
Now comes this article from the New York Times which talks about a new Juilliard program to make graduates effective outreach participants as well as top orchestral players. This is an excellent idea in theory, but I’d love to see a program that could be offered to currently employed or post-graduate musicians as well. It’s something that we really need to leverage for greater connection with our audiences.
My problem with this article: the best player doesn’t get the job, at least that’s what is suggested in the article’s first three paragraphs. Hiring shouldn’t solely rely upon one’s verbal skills or ability to help fundraising efforts, should it? I’d rather see a program to train new hires in how to do outreach than make it a prerequisite to hiring which has more import than one’s standard of musicianship and playing. Period. Discuss.
the value of radio December 4, 2006
Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, add a comment
I was perusing the 2002 Audience Insight study (presented by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation) on orchestral audience segmentation when I found this paragraph (which was used as a pull-quote in large type on the first page of the study findings). It makes the pulling of the plug on Oregon Symphony radio broadcasts and broadcast-quality archival recordings seem all the more a move that was made in desperation and very much requires revisiting by all members and stakeholders in the symphony family (emphasis mine):
Radio is the dominant mode of consumption of classical music, followed by recordings and then live concerts. Six in 10 orchestra ticket buyers listen to classical music on the radio daily or several times a week. The typical orchestra subscriber owns 105 records, tapes and CDs, compared to 63 for single-ticket buyers. While some consumers think of classical radio programming as a substitute for live concerts (particularly those with modest levels of knowledge about classical music), most do not. Generally, classical consumers sustain and enhance their interest in the art form through radio and recordings.
You can download a complete copy of this report here (Adobe Reader required).
finding one’s own voice December 4, 2006
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a commentDerek Bermel is one of America’s hottest and most admired young composers, with high profile commissions and performances all around North America. On his blog I found one of the most concise descriptions of how a composer finds their voice - here’s the crucial excerpt:
The following morning I returned to the darkened microfilm room and remained for an hour, then another hour. Nothing new. I spent several days trekking to the library, waiting in vain. One day, at long last, I managed to achieve a kind of thought vacuum. No material entered or left my brain; it was a mental zone akin to meditation. After a seemingly interminable period during which the ‘nothing’ manifested itself, a sound wandered into my head. It was not what I had expected. It was a beat. I attempted to push it away, but it remained stuck in my consciousness. So I began trying to divine where the rhythm wanted to go, in which direction it tended to grow. It was in this moment that I began discovering my ‘voice’ as a composer.
You can find the rest here.
Much has been written about how composers find their voices, their individual means of expression, but not much has been written about how instrumentalists or singers find theirs. I suppose it’s much the same, in a way. Composers begin by studying the works of those who have gone before them, and try to emulate what they find to be novel or interesting or good. Those composers who have the “right stuff” eventually reach a point where these borrowed methods or devices no longer suit them and their own sound begins to emerge - the pastiche ends and the pure line begins.
With instrumentalists, we study with private teachers for years until we begin our professional careers. Our teachers give us fingerings for tough passages, school us in basic and advanced techniques, and get us through the “standard” repertoire so that we have a basis on which to go on our own after school is done. Good teachers help their students to learn how to teach themselves - forcing the student to figure out the form of a piece and how to deal with new technical demands.
I remember the process during my four years of study with Roberto Diaz (formerly Principal violist of the Philadelphia Orchestra and now President of the Curtis Institute of Music). There came a time where I stopped listening to recordings of various famous violists playing the repertoire I was working on, and when I became less needy of in-studio demonstrations by my teacher. I found that I was formulating my own ideas about sound and interpretation, and these were at odds with what Roberto was proposing. This seemed unreal! How could I possibly have ideas that were “good” enough to stand up to one of the great violists of the world? And he took my ideas in and allowed me to make my own mistakes and learn why some things are done certain ways, but also recognized when something which was not his way was a way that could work for me. The main process at work was that I could do anything I wanted to, but it had to have a foundation in reason, in other words, I had to be able to walk the talk. It was tough, but I think that this process is essential to one finding their own voice in any art form, be it drama, comedy, literature, poetry, singing, etc.
Finding the voice of an ensemble can me even more of a tortuous journey. Orchestras take decades to find their sound, or the sound that their music director envisions. I think that’s why many orchestras sound the same these days. The MD’s rarely stay for much more than a decade and the orchestra is left with a half-formed concept of sound and style. String quartets are perhaps the ideal example. With around ten years of the same personnel, a distinct sound emerges, and no quartet sounds the same. If you listen to recordings of quartets with different personnel, they sound markedly different, regardless of which player has been replaced. In this case, you have four people who are learning the quirks of the others and who are learning the repertoire while also trying to find a common approach to it at the same time.
That’s my half-formed post for today - my posts of late have been a bit scattered, and certainly have no claim to any organization or logical structure. I too am only just beginning to find my blogging voice.
Thanks for the many comments in response to my last post. As I read it again I’m finding it rather whiney in tone and I’m not sure what to do about that. I’m almost ready to just delete it and forget about ever writing it.
Tonight, if you’ve got nothing else going on, come down to the Oregon Symphony concert and see the amazing mezzo-soprano Krisztina Szabó performing three incredible opera arias by Handel. The arias are from his operas Ariodante and Alcina, and they stand up to anything written since, simply and unimaginably beautiful.
