arnica quartet spring concert January 31, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, 3commentsThe Arnica Quartet will present a concert at the new OHSU Center for Health and Healing [directions] in the South Waterfront district on Wednesday, March 14th at 7:00 p.m.
We’ll be performing the string quartet of Claude Debussy and Beethoven’s Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 18 no. 6.
This concert is part of a March series of concerts to present classical music in the newly-developed South Waterfront district. Here is the schedule so far (subject to change):
- March 7 at 7:00 p.m. - Sarah Tiedemann, flute and Jessica Black, piano
- March 14 at 7:00 p.m. - Arnica String Quartet
- March 21 at 7:00 p.m. - Adam LaMotte, violin and Janet Coleman, piano
blast from the past January 27, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, add a comment
I was doing some more scrounging around in my files and found this OSO program cover from March/April 2002. The OSO was doing a series of profiles on musicians and their work with students. Denise Huizenga (at lower left) was in the Ethos Quartet with me at the time, so they did our profiles concurrently. My featured student (at top left) was Caitlin Lynch, who just got back from a semester at the Paris Conservatory and is a senior at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studies with Jeffrey Irvine. A delight both now and then. [Click on the thumbnail for a larger view.]
the genius of Dilbert January 27, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a commentI found this on the fridge today while I was cleaning - it seemed to resonate quite a lot with me today…
programming games January 26, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, 2commentsI’m in the process of figuring out what to play on a planned spring recital, and it’s made me think a lot about the largely forgotten art of programming - the act of picking what pieces will be on a concert.I was poking through some of my music that I haven’t looked at for a long, long while, and came across a set of Three Legends by Heinrich von Herzogenberg. He and his wife, Elizabeth Stockhausen, were both good friends of Brahms, and there is a good record of correspondence between the three of them (yet another triangle in Brahms’ private life along with Robert and Clara Schumann).
Heinrich von Herzogenberg
I first encountered these pieces by hearing them on a recording (sadly, out of print) by Paul Coletti, and they’re quite nice, treading the line between Brahms and Bruch, which is an interesting axis. It turns out that Herzogenberg taught at the Hochschule fur Music in Berlin, where he in turn urged a young Ralph Vaughan Williams to study with Max Bruch.
With these three composers, we’ve got a nice basis for a recital: Herzogenberg’s Legends, Vaughan Williams’ Romance, and Bruch’s Romance. It’s not hugely exciting or varied, but it does show influences between composers and their peers, and all of these pieces are lovely and show the lyric gifts of the viola to good effect.
Other ideas are using compositions which were composed for the same competition, such as the 1919 Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge competition, whose entries included Ernest Bloch’s Suite for Viola and Piano, Paul Hindemith’s Op. 11/4 Sonata, and the Rebecca Clarke Sonata.
the future January 25, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a commentLately I’ve been picking through old clippings of mine as well as albums of photographs and the like. It is an interesting time, to be on the cusp of 40 as a classical musician. You are neither the new young hotshot nor the seasoned veteran. You have neither the allure of being the unknown nor the breadth of experience that puts presenters at ease. And the classical music business is increasingly (although it’s really always been this way, hasn’t it?) preoccupied with youth. Prodigies titillate us with their precocity, by their daring, by their simultaneous (and cognitively dissonant) worldliness and innocence. Schools, competitions and festivals all cater to the young - the up-and-comers. I often dream of a competition for musicians aged 30 and up. Perhaps sponsored by One-a-Day vitamins, I think. There must be a place for us, we middle-farts. We’ve paid some of our dues, are in the process of paying most of the rest, and yet we won’t really attract anyone’s attention again until we’re put out to pasture. We don’t face the pressure to produce like the young turks that are coming up and into the world’s orchestras, our orchestra. Yet we aren’t expected (yet) to coast our way into blissful retirement. In my first five years with the OSO, I played as soloist with the orchestra five times (maybe it was four, my memory is already fading!), and had a great time doing it. In the intervening six years, I’ve played with the orchestra not once. I’ve done solo appearances elsewhere, with the Vermont Youth Orchestra, the Sunriver Festival Orchestra, and at the Cascade Festival of Music. My four years playing with the Ethos Quartet came to an end in 2004. The Arnica Quartet is in its second year, but the momentum is slow in coming, and I think it’s just a different animal with different aims than we had set out to accomplish six years ago. I’ve been lucky enough to be featured at three of the International Viola Congresses (2002, 2004, 2006), and they were all very good and very different experiences. Now I’m left with the nagging question: what comes next? I’m honestly at a loss to say. Needless to say, it will be an interesting journey, and as long as I love playing the viola (and I most certainly do) then life will be good.
orchestral equilibrium January 22, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, add a commentCheck out this story by LA Times classical music critic Mark Swed, then come back and let’s talk.
I wish that journalists were given the time and space to fully explore the ideas that they either come up with or which are assigned to them by their editors. Since not every music critic gets to write for the New Yorker or Atlantic Monthly, 3000 word stories are the very rare exception. Mark Swed may have tried to follow a balanced line, but (as he’s done in the past in review describing members of the Pacific Symphony as ‘greedy’ because they followed the legal language of their contract) he failed miserably and comes out swinging against the musicians and stays there for much of this article. It’s a story, and one with little regard for the facts - he makes generalizations about the orchestras he writes about (Seattle, Baltimore, Philadelphia) without giving any real depth of background - he never asks why the orchestras got into the the terrible situations he describes in the first place. He might have written a very beneficial article which would have done a great public service by looking for the common threads that caused these fine orchestras to go off the rails, but instead we get tabloid speculation and general disdain for the musicians’ side of the story. In writing any factual essay, one must be cognizant of the fact that one might start with one point of view, and after careful research and interviews, end up at another. Mr. Swed seems to have started and ended at the same place, most likely due to a lack of careful research or interviews of the gamut of personalities involved.
I have to say that the musicians’ union (American Federation of Musicians or AFM) often gets a bad rap. Most unions have since they gained any real power in this country, and not without reason. It’s tempting to have one’s thoughts stray to On the Waterfront or other such tales of corrupt and evil union bosses oppressing their helpless and hapless flocks of sidemen - the media continues to push this view, and thus the management agenda gets much more play than that of the workers. The fact is, the musicians union has done much to make orchestras vibrant and viable parts of countless communities. We’ve fought long and hard to make living wages possible, for safe working conditions, and to make the process of termination and/or probation as fair and humane as possible. Without these things an orchestra ceases to become a destination, and becomes a revolving-door stepping-stone to better ensembles. Continuity is lost, and the orchestra suffers both artistically and financially. The same can be said for the management and staff - the longer we retain the best minds in the industry, the better off we will be.
That having been said, we musicians may be in danger of drinking our own Kool Aid (if only well-diluted). It’s tempting push our agenda heedless of the financial facts that scream that the opposite course, or at least a staying of the course, would be much, much more prudent. The long institutional memory of the union, as protected and sustained by our most senior members, is our most valuable resource, but it is also our most dangerous double-edged sword. Indeed, it is a Sword of Damocles, with our own success at negotiating on our own behalf threatening our gravest harm as the institution as a whole suffers as a result. It gets too easy to see ourselves as the only important part of the institutional puzzle, and we lose sight of the effects of our action. The fact is, no orchestra can function without its three major constituent parts: board, musicians, and staff. Each part has its own area of responsibility and expertise, and should work hard both to educate the other parts as to their own importance, and to understand how the other parts work to support each other. Equilibrium such as this is vital, and hard to achieve, but without it, we see the financial, artistic, and public-relations disasters that have befallen Baltimore, Seattle and Philadelphia.
Understanding and empathy are powerful tools, and as Sam Bergman suggests in a post on MyAuditions.com, orchestras who have good, open lines of communication along with strong interconnecting parts that work well together don’t make the news because of public relations disasters. If the musicians see themselves as the only guardians capable of protecting their high artistic standards, you get the Philadelphia scenario. If the musicians see themselves as powerless and oppressed and ignored, you get the Seattle scenario. If the musicians see their livelihood being flushed down the toilet while they’re standing around helplessly, you get the Baltimore scenario.
What is often lost in the discussion about orchestras is that success or failure does not necessarily fall at the feet of the musicians. At the Oregon Symphony we had quantitatively lower artistic standard 10 years ago, but much larger audiences at all of our concerts. Today, the orchestra is at a high water mark artistically, but we are struggling to get butts in seats and enough donations to make us financially viable for the long term. Though we often talk around the water cooler as if we could do a better job than those in the front office, the truth is, the vast majority of us could not. We’re trained to do one thing very well: to play music on our chosen instrument(s). I don’t have an MBA, or marketing experience, or an understanding of business models or any of the other stuff that someone engaged in running a major arts organization should have a good understanding of. And while there are management personnel who have been on the other side of the organizational chart as orchestral musicians, the majority don’t have an intimate knowledge of what we really do on a day-to-day basis. The same goes for the board members.
But, the musicians are the public face of the organization - we’re the ones on stage for the public to see. When there are tensions about money, and the costs are examined, we’re the largest single budget item on the balance sheet. It becomes easy for an uninformed public to blame us for the costs that we’re incurring in public negotiations of our CBA. However, it must be said that we cannot get anything that management isn’t willing to give us. When there is poor communication and incomplete understanding in an organization, both “sides” can ask for too much, or give too much, and end up in a place that invites further conflict and ultimately, meltdown, in the form of a strike or lockout. After such an event takes place, it takes years, if ever, for the institution to again reach equilibrium and make progress.
I wish that the Swed article had been less of an editorial and more of an exploration of the root causes of the highly publicized troubles that have taken place at a handful of orchestras. It may inspire some good conversations amongst orchestral stakeholders, but it will also reinforce preconceptions that have little basis in reality and educating board members, audiences and donors will only be more difficult.
nurture or nature? January 21, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a commentTake five minutes and check out the video link below - it was done by Andrew Finch, son of OSO cellist Ken Finch (who is the featured performer in the video “duet”). It’s really an amazing, professional production, and the whole Finch clan should be (and I’d bet that they are) very, very proud!
musicians ON the bus January 18, 2007
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in the studio… January 18, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a commentYesterday afternoon I was in the studio with eight other string colleagues to play a backing track for one of the new songs on Pink Martini’s upcoming, highly anticipated third album. Recording is an interesting process. A friend who has done a lot of the really high-class movie work in the LA studios described recording as 90 percent crashing boredom and 10 percent outright terror. The boredom is that you spend quite a long time watching the engineer setting up the mics, running cable and checking levels. You run through the chart a couple of times, then you must do everything you normally do, but perfectly, and often many times in a row. It’s a nice change of pace from the orchestral rehearsal, where you have time to work out any passages that you didn’t fully shed at home during the rehearsals. At concerts, mistakes are at a minimum, but since we hear in a linear fashion, things that do happen recede into memory pretty quickly, and the overall impression of the interpretation is what is left in the mind of the listener.
The recording situation for this session was unique to my experience. Rather than recording to a hard drive, they were using what looked like 3 inch tape stock for the recording, and the machine probably was running at 24 feet per second, so there was a limited amount of material that could be kept for editing. An added wrinkle was that the vocalist, China Forbes, was doing the track live along with us in a vocal booth, with Thomas Lauderdale valiantly donning his conducting hat and trying to keep us with her and her with us. It took a while to get the hang of it, but I think we got a good result. Word is it might be the first track on the new album, but these things have a way of changing as the production gets further along.
snow daze January 17, 2007
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snow at the pool, originally uploaded by nobleviola.
We had an unexpected snow storm hit the Portland metro area Tuesday morning. Of course, it should have been expected, as our intelligence-challenged local forcasters insisted that only minor flurries would mar an otherwise pristine day. The rest of us, city governments included, forgot to use reverse psychology and assume that all hell would break loose, and the city was paralyzed with the end result that we lost our first rehearsal for the upcoming classical series concert.
It’s a shame, since we’re doing Stravinsky’s Jeu de Carte, which the orchestra has never done before, and a whole raft of Johann Strauss bon bons, which sound effortless (and are anything but), all on one less rehearsal that was intended. It’ll be fun…
