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EARLY MUSIC
An Old Friend
CHAMBER MUSIC
Accomplished Masters
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Homespun Beauties
OPERA
The Rescue That Failed
RECITAL
Promise Not Fulfilled
SYMPHONY
A 6.5 on the
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
A Variant Mixture
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Controlled Extroversion
OPERA
A Kid's Take on
SYMPHONY
Highs and Lows
MUSIC NEWS
"C" is for "Conservatory"
QUESTION OF THE WEEK
Responses to Our 11/8/05 Question of the Week
By Joseph Sargent
Philharmonia Baroque
(11/11/05)
By Michelle Dulak Thomson
Borodin Quartet
(11/12/05)
By Miguel Galperin
San Francisco Conemporary Music Players
Katherine Rowland
New York New Music Ensemble
(11/8 & 11/05)
By Lisa Hirsch
San Francisco Opera
Fidelio
(11/9/05)
By Stephanie Friedman
Jonathan Lemalu
Malcolm Martineau
(11/13/05)
Orff Scale
By Janos Gereben
San Francisco Symphony & Chorus
Patricia Petibon
Richard Troxell
Christopher Maltman
David Robertson
(11/11/05)
By Heuwell Tircuit
BluePrint Project
(11/11/05)
By Jules Langert
Composers Inc.
(11/8/05)
"The Flute"
By Marcus Weiss
and Janos Gereben
San Francisco Opera
The Magic Flute, children's version
(11/12/05)
By Alexander Kahn
Marin Symphony
Axel Strauss
(11/13/05)
in A.C.T.
By Janos Gereben
Mickey Butts, Executive Director/Publisher
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Editor's Note: Something quite amazing is taking place right now on ArtsJournal, the daily online digest of arts, culture, and ideas. In addition to his blog there, Greg Sandow is "performing a book-in-progress," tentatively titled The Future of Classical Music?. Sandow is a veteran critic, whose writing has most recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal. Lately he's been working as a consultant for orchestras, and teaches at Juilliard (and this spring at Eastman), where one of his courses is titled "Classical Music in an Age of Pop." Finally he's a composer, and among other things has composed four operas and a string quartet that he wrote for the birthday of his wife, New York Times music critic Anne Midgette.
But how can he perform a book? "That means I'm going to write it, or draft it, or riff it online, one installment at a time, until it's done," Sandow explains. Every two weeks, he posts a new installment, then takes down the old one. Why write the book this way? "So I'll have some pressure on me, something forcing me to write it. And so the book can get attention, even before it's published. (Even before I have a deal with a publisher.) And so people who care about what the book says can help me make it better."
In the first installment, Sandow's attention ranged from a discussion of what the rhythmically free performance style of Cuban master Beny Moré can teach classical musicians to a depiction of the user-unfriendly ways that classical music CDs and concerts are packaged and sold. What follows is an excerpt from the second installment, originally published on November 14, 2005 and reprinted with the permission of Greg Sandow and ArtsJournal. To read the full essay, and comment on it if you like, visit http://www.artsjournal.com/greg/.
Discover the magic and the genius of Beethoven's music.
Create holiday memories with this special concert featuring excerpts from the great classics.
Celebrate great music in a great hall.
From the delightful Brandenburg Concerto of Bach to the beloved Canon by Pachelbel, this annual performance of Baroque-era music is an audience favorite.
Close your eyes and flood your thoughts with memories and emotions from tears of joy and sadness, hearts pounding with excitement, love, anticipation, fear; physical exhaustion, exertion, relaxation . . . all the feelings music brings to you. Feel the power of the music.
That last one isn't really empty, but it's naïvely, almost painfully sincere. And, like most of the other examples, not so well written. Orchestra materials — flyers, posters, advertisements, brochures, newsletters — sometimes read like community newsletters, or like something from an eager small-town church.
But now contrast this with what we often find in program notes for classical concerts. These go to the opposite extreme; they're often so scholarly that most people won't be able to understand what they're saying:
The Four Songs, Op. 2, published in 1910, called traditional functional harmony sharply into question. For example, the second song of the group, "Schlafend tragt man mich," bears a key signature of six flats that normally would suggest the tonality E-flat minor; but the chains of chromatic chords that dominate the piece fail to gravitate toward E-flat in the expected way.
Decades ago, convincing reconstructions of [Bach's] Concerto for Oboe and Violin, BWV 1060, and the Concerto for Oboe d'amore, BWV 1055, greatly enriched the repertory. (The range of the solo parts and their characteristic figuration indicate the intended solo instruments.) A more recent effort by the musicologist Wilfried Fischer produced the present Violin Concerto in G Minor, reconstructed from the Harpsichord Concerto in F Minor, BWV 1056. Even in Bach's keyboard arrangement, the figuration of the solo part is idiomatic to the violin, especially when the music is transposed from F minor to G minor, allowing the use of open strings in various passages.
An interesting detail about the horn call at this section's opening is that the fourth note, B-flat, is held for 13 measures so that it serves as a bass to the dolce violin melody that follows. This corresponds to the extra length of the D at the beginning of the symphony, and no doubt when Beethoven had the afterthought of lengthening that D it was to clarify this relationship. As for the violin melody, the first two measures outline the B-flat/E-flat dyad (though in reverse order), and the third and fourth outline F and B-flat.
All of these come from major classical music institutions: the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. The pieces that they're for are Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, songs by Berg, and a Bach violin concerto. You might think I had to work hard to find them, but all of them came my way by chance, when I or my wife went to concerts and found them printed in the program book. I've seen many more like them. If we approached the institutions responsible, and asked how many people in their audience can understand these notes, what would the answer be? Most likely the institutions have never thought about this at all, even though the only purpose program notes like this can serve — apart, perhaps, from entertaining scholars — would be to make the audience feel stupid. "Is this what you have to know about if you want to understand classical music?"
Classical music institutions don't ask who understands these notes, because in many ways they're functioning on automatic pilot, and this, for endless years, has been how program notes are written. Nor do the institutions ask how likely it might be that the same people who'll respond to their advertising — "Schedule the music you love into your life and SAVE!" — will also ponder B flat/E flat dyads. They write peppy ads because they want to sell tickets, and then, without asking why their left hand doesn't know what their right hand is doing, they commission impenetrable program notes, because classical music, after all, is supposed to be scholarly. Not that some institutions don't do better. Lately I'm hearing complaints about the program notes, and also about biographies of soloists and conductors that appear in program books, and glaze our eyes with endless lists of orchestras that the soloists have played with, and the conductors have conducted. (Or, in opera, lists of opera houses where the singers have appeared.) Surely, if these people are, as their bios tell us, "magnificent," "acclaimed," or "one of the great German pianists of today," then of course they've done their thing with all the leading orchestras. Do we really need a list, especially when the biography otherwise says nothing humanly identifiable about what the soloist is like, as a person or an artist?
So, slowly, the biographies and notes will change. The Indianapolis Symphony has replaced biographies with friendly, even chatty Q&As; that's one small step for humankind. Program notes are also getting chatty. But what's remarkable, in spite of this, is how little the classical music audience is ever told. Here's a small but deadly demonstration. Program notes, for reasons I've never understood, typically list the instruments that play in each orchestral piece. So the Pastoral Symphony, we'll read, was written for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, and strings. Exciting, isn't it? Suppose the Pastoral had three trumpets instead of two. What difference would that make?
Well, to an expert it would make a major difference, but the audience is never told what that might be. And what they're also never told is that the list of instruments might not track with what they see on stage. A piece that's written for four horns might be performed by five; its three trumpet parts might be played by four trumpeters. Why? Because the principal horn and trumpet players in an orchestra reserve the sovereign right to skip some of the music in their parts, and therefore other horn and trumpet players sit there in reserve, picking up the slack. But no one tells the audience; no one seems to care that there's a disconnect between the program book and what anybody in the concert hall can very plainly see.
Though that's the least of it. No one tells the audience what the musicians think about — what their goals are in any piece of music, how this performance of the Pastoral might be different from any other one. You could say that it's the audience's job to understand all that, but how can they, even if they're expert listeners? They can only guess, as I myself guess, when I go to a concert. No one tells us what the musicians had in mind. And many people in the audience are very definitely not experts; no matter how long they've been going to concerts, they may not understand how the performance they just heard, even of their favorite piece, was or wasn't different from the one they heard two years ago. The music director of an American orchestra of reasonable size once told me — with an air of utter certainty — that no one in his audience understood what he set out to do in any piece. But how could they? He never tells them.
And so a veil of blankness descends on classical concerts. Behind the formality, who can tell what's really going on? Or as Christopher Small wrote in his book Musicking:
This is the great paradox of the symphony concert, that such passionate outpourings of sound are being created by staid-looking ladies and gentlemen dressed uniformly in black and white, making the minimal amount of bodily gesture that is needed to produce the sounds, their expressionless faces concentrated on a piece of paper on a stand before them, while their listeners sit motionless and equally expressionless listening to the sounds. Neither group shows any outward sign of the experience they are all presumably undergoing.
It's a very odd blankness.
(Greg Sandow is a composer, consultant, critic, teacher, and blogger who lives in New York.)
©2005 Greg Sandow, all rights reserved
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