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SEASON ANNOUNCEMENT
SF Symphony
Reviews
2005-'06,
By the Numbers
By Janos Gereben
SYMPHONY
An Exciting Trip
By Jerry Kuderna
San Francisco Symphony
Pierre-Laurent Aimard
David Zinman
(2/26/05)
RECITAL
All A-Jumble
By Mack McCray
Jean-Yves Thibaudet
(2/22/05)
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
The Next Big Thing at Other Minds
By Mark Alburger
Other Minds Festival
(2/24/05)
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Other Moods
By Jonathan Russell
Other Minds Festival
(2/25 & 26/05)
SYMPHONY
A Very Good Show
By Lisa Hirsch
Oakland East Bay Symphony
Layna Chianakas
Brian Leerhuber
(2/25/05)
CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Five Strong Artists
By Charles Barber
Moscow Chamber Orchestra
Guzik Foundation Award Winners
(2/25/05)
CHORAL MUSIC
Varied Styles Embraced
By Loretta Notareschi
Coro Hispano
Cantare Chorale
(2/27/05)
CHAMBER MUSIC
Carnival of the Symphony Players
By Michelle Dulak Thomson
San Francisco Symphony Chamber Players
(2/27/05)
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Polychromatic
By Alexander Kahn
Ethel
(2/27/05)
CHAMBER MUSIC
Art with élan
By Joseph Sargent
Spoleto Festival USA
(2/27/05)
LETTER FROM L.A.
High Baroque
By Alan Rich
MUSIC NEWS
San Domenico Strings Take
National Title
By Janos Gereben
QUESTION OF THE WEEK
Responses to Our 2/22/05 Question of the Week
Robert Commanday, Senior Editor
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Orchestras and presenters never quit searching for the silver bullet, the quick, sure way to "educate" their patrons musically. The tried and true procedures don't seem to be enough, the program notes ("Maybe they're not reading them?"), the preview lectures ("But only a few hundred show up."), the conductor talking from the podium ("Really nice, but is that enough?"). Then there are the on-line program notes to encourage reading before attending, and now, on Cal Performances' web site, a promising experiment in a downloadable video preview talk, "sound, action, lights, camera!"
The newest thing — and I suppose that it was inevitable once Supertitles became institutionalized — is a hand-held "Concert Companion." It was introduced here at the Oakland Symphony's concert on Friday (see the review in this issue, listed to the left). 100 Hewett-Packard Pocket PCs or PDAs (personal digital assistants), programmed to the evening's program, were loaned out to those who had signed up in advance to test the device and to the music journalists in attendance.
Though by no means a Luddite, I am one who uses no such devices in real life, finding no need significant enough to warrant investing in a Blackberry, Blueberry or Raspberry, nor even a cell-phone, preferring not to be on-call save during times of my choice. That said, I found it very easy to work CoCo (not the gifted Woodside Gorilla, but the hand-held gadget, as the Concert Companion is affectionately referred to by its maker, Rolland Valliere, former executive director of the Kansas City Symphony, and by his associates). You boot it up by poking the stylus into a little aperture, and 30 or so seconds later, all programs now in place, you can prompt the screen at your choices on the menu. "Program Notes" is one, displayed adequately, but they are, after all, in the printed program. There's also "Video," if you wish to view the conductor's choreography — a silly, pointless distraction as I see it, but happily, this wasn't available Friday; apparently the CoCo folks hadn't set up the cameras.
Poking "Commentary" activates the primary attraction, a running discussion of what is happening in the music, as it happens in real time. Cleverly directed by some unseen operator, instructions are sent over wireless to your CoCo at exactly the right second, to switch from the words describing the strings' languid passage in sensual harmonies to those telling about the woodwinds picking up the original themes and tossing them, one to another. (I am making this up, but the commentary went about its business in this manner and style.)
Occasionally, the device would stall or freeze on a text, either on its own or when I attempted to get the "Video" option and the screen turned sullen. Then I found, if I re-booted it, putting the stylus into the aperture, waited for the program to re-load, and selected "Commentary" again, I was immediately taken to the correct text for the music of that moment.
In short, it was not as bad as I had feared, although how helpful for the lay listener and how much it would interfere with musical listening and discovery are other questions that I am glad to speculate about. In the interest of full disclosure, I acknowledge my prejudice against a gadget that would inevitably distract the listener from listening. That is to say, anything that draws attention away from the music in addition to the other and unavoidable distractions (rattling programs, coughing, whispering, electronic devices other than CoCo, gyrating performers who are not actually dancers but just instrumentalists, or mugging singers), is to be avoided, denounced, banished, proscribed.
Now I will admit that in coping with CoCo, my own attention was not unduly diverted from the music and its performance, but then I don't believe I am your typical concert-goer — or, at any rate, not one who would grasp at the straw of a Concert Companion. And fortunately, the music of the evening was either known to me by heart, upside down and backwards (Beethoven's Eighth), or transparent and predictable as the showers that bloom on us this Spring, namely Kenji Bunch's magpie exercise in pop-art illustration, his Lichtenstein Trilogy, ambitiously named a Symphony No. 1. For the third work, Mahler's Lieder aus des Knaben Wunderhorn, I had no need to check on the Concert Companion's Commentary, for it was simply, and gratefully, the translation of the text, line by line, as it was being sung, and, no need to watch the screen, I knew that and could hear it well enough.
But then, I am a highly experienced, or professional, listener, and so the effect on me of this device is immaterial. I can, however, comment on the quality of the commentary as educational material to the effect that it ranged widely as it unrolled. Some of it, specifically for the Beethoven, was to the point and gave about as much detail of structural matters (like the appearance of a second theme, or the recapitulation) as the lay listener could handle usefully while listening. On the other hand, when it tried to make points about the humor in the music, I'm not at all sure that that kind of thing came through. Saying to someone what amounts to, "Now this is a joke; get it?" doesn't bring a smile of recognition. It merely explains why a musical effect has happened. In Beethoven's time, when a "wrong" chord was played, or there was an unexpected, even bizarre change of key, the listeners would have jumped, and the effect would have struck home. For today's audience, programmed by listening to music of the 200 years since Beethoven, bombarded with music in all styles in its musically conscious as well as unconscious lives (at the movies, over TV, in stores, malls, wherever), Beethoven's effects, humorous or simply dramatic, do not automatically surprise. For that to happen, the listener has to learn to listen contextually, accepting the style of a piece as it happens, listening in that language. That's not a hard thing to do, but it entails a conscious acceptance that a little prior guidance helps establish. Words on a PDA screen while the music is playing aren't enough.
As for the Commentary during Bunch's piece, it was wholly descriptive, the strings are doing this and so, then the mood changes and the English horn sings a wistful solo . . . the brass and percussion come in very aggressively, etc. Images of the three Lichtenstein poster art paintings are shown on the screen, reenforcing the programmatic ideas Bunch is depicting in his music (very much like a film score). Do film scores require or benefit from explication? Well, never mind. A script for Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is quoted in the Concert Companion promotional material, describing "the light and pale solo bassoon" at the outset. "Soon an ‘oboe stutters, then takes the lead.' Then, "bassoons seethe and bubble' as ‘the violins begin to flutter." That's the nature of the descriptive narration.
The copy in the promotional material does raise the question whether "During an actual concert, would people become so absorbed in reading the changing prompts on their PDAs that they would fail to look up at the orchestra?" and acknowledges that "such hesitation was not uncommon," adding that "multitasking is common practice." O.K., now it's out in the open. The "M" word. So, does encouraging multitasking while listening to music lead to an enhanced musical experience? I don't think so. I just don't see the value in holding a listener's hand and narrating an obvious course of musical events, the surface of the music, as if you were describing to the blind a scene or a sequence of events that was unfolding. The most important element in the musical listening is, itself, discovering. What happens to discovering in the Concert Companion experience?
There is no end of promotional push behind this device. It has been test-marketed with several major orchestras before this Oakland East Bay Symphony tryout. It's been featured in segments on NPR, CBC and BBC and written up in feature articles in major newspapers, no surprise. (Some 40 are cited in a partial list). Editors today in newspapers up to and very much including The New York Times are not interested in articles about classical music that actually discuss music and musical issues. Seek and ye shall not find musical discussion, either in newspaper reviews or feature articles. The editors, themselves, evidently musically unschooled, are afraid of this mysterious, unknown and to them unknowable art, and they assume the same of all their readership. But a visual thing they understand because, in this visualizing culture, if music can be made visual, it can be made comprehensible. And then a technology is good to write about because it's "cutting edge." It's almost as good newspaper copy as a personality interview: the chatting of a visiting celebrity really gets the audience into the music. Uh huh. That's the level of the newspaper editor.
Surveys have been taken, and a high percentage of user satisfaction and willingness to recommend is cited by the company providing this technology. Considerable skepticism is voiced by musicians and musical journalists and the promotional material fairly cites these arguments against. Good enough. I don't think the Concert Companion is going to change or bring down the world of classical music world as we know it. Many music executives will endorse it and seek its adoption. And there will be symphony boards that will rush to bring it to their audiences, looking into a mirror and seeing them as musical naïfs like themselves, and envisioning their enlightenment through this gadget as the key to universal musical love and to the prosperity of their enterprises. Yep.
Step this way, to a short-cut to knowledge just inside this tent, a mechanical, visual path to learning how to listen, to discover, to think. Step right up, hubba, hubba, hubba.
(Robert P. Commanday, senior editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)
©2005 Robert P. Commanday, all rights reserved
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