It’s Not About You
Can you think of any profession whose practitioners are more famous for their egos than conductors are? Maybe politicians? Certain opera singers?
The egotistical conductor is a central trope in quite a bit of orchestral humor — including several jokes I shouldn’t repeat in a blog that my mother might read. One of my favorite examples is this video, in which two great trumpet players, Mark Gould and Brian McWhorter, not-so-gently mock the legendary egos of conductors. It’s a bit long, but bear with it until at least 2:40 or so for a great line about the bass clarinet.
You may be relieved to learn that no conducting lesson I’m aware of ever went anything like this video…
In the real world, are most conductors out-of-control narcissists? You might be asking the wrong guy, but I don’t think so. (Although I also have a short list of colleagues who definitely fit that description. No, I won’t share the list.)
The surprising reality is that most young conductors find themselves urged to strengthen and amplify their “presence” or “charisma” as they begin their careers. Orchestral players sometimes talk about how they can size up a conductor before a single note is played, just by the way he or she walks to the podium and says hello. Naturally, when a young conductor hears that, he or she can end up focusing too much on how to walk to the podium instead of knowing the score and listening like crazy. (Listening like crazy might be the most important part of the job…)
Like all leaders, conductors need to convince large numbers of people to move in the same direction — but too often, conductors who try to project the confidence or charisma necessary to do that can end up seeming (or becoming) self-centered.
Business consultant Jim Collins (author of Good to Great) might have the solution with what he calls Level 5 Leadership. Level 5 Leaders “blend extreme personal humility with intense professional will.” Conductors would do well to embrace this model, focusing their intense professional will on:
- revealing what is in the score; and
- supporting the confidence and creative possibilities of the orchestra’s musicians.
Of course, the extreme personal humility part of the Level 5 Leadership puzzle can be a tough nut to crack, especially if you’re the person who takes the bows right before and after the music. A good first step? Remember that the person with the baton isn’t making any of the sounds.
Conductor Colin Davis
Earlier this month, the renowned English conductor Colin Davis summed it up beautifully in an interview in The Guardian:
The less ego you have, the more influence you have as a conductor. And the result is that you can concentrate on the only things that really matter: the music and the people who are playing it. You are of no account whatever. But if you can help people to feel free to play as well as they can, that’s as good as it gets.
Words to live by. Or at least, to aspire to!
The Power of Festivals
In my idealistic youth, nothing frustrated me more than jaded orchestral musicians. When so many people make their livings in menial and exhausting ways, how can we complain about playing Brahms and Mozart? Being a musician is hard work that comes after years of dedicated preparation — but it still “beats digging ditches,” as my father used to say. (He knew whereof he spoke, having dug actual ditches in the Arkansas heat in 1959 or so. I try to remind myself frequently that he worked most of his life in the hope that I would never have to know what that felt like. Thanks, Dad.)
The reality, though, is that orchestral life is a grind. From week to week, as music rotates through the folders and different conductors drift across the podium, players can start to feel like cogs in a giant machine. Laying down whole-notes behind a rock singer or playing the umpteenth Light Cavalry Overture in a children’s concert can feel like working on an assembly line. And even the greatest masterworks can get to be a drag with a so-so conductor or an inattentive audience. It ain’t the way things ought to be, but sometimes it’s the way things are.
Which is why the growing trend of orchestras presenting festivals around a single composer or other theme is so invigorating. The routine is broken, and for a few days or a few weeks, everybody rallies around a common focal point. Audience, critics, players, and conductor all share a kind of euphoric burst of energy and a community conversation begins.
The San Antonio Symphony‘s recent Tchaikovsky Festival had exactly that kind of effect. The orchestra played all six symphonies and both piano concertos in four concerts over two weekends. That concentration and focus yielded powerful results: in the finale of the Fourth Symphony during the first weekend, for example, the strings produced a focused, weighty sound in their flying sixteenth-note runs that was exhilarating. Throughout the festival, a palpable sense of passion and abandon was in the air. Here’s hoping that next year’s Beethoven Festival, which will involve more concerts and a wider range of San Antonio performers, will be similarly compelling. It looks promising!
Over the last week or so, an even more fascinating festival experience unfolded at Carnegie Hall. Spring for Music presented seven different North American orchestras playing innovative programs at affordable prices. Because the Spring for Music concerts were nationally broadcast on American Public Media’s Classical Live, people all over were able to be a part of the vibe.
There were several wonderful programs and performances this week, but the standout was the Oregon Symphony‘s May 12 wartime journey through music of questioning and conflict. All four pieces on the program are great masterworks:
- Charles Ives: The Unanswered Question
- John Adams: The Wound-Dresser (with baritone Sanford Sylvan)
- Benjamin Britten: Sinfonia da Requiem
- Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 4
The masterstroke, though, was Music Director Carlos Kalmar’s decision to play the first three pieces without pause, making the first half of the concert into one continuous flow. I can’t overstate the brilliance of this: the moment when The Unanswered Question dissolved seamlessly into The Wound-Dresser gave me chills that I will probably never forget.
Carlos Kalmar (photo by NPR’s Melanie Burford)
And then there was the playing: world-class. I was so blown away by the richness and control of the orchestra that I took to Twitter to see if I was the only one so powerfully struck by the awesomeness. I wasn’t. Moments after the concert ended, New Yorker critic Alex Ross tweeted: “Triumphant Carnegie debut for the Oregon Symphony — best of Spring for Music so far.”
Oregon Symphony violist (and my old friend) Charles Noble blogs regularly, and his morning-after post beautifully sums up what a festival experience can mean when all the stars align:
We quite frankly nearly blew the roof off of the place. It was a moment that was long in coming. It was built not just in the last eight years since Carlos arrived as our music director, though it’s undeniable that his impact on the artistic health of the organization has been positively huge. But before Carlos, there were generations of dedicated musicians and the previous music directors, and managers, and support staff. They, too, all made last night possible.
We were also, as an orchestra and as an organization, ready for this trip. We were in the perfect position to make the maximum impact. We have thrown a rock into the pond that will send ripples out for the foreseeable future. The little orchestra that could came and did. We not only punched above our weight, we k.o.’d the heavyweight champ.
You want to hear this concert now, right? The beauty of Spring for Music is that you can — just click here and prepare to be astonished.
Peeling the Onion
I once heard a theater director describe working on Hamlet as “peeling the onion” — pulling back layer after layer to discover new levels of meaning and nuance. This is also a good metaphor for score-study, the conductor’s lifelong pursuit. No matter how many times you come back to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, there always seems to be one more discovery to be made.
I had a fun “peeling the onion” moment this spring, as I worked on Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. My journey with this piece has been especially rich. Back in 1985 or so, I heard it for the very first time, listening to an LP one afternoon after school at the home of my high school pal, Todd Kovell. This was an unusual first encounter with the piece, since Todd had a score, which we followed along as we listened. A year or two later, I played through the piece with the Tacoma Youth Symphony — one of the more traumatic sight-reading experiences of my viola-playing adolescence! In Philadelphia in the early 1990s, I had the good fortune to work as Assistant Conductor of the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra, where PYO Music Director Joseph Primavera shared with me his score for The Firebird Suite. It was marked up with hundreds of tiny corrections, many of which he had personally confirmed with Stravinsky. (Clinton Nieweg, the eminent retired librarian of the Philadelphia Orchestra, maintains that the standard 1919 version of The Firebird Suite is “the most mistake filled engraving in the history of music, with over 5000 errors for a 23 minute work.”) Since then, I’ve played or conducted the 1919 Suite from The Firebird many times. Because it is a great piece, however, there will probably always be new things for me to learn.
My latest discovery is small, but it’s the kind of thing I love. Near the end of the Finale, Stravinsky presents a slowed-down version of a clanging, bell-like chorale he has been repeating obsessively:
Press the play button below to listen to it:
There is lots of wonderful stuff here. (Forgive me in advance for geeking out; you might even skip this paragraph if you are scared of musical jargon.) The chorale in the upper voices is a rhythmically atomized version of the beautiful horn melody that opened the finale (a Russian folk tune that begins “By the gateway there swayed the tall pine tree”); to me the effect is similar to Picasso’s cubism, a folk melody that has been broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an abstracted form. The slightly dissonant harmonies that underlie this tune are called seventh chords; surprisingly, though, Stravinsky carefully avoids the F-sharp dominant seventh chord that we would usually expect before a major cadence in B major. The result is a glorious chiming sonority that has roots in Russian romantic composers like Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.
What is my new revelation? Focus on the bass line, played by bassoons, tuba, timpani, and double basses. It alternates between F-sharp and B, a rocking motion between what musicians call dominant and tonic that is a familiar cornerstone of many big musical moments. But look at how Stravinsky plays with note lengths here. In the example below, I’ve added brackets denoting how many beats each note lasts. The first two seven-beat measures alternate notes in support of the melody, reinforcing the home key of B major; but over the next three measures, Stravinsky systematically shortens the note lengths. Four beats, then three beats, then two, then one. The effect is a subtle acceleration of the bass line, just as the overall tempo is slowing down. The powerful release of energy when we arrive at the climactic chord is beautifully set up by this subtle harmonic acceleration.
What does this mean? Having found this detail, do I try to emphasize it or bring it out somehow in performance? Is it simply one more piece of the mosaic that makes up my mental map of the piece?
In the end, conductors don’t usually stand around in rehearsal and talk about these layers that we discover as we live with a score. The hope, though, is that each peel of the onion enriches and deepens our sense of how the music should unfold in performance. For now, I need to make one more trip through the score before conducting it again on Sunday…
Troy Peters 