Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 11

“Shostakovich in South Dakota” on NPR — A New Template for Orchestras

My NPR “More than Music” program “Shostakovich in South Dakota” can now be accessed here. 

 I document the impact of a remarkable contextualized performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony by Delta David Gier and his singular South Dakota Symphony last February – and ponder its significance for the future of embattled American orchestras striving to retain pertinence today. Shostakovich’s symphony was composed during the Nazis’ strangling 872-day siege of Leningrad.

Here are a few excerpts from the show: 

“For Mark Bertrand, the pastor of Sioux Falls’ Grace Presbyterian Church, Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony evoked the resilience of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invading army in 2023. Bertrand also found himself thinking about the role of culture in a nation’s life. ‘It’s striking that as the symphony was being composed, Shostakovich was updating people in real time about his progress. They were looking forward to this happening. And it can’t be the case that this besieged population was just seeking some entertainment to get their thoughts off their everyday reality. I tried to imagine us today feeling a similar kind of anticipation for an artistic statement. We don’t value things the way they did. It really gets you thinking about how different their values must have been.’ . . .

“As Shostakovich’s symphony began its slow, inexorable ascent toward a final climax, Bertrand found himself thinking about a German soldier whose words were quoted earlier in the evening. The Russians not only broadcast the Leningrad Symphony throughout the Soviet Union. They managed to broadcast it via loudspeakers to the Nazi troops blockading Leningrad. After the war, a German soldier testified: ‘It had a slow but powerful effect on us. The realization began to dawn that we would never take Leningrad. We began to see that there was something stronger than starvation, fear and weather – the will to remain human.’” 

Another participant in the NPR program is the New Yorker’s Alex Ross, who says:

“There’s just a tremendous amount of caution, a tremendous amount of groupthink, in the orchestra world. So to see an orchestra really out on its own, forging its own identity, and bringing its audience along with it is just extremely impressive – even more impressive than I anticipated. . . 

“For a music director to carry off an ambitious project, you have to be there. You have to be on the scene, persuading people, interacting with them, listening to their ideas. Not just communicating your own. Building a sense of cooperation. You cannot do that as effectively if you’re flying in for two or three weeks, and another couple of weeks in the winter, and another two weeks in the spring. I find it a bit outrageous that music directors are so highly paid to begin with for one job – and then you find them holding a second or even a third position with exorbitant salaries in those places as well. This, of all things, is something the orchestra world should really be thinking about: drastically revising our idea of who a music director is, what their job entails.”

The South Dakota Symphony’s performance of the Leningrad Symphony was elaborately partnered by South Dakota State University. Reflecting on dropping enrollments in the Humanities, David Reynold’s, director SDSU’s the School of Performing Arts, says: “I realize that in some high school curricula today the story of World War II may be only a week. I think that finding a way to use the performing arts to bring this kind of story to life is a wonderful opportunity to touch students who are growing up with social media and other non-traditional resources. Students in our Music Appreciation classes – those are the folks that one of these days will be bank presidents, school board presidents, and will decide the role of the arts in public and private schools. It’s very important for them to have experiences just like this one – Shostakovich and the siege of Leningrad. To get them thinking that life would be incomplete without the arts being a part of it.” 

I also explore the South Dakota Symphony’s signature Lakota Music Project, which connects SDSO to Indian reservations throughout the state, and about which SDSO principal second violinist Magda Modzelewska says: “In Indian culture we’ve found such peace and good will. It’s truly remarkable how similar our musical goals are. We get to share something sublime.”

This story of an orchestra that does just about everything different seems to me so important to the future wellbeing of the American arts that I’m generating a 6,000-word “manifesto,” scheduled for future publication by The American Scholar.

A listening guide to the 50-minute broadcast follows.

PART ONE: The Leningrad Symphony

3:15 — About the symphony and the siege

5:45 — Mark Bertrand on experiencing the Leningrad Symphony

7:10 — Magda Modzelewska on performing Shostakovich

PART TWO: The Lakota Music Project

12:04 — “Wind on Clear Lake” by Jeffrey Paul

14:20 — Delta David Gier on the history of the Lakota Music Project

20:12 — Lakota flutist Bryan Akipa

23:10 — The Composition Academies

25:45 — Arthur Farwell and “Pawnee Horses”

27:10 — Farwell’s “Hako” Quartet

PART THREE: The SDSO as a Model

30:00 — The bedroom scene from Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth

34:00 — The Shostakovich Eighth Quartet on campus

37:00 — David Reynolds of South Dakota State University on collaborating with SDSO

39:15 — Alex Ross on the SDSO and the future of orchestras-

“Drastically revising our idea of who a music director is” — The South Dakota Symphony on NPR

The Creekside Singers performing with the South Dakota Symphony

“There’s just a tremendous amount of caution, a tremendous amount of groupthink, in the orchestra world. So to see an orchestra really out on its own, forging its own identity, and bringing its audience along with it is just extremely impressive – even more impressive than I anticipated.”

That’s Alex Ross, of The New Yorker, discussing the South Dakota Symphony in my upcoming NPR “More than Music” program: “Shostakovich in South Dakota,” which airs via WAMU’s “1A” newsmagazine this coming Monday at 11 am ET. Referencing Delta David Gier, who has been the South Dakota Symphony’s music director since 2003, and who moved to Sioux Falls and raised his family there, Ross continues:

“For a music director to carry off an ambitious project, you have to be there. You have to be on the scene, persuading people, interacting with them, listening to their ideas. Not just communicating your own. Building a sense of cooperation. You cannot do that as effectively if you’re flying in for two or three weeks, and another couple of weeks in the winter, and another two weeks in the spring. I find it a bit outrageous that music directors are so highly paid to begin with for one job – and then you find them holding a second or even a third position with exorbitant salaries in those places as well. This, of all things, is something the orchestra world should really be thinking about: drastically revising our idea of who a music director is, what their job entails.”

Ross told me he had long considered visiting South Dakota to see for himself what Delta David Gier was up to – programing quantities of new music, regularly tackling big repertoire. The focus of my NPR show is Gier’s contextualized performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony last February, with linkage to South Dakota’s two major universities. I also explore the symphony’s signature Lakota Music Project, which connects SDSO to Indian reservations throughout the state, and about which SDSO principal second violinist Magda  Modzelewska says: “In Indian culture we’ve found such peace and good will. It’s truly remarkable how similar our musical goals are. We get to share something sublime.”

Five Festivals for the Charles Ives Sesquicentenary

The National Endowment for the Humanities today announced a $400,000 grant to resume “Music Unwound,” a national consortium of orchestras and universities, begun in 2010, that explores topics in American music. I serve as director. 

Music Unwound disseminates a template I have long espoused: thematic, cross-disciplinary symphonic concerts linked to schools. I believe it represents the future – and that the sooner we come to it, the sooner we can fortify an arts species today embattled: the American orchestra. 

Three Music Unwound themes are now in play: “The Souls of Black Folk” (showcasing William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony), “New World Encounters” (about jazz abroad), and “Charles Ives’ America.” The participating institutions are the Brevard Music Festival (lead partner), the Jacobs School of Music at the University of Indiana/Bloomington, the Chicago Sinfonietta (partnering Illinois State University), the South Dakota Symphony (partnering two universities), the Blair School of Music (Vanderbilt University), and The Orchestra Now (Bard Conservatory/College).

Five of the nine Music Unwound festivals will be multi-event Ives celebrations targeting the Charles Ives Sesquicentenary in 2024. As I have often written: this is a crucial moment for the American symphonic community, if we are ever to secure a “usable past.” The core participants include the Ives scholar Peter Burkholder, the baritone William Sharp, and the historian Allen Guelzo. The NEH Music Unwound application puts it this way:

“This project creates a fresh approach to an iconic American widely regarded as America’s supreme concert composer, yet little-performed because his music retains an esoteric taint. In part, this results from its belated discovery (ca. 1940-1960, long after Ives had ceased composing) by modernists who cherished complexity. Today, in post-modern times, the opportunity is ripe to rediscover Ives as a turn-of-the- century Connecticut Yankee rooted in Transcendentalism and Progressivism — a product (however idiosyncratic) of his own time and place. Ives’s vivid personality, and a plethora of memorable writings (essays and letters), reinforce this opportunity to better acquaint American audiences with the Ives idiom — to penetrate its assaultive exterior and connect to its heart and soul. The MU project creates a permanent set of tools — scripts and visual tracks — that orchestras and presenters can use to nudge Ives into his rightful place in the mainstream repertoire. . . .

“Ives is a quintessential musical Progressive, zealous in his faith in democracy, the common man, and the former slave. No less than Mark Twain, he pioneered in fostering an American idiom boldly appropriating vernacular expression (for Twain, Huck Finn’s dialect; for Ives, quotidian New England strains). Both were self-reliant New World creators. Both empathetically tackled issues of race. The Twain/Ives relationship is a sub-theme of “Ives’s America.” 

“Part two of the central symphonic program is a contextualized performance of Ives’s Second Symphony. It furnishes an ideal introduction to the composer, readily accessible as a Germanic Romantic symphony. At the same time, Ives is already rambunctiously American. As Peter Burkholder (who helped to create “Charles Ives’s America”) writes in his seminal Ives study All Made of Tunes, Ives here achieves a distinctive voice “by using American material, and by emphasizing allusion and quotation…. Borrowed material appears on almost every page…to create a symphony that is suffused with the character of American melody.” Via the parlor and salon, Ives identified with hymns and minstrel tunes; via the organ loft, he identified with Bach; via his father and his Yale composition professor Horatio Parker, he identified with Beethoven and Brahms. That all of these influences intermingle in the Second Symphony, that all are equally audible and equally privileged, creates a musical kaleidoscope more multifarious than any by Mahler. Ives’s egalitarian ethos, and the ethos of uplift, are equally served. 

“With its myriad source tunes, Ives’s Second is a prime candidate for contextualization — and the Music Unwound performances are directly preceded by a performance (baritone/piano) of selected marches, songs, and hymns that Ives integrates, with pertinent commentary — illustrating, for instance, how an inane college song becomes the lyric second subject of movement two, and how the “Civil War” finale celebrates the freeing of enslaved Americans. It bears stressing that most of the tunes Ives uses are no longer familiar. 

“Part one of the symphonic program features Ives’ Three Places in New England, the first of which is a “death march” commemorating Colonel Robert Shaw’s heroic Black Civil War regiment, as famously memorialized by the sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens. This is an example of an important Ives composition that no new listener could possibly “read” without some help.”

No dates yet — stay tuned.

P.S. — My warmest congratulations to Jason Posnock, one of the nation’s premier artistic administrators, who was just named incoming President of the wonderful Brevard Music Festival. And best wishes to Mark Weinstein, the outgoing President, who raised the fesitval’s profile and greatly expanded its resources.

Rediscovering Harry Burleigh: A Valedictory Setting of Langston Hughes

In recent weeks I’ve had occasion to perform Harry Burleigh’s “Lovely Dark and Lonely One” with three singers: Emery Stephens at St. Olaf’s College, George Shirley for Chamber Music Cincinnati, and Sidney Outlaw at Princeton University. And I write in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal that this “may be credibly judged one of the most memorable of all American concer songs.’” In fact, I argue, it may be understood as Burleigh’s 1935 valeictory, a song (setting but re-interpreting Langston Hughes) about Burleigh himself, preaching faith and forbearance. The recordings I have encountered of this song seem a little small to me; I hope to be able to post the Cincinnati or Princeton performance in the coming weeks. That said, you can listen to a lovely reading here.

I write in part:

Burleigh (1866-1949) is the pivotal figure in the transformation of the spirituals of the American South into solo concert songs. You might even say that black classical music begins with the five versions of “Deep River,” for solo voice or chorus, that Burleigh created between 1913 and 1917. Their impact was electrifying. . . . He [also] became a prolific composer of art songs distinct from his arrangements of spirituals. This body of music was exceptionally popular into the 1920s, championed by John McCormack . . . and other prominent recitalists of the day. Burleigh’s spirituals are still widely sung. But beginning in the late 1920s, his art songs swiftly receded from view. In the context of modernism, of the Harlem Renaissance and its enthusiasm for jazz, Burleigh sounded old-fashioned. . . . 

Re-encountered today, this late song seems a valedictory. Only two minutes long, it is—even for Burleigh—a superb exercise in concentration: of mood and expression, of melody, of mobile harmonic activity. It achieves a compositional voice as personal as his spiritual arrangements are elemental. The piano part, virtually symphonic, is co-equal with the voice, with which it eloquently interacts. The mediation between black (bluesy harmonies) and white celebrates the duality of Burleigh the man and artist. Nowhere is Burleigh closer to Wagner; he virtually quotes the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde—an opera he attended 66 times at the Met. But the most distinguishing feature of this exceptional song is that Burleigh has re-interpreted Hughes’s poem . . .  

Processing Hughes’s expression of impatience, Burleigh turns the poem upside down. His method is to first score the closing word, “wait,” as an exclamation crowning the vocal line—and then to twice reconsider it, softening and caressing it so that the meaning turns serene: an expression of forbearance and faith. He then reprises the poem’s first two lines . . . so that the final quiet melodic ascent consecrates youth and sunlight. In this 12-bar sequence, it is the intervening piano that becalms the singer, claiming a lasting philosophic repose. Not for Burleigh is Langston Hughes’s agitation, or the activism of a Paul Robeson. Nor is there the merest hint of modernist dissonance. We do not have to agree with him in order to admire the eloquence with which he here sustains his credo . . . that “deliverance from all that hinders and oppresses the soul will come and man—every man—will be free.”

Burleigh intended “Lovely Dark and Lonely One” for Marian Anderson, whom he mentored, and whose renditions of Burleigh’s “Deep River” were indelibly her own. But Anderson chose not to sing “Lovely Dark and Lonely One.” It is in fact a song personal to Harry Burleigh. It also happens to be Burleigh’s final concert song. If he therefore quit composing art songs at the peak of his creative powers, his truncated odyssey bears comparison to other, more famous casualties of modernism: Charles Ives, Edward Elgar, Manuel de Falla and Jean Sibelius, all of whom stopped composing when they discovered themselves aesthetically estranged after World War I. . . .

George Shirley — a Week-long Tribute

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/shirley-5-min-clip.mp4George Shirley, at the Brevard Festival, tells two Roland Hayes stories — Hayes being thrown out of a shoestore in his hometown; Hayes passing a note to George Shirley in Boston — and then sings Hayes’ arrangement of the spiritual “Lit’l Boy” (with JH at the piano).

Thanks to John Spencer and Chamber Music Cincinnati, “George Shirley: A Life in Music” will be celebrated for an entire week in that city.

Sunday, April 9: George Shirley sings Easter Sunday spirituals at three Cincinnati churches.

Monday, April 10 (7 pm): George Shirley and I reprise “George Shirley: A Life in Music,” the program we presented last summer at the Brevard Festival, with video clips and live performances.

Tuesday, April 11 (7 pm): “Dvorak’s Prophecy.” A program based on my book, with more performances by George Shirley and myself, plus pianist Meishan Lin. (Dvorak American Suite; Harry Burleigh spirituals; Harry Burleigh “Lovely Dark and Lonely One” – a magnificent concert song, Burleigh’s valedictory,  still barely known.)

Friday, April 14: George Shirley is soloist at the Cincinnati Symphony’s “Classical Roots” concert.

The Monday and Tuesday performances, at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, are free but require registration. 

Further information here.  

“Dvorak’s Prophecy” at Princeton April 12 with John McWhorter, Allen Guelzo, and Sidney Outlaw

“Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music” is the topic of an April 12 concert/lecture at Princeton University. I’ll be joined by cultural critic John McWhorter of the New York Times, Princeton historian Allen Guelzo, and baritone Sidney Outlaw – with whom I’ll perform spirituals and songs by Harry Burleigh. It’s free of charge and you don’t have to register. The venue is Nassau Presbyterian Church. The presenters are the Department of Music and the James Madison Program. We start at 7 pm.

McWhorter – who knows music and is a regular contributor to my “More than Music” programs on NPR – will address the significance of George Gershwin and the place of Black classical music. Guelzo – who knows music and is an occasional contributor to “More than Music” – will address the significance of Charles Ives, both with reference to the Civil War and the American cultural pantheon generally. Outlaw – a magnificent concert singer with roots in the Black church – will address African-American vocal composers now being rediscovered.

A special focus of attention will be Harry Burleigh’s “Lovely Dark and Lonely One” (1935), setting Langston Hughes. it’s one of the most memorable concert songs ever composed by an American. Turning Hughes’ poem upside down, it counsels faith and forebearance. Burleigh’s valedictory, it places him in a lineage with Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson, both of whom he mentored. 

I will also have a piece on Burleigh in the April 1 Wall Street Journal, in which I write: 

“Burleigh intended ‘Lovely Dark and Lonely One’ for Marian Anderson, whose renditions of Burleigh’s ‘Deep River’were indelibly her own. But Anderson chose not to sing ‘Lovely Dark and Lonely One.’ It is in fact a song personal to Harry Burleigh. It also happens to be Burleigh’s final concert song. If he therefore quit at the peak of his creative powers, his truncated odyssey bears comparison to other, more famous casualties of modernism: Charles Ives, Edward Elgar, Manuel de Falla, and Jean Sibelius, all of whom stopped composing when they discovered themselves aesthetically estranged after World War I.”

“Mahler in New York” (April 4) — Tickets Now on Sale

One of Gustav Mahler’s most powerful New York experiences was a funeral procession he watched from a hotel window. A fireman had drowned in a burning building. It is often surmised that the stark military drum commencing the finale of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony was a result. 

Tickets are now on sale for “Mahler in New York” – an April 4 program combining music, film, and a foretaste of my new novel The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York. I’ll be reading my rendering of the fireman’s funeral – as it played out inside Gustav Mahler’s head. 

The room – at the Dimenna Center on W. 37th Street — is small and may sell out quickly.

This singular event is the brainchild of Michel Galante, whose Argento New Music Project has long been a fixture on New York’s new-music scene. Alongside my reading, Michel will lead the premiere of his new chamber-ensemble orchestration of the second half of Mahler’s Tenth. And Hilan Warshaw will share an excerpt from his film-in-progress on Mahler in New York.  

Michel writes that the manuscripts for the fourth and fifth movements of Mahler’s Tenth (both left unfinished) contain texts that “function posthumously as a diary into Mahler’s thoughts and feelings, expressing rank desperation and devastation at the series of crises and renewals he experienced during the last chapters of his life. What makes this music special is that he musically captures complex emotions previously unexplored in his other music and in the music that came before him.”

Here’s a taste of my reading, lifted from my new book:

He was working in bed, in pajamas, his correspondence propped on a board, when he heard from afar Chopin’s funeral march per- formed by parading winds. The impersonality of this familiar cere- monial rendition, with its thudding bass drum, its droning trumpets and lockstep clarinets, redoubled the music’s sad finality. He stepped to the window. Looking down to the right, he could see a massive cortege a dozen blocks away flanked by bare-headed throngs. His features lost their rigor and tears coursed down his creased and pallid cheeks. 

The precise nature of this processional was at that moment of scant interest to him. Of course, he shuddered with memories of Putzi. But public rituals of mourning had all his life stirred him strangely. They were in fact written into the dirges of his symphonies. They resonated with the synagogue sobs and wails and with the folksong sadnesses that laced with the quotidian his layered musical language. He had even composed, to Alma’s dismay, a singular series of Kindertotenlieder, which she believed presaged Putzi’s fate. The sources of this morbid susceptibility were known and unknown to him. It was a topic that he had never meticulously pursued, broaching realms of unease that he resisted analyzing. Rather – in his mind, in his music – he preferred to submit to streams of thought and feeling half-conscious, half-subliminal. 

He could now identify the horse-drawn casket. Red-uniformed firemen comprised the massive core of the processional, fronted by mounted policemen. The band uniforms were also police blue. It was the deputy fire chief who had drowned in the flooded basement of a burning furniture store. Alma had read about it in the Staats-Zeitung. 

Re-Thinking the Concert Experience in South Dakota and Minnesota

Leningrad under Nazi siege, 1941-42

There was a time – the 1990s, when I was running the Brooklyn Philharmonic at BAM – when the practice of speaking from the stage at symphonic concerts was controversial, both among audiences and orchestra leaders. And people debated whether or not thematic programing was a good thing. 

Those days are finally over. But the next step – fundamentally re-thinking the concert experience – lies largely dormant ahead. 

I’m not referring to screens and new technologies, but to something more fundamental: programming. Every concert I’ve produced, beginning with those heady Brooklyn Philharmonic seasons, has been thematic. It works. The musical impact is strengthened. There is more to think about. Education and collaboration are facilitated. Museums curate thematic exhibits for these reasons.  

One step beyond that is the narrative concert that tells a story – as with programs in which I recently participated in South Dakota and Minnesota. The South Dakota Symphony presented Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony linked to activities at two universities. “Dvorak’s Prophecy” at St. Olaf College linked to a second public event on cultural appropriation, a classroom visit, and meetings with individual students. 

I also encountered a counter-example – a standard-format concert by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra that went nowhere. 

I have often written about the South Dakota Symphony in this space. So far as I am aware, it’s our most genuinely innovative, most inspirationally forward-looking professional orchestra. It is also the happiest professional orchestra I know, and the most engaged. Its mission is defined and driven by its Music Director of twenty years: Delta David Gier, who in 2004 moved to Sioux Falls and proceeded to raise a family there. Gier’s signature initiative is the Lakota Music Project, which links SDSO to Indian reservations across the state. He also regularly showcases new American music. And he regularly tackles big repertoire: a Mahler cycle, the St. Matthew Passion (unabridged), Redes with Revueltas’s great score performed live — and now Shostakovich 7. More than a century ago, Theodore Thomas – whose touring Thomas Orchestra made the concert orchestra an American specialty – preached: “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of a community.”  Gier’s South Dakota Symphony does that and more. It should become a national model.

Gier’s galvanizing reading of the Leningrad Symphony, three weeks ago, was preceded by a forty-minute “dramatic interlude” commencing with the lascivious trombone slides, from the opera Lady Macbeth, that got Shostakovich in big trouble with Stalin in 1936. The infamous Pravda editorial was recited. We moved on from there to the Fifth Symphony and its ostensible Socialist Realist contrition, thence to the horrific 872-day Nazi siege of Leningrad and Shostakovich’s legendary musical response. All this, with interpolated music, was co-scripted by Gier and myself. The Seventh Symphony followed after intermission.

The performance was attended by dozens of Music, History, and Political Science students bussed to Sioux Falls from South Dakota State University an hour away; they also took part in an hour-long post-concert discussion. In the days before and after that, I visited four SDSU classrooms. And the Dakota String Quartet (comprising principal players of the SDSO) visited with Shostakovich’s autobiographical Eighth String Quartet – which they contextualized, and also brought to the University of South Dakota an hour from Sioux Falls in the opposite direction.

For Mark Bertrand, the pastor of Sioux Falls’ Grace Presbyterian Church since 2017, the testimony of a German soldier, cited by Gier, underlined his experience of the long, inexorable crescendo climaxing the Leningrad Symphony. Using loudspeakers, the Soviets had broadcast Shostakovich’s symphony to the Nazi troops enveloping the city. A German soldier wrote afterward: ““It had a slow but powerful effect on us. The realization began to dawn that we would never take Leningrad. We began to see that there was something stronger than starvation, fear and weather – the will to remain human.” 

Bertrand also told me: “I think that by the end of the evening – the forty-minute preamble about Shostakovich, Stalin, and the siege of Leningrad, the eighty-minute symphony itself – all of us felt a combination of elation and exhaustion. We had gone through something important together. Of course, the symphony crescendos to a point of elation. But you also feel the sheer duration of it all. I sensed a kind of joyful weariness. You know, I’m a cynical person by nature – and David and the South Dakota Symphony are constantly challenging that cynicism. They renew my confidence in the meaning of art.” Like many others, Bertrand found himself reflecting, as well, on Ukrainian resistance to Russian troops today.

I spoke with David Reynolds, Director of Performing Arts and Professor of Music at South Dakota State University, about the ongoing collaboration with the South Dakota Symphony. He said: “Finding a way to use the performing arts to bring these important stories to life – in this case, stories about World War II, about the siege of Leningrad — is a wonderful way to touch students who are growing up with social medica and other non-traditional means of communication. I’ve always been passionate about arts in general education. I know that the students in our Music Appreciation course are the folks that one of these days are going to be bank presidents, school board members – jobs that will decide the role of the arts in public and private schools, and funding for the arts, twenty years from now. It’s vital to open their eyes to experiences just like these contextualized Shostakovich concerts. To leave them thinking, ‘my life would be incomplete without the arts being a part of it.’ ’’

Magda Modzelewska, the SDSO principal second violist since 1998, is also a member of the Dakota String Quartet. She told me: “This is a very special orchestra and I have felt that from the beginning. I remember there was once a survey of job satisfaction in different professions. And [orchestral] musicians – their job satisfaction was the lowest. I have been very lucky – we don’t appear to have this attitude problem. There’s a sense of gratitude for what we do, of friendship and common purpose.“ She called Delta David Gier “a rare conductor with a big heart and a set of really solid values.” She called her work as a core participant in the Lakota Music Project “humbling . . . in Indian culture we’ve found such peace and good will.”

(My next NPR “More than Music” documentary, for the newsmagazine 1A, will be “Shostakovich in South Dakota” on April 24.)

 * * *

Not long after my two weeks in South Dakota, I took part in a series of events at St. Olaf College based on Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. St. Olaf is famous for its choral program. It also boasts an exceptional student orchestra (that tours). The superb conductor, Chung Park, is new this school year; his predecessor for forty-one years, Steven Amundson, is a local legend. 

I was invited to narrate a St. Olaf orchestral concert telling a story. The second half comprised Dvorak’s New World Symphony. The first half freshly contextualized that familiar work. 

We began with Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance Op. 46, No. 3, composed in Prague, in direct juxtaposition with an excerpt from  his American Suite, composed in New York City. Whereas the New World Symphony is a European symphony with an American accent, the American Suite, a year later, doesn’t “sound like Dvorak”; rather incredibly, it is bona fide American music. I introduced the suite’s third movement by correlating its three themes with minstrel dances, plantation song, and Dvorak’s desolate “Indian” mode – not an attempt to adapt Native American song, but a personal and compassionate evocation of the tragedy of Native America.

After that came William Arms Fisher’s “Goin’ Home” – his famous 1922 adaptation of Dvorak’s Largo, sung with orchestra by Emery Stephens of the St. Olaf faculty. Without a pause, Chung Park then launched “Hope in the Night” – the middle movement of William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony (1932). This work is a huge find, in which Dvorak’s 1893 prophecy – that “Negro melodies” would foster a “great and noble school of music” – discovers searing fruition. And I introduced the New World Symphony, on the second half, by citing four passages in which Dvorak found inspiration in Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. 

Many in the audience, many in the orchestra, afterward said that their listening experience was transformed by this exercise in informed engagement.

While I was at St. Olaf’s, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra turned up with a mixed program including Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony alongside shorter works by Fanny Mendelssohn and Hummel. Comparisons were inescapable. Mendelssohn’s symphony was inspired by a visit to Scotland. The canopy of sorrow that magically distinguishes this work are captured in a letter home reading in part: “In the deep twilight we went today to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved. . . . The chapel below is now roofless. Grass and ivy thrive there and at the broken altar where Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything is ruined, decayed, and the clear heavens pour in. I think I have found there the beginning of my ‘Scottish’ Symphony.” Much can be done with this information — especially for an audience of college students.

The online program note (there was no printed program) comprised two sentences. Nothing was said from the stage. The performance itself (sans conductor) was featureless. Both the South Dakota Symphony’s Shostakovich, and the St. Olaf Orchestra’s Dvorak, if less polished, were more energized, more distinctive. Chung Park’s smashing reading of the Slavonic Dance sang with trumpet vibratos and string portamentos. In the Leningrad Symphony, Gier masterfully shaped the long slow movement, challenging his players (in rehearsal) to give everything they could to the culminating reprise of the opening chorale theme. I have rarely heard such massed sonic intensity from a string choir. 

Both the SDSO concert and the St. Olaf concert were livestreamed. My 26-year-old daughter watched the SDSO’s Shostakovich concert from New York City. She phoned me afterward. Were her friends to encounter “concerts like that,” she said, they would be converted to classical music. 

The stakes are that high.

I take part in “Mahler and New York” via the Argento New Music Project April 4 in New York City. Then I’m with George Shirley and Chamber Music Cincinnati, April 10-11. Then April 12 at Princeton University: “Dvorak’s Prophecy,” with John McWhorter, Sidney Outlaw, and Allen Guelzo via the university’s James Madison Program.  

To read Alex Ross in The New Yorker on the South Dakota Symphony, click  here.

Bruckner and the Cellphone PS

Norman Lebrecht has picked up my blog on Bruckner and the Cellphone and posted it on Slippedisc.

You will find a torrent of responses. But the most interesting response I have received was from Norman himself, who wrote to say that cellphones do not intrude at symphonic concerts in Europe.

Something to think about.

Bruckner and the Cellphone

Last Sunday’s performance of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony by Christian Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall was very possibly the peak concert experience of the New York season. And yet when it ended I discovered myself screaming. 

Here is what happened:

Bruckner’s Eighth lasts eighty minutes and is exhaled in a single breath. It invites – it demands – a pact with the audience. It is communal. It cannot be fairly experienced in a living room.

On this occasion, Carnegie had been sold out for weeks. The audience was a marvel – if not fully inter-generational (not enough listeners under the age of thirty), it was remarkably international. It took Thielemann barely a moment to secure perfect quiet: 3,670 souls in thrall. He navigated the great structure with monumental assurance.  

The last movement ends with a famous passage: the apocalyptic “coda.” Bruckner pauses for a long, capacious breath. Then he restarts his engines quietly, gradually – and with the unmistakable promise of a culminating event. In a compositional tour de force both ingenious and inevitable, he proceeds to pile all the symphony’s themes atop one another. This achieved, he drives a refulgent final thrust. Thereafter, Thielemann and the musicians froze. And so did everyone else save a jackass in the left balcony who felt entitled to bellow “BRAVO!!!” The moment was shattered. Thielemann reacted with visible consternation..

But there was worse: the curse of the cellphone.

Not long after the performance began, the little lights began appearing, raised high. The hall’s ushers dutifully raced hither and yon, up and down aisles, gesturing frantically. And the phones were put away.

Some clever listeners, however, realized that they could film the end of the performance – the famous coda – with impunity. There would be no time for intervening ushers. 

With the pregnant beginning of the coda, I moved to the edge of my seat. I was sitting in my preferred location – center Balcony. (The sound is cleaner than downstairs and the sightlines are impeccable.) As it happened, one of the offenders was seated directly in front of me. Because the rake is steep, she held her phone high – blocking my field of vision with her bright miniature screen.

The ovation was deafening. To get her attention I touched her shoulder and screamed: “DO YOU REALIZE HOW DISTRACTING IT IS TO WHIP OUT YOUR CELLPHONE AND START FILMING?!”

This surprising distraction enfurIated her. She whipped around and yelled: “HOW DARE YOU TOUCH ME!!! HOW DARE YOU TOUCH ME!!!”

Mercifully, she was packing up and leaving. As she continued to shriek her displeasure, I advised her: “YOU SHOULD BE BARRED FROM THIS HALL!!! SCRAM! GET OUT!”

Reflecting on this experience, I discover that her behavior was less discourteous than it was selfish. As far as she was concerned, she was the only listener who mattered.

A recent book by Bill McKibbin is accurately titled The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened. McKibben has an answer. In the world of cellphones it is both a cause and an effect. He calls it “hyper-individualism.”

I cannot think of a purer example than the woman who filmed Bruckner’s coda and took it home as a memento.

(I will have more to say — much more — about 21st-century Bruckner in The American Scholar next Fall.)