Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 29

The Future of Orchestras (Cont’d): Would the Philharmonic Sing Palestrina?

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When Doug McClennan persuaded me to start blogging in 2006, I was a newcomer to electronic media and also a skeptic. I read books. It write long. I do not tweet and rarely check Facebook. #

Frankly, the consolidated thread of considered comments elicited by my mega-blog on the future of orchestras has taken me by surprise. These are informed comments from inside the orchestra world. (I trashed a few that were not.) I have also been deluged with emails whose content must remain private. They, too, register the thoughts, frustrations, and anxieties of musicians, educators, and administrators. #

I would like to particularly draw attention to the latest posting – the one from Chris Gekker, who happens to be principal trumpet of my PostClassical Ensemble in Washington, D.C. All brass players know his name. Chris is a trumpeter with lyric bent all his own. He is also the beneficiary of decades of orchestral experience, often with colleagues and conductors of the highest distinction. (It is he who plays the ravishing trumpet solos on PostClassical Ensemble’s new Redes DVD.) #

I was already familiar with the memorized and choreographed Debussy performance, referenced by Chris, of Jim Ross’s remarkable University of Maryland Orchestra. But I had no idea that Jim had his players sing Palestrina as a preface to Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony – a subversive inspiration kindred to Ivan Fischer’s singing Budapest Festival Orchestra (cf my mega-blog). #

As is well-known, when Leonard Bernstein attempted some Cage with the New York Philharmonic in the  1960s, the players collectively misbehaved when invited to collectively improvise. But six seasons ago, the same New York Philharmonic plainly enjoyed doing the unexpected during a terrific performance of Ligeti’s Grand Macabre. #

Would the Philharmonic sing Palestrina? I ask this question in all seriousness. Try to imagine the impact – on the players; on the public. #

As I have countless times observed, our orchestras have failed to innovate. The first permanent, full-time American orchestra to reside in one place (Theodore Thomas’s orchestra travelled) was Henry Higginson’s Boston Symphony, invented in 1881. In terms of format, ritual, and purpose, today’s BSO concerts are no different from Higginson’s more than a century ago. Meanwhile, the world has changed. I would call this evidence of institutional stagnation. #

By the way, Ivan Fischer is guest-conducting the New York Philharmonic this coming season. #

STORM WARNINGS: THE FUTURE OF ORCHESTRAS

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— I — #

I recently spent the three consecutive weekends speaking at conferences pertinent to the fate of America’s orchestras. #

The first, at Grinnell College, was sponsored by the American Association of Liberal Arts Colleges. The topic was reforming music curricula. The second, at the University of South Carolina, was a “summit” sponsored by the College Music Society. The topic was the same. The third, in Baltimore, was the annual conference of the League of American Orchestras. #

As the only person to attend even two of these events, let alone all three (a fact in itself significant), I find I have a lot to think about. I foresee a perfect storm moving at high velocity. #

Both academic conferences endorsed the same new template. Its advocates are progressive educators – the ones ready for change. I have no doubt that something resembling the changes they endorse will happen. It’s just a question of how soon. #

One feature of the new template is removing “Orchestra” from the center of things and repositioning it to the side as an ancillary activity, possibly optional. Instead, students will be encouraged to form their own smaller ensembles. Or they will perform in ensembles practicing non-Western genres. Or they will find other opportunities to perform. #

In general, there is a feeling that students today have creative propensities that must be respected and welcomed. The orchestra experience falls outside this purview. Also, Western classical music will no longer be privileged in the teaching and practice of Music. And there is a pervasive move to require improvisation and composition as aspects of instrumental instruction. #

Another new area of primary emphasis is music as an agent of social responsibility. #

In other words: the young musicians orchestras most need will not gravitate to orchestras. Instead, orchestras will get the blinkered conservatory graduates who don’t care about the institutional life of an orchestra – who will dutifully rehearse and perform. It therefore becomes more than ever incumbent upon orchestras to empower musicians to more fully participate in an expansive institutional mission. #

An interesting question is whether orchestral reform can occur at music schools and conservatories. My impression is that “Orchestra” is perceived as a bastion of conservatism and that campus conductors are perceived as unlikely partners in progressive curricular change. They cling to “professional training” – traditional repertoire and formats – for non-existent jobs. Could not the campus orchestra be rethought as a timely experimental laboratory?  “Orchestra” could impart the history of conducting, the history of performance practice, the institutional history of the orchestra. It could generate cross-curricular study of a symphony or composer. It could be all kinds of things that it is not. #

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These were the thoughts I brought to the League conference in Baltimore. What I discovered there was the same impressive sense of urgency I had encountered among the educators. But here it was channeled toward a single, focused goal: creating a “pipeline” that would send gifted African-American and Hispanic instrumentalists into scarce and coveted orchestral jobs. The ethnic composition of orchestras – to date, overwhelmingly white – would begin (if barely) to mirror that of the communities they serve. Because this effort is mightily supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (an invaluable and influential bulwark for innovation in the symphonic field), it seems likely to bring results. The urgent question on the table becomes: will there be further change? #

The conductor Theodore Thomas, who more than anyone propagated the “symphony orchestra” as an American specialty, prophetically preached: “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community, not opera.” By the 1920s, in American cities large and small, the local orchestra had become the bellwether of civic cultural identity. After that, the world changed and orchestras did not; a Boston Symphony concert, ca. 1890 (before radio, before recordings, before tidal social and demographic upheavals), was more or less the same as the symphonic concerts we hear and see today. (I have told this story in detail in my Classical Music in America: A History.) That orchestras no longer “show the culture of the community” rightly preoccupies the League. #

There is a schizoid elephant in the room. As everyone in the orchestra business knows, musicians and administrators do not adequately experience joint ownership of the enterprise at hand. The players rehearse and perform at arm’s length from the front office. They submit to the authority of the music director. They guard work rules written to protect their interests; they strive for higher pay and more services. They little participate in the crucial activities that keep any orchestra alive: fund-raising and marketing. Their artistic input is usually negligible at best. Their purview is dangerously skewed. #

The tensions between the players and the staff may be strident or subtle, but they are pervasive. Changing the racial composition of a law school makes immediate sense; it will impact the field. Changing the racial composition of an orchestra won’t critically impact unless other changes are ignited. This point circles back to the educators at Grinnell and the University of South Carolina: the most talented young musicians tend to be the most creative. They will not aspire to sit obediently in orchestra seats. #

— III – #

Nothing is more informative about the caliber of an orchestra than the listening behavior of the musicians when others are playing and they are not. Are they keenly attuned or staring into space? #

In my experience, the keenest listeners are to be found in certain European orchestras – such as the Berlin Philharmonic (which picks its conductors; whose principal players rotate). And then there is the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the members of which are picked by its conductor: Ivan Fischer. I have never encountered an orchestra that manifests a more meddlesome active intelligence (unless they are conductorless chamber orchestras like Gidon Kremer’s peerless Kremerata Baltica). Fischer’s players may burst into song in the midst of a Dvorak symphony (I am not making this up). For Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony, Fischer may situate the solo winds around a potted tree. He may choose to begin a rehearsal by having everyone play some Bach for fifteen or twenty minutes. Or the orchestra may learn an Argentine song for use as an encore in Buenos Aires. In fact, Budapest Festival Orchestra encores are often sung. (I cannot imagine a more democratic bonding experience.) The communal intensity of the Budapest Festival Orchestra is instantly tangible. #

Fischer’s hiring practices and work rules would be unthinkable in America: the musicians hold two-year contracts and rehearse without a clock. And yet I do not doubt that there are young Americans who would sooner play with Fischer than win a seat in Franz Welser-Most’s Cleveland Orchestra. #

I do not know if Ivan Fischer has ever been discussed at League of American Orchestras conference. But a Youth Orchestras session, at the League’s Baltimore conference, brought Fischer’s practices instantly to mind. The discourse was electrifying – here, serving inner-city pre-collegiate instrumentalists, were American orchestras fully in ferment. What I heard connected directly to what progressive music educators are saying: the creative impulse must be seized. A new repertoire, a new sound, a new disposition of instruments, a new concert experience must be countenanced. #

I left that room with many questions. What about our nation’s summer orchestral camps? Will they, too, take a lead? Or will they continue to replicate a dying model at odds with present-day realities? #

And there is the nagging question of “excellence.” Museums can maintain the canon by simply keeping Rembrandt on the walls. But inspired readings of Brahms symphonies are increasingly hard to come by. Skill is a prerequisite. So is engagement. These are priorities that must be squared with “showing the culture of the community.” #

Our orchestras are facing a perfect storm moving at high velocity. How fast can they adapt? The most adaptive orchestra I know is the South Dakota Symphony. Its music director, Delta David Gier, began his tenure by initiating a Lakota Music Project linking to nine Indian reservations; most recently, he took Dvorak’s New World Symphony to Native American audiences in remote Sisseton. With its enterprising nine-member “core,” the South Dakota Symphony is positioned to maximize personal interaction with Sioux Falls residents and institutions. #

The Detroit Symphony, energized by a crippling strike, is another orchestra making strides toward showing the culture of the community. That Detroit is the host orchestra for the League’s 2017 conference, next June, is auspicious. The League’s sense of urgency will likely be sustained. Will the conference again identify a single focused goal? How about expanding the role of individual musicians in every facet of orchestral life? #

— IV – #

The historian in me cannot resist a brief postscript. Here are four vignettes from the early history of the American orchestra: #

1.Henry Higginson, who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony, and also built Symphony Hall, was a colossal visionary. After service in the Civil War, he ran a plantation for freedmen in Georgia. Upon inaugurating the BSO in 1881, he insisted that there be twenty-five cent tickets available for all concerts. Even in 1881, this was a sum so small that other Boston orchestras complained that Higginson’s ticket prices (personally subsidized by Higginson, who also paid all salaries) would drive them out of business. Breaking with Brahmin Boston, Higginson was a philo-Semite, ready to hire a Jewish music director (Mahler and Bruno Walter were seriously considered) decades before the trustees of the New York Philharmonic rejected the possibility of a Jewish conductor post-Toscanini (for this incredible story, see my Classical Music in America, pp. 423-424), and the trustees of the Boston Symphony looked askance at Leonard Bernstein’s Jewishness post-Koussevitzky. #

2.In Brooklyn, the major presenter of symphonic concerts was a woman: Laura Langford, president of the Seidl Society. There were many more Seidl Society concerts than there were New York Philharmonic concerts across the river. The conductor was the same: Anton Seidl, Richard Wagner’s most intimate protégé. Langford charged as little as fifteen cents for Seidl Society concerts, most of which took place fourteen times a week at Coney Island. She prioritized bringing working women and African-American orphans to the seaside Music Pavilion. Seidl himself loudly championed access for working men and women. Langford and Seidl also prioritized hiring leading female pianists and violinists. And, over the objections of the Seidl Orchestra, they hired a female harpist (whose engagement was made a public cause). #

3.In Manhattan, Antonin Dvorak chose an African-American, Harry Burleigh, to be his personal assistant at the National Conservatory of Music. Dvorak conducted his own transcription of Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” at Madison Square Garden in 1894 with an African-American chorus, a racially mixed orchestra, and two African-American soloists: Burleigh and the “Black Patti,” Sissieretta Jones. Burleigh went on to become the person most responsible for turning spirituals into art songs. #

4.Henry Krehbiel, the dean of New York music critics and Dvorak’s most important champion in the press, endorsed Dvorak’s conviction that “Negro melodies” would be the fundament of a future American music. He wrote the first book-length study of plantation song. At the 1893 World’s Columbia Exposition in Chicago, he did not gawk at the African “Dahomians,” as others did, but admired the rhythmic sophistication of their songs and dances. He also eagerly promoted study of Native American song. #

Higginson, Langford, Seidl, Dvorak, and Krehbiel tirelessly extolled the moral properties of music. They understood art as an instrument for social reform both timely and timeless. The early history of the American orchestra is a history of ceaseless innovation. #

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Musical Films

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With our newly released Redes DVD, PostClassical Ensemble completes its Naxos quartet of classic 1930s films with freshly recorded soundtracks. #

The scores for these four films – the others are The Plow that Broke the Plains, The River, and The City – are among the most distinguished ever composed for film. The composers are Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, and Silvestre Revueltas. What is more remarkable, all four films are music-driven to a degree rarely approachable today. #

While sound films, The Plow, The River, and The City are famous documentaries shot without sound. This is because in the thirties sound equipment was not readily portable in the field. No ambient sound was added. Rather, the three soundtracks comprise formidably original symphonic music and sonorous blank verse narration, sans dialogue. The result is a unique but short-lived high-art genre. #

Redes was mainly shot without sound. Most of the ambient sound and dialogue were added later. But the film’s iconic sequences were without exception shot without sound, and no dialogue or ambient sound were ever added. #

All four films feature powerful and powerfully autonomous music tracks. The music does not merely mimic the action. Nor does it merely drive the narrative trajectory. Rather, it acquires a rare degree of autonomy. #

When at the end of The Plow a sad parade of cars escapes failed farms victimized by a legendary drought, Thomson supplies an ironic habanera.  Copland’s “Sunday Traffic” sequence, in The City, juxtaposes a massive traffic jam with an ebullient accelerating march. #

For the child’s funeral in Redes, Revueltas composes a self-sufficient dirge based on a minor-key leitmotif he triumphantly reprises in the major at the film’s close – a signature of redemption for the oppressed fishermen whose plight the film exposes. #

Significantly, these are not films to which music was added after they were shot and edited. Pare Lorentz recut The Plow upon receiving Thomson’s startlingly original score. For The River, Thomson was part of the creative team from the start. The same was true of Copland with regard to The City. #

In the case of Redes, Revueltas began work on his music before seeing any rushes. It’s not surprising that this unsettled Paul Strand, the film’s legendary cinematographer. Revueltas also had the final say after Strand and the film’s directors – Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gomez Muriel – were no longer around. It would be hard to imagine a film project that more empowered its composer. #

It bears mentioning that the four films influenced one another. Pare Lorentz directed both The Plow and The River, and wrote a script outline for The City. Paul Strand shot Redes and was one of four cinematographers for The Plow. Willard Van Dyke took part in The River and The City both. #

Aaron Copland reviewed Redes for The New York Times – and we can infer that both Redes and the two Lorentz films inspired his work on The City. Copland was then off to Hollywood, where he scored five films and won an Academy Award. But none of those film scores nearly attains the caliber or impact of his music for The City. #

In fact, after 1940 — with the full advent of sound and of more mobile outdoor sound equipment – little comparable to The Plow, The River, The City, or Redes was ever again likely to materialize. I can think of rare exceptions, such as Ken Russell’s amazing 1983 film version of Holst’s The Planets, in which not a single image is planetary. But that, too, is a silent film with music – an anomaly. #

Naxos plans eventually to package PostClassical Ensemble’s DVDs as a single boxed set – memorializing a landmark effort in the history of music and the moving image. #

Bach on the Piano

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I have a good friend who’s a magnificent pianist, maybe sixty years old. #

Some years ago, my friend remarked: #

“You know, when we were young, there were a lot of major pianists. Everyone knew who they were: Horowitz, Serkin, Arrau, Michelangeli, Richter, Gilels, Pollini, Kempff, Rubinstein [I cannot replicate his full list]. They were all different, of course. But in every case you could understand why they were major pianists.” #

“Except for Pollini,” I said. #

“Except for Pollini,” he agreed. #

“Nowadays,” my friend continued, “anyone can be a ‘great pianist.’” #

“It’s a complete crap-shoot,” I said. #

“A complete crap-shoot,” he agreed. #

Well, not completely. It helps a lot to be very, very young. Whereas in general older pianists are better pianists. #

I found myself remembering this exchange a few weeks ago when I received an email from Sergei Schepkin inviting me to his New York recital on June 7. I remembered Schepkin from a Rachmaninoff festival I helped to curate in Pittsburgh in 2009. I knew he was a mature civilized pianist. These days, that’s saying a lot. I instantly wrote back accepting his invitation. #

It turned out that Schepkin’s program was all-Bach: three partitas. The venue was the new Steinway Hall on Sixth Avenue. It houses a basement recital hall that’s elegant and intimate, excellent in every way. #

My first exposure to the Bach partitas was a recording by William Kapell of the D major Partita. This would have been around 1960, when I was in high school. In retrospect, Kapell’s faceless, unpianistic Bach marks a nadir. But it wasn’t his fault. That was a time – in the US, at least — when the Bach keyboard standard was set by Wanda Landowska, playing her harpsichord. Pianists mainly shunned Bach, or approached him tentatively, on tiptoe. #

Then came Glenn Gould and a new kind of piano Bach, galvanizing in its way, but still remote from exercising the full resources of the instrument. #

Wilhelm Kempff’s DG recording of Bach’s G major French Suite was my Bach epiphany, ca. 1980. Kempff pedaled the G major cadence of the Loure right into the opening measures of the Gigue, producing the musical equivalent of a shower of stars (at 13:22). My notion of Bach on the keyboard was changed forever. #

Next I came to Edwin Fischer’s titanic Bach and discovered that Kempff was part of a performance tradition simply unknown in America – call it Bach with pedal. Like Kempff, Fischer’s Bach was a sonic kaleidoscope. Unlike Kempff, Fischer was heroic. His version of the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue is one of the most justly famous Bach recordings ever made by a pianist. #

Richard Wagner, in his indispensable treatise “On Conducting” (1869), describes how his frustrations with “serenely” featureless Bach keyboard performances, innocent of “somber German Gothicism,” were relieved when his friend Franz Liszt assayed the Prelude and Fugue in C-sharp minor from Book I of the Well-Tempered Klavier. “Now, I knew what to expect from Liszt at the piano; but I had not expected anything like what I came to hear from Bach, though I had studied him well; I saw how study is eclipsed by genius.” If you’d like some idea what Liszt’s performance might have sounded like, listen to Fischer’s recording and pay particular attention to the climax of the fugue. #

Another classic Bach piano performance that’s miraculously pedaled is Ferruccio Busoni’s pealing 1922 version of the C major Prelude and Fugue from Book I. Listen (with headphones) to the mystic pedal point he creates (at 3:42) in the final measures. #

Today, at last, all performance options are open. Typewriter Bach is a thing of the past. Two pianists I especially admire in the Partitas are Vladimir Feltsman and Jeremy Denk. Both go their own way. And so does Sergei Schepkin. I would say his keyboard Bach is mutually influenced by the agogics of the harpsichord and the resources of the piano (dynamics and voicing more than pedal). And he is an acute, active listener who attends equally to the melodic and the contrapuntal. I have no idea if the ornaments he adds – sometimes liberally, sometimes not – are rehearsed or spontaneous. What matters is that they sound improvised on the spot. #

And so Bach today affords a rare opportunity for performers of composed music. The choice of style, even the choice of instruments, is completely open-ended (or should be). Bach interpretation may never be standardized again. All we need is another Edwin Fischer. #

Instead of Alexander Nevsky

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For every screening with live orchestra of Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (music by Prokofiev), there should be at least a dozen screenings with live orchestra of Paul Strand’s Redes (music by Silvestre Revueltas). #

I supply three reasons: #

1.Revueltas’s score is as great an achievement as Prokofiev’s, yet remains virtually unknown. #

2.Unlike Nevsky, which Prokofiev turned into a terrific cantata, Redes does not readily yield a concert work; it requires pictures to make sense. #

3.Alexander Nevsky is a galvanizing cinematic experience. Redes is only a galvanizing cinematic experience when the music is live. The original soundtrack, recorded in haste, is execrable. #

All this comprises the rationale for PostClassical Ensemble’s latest in its series of Naxos DVDs featuring classic 1930s films with the soundtracks newly recorded. In fact, this same DVD is the world premiere recording of the complete Redes score. #

A full-page article in last weekend’s El Pais (Madrid), by the eminent Spanish novelist Antonio Munoz Molina, takes it all in as follows: #

“Revueltas is one of those composers who for various accidental reasons — his disorderly life and premature death, the fact of his being Mexican – does not occupy the place that he should in a present-day musical culture that clings so tenaciously to the sclerotic. . . . His music, so powerful in itself, highlights the rich artistic crossroads of the thirties, the tensions between modernity and mass culture, between formal innovation and political activism. #

“PostClassical Ensemble’s . . .  latest great effort of rediscovery is the premiere recording of the complete score composed by Silvestre Revueltas for a legendary 1935 Mexican film, Redes, in collaboration with the  photographer Paul Strand and exiled Austrian filmmaker Fred Zinnemann. It is hard to imagine a more complete conjunction of talent. . . . #

“In 1935 the best films still preserved the purity and expressive visual sophistication of silent cinema. In Redes, imagery and music combine so powerfully that the few spoken words are rather irrelevant. Revueltas’s love of Stravinsky and of the folk music of Mexico inspire a fiercely corporeal rhythmic sensibility applied to the collective choreography of fishermen.  Almost twenty years later, in Hollywood, Fred Zinnemann would direct High Noon, in which we find a bedazzled white clarity of inflexible sunlight identical to Redes. Now, with a restored print of Redes and Revueltas’ soundtrack newly recorded by PostClassical Ensemble, the beauty of image and of sound register as never before. As Joseph Horowitz says, it is like experiencing a masterpiece of painting cleaned of centuries of grime. The exhausted and disillusioned Silvestre Revueltas of his final years would never have imagined such posterity.” #

My English translation, abetted by google, does scant justice to this stellar example of what Americans call “arts journalism.” Especially pregnant is Munoz Molina’s observation of the “artistic crossroads of the thirties” – of the “tensions between modernity and mass culture, between formal innovation and political activism.” This perspective nails Revueltas’s high achievement. Prokofiev and Shostakovich excepted, has any other 1930s political composer  – think of Hanns Eisler or Marc Blitzstein —  so succeeded at mating originality, innovation, and popular appeal? #

Kurt Weill’s “Note Concerning Jazz”

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In Berlin 1929 Kurt Weil wrote a “Note Concerning Jazz” which today reads as both a prediction and a warning. #

Weill wrote in part: #

“Today it appears to me that the manner of performance of jazz is finally breaking through the rigid system of musical practice in our concerts and theaters and that this is more important than its influence on musical composition. Anyone who has ever worked with a good jazz band has been pleasantly surprised by an eagerness, a devotion, a desire for work that one seeks in vain in many concert and theater orchestras.” #

Eighty-seven years later, amen to that. Weill continues: #

“A good jazz musician completely masters three or four instruments; he plays from memory; he is accustomed to the art of ensemble playing. But above all, he can improvise; he cultivates a free, unrestrained style of playing in which the interpreter achieves to the highest degree a productive performance.” #

As I was recently on the West Coast, I had occasion to rent a car for two weeks – and therefore to listen to “classical radio.” Every day I was subjected to recent recordings of familiar music. I quickly discovered a basic similarity in performance style. Never was it “unrestrained.” Never did it achieve “to the highest degree a productive performance.” One rare occasions I encountered a degree of individuality – as in a fresh recording of Beethoven’s E major Sonata, Op. 14, No. 1, rendered by a young pianist of some reputation. But even here there was not a whiff of spontaneity. #

Anyone familiar with how recordings are made the studio should be unsurprised. That note-perfect Beethoven E major Sonata had doubtless been spliced. And you can’t splice a performance credibly unless it’s rendered with some regularity, both internally and sequentially via multiple takes. #

When I returned to my hotel I resorted to youtube for an antidote and listened to Artur Schnabel’s 1930s version of the same sonata. This, too, is a studio recording – but it predates magnetic tape and was not susceptible to splicing. The first thing I noticed was that Schnabel does not maintain anything like a steady pulse. The tempo of the first movement quickens (often in response to harmonic density) and retards (as does a human pulse). This is not a spliceable performance. #

Mainly, however, I noticed the depth and variety of this pianist’s emotional vocabulary – in particular,  the unexpected gravitas of the little Allegretto movement. Schnabel’s interpretation here begins with an idea – a state of being. (Wagner once wrote that a conductor’s chief and most elusive responsibility is to extrapolate the “idea” of a piece.) I did not sense anything like that in any of the pristine broadcast recordings I sampled in my rented car. #

Here’s a criterion for an “unrestrained” performance – it cannot be spliced. Many piano performances by Edwin Fischer or Albert Cortot are of this kind. There are even pianists who can sound “unrestrained” in  magnetic-tape times – say (to cite opposites), Wilhelm Kempff or Vladimir Horowitz. #

I was subsequently reminded of Weill’s essay, as predictive rather than admonitory, last weekend in Washington, D.C. PostClassical Ensemble (I’m the Executive Director) presented two days of music performed by David Taylor (bass trombone), Daniel Schnyder (saxophones), Matt Herskowitz (piano), and Min Xiao-fen (pipa). The centerpiece was the world premiere of a jazzy Schnyder Pipa Concerto that deserves the widest possible exposure. Like Schnyder’s music generally, it seamlessly transgresses boundaries of style and genre. It also happens to be a fabulous vehicle for a demonic virtuoso – Xiao-fen – who has mastered a variety of plucked instruments; who improvises; who sings; who cultivates an “unrestrained style of playing.” #

Taylor (the world’s most famous bass trombonist) equally exemplifies the “unrestrained.” Last week I twice heard him play the Zuhälterballade from Weill’s Dreigroschenoper. The two performances were so different that you can forget about studios and splicing. The late Gunther Schuller (who crossed over between classical and jazz) (as does Taylor) once called David Taylor “one of the three greatest instrumentalists in the world.” He didn’t say who the other two were. Taylor is great in the ways Weill extolled in 1929. #

Schubert’s “Doppelgänger” is a Taylor specialty. I have heard him do it half a dozen times, all different. Here he is with PostClassical Ensemble at the Kennedy Center. #

Whenever I visit music schools I make a practice of sharing this youtube performance. The range of reaction is very wide. I must confess that emotional reticence is a frequent keynote – an inability to enter into an uncomfortable realm of feeling. There is too often a predilection to attempt to “classify” Taylor – a fruitless endeavor. I even encounter complaints about his attire. #

I discover cheerful versatility and spectacular facility among the young instrumentalists I encounter. What I miss is emotional “unrestraint.” I turn to David Taylor, pushing age 70, for “the highest degree of productive performance.” #

The Most Under-Rated Composer?

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Who is the most under-rated 20th century American composer? In the wake of the month-long Bernard Herrmann festival curated by DC’s PostClassical Ensemble, I have to believe Herrmann is the most likely candidate. #

The festival, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Georgetown University, and the AFI Silver Theatre, featured three world premieres and a DC premiere. A special focus was a genre now forgotten: the radio dramas of the thirties and forties, which during World War II were a bulwark for home-front morale. The twin creative geniuses were Orson Welles and Norman Corwin – and Herrmann, the supreme radio-drama composer, worked with both of them. #

Thanks to the Herrmann scholar Christopher Husted, we were able to revisit two classic 1944 Corwin/Herrmann radio dramas in live performance: “Untitled” (about a dead American serviceman) and “Whitman” (in which a celebration of the iconic American poet morphs into a patriotic paean). #

“Whitman” proved the revelation of the festival. It unforgettably mates words and music. It peaks where it turns interior. “I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of grass,” writes Whitman.  The grass may be “the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.” Or “the handkerchief of the Lord.” Or “the beautiful uncut hair of graves” – a memorial to dead young men. “Tenderly will I use you, curling grass.” This exceptional passage, combining the transcendental with the erotic, inspires a musical epiphany for strings and harp surpassing many a comparable work mating poetry with words sung. The Herrmann/Corwin “Whitman,” 25 minutes long, deserves wide concert performance as what in music is termed “melodrama” – music underscoring speech. (Cf. PostClassical Ensemble’s own Hiawatha Melodrama. Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon is a masterpiece of melodrama.) PostClassical Ensemble plans to revisit “Whitman” and to record it. #

In short: Herrmann’s radio melodramas were a crucial step towards the melodramas he composed for Vertigo and Psycho – underscoring dialogue, sealing transitions, defining mood. #

Psycho occupied us for two days. The film-music historian Neil Lerner explored Herrmann’s debt to Bartok – who knew how to use strings alone to inspire terror and suspense. We performed – in its previously unheard original version – Herrmann’s atonal Sinfonietta for Strings of 1935 – in some ways, a trial run for Psycho. We watched Psycho and talked about it. But most memorably we performed Herrmann’s 1968 Psycho “Narrative for string orchestra.” Orchestras that continue to perform the “Psycho Suite” (as recorded, e.g., by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic) should shelve that collection of film cues in favor of Herrmann’s own integrated Psycho synthesis, invaluably recovered by John Mauceri in 1999. As conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez, this 15-minute composition (featured by Simon Rattle on his opening concert of the current Berlin Philharmonic season) built ineluctably to a closing, climactic reprise the three-note motif that anchors Herrmann’s famous film score. #

The festival also featured my favorite chamber work by any American: Herrmann’s sublimely nostalgic 1967 clarinet quintet Souvenirs de Voyage. In a program note, I wrote of the quintet’s long, masterfully woven first movement: “We feel we have journeyed somewhere, even if that makes no ultimate difference in a world of sadness and remembrance.” #

“Bernard Herrmann: Screen, Stage, and Radio” was part of an all-American PostClassical Ensemble season, exploring an “alternative narrative” for American music outside the over-exposed Copland/Boulanger axis. #

We are very far from taking the full measure of Bernard Herrmann. #

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$1 for Music Unwound

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The NEH Music Unwound consortium, which most recently brought Dvorak’s New World Symphony to an Indian reservation, has been re-funded by the Endowment with a $400,000 grant, bringing the total NEH investment to $1 million since the inception of Music Unwound in 2010. #

The consortium has quickly evolved into a major opportunity and challenge for American orchestras to rethink themselves as “humanities institutions.” It funds thematic, cross-disciplinary concerts linked to high schools, colleges and universities, and museums. The premise is that such programming (which more resembles what museums do) supports audience engagement and development, and also outreach and institutional collaboration. #

Three protean topics have been in play: “Dvorak and America,” “Copland and Mexico,” and “Charles Ives’s America.” A fourth topic – “Kurt Weill’s America” – has now been added. The themes include immigration, World War II, American identity, and the Mexican cultural efflorescence of the 1930s. All the main concerts include visual tracks and scripts. There have also been film, dance, and theater ingredients. #

As director of Music Unwound, I have been delighted and surprised by the alacrity with which new relationships have been formed and sustained. Music Unwound has helped to create a permanent bond between the Pacific Symphony and Orange County’s Chapman University, and also between the El Paso Symphony and the University of Texas/El Paso. By an incredible coincidence, the visionary educators driving these relationships in the two universities have both just been promoted: Daniele Struppa (a mathematician) will shortly become President of Chapman, and Frank Candelaria (a music historian) is now Associate Provost of UTEP. Both of these educational leaders are driven to infuse the arts and humanities across the curriculum. #

Another surprise has been the increasing inclusion of student musicians. The Brevard Music Festival, which joined the consortium this year, is a major summer training camp for orchestral musicians. Under Music Unwound, it will supplement such training with humanities instruction – so that all the collegiate instrumentalists taking part in “Dvorak and America” this summer will read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha and ponder its pertinence to Dvorak’s American style. #

DePauw University, also new to Music Unwound this year, will produce a Kurt Weill festival including Street Scene – Weill’s “Broadway opera” about immigration. The participating students will read Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Street Scene, and explore the process by which it was turned into an opera by Weill, Rice, and Langston Hughes. The same exercise will subsequently take place at Brevard and UTEP. As Mark McCoy, the exceptional Dean of the DePauw Music School, is about to become President of the university, he will – like Struppa and Candelaria – be commanding a comprehensive humanities exercise from the top. #

The other consortium members are the Buffalo Philharmonic (lead partner), the North Carolina Symphony, the New Hampshire Music Festival, the Las Vegas Philharmonic, and the South Dakota Symphony. #

In Las Vegas and El Paso, “Copland and Mexico” will connect to large Hispanic populations – including both high school and college students. #

Donato Cabrera, Music Director of the Las Vegas Philharmonic, and Delta David Gier, Music Director of the South Dakota Symphony, will join me in Baltimore June 11 at the annual conference of the League of American Orchestras to discuss Music Unwound and present our experiences to date. #

Dvorak on the Reservation

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Sisseton, in the northeastern corner of South Dakota, sits within a Dakota Indian reservation called Sisseton Wahpeton. The population – 2,500 – is half Native American, half non-Native. #

Last Monday night, Sisseton hosted the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra in a program, “Dvorak and America,” at the local high school auditorium. This multi-media production, which includes a “visual presentation” extrapolating the American accent of the New World Symphony, has been seen throughout the United States for a decade. Unique to South Dakota, however, was the participation of the Creekside Singers of the Pine Ridge Reservation (pictured above) in a symphonic composition by the Native-American composer Brent Michael Davids. Sisseton also produced the most eclectic audience I have ever seen at a symphonic concert. Both the very young and the very old were well represented, as was the local Dakota population. #

Part of the NEH’s “Music Unwound” orchestral consortium, this singular adventure in cultural outreach was the latest installment in the South Dakota Symphony’s Lakota Music Project, which makes music for and with Native Americans. The Project’s touring program, comprising back-and-forth musical exchanges, has since 2009 been given nearly thirty times on six reservations. It has also commissioned new works from both Native and non-Native composers. Crucially, it is mutually conceived and implemented by the Symphony and its Native American partners. #

As I have many times observed on this blog, the Dvorak topic is protean. His espousal of a future American concert idiom based on “Negro melodies” and Native American lore remains provocative and timely. The “Dvorak and America” program plays with particular pertinence in New York City, where it has been produced by both the New York Philharmonic and the late Brooklyn Philharmonic; a city of immigrants, New York took Dvorak to heart. If it ever makes it to Boston, “Dvorak and America” will powerfully recall a historic moment when New Englanders denounced Dvorak as a “negrophile” and shunned his influence and advice. In Fayetteville, presented by the North Carolina Symphony, “Dvorak and America” memorably connected with an African-American audience. #

In Sisseton, “Dvorak and America” was doubly resonant. Dvorak’s sadness of the prairie, enshrined in the Largo of his great American symphony, instantly evoked the wide horizons directly at hand. The symphony’s many allusions to Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, highlighted by visual renderings including the Dance of Pau-Puk Keewis with its moccasin bells (Dvorak’s triangle), served to introduce an Indian reservation to the long-ago Indianists movement of which Dvorak was part. #

How did the Native Americans in the room process the whirling, spinning dance at Hiawatha’s wedding feast? As Dvorak’s “Indian” mode makes no attempt to evoke actual Native American music, we undertook a necessary consideration of what anthropologists call “cultural appropriation.” Our resident anthropologist, Ronnie Theisz, has participated in the Lakota Music Project since its inception. He is an Austrian who upon earning a Ph. D. at NYU took a job on a South Dakota reservation and never looked back. On this occasion, Ronnie contributed a mini-tutorial on the structure and vocal techniques of Lakota song. He also contrasted the nineteenth century’s celebration of the “noble savage,” as in Longfellow and Dvorak, with such twentieth century Indianist kitsch as Victor Herbert’s “Dagger Dance” – as performed by the South Dakota Symphony; as appropriated by the Hamms Beer cartoon commercials I remember from my childhood. That beer commercial drew laughter – but no such depiction of “injun country” could conceivably be purveyed today. #

Another participant was Chris Eagle Hawk, an honored elder of the Oglala Lakota Tribe, who eloquently described the role of music in Lakota culture, and the sanctity of the Black Hills. #

The same South Dakota Symphony Dvorak program was given on subscription Saturday and Sunday in Sioux Falls (population 170,000). Not the least remarkable aspect of these three concerts was the caliber of the orchestra itself and of its conductor, Delta David Gier. He has led the South Dakota Symphony since 2004. For many years an assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, he has since raised two children in Sioux Falls. It was he who initiated the Lakota Music Project. #

Gier’s reading of Dvorak’s Largo was the most affecting I have ever encountered. It was also the slowest, and in places the softest. His splendid English horn soloist, Jeffrey Paul, is South Dakota’s principal oboist. He also composes, conducts one of two South Dakota Symphony youth orchestras, and plays the electric guitar. #

The current South Dakota Symphony season puts to shame a major American orchestra that resides in eastern Pennsylvania. There are no celebrity soloists, no Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky concertos. The season began with Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, part of an ongoing Mahler cycle that now only lacks Nos. 8 and 10. Next season opens with John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. In fact, there is contemporary music on every Classics program save the annual semi-staged opera – Don Giovanni. Last season, it was Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. #

These enterprising repertoire choices are doubtless one reason the musicians of the South Dakota Symphony seem as motivated and engaged as any I have encountered among professional American orchestras. I had occasion to chat backstage with the principal double bass, Mario Chiarello. Mario is also the conductor of one of three Sioux Falls high school orchestras. He told me that after 9/11, his Lincoln High orchestra prepared Mozart’s Requiem in eleven days. He also said that Sioux Falls’ “Harmony” program, modeled on Venezuela’s El Sistema, in conjunction with a separate Suzuki-based program, is producing skilled young instrumentalists in such profusion that they will burst the seams of the city’s existing student symphonic ensembles. He counts 2,631 string players in the Sioux Falls public schools. Many are not native speakers of English. #

My most memorable backstage exchange, however, was with Chris Eagle Hawk. He is a man whose very presence commands attention. He shared an axiom about listening. One should listen with one’s heart, he said, and only later process that with one’s brain. In the meantime, one’s mouth should remain shut. This is a lesson I have never learned. Onstage, during one of three post-concert discussions, I asked Chris what he thought of the New World Symphony. “Awesome,” he replied. Was he hearing it for the first time? I innocently inquired. Well, no – he first encountered Dvorak’s symphony in college long ago. This from a man who grew up in a tent and first spoke English at the age of seven. #

At Sisseton we were greeted by David Flutes, chairman of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, Mayor Terry Jaspers, and Jane and John Rasmussen. Jane is director of the Sisseton Arts Council. She and her husband asked me to inscribe their copy of my book Classical Music in America: a History – which, moreover, they had evidently read. John said that racial tension in Sisseton had considerably abated over the past decade. One reason, he added, was the South Dakota Symphony’s Lakota Music Project. #

Gergiev and the Vienna Philharmonic

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Last Sunday afternoon’s Vienna Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall began with a Valery Gergiev moment. Mounting the podium, he turned to the concertmaster and shrugged his shoulders to acknowledge that (as sometimes happens to Gergiev in particular) he had arrived a little late and kept the musicians waiting. He then took a deep breath and launched an unforgettable reading of the Prelude and Good Friday Spell from Wagner’s Parsifal. #

The second half of the concert, with Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony, was incendiary – a rare musical phenomenon that bears some scrutiny and analysis. #

Wilhelm Furtwangler was famous or notorious for his indistinct baton gestures. He did not wish to over-instruct his players. He invited an initiative that was partly theirs. #

With his ever fluttering hands and arms, Gergiev insists that his performances, no matter how much or little rehearsed, not be over-prepared. The pay-off is an intense synergy unknown among conductors who impose submission to pre-calibrated rubatos, sharply drawing attention to themselves. A Furtwangler or Gergiev, by comparison, can unleash a primal musical force that is wholly impersonal. They can ignite a Dionysian intensity that can only be leaderless, can only be communal. #

Vienna’s magnificent orchestra is different from Gergiev’s magnificent Mariinsky Orchestra. Its sounds are sweeter. Its synergy with Gergiev is dynamic. The fullness and depth of sonority, the regal low strings informing Sunday’s performances were Gergiev signatures. But there was more daylight than in the St. Petersburg sound. (I am not choosing, just comparing.) #

The resulting performance of the Parsifal music doubtless displeased the precision-police. But Gergiev’s reading wasn’t about precision. It feasted on color and texture. It also majestically sustained a musical line stretching to infinity. #

The Manfred Symphony, after intermission, isn’t much heard for a reason. A 50-minute essay in Faustian striving and redemption, it sags in places. I read in Jack Sullivan’s Carnegie program note that Leonard Bernstein called it “trash.” Certainly Tchaikovsky’s Manfred, estranged from humankind, at home with dark despair, requires inspired advocacy. As with Shostakovich’s kindred confessional symphonies, Manfred turns banal absent maximum emotional and physical commitment. As with so much of Liszt, it needs to be “made” – molded, interpreted. #

The Gergiev/Vienna Manfred Symphony was a performance for the ages. The first movement coda – an avalanche of grief – was titanic. Even more remarkably, the symphony’s apotheosis told. I still cannot believe that this problematic note of triumph — laced with harp arpeggios, punctuated by stentorian organ chords — is an emotional state Tchaikovsky earned. But I will never hear a Manfred performance more momentarily persuasive. #

The first encore was the act two “Panorama” from The Sleeping Beauty – so airborne, so trembling with beauty that only levitating ballerinas could have danced to it. In fact, a complete Sleeping Beauty delivered by this orchestra and conductor, in this hall, would surely surpass any possible performance by the American Ballet Theatre or New York City Ballet. Those companies do not nearly possess the musical or acoustic resources to do justice to Tchaikovsky (or Prokofiev). This is a topic

I have belabored before. #

The second and final encore was the “Thunder and Lightning” Polka by Johann Strauss, Jr. Here Gergiev let the orchestra play by itself (with plenty of thunder). The unlikely sequence of Wagner-Tchaikovsky-Tchaikovsky-Strauss proved magically cathartic. #

Musicians I know complain they cannot follow Gergiev’s beat. I know orchestra managers who consider him unreliable and under-prepared. I cannot imagine what priorities they pursue. #

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