Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 34

Mixing Art and Music — An Open Letter to the Corcoran Gallery

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE DIRECTOR OF THE CORCORAN GALLERY #

Dear Mr. Bollerer: #

As someone who writes frequently about the Gilded Age, I’ve long been eager to visit the Corcoran Gallery to study your most iconic painting: Frederick Church’s “Niagara.” I was recently in DC and seized the opportunity, arriving one Sunday in the late morning only to discover a cellist in the atrium playing movements from the Bach cello suites. The atrium is a resonant space and the cello was loudly audible in the galleries. #

A painting summons thought and feeling. It can also (in my experience) summon music. Music can equally silence the experience of a painting – Bach’s Bourees, Sarabandes, and Gigues were played (and also practiced) over and over. In between, the instrument was raucously tuned. Only during a brief respite could I discover the seething energy of Church’s rendering of Niagara Falls, unshackled by Bach. #

Though neither of your gallery books mention it, Church’s canvases are of course ambitious exercises in metaphor. “Niagara” was painted in 1857 – on the cusp of civil war. The calculated play of sunlight and impending storm can only be symbolic. The broken rainbow reinforces Church’s message of a nation’s ambiguous fate. Church intended that a leisurely examination of his large, painstakingly detailed canvases would provoke conscious analysis. #

An adjoining American gallery, in which Bach remained a deafening presence, displayed Thomas Eakins’s “Singing a Pathetic Song.” The parlor music of this painting is, I would say, an explicit soundtrack anathema to Bach. #

A museum considers framing, placement, and lighting in displaying its collection. What the ear hears can become as pertinent as what the eye sees. Silence is safest. And yet when visual art is discussed on film or TV, a symphonic soundtrack become inescapable. For any musically sensitive person, Kenneth Clark’s “Civilization” was made unwatchable by the clumsy imposition of chunks of Schubert, Debussy, et. al. I remember giving up quickly, when Delius was applied to French Impressionism. #

Many years ago, in a conversation with the late Kirk Varnedoe, I discovered that this distinguished connoisseur of fin-de-siecle Austrian visual art had no ear from Mahler. And yet the profound relationship of Klimt to Mahler is mutually illuminating. As it happens, Tim Barringer – who as you know is a leading authority on Church – is a counter-example: a trained musician fascinated by resonances binding painters and composers. It’s been my pleasure to collaborate with Tim on a variety of museum programs investigating points of alignment linking Dvorak’s New World Symphony and American Suite with the “American sublime” of Church, Bierstadt, and Moran, and also with the genre paintings of Durand and Bingham. #

Anyway, I’m writing this letter in Rock Creek Park as a therapeutic exercise, having fled your museum after 45 minutes of enforced listening. The moment I exited my brain began to breathe. Frankly, what I’m trying to say to you seems self-evident to me. Would you consider doing without music? The paintings would appreciate it. #

Yours sincerely #

Teaching Music Across the Curriculum

Cross-disciplinary education is in fashion right now, but I have the impression it’s more honored in the breach than the observance, at least insofar as music is concerned. #

My vantage point is limited but informative. As readers of this blog know, I have for years espoused using the story of Dvorak in America to sneak the humanities into Social Studies and History classrooms by the back door. #

I have learned a few things in the process. One is that the usual obstacle is ostensibly curricular: learning standards and standardized syllabi that must be prioritized. Another thing I’ve learned is that this obstacle is more a smoke-screen: teachers shy away from classical music because they feel they don’t know enough to teach it. That may be true, but it’s remediable. #

With a modicum of training, even History teachers innocent of symphonic music will seize the Dvorak opportunity once it’s understood. Because it’s fresh, entertaining, and popular. #

All the “Dvorak and America” festivals in which I’ve taken part this year – via the Pacific Symphony, the North Carolina Symphony, and most recently the Buffalo Philharmonic – have linked to classrooms with teachers who attended the NEH “Dvorak and America” Teacher-Training Institute hosted by the Pittsburgh Symphony two summers ago. In Orange County and North Carolina, the participating educators were Music and Social Studies teachers in elementary and high schools. In Buffalo a month ago, the participating educator was Brenda Cowe, who’s the librarian for the Buffalo Performing Arts High School. #

Brenda’s eighth graders studied Dvorak for a period of weeks. They all attended the Buffalo Philharmonic’s performance of the New World Symphony. And, amazingly, they all participated in creating Dvorak films. #

Brenda’s “Dvorak Project Page” — http://dvorakproject.wikispaces.com/ — embraces a cornucopia of Americana, including – for instance – exposure to wax cylinder recordings of Native American music in juxtaposition with the “Indian dance” that is the Scherzo of the New World Symphony. Her students also studied the role of Dvorak’s assistant Harry Burleigh in bringing spirituals into the concert hall. They sampled recordings by Burleigh and Marian Anderson. They pondered issues of American identity as explored by Dvorak via Native American culture and “Negro melodies.” #

In future seasons, there will likely be more Dvorak festivals funded – like this season’s – by the NEH’s landmark “Music Unwound” initiative. Music Unwound not only supports “contextualized” symphonic programming, but explores the role orchestras can play as a much-needed catalyst for incorporating the arts in “non-arts” classrooms and curricula. It pursues an ideal — integrated arts instruction — that deserves to become common educational practice. #

A Message for Young Musicians and Old Orchestras

I was recently entrusted with delivering the graduation address for the School of Music at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. I wound talking about the future of orchestras. My larger point was that this is a moment for young musicians – and not so young institutions – to hone their sense of mission. Here’s what I had to offer: #

A lot of the writing that I’ve done over the past 25 years has explored the story of classical music in America in its most dynamic period – the late nineteenth century. #

Here’s a vignette: the Metropolitan Opera presented the premiere of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in 1886. When the curtain fell on Isolde’s Liebestod, stunned silence ensued for a period of minutes. Then – as we can read in the Musical Courier – women in the audience stood on their chairs and “screamed their delight for what seemed hours.” #

Here’s a second anecdote about the same event. In the third act, Wagner has Tristan tear the bandages off his wound when he sees Isolde’s ship approach. The wound bleeds copiously, and Tristan expires. When Albert Niemann, the Met’s first Tristan, tore his bandages and bared his wound, many in the audience swooned. At subsequent performances, the bandages remained intact. I don’t think that this story is about an audience’s timidity; what it documents is an unbearable intensity of experience. #

I would suggest that at least four ingredients account for the astounding urgency and immediacy of this epochal 1886 operatic performance. The first of course is Wagner’s opera – it was radically new. The second is the condition of the people who swooned and screamed. That the vast majority of Wagnerites in late nineteenth century America were women tells us that Wagner answered powerful needs, needs for self-realization not otherwise answered for corseted and sequestered Gilded Age housewives and mothers. #

The third ingredient is the Metropolitan Opera of the 1880s and 90s – never again would the Met be such a hotbed of innovation and experimentation. Its visionary mastermind was a charismatic conductor who had lived with Wagner almost as a surrogate son: Anton Seidl, the central missionary for Wagnerism in the United States. Fourth, and finally, Americans of the late nineteenth century were acutely susceptible to sophisticated art and culture: it crucially helped them to discover and define who they were, and what America was as a nation. #

I have a new book, published this month, titled Moral Fire. Here are three sentences from my introduction: #

“If screaming Wagnerites standing on chairs are unthinkable today, it is partly because we mistrust high feeling. Our children avidly specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare us in a surrogate world that shuns all but facile passions; only Jon Stewart and Bill Maher share moments of moral outrage disguised as comedy.” #

The full of title of my new book is Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin de Siecle. The portraits are of Laura Langford, who presented Wagner concerts 14 times a week in summertime at Coney Island; of Henry Krehbiel, the onetime dean of New York’s music critics; of Charles Ives, arguably the most important concert composer that this country ever produced; and of Henry Higginson, who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The binding theme is that all four of these heroic individuals embraced the notion that art is morally empowering. #

They inhabited a moment half a century before the music lovers Hitler and Stalin discredited art as a moral beacon. But we can still, I believe, draw inspiration from their example, and from those screaming Wagnerites at the Met. #

This afternoon, I would mainly like to ponder the saga of Henry Higginson and his Boston Symphony – its gestation and subsequent history – and ask what lessons this history might teach today. #

Higginson was not born to wealth. As a young man he went to Vienna to become a musician. When he discovered that he lacked sufficient talent to excel, he adopted a different life plan: to amass enough capital to create a world class orchestra for the city of Boston. He entered the family business, which happened to be banking. Then, in 1881, at the age of 47, he placed an announcement in every Boston paper headed “in the interest of great music.” #

What Higginson announced was the creation of a Boston Symphony Orchestra, wholly financed by himself. It would perform twice weekly, October thru March. Its membership would be stable – no playing for dances on rehearsal or performance days. Also, a certain number of 25 cent tickets would be set aside for all performances – because Henry Higginson was a cultural democrat. #

By 1900, Higginson’s Boston Symphony was already internationally acknowledged as a great orchestra. It was already a catalyst for the creation of important orchestras in Cincinnati and Chicago. It already gave more than 100 concerts a season. It already offered a summer series of Promenade concerts – today’s Boston Pops. In format, length, and ritual, its concerts were virtually identical to the Boston Symphony concerts of today. #

That by 1900 Higginson’s orchestra looked and sounded like American concert orchestras a century later either documents resilience – or inertia: resistance to change. Meanwhile, the world was changing – and in ways that impacted on the symphonic experience. #

A useful criterion in assessing any cultural event is “sense of occasion.” Higginson was lucky: his concerts created a sense of occasion automatically. In 1900, you couldn’t hear an orchestra in your living room on the radio or phonograph. Also, orchestras the caliber of Boston’s were few and far between. Also, Higginson’s audience was keenly inquisitive about new music: new symphonies by, say, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky. Also, Boston’s audience equally appreciated local composers. Everyone understood that George Chadwick was no Beethoven – but every new symphonic work Chadwick composed was promptly premiered by Higginson’s orchestra. Theodore Thomas, the founding father of American symphonic culture, preached that “a symphony orchestra shows the culture of a community.” Higginson’s Boston Symphony did that. #

If this late Gilded Age moment marks the apex of classical music in America, that’s because it’s a moment buoyed by a central aspiration, an aspiration influentially pursued by Antonin Dvorak as director of Jeannette Thurber’s courageous National Conservatory of Music – the aspiration to create for American orchestras and opera companies a native repertoire of operas and symphonies that would gird American classical music to come. But this never happened. We instead acquired a mutant musical high culture, a Eurocentric culture privileging masterpieces by dead Europeans. #

How that occurred and why are questions that have long preoccupied me. Certainly, after World War I, visionaries like Higginson – or Thurber, or Dvorak, or Anton Seidl, or Henry Krehbiel, or Thedore Thomas – were little in evidence. Instead, the central powerbroker for classical music was a businessman: Arthur Judson, who simultaneously ran the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Columbia Artists Management – the major booking agency for conductors and solo instrumentalists. It was Judson’s frank opinion that an orchestra’s programming could QUOTE “only go as far as the public will go with us.” #

This notion that the audience sets taste was something new, a concession unknown to the pioneering tastemakers of turn-of-the-century America. #

With the advent of recordings, of radio and TV, orchestras could be heard at home. With the advent of modernism, audiences were estranged from contemporary music as never before. That every concert would generate a sense of occasion, as in Higginson’s Boston, could no longer be assumed. All of this challenged orchestras — or might have — to rethink the concert experience. Then came exigent challenges of another kind. Since 2005, the average orchestral deficit – and most American orchestras run deficits – has more than tripled. Classical music participation has dropped 30 per cent over the past two decades. Costs continue to rise faster than revenues. According to Jesse Rosen, who heads the League of American Orchestras, “The current problems are not cyclical problems. The recession has merely brought home and exacerbated longterm problems.” #

And here’s one more statistic – according to a survey of Philadelphia Orchestra subscribers – by reputation, a conservative body of listeners – only 21 per cent are in favor of standard format concerts with no talking. This hunger for information, I would say, reflects both fatigue with business-as-usual among “old listeners” and the growing needs of “new listeners.” #

I cannot recommend a panacea. But I’d like to cite one sign of constructive change. As never before, American orchestras are experimenting with what’s known in the field as “contextualized programming.” – explicating music in the context of cultural and political history, and in relationship to literature, the visual arts, dance and theater. The Chicago Symphony calls it “Beyond the Score.” The New York Philharmic has used the rubric “Inside the Music.” Philadelphia offers “Access Concerts.” #

In particular, a landmark $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities supports a consortium of orchestras intent on absorbing contextualized programs not as a tangential option, but as part of their central artistic mission. #

During the season just concluded – the first year of this NEH “Music Unwound” initiative — three orchestras performed Dvorak’s New World Symphony in tandem with a visual presentation restoring the cultural vocabulary of the symphony’s first New York audience, culling pertinent excerpts from Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, culling iconic paintings of the American West by Albert Biestadt, George Catlin, and Frederic Remington. #

The Buffalo Philharmonic’s “Dvorak and America” festival incorporated an event at an art museum exploring the relationship between Dvorak’s symphony and what art historians term “the American sublime.” The North Carolina Symphony’s Dvorak festival, last February, linked to 11th grade American History classrooms that made Dvorak‘s American sojourn a major curricular component. When the Pacific Symphony Youth Orchestra did its Dvorak festival, last March, all 100 members of the orchestra, grades 9 to 12, studied the Dvorak story in detail, and inquired into the possible impact of extra-musical readings on the way musicians hear and interpret Dvorak’s American symphony. #

The success of these festivals – all the participating orchestras are eager for more – suggests that today’s orchestras, unlike Henry Higginson’s Boston Symphony, cannot take their mission for granted. This is a moment for orchestras to refresh and even to reformulate their reasons to exist. #

And I would like to further suggest, in closing, that this lesson may pertain to young artists such as those assembled here today. #

Certainly those of us in classical music occupy a milieu in flux. It is, I would say, incumbent on us to discover and articulate, as never before, a personal sense of mission. We cannot assume that we can slip into existing niches of professional experience – because those niches are vanishing or evolving. When I meet with young pianists, I urge them to study composition and improvisation, and music outside the Western canon – to identify objectives that are specific, novel, and individual – new pieces or little-known composers that they believe in, or new ways of presenting music in live performance. And in fact a fresh wind of entrepreneurial innovation is everywhere apparent. #

Those 1886 Wagnerites screamed and stood in their chairs because Tristan und Isolde answered the needs of the moment – needs demanding a new kind of artistic expression, and new realms of aesthetic experience. Today’s moment again generates substantially new needs, needs impacting on artists and on artistic institutions. #

This challenge is equally an opportunity. #

Thank you very much. #

“Moral Fire”

I have a new book, just published: Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle. Here’s a sampling: #

“If the Met’s screaming Wagnerites standing on chairs in the 1890s are in fact unthinkable today, it is partly because we mistrust high feeling. Our children avidly specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare us in a surrogate world that shuns all but facile passions; only Jon Stewart and Bill Maher share moments of moral outrage disguised as comedy.” #

My portraits are of Henry Higginson, who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Henry Krehbiel, who as the proactive “dean” of New York’s music critics was a leading catalyst for a nascent “American school” of musical composition; Laura Langford, who presented the Music of the Future fourteen times a week in summertime on Coney Island; and Charles Ives, who composed great American symphonies long before Serge Koussevitzky searched fruitlessly for a Great American Symphony during the interwar decades. #

These are heroic figures for whom the notion that art is morally empowering was a vital catalyst and inspiration. My book ends: “Though not all supreme art is uplifting, or intended to uplift, culture as a moral force is a concept that fills human needs stronger than any dogmas, be they aesthetic, political, or intellectual.” #

More info here. #

San Francisco’s American Mavericks

I review the San Francisco Symphony’s remarkable “American Mavericks” festival in the current Times Literary Supplement (UK) as follows: #

There is a type of American creative genius whose originality and integrity correlate with refusing to finish their education in Europe. Herman Melville and Walt Whitman are writers of this type. In American music, Charles Ives is the paramount embodiment. The unfinished in Ives is crucial to his affect. Emerson, whom Ives revered, put it this way in his poem “Music”:”’Tis not in the high stars alone . . . /Nor in the redbreast’s mellow tone . . . /But in the mud and scum of things/There alway, alway something sings.” The “Emerson” movement in Ives’s iconic Concord Piano Sonata (1910-15) is both literally and figuratively unfinished. He regarded it as a permanent work in progress. He also intended to make something orchestral out of it. #

Over a period of 36 years (1958 to 1994), Henry Brant – a composer variously admired for spatial effects and a sure symphonic hand – transcribed the Concord Sonata for large orchestra. Brant’s Concord Symphony not only orchestrates Ives; it finishes him: the mud and scum are mostly cleaned away. (Ives’s actual voice, which we can hear singing on a 1943 recording, was itself arrestingly frayed.) The result is improbable, provocative, and important: music that demands to be heard. At its first American hearing, at Carnegie Hall in 1996, the Concord Symphony was weakly conducted by the composer. It has rarely been given since. In recent seasons, Michael Tilson Thomas has emerged as its crucial advocate – with his San Francis Symphony (in concert and on CD), with his Florida-based New World Symphony, and most recently as part of the San Francisco Symphony’s indispensable “American Mavericks” Festival, with stops in Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Carnegie Hall. #

Brant’s decision not to attempt an Ivesian orchestration makes sense – the Concord Symphony establishes its own sonic identity. His symphonic textures and sonorities do not resemble those of Ives; he paints with acrylics where Ives would use oils. Measure for measure, the score corresponds to its source. But there are countless surprise timbres and voicings. In the Concord Sonata, “Thoreau” evokes bells across the water; Brant here uses no bells. “Thoreau,” as composed by Ives, ends with a tolling bass line in octaves: an Ur-pulse. Brant here thins the bass. Ives’s simplest, most finished movement, “The Alcotts,” generates the most finished orchestration, climaxing with a peroration as stirring as any by Copland; this tremendous six-minute cameo should be sampled by every American orchestra. Ives’s most pianistic Concord movement – “Hawthorne” – is necessarily the movement Brant most makes his own: some pages are unrecognizable as transcription. In Ives, “Emerson” is wild and “Hawthorne” demonic. “The Alcotts” adduces a parlor plainness. “Thoreau” is a seer. None of this registers completely in the Concord Symphony. And yet the ear can still trace the arresting mutations of Ives’s faith tune – a derivative of Beethoven’s Fifth – en route to its final transcendental ascent. #

Neither a highly literal appropriation, like Ravel’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” (after Mussorgsky), nor an interpretive paraphrase, like Liszt’s “Don Juan” Fantasy (after Mozart), the Concord Symphony is genuinely eccentric – but not in the ways that Ives is eccentric. At its belated 1939 premiere, the Concord Sonata was decisively reviewed by Lawrence Gilman in the New York Herald-Tribune as “exceptionally great music — . . . indeed, the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication.” Decades later, Brant wrote of his orchestration: “It seemed to me that the complete sonata . . . might well become the ‘Great American Symphony’ that we had been seeking for years. Why not undertake the task myself? What better way to honor Ives and express my gratitude to him?” The Concord Symphony, whatever its possible disappointments, makes this bold impulse seem wholly understandable and commendable. #

The San Francisco Symphony’s festival (which I heard partly at Ann Arbor’s Hill Auditorium and partly at Carnegie Hall – both acoustically resplendent spaces) was from start to finish musically, viscerally, and intellectually enthralling. At least two of the featured mavericks — Lou Harrison and John Adams – are highly polished craftsmen. If they qualify as mavericks, it’s because their renegade spirit remains intact. Harrison is chiefly known on the West Coast of the United States. He is an unclassifiable hybrid who consummately synthesized East and West long before it became musically fashionable. His 35-minute Piano Concerto (composed for Keith Jarrett in 1985) is a rangy American masterpiece whose lean, uncluttered textures connect with Copland and Roy Harris – and yet is more polyglot, more idiosyncratic, more remote from European models and experience. Tilson Thomas’s festival did not offer the Harrison Piano Concerto. Instead, we heard the kindred Harrison Concerto for Organ and Percussion, music of extraordinary sonic freshness capped by a cluster-laden perpetual motion finale anticipating the Piano Concerto’s rambunctious “Stampede.” #

Of Adams, the festival offered a terrific premiere: “Absolute Jest” for string quartet and orchestra. During the second half of the nineteenth century, landscape became the iconic genre for American painters, with Frederic Church in the lead, inspired by a New World vastness of topography. This trope has long found its way into American music. Among contemporary Americans, Adams brings to the act of composition an acute visual sense; he keenly translates widescreen imaginary vistas, often majestic or phantasmagoric. “Absolute Jest” keys on late Beethoven fragments — in particular, a passage from the Vivace of Op. 135 that doubtless appealed to Adams as one of the most raucous string quartet passages ever conceived. In “Absolute Jest” this Beethoven scrap goes viral. Absorbed into an expansive Adams soundscape, it generates a dialectic between New World and Old. The disparate elements combine or collide in a fast and furious 25-minute trajectory that peaks and improbably peaks again, but not without glimpses of serenity. I would like to hear the Berlin Philharmonic play this music. #

“American Mavericks” also formidably sampled two “unfinished” composers of great influence whose compositions are more acknowledged than heard: John Cage and Henry Cowell. The loudest “Mavericks” pieces included “Sun-Treader” by Carl Ruggles. The quietest was “Piano and Orchestra” by Morton Feldman. Having known both Ruggles and Feldman, Tilson Thomas at Carnegie Hall offered a little talk juxtaposing the two composers as antipodes. The real purpose of his too subtle speech, however, was to urge a large audience to remain silent. Feldman’s music attunes the ear to the softest sounds. At Carnegie, these included shuffled papers and chairs, coughs muffled and unmuffled, and a passing subway train. The score’s sonic prickles and washes were challenged by sounds less exquisite. #

Aaron Copland, not normally considered a “maverick,” was represented by the Orchestral Variations — a 1957 reworking of his 1930 Piano Variations: spare, hard skyscraper music preceding Copland’s populist/Popular Front phase. The festival’s youngest composer, Mason Brown (b. 1977), contributed its most conservative composition: “Mass Transmission,” an affecting choral work with organ, superficially spiced by electronics. The oldest piece was Edgard Varese’s “Ameriques” (1921; revised 1927), which in any company retains plenty of mustard. Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” is here an obvious influence. But to the degree that Stravinsky is Russian, Varese, transplanted to New York, became categorically and brazenly rootless. His title, as he once explained, does not refer to the Western hemisphere, but rather is “symbolic of discoveries — new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men.” #

The orchestra brought with it a host of eminent soloists all of whom proved suited to the tasks at hand. The virtuosic organist in Harrison’s concerto was Paul Jacobs. The slashing string quartet for “Absolute Jest” was the St. Lawrence. The gripping singers for Cage’s “Song Books” were Joan La Barbara, Meredith Monk, and Jessye Norman. The pianists for Cowell’s Piano Concerto and Feldman’s “Piano and Orchestra,” Jeremy Denk and Emanuel Ax, relished unusual expressive possibilities. In Ann Arbor and New York, the festival also included chamber works (which I did not hear) by David Del Tredici, Lukas Foss, Meredith Monk, Harry Partch, Steve Reich, and Morton Subotnick. A cumulative festival statement, both impressive and startling, was that twentieth century American composers discovered a variety of avenues to originality other than modernist complexity born in Europe. #

Michael Tilson Thomas’s first season as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony — 1995-96 — featured an American composition on every subscription program and ended with an American festival. Four seasons later, he presented an “American Mavericks” festival that registered nationally as a signature event. This season’s “Mavericks” installment, marking the orchestra’s centennial, testifies to a resilience of mission and implementation: the San Francisco musicians tackled everything with unfailing concentration and polish. At a time when other ensembles are retrenching, the tour party totaled 129 musicians, 23 guest artists, and a stage/technical crew of 21. I cannot imagine that another American orchestra will offer as necessary a series of concerts anytime soon. #

Schubert Uncorked

For a variety of reasons, raw spontaneity is less common at symphonic performances nowadays than in the nineteenth century and before. In the days when they were also composers, performers were of course more prone to improvise. In the days before recordings and airplanes, there was no centripetal norm for interpretation. #

PostClassical Ensemble’s “Schubert Uncorked” in DC last weekend was the least predictable concert I have ever produced. At the close of the dress rehearsal the same afternoon, we had little real idea how the evening concert would fare. #

The main event was a world premiere: the Arpeggione Concerto for bass trombone and strings, this being a reimagining of Schubert’s Sonata for arpeggione (a sort of six-string cello) and piano by the inimitable bass trombonist David Taylor. You can hear Taylor’s Schubert – his versions of the song “Der Doppelganger” and of the finale of the Arpeggione with piano — on the Ensemble’s website. But these performances supply an imperfect impression of what happened when David Taylor played Schubert’s sonata with an ensemble of 22 intrepid strings. #

I first heard David Taylor play the Arpeggione Sonata in my living room, accompanying him at the piano. He had just come to the piece and was sticking to Schubert. In subsequent months, he took wayward possession of this music with a will. Tempos, dynamics, registers careened toward expressive extremes. The rehearsals with orchestra, courageously led by Angel Gil-Ordonez, were not reassuring. Following a wayward trombonist at the piano is a lot simpler than chasing him with an ensemble in tow. #

Meanwhile, Taylor inflicted his insidious sonic imagination on Schubert’s innocent keyboard textures. For the opening of the slow movement, he had the violins play in harmonics in imitation of a glass harmonica, the better to set off the low blasts of his instrument. #

The sheer virtuosity of Taylor’s command of Schubert acrobatic showpiece was never in doubt – he can play it, and beautifully. But Taylor’s virtuosity is divinely wed to an idiosyncratic musical personality wholly his own. A lot of head-shaking and head-scratching followed that dress rehearsal. #

The program began with a set of Schubert dances for strings. The Arpeggione Concerto came next, then – sans intermission – the sublime Adagio from Bruckner’s String Quintet (with string orchestra), followed by two Schubert songs with bass trombone and strings: “Die Stadt” and – Taylor’s specialty – “Der Doppelganger.” #

About a minute into the concerto, it was suddenly obvious that all would be OK. The performance was a bewildering success. The program as a whole moved clairvoyantly from light – the dances and concerto – to dark: the solemnity of Bruckner (magnificently rendered; Gil-Ordonez studied for years with Sergiu Celibidache in Munich); the anguish of the two late Schubert songs. #

None of us had anticipated the shock of “Doppelganger” in this context – it was Taylor’s first opportunity to open up and blast us full force. In the audience, bodies bobbed as if electrocuted. Watching the response of the musicians onstage was a rare pleasure: I have never seen members of an orchestra react as vividly, or visibly, to a soloist’s entrance as on this occasion. We invited the audience to stay for a post-concert discussion; the vast majority did, for fully half an hour. #

The days of the performance specialist are numbered. More and more, important instrumentalists will again – as in the days of Liszt and Paganini – be spontaneous creators of their own music. #

Orchestral Summitry

The recent “Orchestral Summit” at the University of Michigan was a labor of love on the part of Mark Clague of the university’s Musicology faculty. Mark is a tireless advocate of conciliation and consensual change in a field wracked by frustration and dissent. The conference had its ups and downs. I was especially impressed by the gravitas and honesty sustained by a panel of conservatory-level educators, alert to the need for fresh thought in preparing young musicians for a rapidly changing cultural landscape. #

Peter Witte, who heads the Conservatory of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri/Kansas City, hit a high note in calling for collaboration between orchestras and music educators at every level. “Education,” as pursued by orchestras, is too often limited to visiting elementary schools and bussing schoolchildren to Young People’s Concerts. #

A broader educational mission was also limned by Laura Jackson, Music Director of the Reno Philharmonic – whose composer-in-residence works in Reno’s schools to complement instrumental instruction. #

For me, the Summit afforded a further opportunity to rant about rethinking orchestras as purveyors of the humanities. As readers of this blog know, that’s the gist of a $300,000 NEH “Music Unwound” grant, supporting a consortium of orchestras pursuing cross-disciplinary programming in association with museums, universities, and public schools grades 4 to 12. The most recent installment, the Pacific Symphony Youth Orchestra’s “Dvorak and America” project, brought to four schools with ambitious instrumental and choral programs a different approach – contextualized instruction, linking music to history, literature, and the visual arts. A short film, created by the Pacific Symphony for the Summit, afforded a crisp snapshot of how and why it worked. #

I next lecture on “Rethinking What Orchestras Do – A Humanities Mandate” at the University of Texas at Austin on April 14, then (as a convocation address) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana on May 13. My previous “Music Unwound” blogs: Feb. 23, 2012; May 31, 2011. #

How Orchestras Can “Plug a Hole in the Curriculum”

“Music Unwound,” the $300,000 NEH initiative funding a consortium of adventurous orchestras, has two basic components. The first is contextualized thematic programming — it supports concerts that explore music from a variety of vantage points, including visual art and literature. The second is linkage — it supports connecting such programming with art museums, schools (grades 3 to 12), colleges, and universities. #

The latest “Music Unwound” project was “Dvorak and America,” presented by the Pacific Symphony Youth Orchestra — a gifted aggregate of 100 high school musicians supervised by Southern California’s exceptional Pacific Symphony (long a national leader in thematic programming and new concert formats). The lead-up to the orchestra’s Dvorak concert included classroom presentations in three high schools and an elementary school. The concert itself comprised a first half — including a visual track and the bass-baritone Terry Cook — exploring the Dvorak story and the programmatic resonances of the New World Symphony. Part two of the concert was a performance of the symphony itself. The concert was attended by hundreds of students from the participating schools. #

All four schools fall within the Irvine public school district, in which instrumental music is a longstanding high priority, thanks to support from Irvine Company. The high schools I visited all had multiple orchestras. The elementary school had both string and wind ensembles. What “Music Unwound” brought to these schools was a push toward integrating music education with music history — and also with American history and literature. #

At one of the high schools, I was delighted to discover that my Dvorak presentation was attended by an American History class — whose teacher confided that the topics I addressed comprised “a hole in the curriculum.” These topics included three that I have long believed belong in any overview of the Gilded Age: Dvorak’s New World Symphony, Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, and the paintings of Frederic Church. It was through this music, this poem, and these paintings that Americans in the late nineteenth century saw and defined themselves. I cannot imagine how anyone could study nineteenth century American history without recourse to such iconic cultural markers. #

The participating music teachers felt empowered by the “Music Unwound” experience to amplify the impressive instrumental skills of their students with something more. There is a disconnect here that orchestras can help schools to address. In the Irvine, there are already prospective plans to link with the Pacific Symphony’s Rite of Spring festival next season. The next “Music Unwound” Dvorak festival will be presented by the Buffalo Philharmonic in April. #

Horowitz on Horowitz on Horowitz (continued)

Readers of this blog will be aware of an ongoing state of war with my son, Bernie, whose adoration of Vladimir Horowitz I do not share. But Bernie is relentless, and in order to get him off my back I occasionally concede that his icon is a more remarkable pianist than his recordings disclose. #

Bernie has now contributed a detailed interview on the topic of Horowitz’s concert performances and their superiority to manicured studio jobs and edited concert recordings. I confess that it is worth reading. For one thing, it reiterates a point that bears repeating — edited recordings often disserve both music and the performer. For another, it includes a tremendous live 1966 Horowitz recording of Liszt’s Vallee d’Obermann — which Bernie compares not to a studio recording, but to an edited live Horowitz recording from the same season. The unedited performance (as always with Horowitz’s Liszt) lacks something in gravitas and worldly ennui. But the demonic thrust of his playing here attains an unadulterated wildness that studio doctors and complicit performers oftentimes elect to suppress. #

North Carolina’s State-Wide Symphony

Having just spent a week taking part in a “Dvorak and America” festival presented by the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra, I think I’ve learned a thing or two about how an orchestra can serve an entire state. The NCSO travels the length and breadth of North Carolina – more than 12,000 miles annually, offering more than 150 concerts. And it’s done that for a long time. In all four cities that hosted festival concerts, audiences strikingly evinced pride in the orchestra and an intimate sense of ownership. No one in Chicago would speak of “our very own Chicago Symphony.” In North Carolina, the orchestra serves not as a city’s international ambassador; rather, it invaluably buttresses a range of cultural communities. #

The audience for “Dvorak and America” in Fayettville, on the campus of Fayettville State University, looked to be about fifty per cent African-American. I addressed a group of students earlier in the week, none of whom had previously heard the name “Dvorak.” A pre-concert recital featured members of the FSU music faculty in the Violin Sonatina and G-flat Humoresque. The first half of the concert was (in every venue) a multi-media exploration of Dvorak’s “American accent” in his New World Symphony. Dvorak’s espousal of “Negro melodies” was the central topic. The Fayettville audience hung on every word. The second half of the concert was the New World Symphony itself. Afterward, many stayed to offer intense expressions of gratitude. #

In New Bern (population 30,000), near the coast, the orchestra’s seasonal series is ever popular. I have rarely seen a more eager audience. I observed people listening to the New World Symphony with eyes closed, their faces aglow with appreciation. The venue was a large conference room with vivid acoustics; it sat about 800. #

In Raleigh, the concert took place Friday at noon. The hall was full to capacity, including two groups of high school students both of which had travelled for several hours. Their teachers had been participants in a 2010 “Dvorak and America” Teacher-Training Institute hosted by the Pittsburgh Symphony. Kevin Deas, the eminent African-American bass-baritone, frequently partners my “Dvorak and America” presentations. At Raleigh, Kevin and I offered a “Harry Burleigh Show” for the visiting students at 10:45 in the morning. #

In Chapel Hill, on the campus of the University of North Carolina, there was both an orchestral concert and an ancillary event featuring chamber music, and Burleigh songs and spirituals. #

The orchestra itself, a spirited and disciplined group, undertook this typical week of travel and performance without apparent fatigue. The music director, Grant Llewellyn, happens to be Welsh and yet is a fit. It matters that the pleasure he takes in the orchestra’s unusual mission is at all times palpable. He likes people. He gravitates to students. The message that he and the musicians convey is “We’re happy to be here.” The orchestra’s unusual mandate, which could prove a burden, instead functions as a beacon: it focuses and inspires the institution. #

The NSSO “Dvorak and America” events were part of a $300,000 National Endowment for the Humanities project called “Music Unwound.” NEH funds paid for free student tickets, busses for school groups, and teaching materials – as well as the extra personnel (host David Hartmann, video artist Peter Bogadnoff, myself as producer/writer) and technical requirements (screens, stand-lights) the concerts demanded. The project next travels to the Pacific Symphony Youth Orchestra (where it’s partnered by an elementary school and four high schools) and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (where the partners include an art museum). Few Americans have any idea what the NEH does. (Mitt Romney favors its termination.) Would that more orchestras undertook a humanities mandate, linking to literature, film, visual art, and history; and to high schools, universities, and museums. The NEH is there to help – for now. #