Conductor Humor

After my last, long rant on texting at symphonic concerts – I think it’s time to lighten up. Conductors notoriously take themselves too seriously. I guess it goes with the territory. But orchestral players have never been shy about putting conductors in their place. After all, as the saying goes: “The stick makes no sound” – which is not really true because the silent gestures we make on the podium do, in fact, influence the sound for better…or worse. But the point players are making is: “It is WE, the players, who actually produce the sounds, not that person waving the baton.”

How do professional orchestra musicians express their conductor humor? Well, first, there are the things they write in the parts they are playing from. If a conductor has a “tick” or a banal gesture repeatedly physically expressed, players have been known to make tally marks (IIII) in the parts during rehearsals. The same goes for keeping track of the number of times a conductor says the same unnecessary, inane remark.

When orchestral parts are rental material, one often finds a compendium of remarks that have accumulated in the parts over the course of performances by various orchestras around the world. I remember when I was playing in the viola section of one of the professional orchestras (name withheld to protect the guilty) I worked for over my playing career, a rented set of parts was on the stands that had just previously been used by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The music was a technically challenging contemporary work. One very difficult passage for the violas had the following message in the margin: “Fake it – Seiji Ozawa,” who had presided over the Chicago performances. My stand partner added in pencil: “Play EVERY NOTE!” – with the attribution to our music director who had just said that in rehearsal.

Then there are the jokes themselves. Some are vicious. When I moved to New York City in 1975, it wasn’t long before I heard the ‘New York Freelance Musician Conductor Joke’ – “What are three dead conductors floating face down in the Hudson River? A start.” Then there is the light bulb joke that I’ve also heard attributed to sopranos. “How many conductors does it take to change a light bulb? Three. One to change the light bulb. One to pull the ladder out from under the one changing the light bulb, and one to criticize this entire performance.” Some are slightly off color. I will partially sanitize here. “What is the difference between a symphony orchestra and a bull? A bull has the horns in the front and the ass in the back.”

My all-time favorite conductor joke? This one speaks more than any other to the love-hate relationship players have with conductors as expressed in their desire to look at the conductor as little as possible. “Just before curtain time at the opera, the house manager peers out from the wings to see that there is no conductor on the podium. Quickly getting on the phone he says: ‘Are there any assistant conductors in the house?’ ‘Nope’ comes the reply. Desperate, the house manager shouts into the pit: ‘Anyone down there who could conduct Tosca tonight?’ One violist (another reason I love this joke) starts waving his bow yelling: ‘I know it from memory. I can do it!’ ‘Get on the podium’ barks the house manager. And so the violist conducts a brilliant performance of Puccini’s Tosca – from memory, as promised. The next night, the violist sits down in his chair in the pit, and his stand partner turns to him and says: ‘Where were you last night?’”

If this is not enough for you, feel free to visit this website: Things People Said – Eugene Ormandy Quotes. Here you will find a totally bizarre collection of things Maestro Ormandy said over the years of his long tenure in Philadelphia, as lovingly documented by the members of that esteemed orchestra.

Does it take a lot of chutzpah to stand in front of an assemblage of Juilliard, Curtis, Oberlin, etc. graduates – all highly trained, accomplished artists who each expect you to know EVERY line of the score as well as each of them knows their own single line? You bet it does. It also helps not to take yourself so seriously!

Secrets of Conducting

We know what you’re thinking!  Who is “we?”  We conductors know what many audience members are thinking when you attend our performances. From your perspective, it looks like a lion taming act!

The all-knowing, all-powerful maestro is cueing everyone in the orchestra. Small gestures, a tiny flick of a wrist, elicit gigantic changes in the volume level of the sound.

Yes, we know what you’re thinking…and some of us conductors may have even harbored similar notions about conducting when we were children or adolescents.  But!  When the moment came for us to actually play in a symphony orchestra (and many conductors began their professional lives as orchestral musicians), we learned one of the first secrets of conducting!  If you played in your high school orchestra or any other orchestra – you undoubtedly learned this yourself.  

The musicians actually make the sounds. And in order to do this effectively, they must first obey Itzhak Perlman’s dictum: “The most important thing to do is really listen.”  And by this, Maestro Perlman was not referring to the kind of listening as appreciators we teach at The Discovery Orchestra.

In order to perform well in an ensemble – whether there are two musicians or one hundred musicians – one must constantly listen to oneself and the other musicians simultaneously.  The brain becomes highly trained to instantly recognize tiny discrepancies in intonation.  “Am I playing ‘in tune’ with everyone else?”  And the body instantly responds by fixing any issues.

Equally important: “Am I in exact sync with everyone else?”  This is the phenomenon musicians refer to as ‘ensemble.’   Are we performing ‘as one’ rhythmically?  Again, we know what you’re thinking.  “Isn’t the conductor beating time?”   Yes, of course.  But all the time beating in the world won’t help one hundred musicians perform ‘as one’ if they are not really listening to each other – or if they are not motivated to do so.

Now we’re delving into the area of inspiration.  What makes a conductor inspiring to players?  Many attributes – most of which are transmitted during the rehearsals that precede the performance.  These attributes include, but are by no means limited to: a profound knowledge of the score,

reliable conducting technique, and perhaps most important, really passionate convictions and feelings about the music. 

I know that last one sounds ridiculously obvious.  But if a conductor does not have a really moving interpretation of the music that can be transmitted in a myriad of ways during the rehearsal period, professional players may not be motivated to really listen to each other.  And far worse, they may never feel like ‘putting out’ – giving the performance ‘their all.’

One final secret.  All the musicians in the orchestra have their own egos. This is as true for the last stand 2^nd violinist as it is for the principal oboist.

I will never forget a session with my conducting teacher Richard Johannes Lert, an Austrian who was 96 when I studied with him.  His pedigree was impressive; Richard Strauss had been one of his teachers.

Here were ten young conductors in one of our first meetings with the old maestro.  Typical of young conductors, we were probably waiting for Dr. Lert to tell us the secret of controlling an orchestra.  Instead, he said softly in his Austrian accent: “When you come to the rehearsal, before you begin…look at the first oboist, look at one of the members of the viola section, look at the first horn.  And in your eyes communicate: ‘What wonderful thing do you have to say about this music as you play today’?”

Richard Lert, whom Johannes Brahms had bounced on his knee when Richard was a child, was saying to us that we should make every player in that orchestra feel that they are important and valued.  What a concept! Think on these things the next time you attend a performance.

Can We Really Multitask And Listen?

An article in symphony THE MAGAZINE OF THE LEAGUE OF AMERICAN ORCHESTRAS definitely caught my attention.  The Quest for Generational Diversity by Harvey Felder is an informative article that begins: “To connect with younger audiences, orchestras must understand and embrace the values of Generations X and Y.”  There is much of interest presented here by Maestro Felder and well worth reading.  There are lots of really good ideas for reaching these two generations.

“For multitasking Generations X (born 1965-76) and Y (1977-98), there must be multiple layers, all designed to broaden the experience beyond what has been thought of as sufficient for a symphony concert.  Consider the baseball fan who brings a portable radio or television to a game…The fan now has access to a stream of information he or she will miss by merely observing the game without electronic enhancement. In the concert hall, some Generation X and Y audience members undoubtedly would find the concert experience more attractive if they were offered a stream of information about the event they are witnessing.”

At The Discovery Orchestra, we have certainly found that audience members of Generations X and Y as well as those born well before 1965 have benefited from our listening guides that are first used as an exploration tool and then visually followed during the performance.   Our staff has discussed streaming the guides electronically at concerts – and we may well experiment with that in the near future. Our audience members tell us the listening guides help - and why?  Our listening guides encourage audience members to notice more detail and stay focused in the music!   As I said in my previous blog The Invisibility of Music “…a movement of music by Beethoven or Bach is delivered to us in time…the intent of the composer is always to have a continuous, non-stop presentation of their musical ideas.”  These musical ‘events’ – be they a chord change or an ascending sequence – are meant to be noticed and emotionally experienced as they occur in real time, one after the other.   If I stop to read the contributor’s list – let alone send or receive a text message – I risk missing some of these events as well as their relationship to musical ideas that occurred earlier.

Maestro Felder goes on to say: “Conversation, of course, must be curtailed during a concert, since it competes with the sonic creation emanating from the stage. But written (emphasis mine) communication and silent video screens can co-exist with live music.”  Here, he appears to be concerned with not disturbing audience members who are just listening.  He continues: “Problems may arise when the interactive style of Generations X and Y interferes with the listening style of other audience members.  One easy solution is to designate a section of the concert hall ‘silent mobile device friendly’ allowing the virtual community to engage in the multitasking and interactivity that is second nature to them.” 

I must respectfully disagree.  Rather than ‘styles’ of listening, I believe we are all consciously capable of applying variable degrees of attentiveness while listening.  At the bottom of the dial, we notice almost nothing except that there is perhaps a musical sound in the background which we are hearing while we do or think other things.  At the upper end is that state of attentiveness in which we are so present with the music that we notice every detail in the sounds we are hearing as they occur.  It is not so much having electronic mobile devices that worries me, especially if they were receiving a streamed listening guide.  What concerns me is the “multitasking and interactivity that is second nature to them” – as in texting.

Written communication and silent video screens may be able to ‘co-exist’ with live music.  However, people creating written communications with other device-users on and off the concert site – even if seated in a protective area where their lights and flashes will not disturb others – will likely miss, while texting, that one incredible re-harmonization of the melody which Rachmaninoff had calculated to be ‘the point’ or moment of greatest emotional intensity in the movement – not to mention a myriad of other musical details along the way. 

Is going to a baseball game an equivalent experience to going to a concert and listening to a Beethoven sonata?  I’m absolutely certain that Maestro Felder would not assert that.  But to emphasize my point…at the game, we watch the pitcher, and then we take a bite of our hotdog, then have a sip of soda, then call a friend on our cell phone. We do all these things because we can and it doesn’t matter in all of that ambient noise!  Even if we miss an entire half inning of play while we visit the restroom, it still doesn’t matter. But if we miss that one chord change as it happens in its unique moment in time, Rachmaninoff might say we would not understand the entire movement.  We might feel bad if missed seeing the grand slam while we were in the restroom – but we would still know the score, understand the game and enjoy the day at the ballpark!  At the concert, we have only that one precious moment to perceive that chord in its context.

I don’t believe that one would ever suggest we have a special ‘silent mobile device friendly’ section of a Broadway theater in which people could blissfully text each other while missing crucial dialogue lines of an Arthur Miller play.  How would these ‘texters’ understand the plot?  Is a symphonic movement not similar to an act of a play except that the information is all being conveyed in wordless abstract sound?

  

Understand we must, but rather than completely “embrace the values of Generations X and Y” perhaps orchestras should challenge those values.  There are individuals in the field of neuroscience who hold that we actually cannot multitask, that multitasking is a myth.  They maintain that even if we are consciously doing many things, our brain is still doing them serially – one at a time.  I’m not a scientist, but I think the dramatic increase in automobile accidents in America has already proven that people should not text and drive cars.  I would also ask: “Are there other life experiences where an instant electronic communication is not appropriate and would perhaps ruin the experience? Would we want to be texting at the precise moment that ice cream enters our mouths and surrounds our taste buds in a sea of pleasurable sensations?  Would we want to be texting a friend at the moment of orgasm?”  Might the act of listening to the music of Mozart or Thelonius Monk be a similar situation - something that just has to be singularly experienced?  

Do orchestras need to help Generations X and Y enjoy the concert experience?  Absolutely!  We know that the percentage of our entire population that regularly listens to classical music and attends live concerts is pitifully small.  Perhaps there is a remedy. How about we just teach Generations X and Y how to listen perceptively to the invisible language of music? We can then let them decide whether they really want to be texting at concerts or just giving their undivided attention to the most important communication in the room – a very intimate emotional exchange from the composer’s soul directly to theirs with an assist from us, the performers.

The Invisibility of Music

Think about this.  Music is invisible.  Yes, it may be there as a background to visual images on television or the movie screen.  And yes, music may cause you to conjure visions in your mind, but it is always delivered to your sound receptors (your ears!) in...invisible wave patterns.

This makes music distinct from painting, sculpture and photographic art.  I occasionally remind my listening students that if they go to an art museum, they may gaze at a Monet painting for a few minutes or even a half hour.  At any time during the process if they wish to look away, they may do so.  The painting is not going anywhere.  It is fixed on the wall of the museum.  You can look back at it again whenever you wish that day – next week or next year!

But a movement of music by Beethoven or Bach is delivered to us in time - real time, one sound or group of sounds at a time and always invisibly.  True, the composer has given us written shorthand for the music, the musical notation read by the performers which they translate into a musical performance.  However, whether the performance is a live one we are attending or a recording being played back to us, it all happens in time.  Of course, if we are controlling the playback we can stop and start it at will and achieve the museum painting’s “not going anywhere” attribute.  But the intent of the composer is always to have a continuous, non-stop presentation of their musical ideas.

The invisible aspect of music is one that has always fascinated my mentor, Dr. Saul Feinberg – so much so that it spawned one of his important contributions to the teaching of music listening.  Why not give listeners - especially new listeners - what he called a ‘picturization’ of the music?  This question led him to create his ‘Blueprints for Musical Understanding’ which inspired my own ‘Listening Guides.’  These visual guides are a vehicle for making an invisible art form visible. 

The guides contain a mixture of brief, numbered descriptions such as: “Trumpets enter loudly,” actual pictorial representations of instruments, musical symbols and tiny segments of musical notation.  All of these numbered events can help the listener follow and ‘stay with’ the music as it invisibly progresses through real time.   Often, after years of listening with full attention, one may well find that listening guides are no longer necessary.  But many of the individuals that Saul taught, as well as the majority of students I have worked with, have said that they found listening guides to be really helpful.

If you never have before, why not give one a try!  Treat yourself to Bach! Discovery Orchestra Chat 56 has one of Saul’s listening guides imbedded in the YouTube clip.  Take a look!

Open Sesame

Do you remember the first time you encountered that phrase?  Perhaps you saw it in an English translation of Antoine Galland’s Les Mille et une nuits (One Thousand and One Nights…the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves). In that case, you might have pronounced it: ‘Open See-same.’

Or perhaps you - like I - just heard some childhood friend say with a magical voice: ‘Open Ses-ah-mee!”  

As much fun as it might be to remember our first experiences with this phrase – still very much a part of English colloquial speech – it is a saying I find myself wanting to use whenever we present Fall in Love with Music, our basic listening course.

But open what?  Open one’s mind, of course.  And so it was a pleasure to read Michael Barrett’s article in Prelude, Fugue & Riffs (News for Friends of Leonard Bernstein Spring/Summer 2016) entitled: High-brow,Low-brow, All-brow Bernstein, Gershwin, Ellington, and the Richness of AmericanMusic. 

Erasing the imaginary boundaries between the genres of music – classical, jazz, pop, Broadway, world, etc. – was a personal mission of Maestro Bernstein, and Michael Barrett credits Maestro Bernstein with helping him to shed those boundaries – the artificial genre borders sometimes actually taught as “Gospel Truth’ to those of us who attended music schools and conservatories in the 20^th century.

The importance of developing and maintaining an open mind is an integral concept of Fall in Love with Music.

In fact, Episode 3 ("Is This Music?”) of our new 8-part television series by the same name, takes up this very topic. 

Composers, whether they might be Mozart or John Lennon, have very open minds.  It is this quality of their personalities that allows them to notice things they like and admire in another composer’s music, and then permits them to restate those things in their own musical vocabularies.  This personality trait is what also gives them the ability to reshape their own ideas in a myriad of ways.

For listeners, it is essential to bring the same degree of open-mindedness to the listening process that composers bring to the composing process. When someone says: “I know what music I like…and I know what music I don’t like”…I worry.  I wonder: “With such a closed-minded attitude, have they really noticed all the wonderful details in the music they think they like?”

One of the composers lauded in Michael Barrett’s article is Duke Ellington.  If you’d like to spend 12 minutes with the great pianist – recorded live at a performance in France in 1966 – view this YouTube performance.

And by the way, Michael Barrett spends plenty of time helping people to understand and appreciate music as the conductor for Jamie Bernstein’s educational concerts.  I wrote a bit about this before in my 2013 blog The Bernstein Legacy. 

You just never know.  If we take the time to become perceptive listeners, noticing detail in music with an open mind…we may find ourselves getting goose bumps from an exceptionally cleverly written 30-second television or radio commercial jingle!

Is Classical Music Dying? Part 2

In a March 2011 blog post I posed the question: "Is classical music dying?" My thoughts mostly concerned the precarious financial condition of many of America's professional symphony orchestras...a condition that, sadly, has improved only a little in the interim.  In the concluding paragraph I answered my own question. “I’d like to think that, were there just one human being left on the planet who was moved by this music, the flame would still flicker. Thankfully, there are yet many appreciators. But we must not kid ourselves — most of the US population remains largely uninvolved with this music because they simply don’t know how affected by it they could be!” This also, sadly, remains true. But, thankfully, all of us who passionately care about classical music may breathe one collective sigh of relief. That relief may be summed up in two words: ‘El Sistema.’

For more than a decade I’ve gotten to know musicians who were products of Venezuela’s incredible music educational program/social safety net known as El Sistema. Yet, to my own detriment, I failed to comprehend the full impact of this movement, that is, until I read Tricia Tunstall’s book: Changing Lives Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema and The Transformative Power of Music (W.W. Norton & Company, 2012).

Changing Lives By Tricia Tunstall

You will be unable to put this book down.

Tricia Tunstall, a writer and music educator who lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, has been a friend and colleague for a number of years. To our delight, Tricia is an ardent fan of The Discovery Orchestra.

I simply had no idea what was really going on — not only in Venezuela, but also around the planet — as the “children” of Jose Antonio Abreu, founder of El Sistema, daily continue to transform the lives of literally hundreds of thousands of individuals. From reading Tricia’s riveting account of her time spent researching this miracle in Venezuela, I do not get the impression that Maestro Abreu was seeking to “save classical music” or keep it from dying. He was engaged in a much more urgent enterprise. He was saving the lives of the impoverished children living in the gang-infested barrios that surround cities such as Caracas, by teaching them to play orchestral instruments and organizing them into music educational dynamo ‘safety zones’ known as núcleos.

The results since this movement began are truly earth shattering and mindboggling. Take a look at this video. Not only have so many lives been transformed …not only have youth orchestras been started, cultivated and brought to such a high level of perfection that their playing rivals that of the greatest professional symphony orchestras … but, while engaged in the process of saving lives, Maestro Abreu and his disciples have insured that ‘the light’ of classical music will not be extinguished! At least not for a very, very long time.

Thank you, Tricia, for chronicling the incredible saga of this now worldwide classical music educational engine for meaningful social change. What a welcome burst of good news in this time of depressing news cycles! I repeat: you will be unable to put this book down. To purchase a copy of this inspiring book, visit Tricia’s website.