“Chanticleer-ed’

It’s the only way I can describe it…’Chanticleer-ed.’ It happened to me earlier this month when I had the privilege of attending ‘A Chanticleer Christmas’ presented at St. Mary’s Abbey at the Benedictine monastery in Morristown, New Jersey.  As I told my wife Marcia when I returned home after the concert: “I was so moved by their performance, you could have scraped me off the floor when it was over.”

I’m a long-time fan of this amazing group of twelve virtuoso male singers who perform primarily without accompaniment, and have a number of their recordings.  I raved about them before in a blog I wrote in December 2014, and so it was a wonderful treat to get to listen to them live, particularly in the Abbey’s acoustics - so ideal for a cappella singing.

Their concert concluded with a short group of traditional Christmas carols chosen by them ‘on the spot’ from a longer list in the printed program.  During the applause that preceded this segment, I said to two friends sitting astride me: “If they do It Came Upon A Midnight Clear I’ll need a box of Kleenex.” (Maullese for “I’ll be moved to tears.”)  When, after several selections, they began to sing “It Came Upon…” I got poked in the ribs from both sides, and the tears began to flow, just as I had anticipated.

Why am I so moved by this carol and this arrangement in particular?  It partly has a lot to do with my childhood.  It was my grandfather Howard Jordan’s favorite carol.  I can still see and hear him and my grandmother singing it together as she played the piano in our home. That memory alone might be enough to commence the waterworks for this aging, sentimental musician.

 

Maestro Maull's house where carols were sung.

The carol was written in the mid-1800’s, the text by a Massachusetts Unitarian clergyman, Edmund Sears, and the melody by a student of Mendelssohn, Richard Storrs Willis. Chanticleer’s rendition, composed by their Grammy-winning former music director Joseph Jennings, is incredible.  Perfectly suited to the impeccable dynamic control, blend and intonation of the members of Chanticleer, Jennings’ treatment – a gentle amalgam of barbershop and vocal jazz influences - maintains the original core material, yet bathes this familiar, haunting melody with harmonies that are at once unexpected and beautiful.  Sears’ poetry is a reflection on peace in the midst of the chaos caused by human beings’ inherent difficulty in getting on with one another…peace always being a good place to mentally, if not in practice, visit.

If It Came Upon A Midnight Clear is an old favorite of yours, or completely new to you, why not give yourself a 4 ½-minute break from the craziness of the season, and listen to Chanticleer sing Joseph Jennings’ stunning arrangement.   You can follow the text if you like by scrolling down in the Wikipedia article.  Of the original five verses, Jennings’ arrangement makes use of verses 1, 3 and 5. 

Art for Life’s Sake

On the evening of Monday, April 8, 2013 cellist Yo-Yo Ma delivered the Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.  He called his presentation ‘Art for Life’s Sake.’  It is well worth the one-hour view on YouTube. Mr. Ma chose to end this address with a listening lesson for the audience.

I repeat. Mr. Ma chose to end this address with a listening lesson for the audience.

Why did he choose to do this?  He had, after all, most eloquently presented the case for the importance of art in our lives with wonderful musical demonstrations, impressive statistical results and inspiring words.  As he said in the summation of his main points:

“Societies are powered by three engines: politics, economics and culture. A vibrant society exists when all three engines are firing and intersecting, resulting in a populace that is energized, engaged and fulfilled. Our collective work in the arts is not just relevant, but essential to strengthening our culture and positively influencing society. Thus: ‘Art for Life's Sake.’  The arts are the way to foster the four critical skills necessary for our children to succeed in the 21st-century workforce: collaboration, flexibility, imagination, innovation.”

Yet, he chose to end the entire presentation by playing a Bach unaccompanied Sarabande – but before doing so Mr. Ma gave us a beautiful listening lesson which I encourage you to experience for yourself.  Why did he give us this listening lesson?

He did so because he understands that it is only by giving our undivided presence and attention to music that we, as listeners, truly become one with the music – noticing and being moved by the music’s detail as it unfolds.  It is only by listening, and not merely physically hearing, that we can receive the deepest benefits which music may impart.  And this is, of course, why the board, staff and members of The Discovery Orchestra are totally committed to fostering a national ‘listening conspiracy’ to encourage truly attentive listening among the members of our society.

On a personal note before beginning the lesson, Mr. Ma commented that he has played this Sarabande for his friends both on happy occasions such as weddings and on sad ones such as memorial services. One might say that he takes the enormous emotional-spiritual power of music with him wherever he goes…be it the concert hall or the hospital.  I can personally verify that this is true.  When my niece Rachel Simon, just out of college, was first treated in a Boston hospital for leukemia, Yo-Yo Ma appeared one day to play for one of his friends who, like Rachel, was very ill in the room across the hall.  Mr. Ma graciously included Rachel in this most intimate audience.  Many years later, after Rachel’s death, my wife Marcia and I saw Mr. Ma following a New Jersey performance. When Marcia identified herself as Rachel’s aunt he immediately embraced her, all three of us crying, unable to speak, so powerful was the memory of that occasion back in Boston.   ‘Art for life’s sake’ indeed!

The Discovery Orchestra applauds Mr. Ma for choosing to elevate the act of listening at a national forum in our country’s capitol.  As he said: “Our collective work in the arts is not just relevant, but essential to…positively influencing society.”  Listening is the key that unlocks the life-affirming power of music.  We cannot all be performers like Yo-Yo Ma.  Most of us will not be musical performers at all…but we all can become perceptive music listeners, the result of a conscious decision on our part that will change our lives forever.

Two Visits in Four Days

On Steve Hoffman Music Forums there’s an interesting conversation going on around the topic: Is it OK to NOT like classical music?  For a look at the thread, click on this link. We might also ask: “Is it OK to not like sushi, broccoli, rice cakes, Robert DeNiro films…the list could go on ad infinitum.  I personally feel it’s OK to not like anything under the sun – you fill in the blank.  Who is better qualified - beside you – to be the arbiter of your tastes and preferences?  But I think we might be asking the wrong question.

To me a better question is: “Is it OK to NOT notice detail in the world around us?”  The answer here might be “Perhaps it’s really not OK to NOT notice detail in the world around us.”  If we’re talking about the difference between red and green traffic lights, failure to notice this particular detail might prove fatal – an event made easily possible by texting while driving!

Certainly, failure to notice detail in music will not lead to fatalities. It’s more like the difference between looking at our world through corrective lenses that help us see every beautiful aspect of that flower garden instead of a pleasant, blurry array of color.  Whether we like the flower garden or not is a decision we can make as we gaze on every subtle detail of the rose petals.  But lacking this precise view of things, any decision we make will be based on inadequate information. 

One of the thoughts expressed in this forum recounts the familiar generational argument. “The overall popularity and sales of classical music, especially of the stuff made before, say, the 50s, is diminishing, and that is no accident, as the generation that classical music is culturally relevant to is dying off.  And younger generations, starting with WWII baby-boomers, have other types of music they are interested in, such as jazz or blues.  By the way, many of the same arguments for jazz and blues are similar to the ones for classical, and I'm starting to see hints of it with rock vs. hip-hop music as well.  So, I'm wondering if it is a generational thing where the aging generation is trying to assert their cultural identity in a last gasp before it passes into history.”

As I have said in a previous blog, for me - the ‘when was it written’ aspect of a musical composition is completely irrelevant.  If we receive, with an open mind, each piece of music we encounter as a singular event to be taken or left on its own merits, it doesn’t really matter whether it was written yesterday or one thousand years ago.  If we like it – we like it – just like a piece of jewelry or pottery.  If a ring catches our eye’s fancy, it doesn’t matter if it was crafted last month or two hundred years ago.

I personally use one standard for deciding whether I like an individual musical work regardless whether it is rock, pop, classical, sacred, vulgar, old, new, etc.  If I listen to it, that is, give my undivided attention to it – enough times – to absorb and understand its rhythms, melodies, textures, harmonies, dynamics, timbres and form…if I still don’t like it then it’s OK! 

Maestro Maull with some of the campers
 and staff from Camp YDP, Paterson, New Jersey

Over the course of four days, I’ve paid two visits to Paterson, New Jersey – one visit to the young people at the Camp YDP after school program and the other to be with the students in the Paterson Music Project, modeled after the El Sistema program imported from Venezuela.  As we listened together to music – with an emphasis on noticing detail – we did not speak of when the music was written.  We barely spoke of who wrote the music.  But I can tell you that the YDP campers had no problem recognizing a repeating melody.  And more than a few of the young string players of the Paterson Music Project quickly noticed when I played the ‘wrong music’ on purpose – just to make sure they were really listening to and not just hearing the music.

Did these 2^nd through 8^th grade students enjoy the music of Vivaldi and Bach?  They seemed to.  I never mentioned that it was classical music or that it was nearly three hundred years old!  It was just enjoyable music.  I wonder what the response would have been had I begun my presentation with these words: “Today we’re going to listen to some classical music.  It is ‘GREAT MUSIC’ and because it is considered to be ‘GREAT MUSIC’ – you should pay attention and you should like it!”  

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.

How Shall We Study Music?

Last week I was given the privilege of speaking at a conference on the campus of Princeton University presented by the New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association and the Foundation for Educational Administration.  The three-day event was underwritten by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

The conference theme, Using Arts-Infused Instruction to Enhance NJ’s Learning Standards, provided all of the artist-speakers with an opportunity to advocate for just how their art form can be used to advance the core curriculum standards of New Jersey’s Public Schools.

I am product of public education.  While it’s true that I received a very intense music education at St. Peter’s Choir School in Philadelphia, grades 4-7, the remainder of my secondary education was in a public school – Abraham Lincoln High School.  The musical studies and activities offered at Lincoln were typical for the 1960’s.

The emphasis was on teaching music performance.  There were two concert choirs, a chamber choir, two small chamber choral ensembles, two concert bands, a marching band, a jazz band, two orchestras…and an annual musical.  Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?  But, for 5,000 total students, these ensembles involved a bit more than 500 students or 10% of the student body.

What was atypical at Lincoln, compared to any of Philadelphia’s other high schools at the time, was the presence of Saul Feinberg, my mentor. Using the two-year general music requirement, Saul taught aesthetic music listening skills (as opposed to music performance listening skills) to the remaining 90% of the student body.

How should we teach music?  Music instruction offered in schools should ideally mirror the three basic musical behaviors – creating (composing or improvising), performing and listening (from an aesthetic viewpoint.) 

In a perfect world, all students in school would receive instruction in composing/improvising, performing and listening.  Each year, from Kindergarten through Middle School, very specific standards could be set for each grade level. 

For example, by the end of 1^st grade, every child will: be able to improvise in song or on an Orff xylophone a simple ostinato (creation); be able to sing a simple melody transmitted in Kodaly hand signals (performance); be able to recognize a simple ternary form (listening). 

Such a curriculum would produce a musically literate society, capable of performing, reading and inventing music – and most importantly – emotionally connecting with and appreciating, as listeners, the greatest music our society has produced regardless of genre – classical, jazz, pop, world or era – ­from medieval to the present.

But we don’t live in an ideal world.  And in the very real world of schools, many music curriculums are entirely performance oriented or nearly so.

Music education means: little children with violins in hand; kids singing in choirs and playing in bands; and performing in annual Broadway shows.

And all of that is very important, and not to be taken for granted where it exists – given the cuts to arts programs that we have experienced in recent decades.

But, short of offering comprehensive music education (encompassing all three musical behaviors), might we consider offering aesthetic music listening to all students, performers and non-performers alike?  This is what I proposed to my audience of Principals and Supervisors in Princeton.

We have some follow-up planned.  Stay tuned.

The Annual Recital

A few weeks ago I attended the annual recital of my wife Marcia’s piano students, who range in age from six to eighteen.  Annual student piano recitals have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My mother Helen taught in our home in Philadelphia, just as Marcia now does here in Bedminster.  The weekly parade of children sometimes seems to me like the only real constant in my life!

There is also my recollection of my personal feelings about participating in these recitals throughout my own career as a piano student. A mixture of exhilaration, dread, pride, abject terror and sheer joy in performing attended these recitals from the time of being one of my mother’s students all the way through music school, when my formal piano lessons ended.

The annual recital of a class of piano students is, however, much more than my own memories of them as a participant.  Attending one of them as an audience member gives one a very different perspective.

These events give every young instrumentalist a goal to aim toward.  And in listening to Marcia’s students, it was obvious that they all really took some sort of quantum leap that evening.  That, in itself, is a very worthwhile moment to have in one’s life.

How do I know this?  I have eavesdropped on their lessons – to a degree – all year long leading up to the big evening!  I know how “Jennie” had previously been performing Edvard Grieg’s Elfin Tanz.  At the recital she was positively transformed!   An opportunity to reinvent oneself…wow!

It was also nice to see how well these young people had been trained – by Marcia – to calmly walk to the keyboard and bow from the waist, acknowledging the initial applause.  Ah ha!  The annual recital also includes lessons in poise.

But perhaps one of the greatest gifts of preparing oneself for a recital appearance is having the chance to deal with the unexpected.  I have heard Marcia say to her students in a lesson:  “You know that you will not be able to stop playing in this spot in the recital.  So – if you make that same mistake - what will you do?”  And in this manner she prepares her students to “think on their feet” or “think on their hands” as it were.  “How can I improvise myself out of this problem and go on?”  That is an invaluable skill to learn and applicable to many situations in life.

So the next time you think you are just providing your daughter or son with piano lessons…think again!