Daniel Levitin and I have been meeting in various locations these past few weeks putting our Intersections show together. It’s called “Beethoven & Your Brain.” (See it in October in Kitchener-Waterloo or Koerner Hall in Toronto) It’s basically one of many possible ways to look carefully at this great composer’s music and how it works. What we’re finding is that when you look at the effect Beethoven’s music has on us from a biological/neurological/primal level, music becomes less of a “thing” and more of a “process.” And that really, you don’t need to be an expert to experience this music in a profound way.

One of our first exercises was that we sat across from each other at a table and wrote 10-minute blurbs on what we knew about. I wrote about “Beethoven” and Daniel wrote about “Brain.” It’s interesting to see where our ideas intersect. Here are the blurbs.

BEETHOVEN

What’s great about LvB?

I think it’s extraordinary the way LvB grabs the listener with his music. There’s a sense of profound emotion, human drama — even to the point of violence — in his music. Somehow when you listen to a work like the Fifth Symphony you immediately know that the emotional stakes are very high. He does this by creating a sense of momentum and turbulence in his music that can still shake up audiences hundreds of years later. There are so many kinds of music in life that one might call “polite:” music that soothes us and makes us comfortable and happy. But Beethoven’s music is not polite; it is full of fervent questioning and takes nothing for granted. He stretches form, structure, and even sound to the absolute limit. So if you know a lot about classical music you get the sense that he almost wants to destroy it. If you don’t know about classical music, you still get the sense of drama and urgency through its sheer physicality.

Take the beginning of the Fifth Symphony for instance. Though we all know how it goes, those first few notes retain their ability to shock. That’s because Beethoven writes an indeterminate hold – a fermata – on the fourth note of his famous statement. How long this note should be held is left to the conductor. There are many other such moments in the piece. But underlying it all is a tremendous pulse and groove that counteracts the instability. It is Beethoven’s ability to balance the predictable and the unstable in just the right way that makes him great.

When I conduct Beethoven’s music, more than any other composer’s, it is as if I can feel his spirit reaching out to me. Though we know that he had a difficult, irascible personality, he craves an intimate connection with his listeners through his music. He felt that his deafness prevented him from being him from being intimate with others. Yet for one hundred and fifty years he has made profound connections with countless listeners. It’s uncanny, like this poem by Keats.

This Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

BRAIN

Expectation

Expectation is everything in music. The brain is a giant prediction device. Whether we realize it or not – whether we’re aware of it or not – it’s working hard to figure out what’s going to happen next. There’s an obvious evolutionary/adaptive advantage to this – if a lion is in the area, you need to be able to accurately predict which direction he’s headed. If a potential mate is looking at you a certain way, you have to know whether this means “come hither” or “get lost” (or “not now - my boyfriend is watching, but come back later”). In music, we hear a few notes and our brains are already trying to figure out what’s going to come next.
A “good” piece of music rewards those expectations by meeting them at least some of the time, but also violates them sometimes in interesting ways. Why? If the music meets all of your expectations, and does exactly what you think it will, it’s boring. We reject as too simple, like “Barney the dinosaur” music.” If it never meets your expectations, never conforms to your predictions, it’s frustrating because you have no frame of reference, no grounding; you’re disoriented. So the job of the composer is to hit that sweet spot, to meet your expectations some of the time, and violate your expectations in interesting ways the rest of the time. When the composer gets that balance just right, you end up liking the piece. And if the composer can complete a musical phrase in a way that sounds better to you than anything you could ever have ever imagined – well, then he’s got you and that’s a piece of music you can enjoy for the rest of your life.
Another aspect to expectation has to do with momentum. Skillful composers set up expectations and momentum, making you want to hear more.

©2010 Daniel J Levitin

This week I conduct Carmina Burana with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. It’s the big closing to our season! It’s epic, it will have the Grand Philharmonic choir, three great Canadian soloists, and more! It will sell a lot of tickets, people will dig it. There’s just one problem.

I kind of detest Carmina Burana.

How can I explain this? Let’s just say I look at this piece the way Werner Herzog looks at a shark attack.

I find this piece kind of “eroticizes” and makes pretty some nasty things that we human animals do. I’m not even going to get into the fact that this piece was written in 1930’s Germany (whoops, I just did). Now that may not really be fair. A lot of art eroticizes violence and makes it pretty, and I like quite a bit of it. Maybe I personally can deal with it in the movies (Quentin Tarantino, etc.) but get a little queasy when it gets mixed up with orchestras. Maybe orchestras are my mental and moral territory for the higher aspirations of humanity. Maybe it’s my problem. But the fact remains: Carmina Burana rubs me the wrong way. It’s creeps me out.

All of this however, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t conduct it or program it. Whether I like it or not, this piece gets my mind and emotions going. In fact, in all of my years watching concerts and being behind the scenes, I’ve found that sometimes artists do the worst performances of the the music they care about the most. They overthink and get lost in the details. On the other hand, when a performer has an ambivalent relationship with a work, truly fascinating things can happen in the performance.

So what am I going to do with Carmina Burana? First, I’m going pair it with a piece of music that also has a lot of banging and clanging, but celebrates PEACE and BEAUTY (Colin McPhee’s Tabuh-Tabuhan).

Second, I’m gonna go really primal with the Orff. And my hope is that it will creep you out too.

So I’ve been obsessing about this recently: a cup of coffee has been DESCRIBED as a “cacophony of nuance.” This cup of coffee costs $12. A friend of mine actually tasted it and joked that it tasted like “a Bartók string quartet in his mouth.” Another mentioned a sign he saw for coffee recently that said “Taste the Aroma!”

The point is — it’s really hard to talk about coffee and/or music! And the “cacophony of nuance” pretty much sums that up. There is some music that is a cacophony of nuance I suppose. Would anyone like to try a cup of Unsuk Chin? It’s a Korean made coffee made in Germany and it’s a wonderful blend of Hungarian and French roasts. Hyper-complex with a hint of D Major here and there. It’s a CACOPHONY OF NUANCE!

Anyway it’s hard to talk about music and coffee, and it’s hard to know what you’re buying if you are a music or coffee customer. Recently I walked into Chicago’s famed Intelligentsia Coffee in search of new flavor. I had gone through a pound of Serra do Bonè: Brazil and it wasn’t working for me. But when I tried to describe what I didn’t like about it, I was at a loss for words, because I didn’t know the COFFEE LINGO. I was like, “it was kind of sour.” And the barista guy was all, “??” I should have read the label on my airtight coffee bag (it pushes the air out if you squeeze it, really quite cool). “Creamy and decadent, with a chocolate truffle focus. Dried raspberries add dimension to the otherwise soft acidity.” Very descriptive, no? But it’s Bad English again. The first sentence isn’t even a sentence. Also, I don’t know what dried raspberries taste like! Has anyone ever had one? Anyway, we know this kind of thing from wine lingo. I asked the barista guy for something a “little less fruity” and “more bitter.” He told me that Intlligentsia Coffee is “really trying to steer their customers away from that taste” but nonetheless recommended Black Cat Classic Espresso noting that it “wasn’t really an espresso.” “This syrupy sweet espresso blend has been the staple of our lineup since the very beginning. Supreme balance and a wonderful sweetness make this a classic.” It’s syrupy, sweet (so sweet they say it twice) and balanced (what is the syrupy sweetness balanced with?), and it’s great because we say it’s great! These descriptions don’t help. They’re vague and subjective, but perhaps they’re good marketing tools, I don’t know.

What I wonder about is what happens when a PATRON calls my wonderful orchestra’s PATRON SERVICES (1-888-745-4717 call now!) DEPARTMENT and asks about the music? What do they say? In that coffee shop I bet I felt like lots of our audience members! Orchestra marketing is way more friendly and stays away from the whole “Intelligentsia” angle in general. You’re not gonna hear “We’re really trying to steer our patrons away from Tchaikovsky and more towards R. Murray Schafer.” But maybe we should do that! It might be fun to try. When I look through our current brochure, I see only one description that really gets into “coffee description” territory. And that’s for a concert we’re doing with Dan Deacon.

“Dan Deacon’s music is simultaneously dance party, electronic odyssey, minimalist magnum opus, and childhood gone horribly right.”

I have no idea at all what that means, but I’ll have a cup of that.

I think I’m going to start getting into this! Composer descriptions that read like the ones on my coffee bags! We could do it for performers too! It might be really fun! I’m sure before long it will reach a crescendo, but the only casualty will be the English language! Let’s go!

Reader, I am about to leave for a tech rehearsal for our Music & Food concert tonight at the KW Symphony. We’ll be playing the music, and my favorite (or favourite, since I’m in Canada) local restaurant, Nick & Nat’s Uptown 21 will be doing the food! Btw. Nick and Nat, great theme music on your website. Anyway, I’ve never heard of anyone doing a concert like this, so I’m xcited!!!

There might be standing room for tonight; there are a few tickets available for Friday.  Get them at www.kwsymphony.ca.

What’s on the (musical) menu?

Raymond Scott: Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals
Per Nørgard: Pastorale from Babette’s Feast
Shostakovich: Tahiti Trot (Tea for Two)
Vaughan-Williams: “March Past of the Kitchen Utensils” from The Wasps
John Estacio: “The Harversters” from A Farmer’s Symphony

-intermission-

Cole Porter arr. E. Outwater: “The Tale of the Oyster”
Lee Hoiby: Bon Apetit
Strawberry Alarm Clock arr. Nicole Lizée: Incense and Peppermint

What food will be served:  Well that’s a surprise!

By the way — did you know that orchestras basically started as accompaniments to Grand Feasts.  For real! I read this in the scholarly tome The Birth of the Orchestra. You can read about it through the link on page 41!

Check out this feast for the archbishop of Milan in 1529 for instance …

1st course:

Food: Sea bream, boiled sturgeon in garlic sauce, pike entrails fried w/ oranges, cinnamon, and sugar.

Music: 3 trombones & 3 cornets

2nd course:

Food: Cream-filled French Pastries, artichokes, olives, fermented apples, oyster pies

Music :3 flutes, 3 bagpipes, 1 violone.

17th Course:

Food: Candied Orange & Lemon Rinds, Ices, Nougat w/ mounds of cinnamon, pine nuts, pistachios, melon seeds

Music: 6 singers, 6 viols, lira, 3 flutes, kit fiddle (sordina), trombone, lute, zittern, 2 keyboards.

Wow! It’s snowy in Canada right now! Which is good for me because I need to stay inside and work work work. The thing I love about cold weather is that it gives me a great excuse to stay in and read & study and look out at the snow falling. I couldn’t be happier doing this, and though I miss California, pondering music while the snow falls is a real bonus.

Today I’m between concerts — doing some serious studying in the next few days — preparing for our Music & Food concert next week and then in a few weeks a rather daunting program of Barber 1st Symphony, Adams Dr. Atomic Symphony, and the Unsuk Chin Piano Concerto w/ BBC Wales followed by a few days in London.

This week is a concert of music I totally love. I can get bored with the overture, concerto, symphony concert format and like to explore different ways of presenting music to the people. It’s Italian music this week, starting with Monteverdi in 1610 and going all the way through Nino Rota, with Verdi, Rossini, and Vivaldi on the way. The KWS is switching on a dime from Baroque, to Classical, to Grand Opera to lush film music, and I’m quite impressed with that. I don’t believe that an orchestra should have a SOUND. I think it should have many, depending on what we’re playing. That doesn’t mean that an orchestra might not become known for a certain sound, because every orchestra (and artist) does some things better than others, so that’s what they become known for.

What strikes me about Italian music conducting this concert with such a huge timeline is the exquisite coloration of melody. Like the florid violin and trumpet duets in Monteverdi, or the simultaneous melodic arco/pizz in the Vivaldi or the cello ensemble that opens the William Tell Overture, or the absolutely perfect and noble combination of solo cello/bassoon/bass clarinet in Verdi’s Ballet Music from Macbeth. And then within these colors, there are other colors as certain notes open up and shine, while others are dark and smoky, all done without calling too much attention to itself. Is there anything more beautiful than music like this?

Ok — now for some ANNOUNCEMENTS! We have a new season coming up at the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and we’ve just released all the info!

You can find out about it HERE!

We’ve got some amazing soloists like James Ehenes, Measha Breuggergosman, Alban Gerhardt, and Kirill Gerstein.

Our Intersections series features three people named Dan! Daniel Levitin, who will be creating a show with me called Beethoven & Your Brain, Daniel Handler who is narrating HK Gruber’s Frankenstein!! and curating the concert, and Dan Deacon, who is driving a bus full of Baltimore people up here to create an electronic/orchestra Cage/Ives/etc. influenced extravaganza! Read about it right HERE.

My only regret about next season is that we couldn’t get this guy:

This pretty much says it all. I believe this is the son of my friend and colleague Larry Loh!  Please please please do not miss the end. No conductor has ever dared to end the Rite this way, but it’s so … right!

This put a smile on my face!

It appears that The Composer is Dead is the 5th most performed piece written in the 21st century! This from Norman Lebrecht’s BLOG.

[Full disclosure: I premiered and recorded the piece]

I’m not surprised actually. Here’s why I think certain new works get performed a lot:

1. They’re good.

2. They’re not expensive to perform (esp. w/r/t extra musicians).

3. The are unique.

4. Audiences like them.

I don’t know if that’s the right order at all, but this might be a good guideline if you want to write a piece that’s going to be played.

So I just landed in Miami Beach for a concert with the New World Symphony, and my hotel room is crazy dark with blue walls, wood floors, animal skin rugs, egg lamps, and sub woofers. There’s a pool in the courtyard and a free happy hour. There’s a Continental breakfast starting at 8am, but who’s going to be awake for that? It’s rock-and-roll baby!!

It’s fitting in a way because this week’s concert is about Baroque music, Bach in particular. I have my parts in front of me for the Suite No. 3, which I haven’t done in a while, and I’m going through it all and checking all of my markings and such, changing this and that as my mind has changed about certain things over time. While I’m doing this, it occurs to me that this is all so unnatural. No one would have had to mark up the parts back in Bach’s day! Everyone knew the language of the music and knew the grooves. The trick for us is that we have to re-invent it every time!

We’re getting into this issue this week. What this concert at New World is about is WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO THIS MUSIC? How did Bach’s melodies and grooves get mutated into Lobby Music, or music for Wedding Planners or Jewelry Commericals? It’s one of those Concerts With Video that New World is working doing, so I get to illustrate this. We’ll be playing a cheezed up version of Bach “Air on a G-string” while images of Hannibal Lecter flash on the screen. (That is one of my all-time favorite uses of Bach — serial killers — the brilliant, seductive, yet cold, impenetrable and dangerous OTHER). Then, we show what happened when Stokowski got his hands on the music, and finally what folks are doing nowadays.

But the problem, even now, is all of these nit-picky markings that drain the life out of the music in the rehearsal process. If the Historically Informed Performance people have re-discovered that this is groove music, the process of learning to groove is not particularly groovy. I’ve seen conductor/professors with great ideas kill the music in rehearsal because they spend so much time explaining it. They players try to go along, but can’t help but loose a little school spirit in the process, because the process is boring. I wonder how helpful all the directions and markings I’ve provided in the parts really are. How do we get the Rock Back Into Bach?

I came up with one solution with the Charleston Symphony last week. We did a Classical-Jazz Hybrid concert with the excellent drummer Quentin Baxter. We sent two violinists to his house to learn play the first movement of the Bach Double jazzily with him drumming along (very softly and elegantly — think Modern Jazz Quartet). When those guys came to the rehearsal the orchestra and I were blown away. They told me about the rehearsals: in the process of learning to do the piece this way, lots of sounds were made, but few words were spoken. It was the way music should be learned, by listening, not explaining. The violinists had trouble going back to the “normal” way of playing after that, because in the jazz version, the notes were speaking. I wonder which version of the Bach Double was the most authentic?

So I hope we can find a way to do the same this week as well!

PS another cool thing we did in Charleston was play Ravel’s Bolero with a jazz quintet improvising on top of the orchestra. I haven’t heard an audience go apeshit like that in a long time. You should try it.

I must admit I’m kind of totally obsessed with this Yale Video:

(If you’re going to watch it hang in for at least 2:00 and you’ll see why. I recommend watching the whole thing).

So here’s my thing about this video. The idea is fun and kind of cool; the execution is really awful (aside from the nice camerawork, and fairly high production values). Bad rhymes, lame jokes etc. Obviously this is a result of “Glee” and “High School Musical.” What is shares with “Glee” in particular is its constant shift from winking meta irony, to super-sincere sentimentality — in this case, the aspirations of young college undergraduates, and their wish to change the world.

Now I’m not a hard-hearted person, but I just can’t deal with the sentimental side of this stuff. It’s so bad! Here’s an example from “Glee”:

It’s not set up well in the show, you never really get to know the deaf folks, so they don’t seem included at the end of it all anyway. They’re only their for our emotional catharsis. It’s lazy. It’s gross.

The Yale Video is more of the same. But, unlike glee, the Yale Video features no people in wheelchairs, gays (well, there are millions in the video, but are not identified as such), or overweight people (it does include Brian Williams, who hasn’t yet lent his ironic gravitas to “Glee”). Maybe this is because the agenda of the Yale Video is not only to entertain but to recruit students. Though it definitely winks at the audience, it’s cheesy propaganda. It’s a new thing, I think, self-aware audience manipulation. Madame Mao would have loved it. But couldn’t the witty Yalies have come up with something better, after all of this work?

But maybe the point of the video isn’t to be good or bad. In a recent string of emails I read, I came across some really insightful comments like:

“This is pretty much utterly ridiculous.  It’s so utterly ridiculous that to parody it would be redundant.  In a way, it’s so brilliantly inane (or inanely brilliant?) that it’s virtually parody-proof.  Which is not to say there can’t and won’t be knock-offs in abundance.  But those will likely only strengthen its appeal and effectiveness by drawing more attention to the original.

 IMHO this is a masterful example of a traditional institution stepping boldly into the 21st century by adapting not only new forms of distribution/media, but effectively resourcing the CULTURE of those new media.  Yale Admissions goes viral, and I’d say they’ve done a pretty damn good job of it.  This is precisely the kind of thing people LOVE to waste time on Youtube watching - it doesn’t ultimately matter if they’re laughing “with” or “at”, so long as they’re watching it and telling their friends to do the same.”

And:

“Does it matter any more if something’s “good” or “bad” if it gets people to notice it?  Are we at a place in our culture where epic fail = epic success?”

As a classical musician, this hits home to me. In our efforts to be “unstuffy” and “connect” how far are we willing to go? How far are we willing to separate ourselves from our core message to get people to notice us? The Yale Video has a good feel for the current irony/semtimentality thing happening on TV right now, but what does it ultimately have to do with Yale?

I will say this: the video does reflect the real Ivy League in the sense that it features an unusually large amount of juggling.

I was asked to write a (really) short essay about Beethoven for our Beethoven Festival program book. Here it is:

Who is Beethoven? It’s a question that haunts me. When I perform Beethoven’s music, I feel close to a presence, a personality, a force of will so strong that it’s unnerving. I start to have strange dreams. Certain passages keep repeating in my head. My blood pressure goes up. You get the picture.

I first felt this presence at age 16 or so. I was watching the Emerson String Quartet play the second movement of his String Quartet Op. 132. It was in a massive church, on an unadorned altar. I had no idea what I was about to hear. The second movement begins with serene chant-like lines interweaving. It is music of deep devotion, serious prayer. Little by little, the music becomes more expressive, more personal and by the time the second subject is introduced, we’ve moved from deep devotion to pure joy. I didn’t know that the music was about something specific at the time, only that it felt shockingly intimate and personal. Later I learned that the movement was called the “Heiliger Dankgesang,” the Holy Song of Thanksgiving. In this music, Beethoven was sharing the joy of recovering from an illness that almost killed him.

Imagine all the conversations you’ve ever had in your life. How many of them were about something truly important, truly profound? How many times have you laid your soul bare to someone else? This is what Beethoven does in his music: often with power and violence, but just as often with mystery and tenderness.

It was emotional intimacy that Beethoven missed when he went deaf, not just musical sound. “My misfortune is doubly painful to me because I am bound to be misunderstood,” he wrote in his Heiligenstadt Testament. “… for me there can be no relaxation with my fellow men, no refined conversations, no mutual exchange of ideas. I must live like one alone, like one who has been banished.” Beethoven was no longer able share these intimate moments, these secret whispers, with others.

When Beethoven’s secrets reveal themselves in his music, they are mysterious, uncanny. He brings us messages from his isolated world, messages that are urgent, but hard to completely understand; they both obfuscate and enlighten us. It’s like God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind: more questions. Like all instrumental music of its time, Beethoven’s music speaks, but there are no words to express what he is saying.

Those moments of wordless speech haunt me: the opening of the Fourth Piano Concerto; the lamenting violins at the end of the Eroica’s funeral march; even the Ode to Joy itself. These messages are profound, but what do they really mean? Beethoven leaves this open. He knows what they mean to him, but he wants a “refined conversation” with us, his “fellow men,” his listeners.

Who is Beethoven? What is this force, this presence in his music? He answers us through his music: “Who are you?”