OPEN EARS started last night. You should be sad if you’re not here with us, you really should. Buy a ticket to Kitchener-Waterloo now!

We started with an orchestral concert which began with a tribute to David Byrne and Stop Making Sense. I stood alone onstage for about 15 minutes while a powerpoint flashed over my head alternating words about classical music and the natural landscape. “Viola” “Cloud” “Crescendo” “Lake” etc. etc. The concert was about the Romantic Landscape in music and featured Mendelssohn’s HebridesOverture, Frank Bridge’s The Sea, and R. Murray Schafer’s The Darkly Splendid Earth: The Lonely Traveler, a violin concerto played by our amazing concertmaster, Stephen Sitarski. In the lobby before the show, students from Wilfrid Laurier University did a lively performance of In C. We also performed 4′33″ which I had never done before. It was amazing to hear people settle into the silence after a while, when their nervousness about the piece faded.

This festival is about sound and environment. Yes I mean THE environment (oceans, trees, and so on), but also the environments in which music can take place (concert hall, jazz club, lobby, forest, factory, bathtub). I think in the world of symphony orchestras, environment is key. We’re taking a good, fun look at this.

There’s still some YouTube symphony press floating around. Particularly amusing is MEASHA BRUEGGERGOSMAN’S ACCOUNT of preparing John Cage’s Aria, which was performed simultaneously with the same composer’s piece Renga. She also mentions my musical integrity and hair in the same sentence. Which is so Measha.

The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony’s biennial OPEN EARS FESTIVAL has launched its 2009 website. Candadian composer Peter Hatch and I have put together an eclectic musical world to explore: super-engaging music crossing many genres.

Some highlights:

R. Murray Schafer residency (he’s a great, truly great, Canadian composer)
The Music of Lou Harrison
The Books (one of my favorite electronic music groups)
Turtle Island String Quartet
David Lang
Francisco Lopez (Spanish sound artist who blindfolds the audience!)
Hard Rubber Orchestra (a new music big band from Vancouver)

… and the list goes on. Check it out! It’s all worth hearing, and even worth a flight to Kitchener!

So rehearsals for Mahler 9 begin tomorrow. Mahler entered my life as a teenager.  I spent hours and hours listening to this music by myself, playing bass gigs so I could buy another Mahler CD.  I think a lot of teenagers have their own personal “sad” music.  For my friends it was The Cure or New Order or Depeche Mode; for me it was Mahler. It’s tragic, cathartic, full of yearning. Even when it’s joyful there’s always a tremendous cost. The hugeness of the music reflected the feelings I had inside of me.  The questions it asked were questions I was asking myself, too shy to ask others.  From a young age, I always took metaphysical questions very seriously. I thought about death and what it all meant. Mahler became my constant companion on this journey,

I opened up my high school yearbook last week and there it was, an “I <heart> Mahler” bumpersticker.  I put it up over my seat in student government for everyone to see.  I wanted more people to <heart> Mahler too.  But more importantly, it was a mark of my individuality, what set me apart.  Mahler’s sadness was my sadness. It was my mark of rebellion. Mahler was my purple mohawk.

I’ve spent the last few months immersed in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, in preparation for a concert in a few weeks with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. It amazes me that I’m actually going to conduct this piece soon — it’s something I’ve dreamed of doing for a long time. I’ve been trying to figure out how to share this experience on the blog. I could go on and on, but I’ve never been into reading long blog posts (or writing them). So I’ve decided to do a series of “Mahler Entries,” which will be a collection of experiences I’ve had with the piece. I hope it will get people excited about the work. I personally couldn’t imagine what my life would be life without it.

So I’ve got a Mahler 9 coming up in a few weeks with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. As you might imagine, I’ve been working on this piece for months and months and living with it for years and years. This symphony is about the end of a lot of things, not least among them the end of Vienna as Mahler knew it. The symphony is, in my mind, a witness to the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire and a collapse of the traditions and culture of that city. A good book to read about this is the extraordinary epic novel by Joseph Roth, The Radetsky March. It talks about how the Radetsky March becomes a parody as the empire collapses and becomes more and more decadent. Sound familiar? Those who know the second and third movements of Mahler 9 will get what I mean. In fact, the third movement of Mahler 9 may be a parody of the Radetsky March itself.

But what about the parody of the second movement? It’s about the ländler and the waltz. As I’ve been studying the second movement this week it occurred to me that I’d never seen a ländler danced or heard an authentic folk version played. So I did a search on YouTube and decided to go even further by typing in “Bohemian Ländler,” the kind of sounds Mahler might have heard in his childhood in Iglau.

This is what I got:

It occurs to me that there are more sources at our fingertips to learn about music than ever before. Who knows if this clip is accurate, but it certainly feeds my imagination.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m decompressing. It was a busy week.

We had TIME FOR THREE here this week, who played in our Intersections series. They got a good REVIEW in our local paper, The Record. The end of the review is really funny to me though. The reviewer comments that the orchestra didn’t have enough to do during the concert:

“Perhaps this show belonged with the symphony’s Pops series (where I would probably go see Tf3 again for all the froth and fun). While applauding Outwater’s efforts to challenge the boundaries of symphonic music in this series, I vote for more intersection and less wallpaper.”

Now I happen to agree strongly with the reviewer that the orchestra didn’t do enough. It’s a problem with Time for Three … they don’t have enough charts yet. They’re working on it. Even so, I couldn’t resist bringing them to KW asap., despite the fact that the orchestra would be sitting most of the time. In an ideal situation, the orchestra should have had more to do. No doubt.

But what’s funny to me is that he’s suggesting what does and doesn’t belong in the INTERSECTIONS series, a format I INVENTED only four concerts ago! That’s kind of cool — it must mean that the four shows that we’ve done already have a common vibe …

The real intention is that INTERSECTIONS is a completely flexible format, and that includes some concerts where the orchestra plays a lot (like the electronica show earlier this year) and sometimes not so much. It’s about whatever is new, interesting. In the case of Time for Three, the music they play is an intersection: it’s impossible to categorize as bluegrass, classical, country, hip-hop, etc. That’s why I think they belong in this series.

At any rate, this particular critical response shows the human need to categorize art, which is not what art is about, ultimately. But that tension has been around since the beginning of criticism.

There were some extra events around this concert, including an apres-concert gathering at the Jane Bond in Waterloo. Good turnout of musicians, staff, and audience. And we had a party at my place earlier in the week to attract new folks to the KWS. It was a younger crowd, and they got to hear Time for Three up close. Here’s a video of them playing for the party. It was their first time as a group in Canada, but they chose the right music to impress the Canadians! Soon they’ll figure out it’s not “Tom Horton’s” and then they’ll really be in business.

I spent (US) election night in Canada, basically by myself with a glass of wine (well, more than one). The next day I found myself being congratulated by various Canadians, not only because the guy they wanted won, but because our country had taken an enormous step into the future. It made me think a lot of America’s audacity, which can be both bad (last 8 years) and good (the election). I wonder what our future holds?

In town that week was Richard Stolzman, who played a tribute to Benny Goodman. Richard is what some of my musical friends and I would call a “spaceman.” An intrepid musical traveler who (successfully) explores the outer limits of musical phrases and colors and sound. What comes out of his horn sounds like nothing else on earth, and that’s a good thing. It was really really inspiring to work with him. His music-making immediately imprinted on my soul. What more could one ask from an artist?

Headed back to SF for two days of good food (Shanghai Dumpling King, SPQR, Suppenküche) and a short protest against the gay marriage ban (aka prop 8). Again, the Canadians reaction to that was interesting. It was basically, “What’s up with that?!” In Canada they’ve figured out that you can be “traditional,” deeply religious, and conservative AND not imprint your religious/cultural beliefs on others. Everyone gets along just fine. I think Prop. 8 is just a temporary setback.

Now I’m staying in Pasadena and got to see the Huntington Estate, which has the most beautiful and poetic gardens. It was a clear day, and the light was so beautiful, a sprinkler could be poetic.

And they had a cactus garden …

And a Japanese Garden …

These are all in the same place. Another one of those LA fantasies that really exist. It was a bit like a movie studio, because you could see where the fantasy gardens ended, and the desert climate and urban reality began. It added a whole layer of melancholy to the place, which made it even more beautiful.

This week the KW Symphony and I are performing Wish You Were Here by Nico Muhly. Unfortuately, Nico couldn’t make it to the show so I asked him some questions about the score via email. I’ve never done this before, and it’s working pretty well. For those of you interested in what a conversation between a conductor and a composer sounds like, here are some of the more interesting excerpts:

[Before the first reherasal]
EMO: Electric bass — Mainly for articulation or do you want a lot of the sound?
NM: Just for articulation. You don’t really even need to use it; I just wanted to give the guy who plays it for the Boston Pops (who has amazing hair) something to do.
EMO: We’ll use electric bass. I’ll ask our guy to wear a cool wig and it’ll be fine.
(post rehearsal note - we tried with and without electric bass and it definitely sounds better with)

EMO: mm. 85. ob/trumpet. (where the 5/8 begins, if you don’t have a score handy) Those are the correct notes, right (different than the following bars)? I assume they’re different ’cause you wanted to soften the harmonic landing or it has something to do with the second oboe.
NM: Yeah, this is a little prelude information.

EMO: Any other things I missed, or advice for rehearsals/performance?
NM: In terms of general advice, I don’t have much! It sort of plays itself, this piece. There are a few moments that I always like to have MILKED OUT, namely, those glissandi in the cellos around figure N, which gets joined with the trombones – very sad, those moments!
(a few minutes later)
NM: Actually there are two things I always want to hear more of. You know the bass drum rimshot stuff in that section with the piano drones? I always want that to be like nine times as loud, like, dumb high school kids trying to do Peking Opera. The second thing is if your piccolo player can do a lot of vibrato in that whole fake gamelan bit (which I think I ask for but never explain that I mean almost out of tune!) we will be in good shape.

[After the first rehearsal]

EMO: Worked on the bass drum rim thing at letter S. We came up with a rim shot that also hits the membrane of the drum that makes it sound a lot louder and boomier, but still woody and percussive. It is a lot louder than it was when we started, maybe not 9 times louder, but hey.
NM: I like the idea for the bassdrum, it’s like a more proper rimshot.

EMO: At W I had the picc player use a really wide, slow vibrato. Not sure if it totally works, but we’ll see when we get in the hall for a dress rehearsal. The picc player asked if I we could send out a press release stating that this is not his normal vibrato, so I think we’re on the right track.

EMO: The violins and violas would love to know what you mean when you mark a passage “athletic.” They love poetic markings from composers, but this one is a bit mysterious.
NM: Now, as for athletic, all I mean by that is energetic but controlled; steady, studied. Think about the way ostinati need to feel in Shostakovich (like somebody who has never run in his life outrunning the KGB or whatever - frenzied) versus how they want to feel in Reich, which is almost like rowers or a team of dogs. That’s athletic. And come on, that’s not TOO poetic!
EMO: hmm — athletic. It came off to me as meaning virtuosic or something. The music doesn’t imply that anyone is running from the KGB! It seems like much of the passagework in the piece is “athletic” in the sense you mention, so it’s a bit confusing when a few particular passages are marked that way. I guess you mean it as a “safety” marking in those particular passages with the violins and violas.
NM: Yeah, that’s totally it. I mean it can get out of control. I use Britten as the model usually.

So I have a cool board of directors at the KW Symphony. For my electronica concert with Mason Bates last night, I was given THIS SHIRT. Which I wore during the concert. We also started the show with the lights down and Mason spinning and giving a moody introduction before we launched into Aphex Twin’s “Cock/Ver 10,” arranged by Stefan Freund for Alarm Will Sound’s“Acoustica” CD. The orchestra and I snuck onstage under dim lights — it was full rock concert mode. The concert was recorded and will be broadcast in a little while by the CBC, with lots of good interview material with me and Mason.

Here’s an ARTICLE about our fairly new educational series for young and old at the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony.