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 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?”

When I was studying with Leonard Stein, who was Schoenberg’s student/assistant …

(by the way he had this old house up in the Hollywood Hills to which I would drive every week and he was pretty old and feisty and “had this neighbor, who was quite attractive I must say — I think she’s an actress or model or something her name is Linda … Evangelista I think? Have you heard of her? Anyway I want to show you this letter Boulez wrote me about Le marteau … “)

…. when he really didn’t dig a piece he would call it “rhapsodic.”  He said it with a sneer.  And I’m thinking about him this week because it’s all Chopin, Wagner, and Liszt at the KW Symphony.

I personally have no problem with rhapsodic music, because I don’t think structure is everything.  I do know a lot about structure, in fact that’s the way I was taught to understand music, but these days I’m thinking about how the music “gets you there.”  Structure is all well and good, but music happens in real time, and though the audience might perceive the structure of a piece in some way, they’re much more concerned with the moment to moment. The fun of performing a piece like Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod or Liszt’s Les Préludes is getting there.  And by “there” of course I mean a musical CLIMAX.  We all know where this piece is going to end up, but the options one has as a performer to get there are infinite! Hmm, that last sentence reminds me of something else (SEX). That’s what’s fun about rhapsodic music — there are fewer structural roadblocks for the performer to do his or her thing.  The only problem with rhapsodic music is that without a clear musical form, the listener has to have at least some idea of what’s coming next — so Wagner and Liszt use lots of sequences and you have to deal with those.  But I don’t mind, I’ve always had a soft spot for them.

Last week I heard the Berlin Philharmonic play Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 in the big orchestra version, which is a piece I studied with Leonard and know really well.  There’s a piece that wears its structure on its sleeve, but it goes by so fast and is so complex (for instance, there are several superimposed structures happening in that piece) that I can’t imagine the audience is following this, though I’m sure they’re aware that the music has structure and is complex in that way.  Schoenberg was of course a Structure Queen as was Brahms ,which is why Sir Simon put them on the same program.  (You have to read Schoneberg’s essay Brahms the Progressive).  In both composers, there’s this tremendous tension between structure and Romantic Sentiment.  A kind of self-repression or self-negation going on I think. The structure seems to be the walls holding the wildness back.  This is what makes Brahms so difficult to perform well, I think.  But when it’s great, when all the structure and emotion are in line it’s beautiful and always a little sad because it’s about real life where rhapsodic music is about our inner fantasies.

And yes, Wagner and Liszt do have structure too, in their own way, but as compositions they are by no means obsessed with it.  It’s fun to be in rhapsody / fantasy world this week.  Orchestra concerts could use more music like this and less “structure concerts.”  Opera, you know where it’s at, you’ve got plenty of both!

Our new place in Chicago has an amazing view. Its up on the 33rd floor and I can see all around.  It’s a great place to think about things like planning a season, and various other items that are crossing my desk.  I find now more than ever I’m getting asked to work on projects like “How do we combine jazz and orchestra in a new way?” or “How do we get these pop songs to work in a subscription concert?”  And what I do is pace around the apartment and look out the window at the lake and think about the air meeting the water.  Some days it’s prettier than others. That’s kind of how it is with these projects.  The truth is I think almost any idea with orchestra can work, but it’s how you do it.  It takes a tremendous amount of thought and you really have to know both sides of the coin pretty well.  What I like about these projects is that they assume that the orchestra is an amazingly versatile and flexible sound entity, and that’s forward-looking  But there is also this tremendous tradition and training and skill with orchestras that you want to draw on as much as possible, or they’ll be bored and using like 2% or the processors.

How do you get the most out of these things? It’s a tricky question, but it’s fun.

THIS ARTICLE in newmusicbox is the most thoughtful examination of The Composer Is Dead.  Now that I no longer live in SF, it makes me nostalgic for the creative crew who live there.  But I’ll be there in a few weeks so beer, sausages, and amoeba await!

Finally I’ve gotten this season’s SCHEDULE up on the site, so if you want to check out where I’m conducting this season it’s all there.  Come and say hi!

Right now I’m in Las Vegas doing Sgt. Pepper with Cheap Trick again.  I have to say that one of the more eclectic experiences of my life was leaving the run here to do a show with Frederica von Stade in Canada, then getting on a private jet the next day and flying back for Cheap Trick the following night.

First of all, Flicka was sublime and she sang a world premiere by our very own Nathaniel Stookey called Into the Bright Lights.  Flicka wrote the words herself and they are personal to the point of being confessional.  It is such a wonderful thing to sing on her farewell tour and I hope she keeps doing them.

Flicka is such a consummate musician, and standing next to her while she sang “Baïléro” and other gems like that was of course unforgettable.  It’s this incredible combination of beauty and humanity and truth that is unique to her.  I’m glad our paths crossed on stage, if only for a brief moment.

Then back to the Cheap Trick show — we did this at the Hollywood Bowl a few years ago, and it’s taken on a life of its own.  This time they’ve put the orchestra directly above the band and me dead center on stage.  Robin Zander gave me this cool jacket to wear, and it occurred to me right away that I’d better do something different.  I’ve seen enough rock-orchestra shows where the orchestra looks disengaged and the conductor is a big ol’ nerd compared to the band.  So I decided to be part of the band and do all of the rock stuff: dance around, look at the audience, smile, sing along, play cowbell, and so on.  I think this works very well!  And it’s fun!  The Vegas orchestra players are very aware they are being watched, and don’t have terribly difficult parts to play, so they want to get involved.  As we were rehearsing to coda to “I am the Walrus” there are these huge downbows in the orchestra parts and the concert master offered me the so-called “LA Flail,” in which the entire string section flails their head on every downbow!  Yes!  One of the reviewers said listening to “I am the Walrus” live made him want to “drop acid and pick up a cello.”  Now that’s a good review, and if you haven’t payed attention to the cello parts on this song, you should.

And finally …

Someone emailed me a little while ago and asked me what I was listening to these days. So here are two things I keep coming back to over and over …

First of all, anything by JORDI SAVALL.  He is an endless well of musical genius and basically I listen to him all the time and wish orchestras played that way.  For instance check this out:

And then on the other side of things I just can’t stop listening to The Bird and the Bee. The songs are so elegant and witty, the voice is so sexy.

I’m getting to the end of our La Traviata run at San Francisco Opera.  For a conductor who mainly does symphony work, it has been refreshing and revelatory working on this score.  I can see why Stravinsky gushes about him so much in his Poetics of Music.  There’s something pure about his music: perfectly distilled sounds, perfectly distilled emotion and expression.  But more importantly, there is the beauty and sensuality of the sound itself. Human emotions and foibles and mistakes and failures are transfigured into something glorious and profound.

It’s also amazing to actually conduct a seasoned and accomplished opera orchestra. I love the feeling of each and every one of them listening along with me, ready to go any direction at any time.

And singers, well, it’s just sexy to work with a great singer.  

Beyond this, it’s refreshing to see how much is done in opera that’s not written in the score. Of course this is the result of tradition, and some tradition is bad.  But we don’t run into as much musical literalism here.  A 16th note is not necessarily a 16th note; what is written is not exactly what the singer sings.  Everyone knows this.  I’ve never been a fan of musical fundamentalism: the idea the the written text means literally what it signifies.  There are many musicians who are musical fundamentalists, which is infuriating.  They can’t see beyond the written page, like some religious folks can’t see beyond what is written in the Bible, or some legal scholars can’t see beyond what is written in the Constitution.  This can make Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony sound very bad, for example.

One of the greatest challenges in performing classical music now is getting an orchestra to go beyond the notation, because that’s where the expression really is.