Does anyone say "L7" anymore? Back in my rock & roll days, in '88 or '89, I knew Donita Sparks, the frontwoman in a tough all-female band called L7, which I see is fondly remembered. And I see, following that last link, that Donita in a British show got off one of the great rock & roll lines of all time, though some people won't think it's in good taste. Which of course is one reason it's a great rock & roll line.

Talk about the future of classical music! Pierson, an indie classical musician known for conducting Alarm Will Sound, a pretty astounding new music ensemble, is shaping the orchestra's season almost entirely around Brooklyn composers and Brooklyn communities:

In this debut "reboot" season, the Brooklyn Phil features the work of generations of great Brooklyn musicians, from Aaron Copland and Lena Horne to Mos Def and Sufjan Stevens. The orchestra will also connect with its own past, through Beethoven's Eroica Symphony--the first work the Brooklyn Philharmonic ever performed, in 1857. In each of the three neighborhoods, one Beethoven movement is presented in a context that speaks to the local community.

"We used to sell out two nights of Tchaikovsky," says [Wolf Trap president Terrence Jones], referring to the early days when the NSO often offered the same program at Wolf Trap over two or more evenings. "Now we're not even selling one." 

That concludes my posts on orchestra culture, in my larger series on whether orchestras play as well as they might. Surely it's clear that orchestras in which the things I've described in this post happen -- no matter how good their performances might seem -- could play better (more spontaneously, more imaginatively, more excitingly, more passionately, more raptly) than they do. 

The other posts in this series:

A difficult discussion

    

Measuring how well orchestras play

    

How well orchestras play -- applying some criteria

    

Why my criteria matter

    

Reasons for the silence

    

Four personalities

    

Atomized?

    

No direction home

    

Not so satisfied

    

More unsatisfied

    

The culture I've seen

Specifically, they are generally dissatisfied with their voice in matters affecting the orchestra, and they are unhappy with the job performance of their music directors.

A more subtle stress musicians face is difficult even to label, much less to quantify. Instrumentalists generally view whatever they produce on their instruments as flawed in comparison with the ideal they have set for themselves. This comes, at least in part, from a system of instrumental education that views anything less than absolute technical perfection as completely unacceptable. Yet it is also the mindset that an instrumentalist, at any level of proficiency, must maintain in order to improve. But most instrumentalists, however good, are never going to reach perfection in their playing or even reach the level regularly achieved by the soloists who stand in front of professional orchestras.

In few other professions are the practitioners forced to confront their own professional failings so regularly, and this constant awareness of their personal limitations can lead to chronic internal conflict between diminished self-esteem and musicians' natural desires to think well of themselves....

[T]he disparity between myth and reality in professional orchestras is extreme and serves as the most powerful source of musician stress and counterproductive institutional dynamics.

[One myth the Levines cite is the myth of the omnipotent conductor. Musicians are the first to know that conductors aren't omnipotent -- and might, in some cases, not even be competent -- but have to pretend that they buy the myth.]

What happens when a member of the orchestra asks the conductor a question is"revealing. (Virtually every communication from a musician to a conductor in a rehearsal is phrased as a question, even when it is really a statement of fact or belief.) One of the authors once heard the principal clarinetist of a major American orchestra ask the conductor whether he wanted the notes with dots over them "short, or like the brass were playing them?" This rather complex statement masquerading as a question conveyed both the musician's lack of respect for the brass players in question and scorn for the conductor's failure to notice the problem. But to fit the myth of the omniscient conductor, the comment had to be phrased as a question, for how could a musician possibly inform an omniscient being? The myth dictates that a musician can only tap into that well of knowledge, not add to it.

Questions from musicians to conductors must be respectfully phrased and, ideally, prefaced with the honorific "Maestro." (This title may be dropped if the conductor is sufficiently young or doesn't speak with an accent.) Such questions must not explicitly challenge the conductor's interpretation of the music or conducting and rehearsal technique in any way.

This arrangement makes matters awkward for the orchestral musician who desires to improve the quality of the orchestral product. The musician must not challenge the conductor's tempi or interpretation; he or she cannot even suggest that there might be a pitch or ensemble problem, much less how the conductor might fix it. Questions are therefore limited to issues of whether the parts agree with the score or how the conductor would like a certain passage bowed. Even the latter has risks, however, as it implies that the conductor didn't see how it was bowed the first time; certainly no self-respecting omniscient being could have missed something as elementary as whether a passage started up-bow or down-bow.

In fact, the myth makes virtually all communication from musician to conductor impossible. (In one major American orchestra, musicians are discouraged from addressing the music director until he addresses them first. Matters are arranged so that the music director never encounters musicians except on the podium or in private meetings which he calls.) This is not to say such communications don't happen, of course, but the farther they venture from simple inquiry, the more uncomfortable they are likely to make orchestra members and the more angry the conductor. Challenging the conductor's omniscience is, quite literally, taboo.

Musicians in a professional orchestra of any significance know quite a bit about music and about what they're doing. So do many conductors, of course; but generally, individual conductors do not know more than the orchestra in front of them knows collectively. In fact, about certain issues, such as the mechanics of string playing, conductors usually know quite a bit less. Most orchestra musicians would agree that many conductors deal ineptly with technical issues such as pitch and ensemble, and that many conductors do not even recognize such problems when they occur, much less address them. Most orchestra musicians, after all, have extensive chamber music experience, in which pitch and ensemble are prominent on the work agenda.
This is actually the fundamental structure of the orchestral workplace. During rehearsals or concerts, musicians experience a total lack of control over their environment. They do not control when the music starts, when the music ends, or how the music goes. They don't even have the authority to leave the stage to attend to personal needs. They are, in essence, rats in a maze, at the whim of the god with the baton.

Much of what is inexplicable to observers of professional orchestras can be explained by stress caused by chronic lack of control and musicians' attempts to deal with it. Musicians' first line of defense is the classic tactic of avoidance. It is no accident that every professional orchestra of any consequence is unionized and that the resulting collective bargaining agreements under which orchestras labor spell out in
exquisite detail the limits of a conductor's authority over the musicians. Such agreements attempt to limit the amount of time musicians are exposed to a situation over which they have no control, as well as expressions of musicians' need to control at least something about the workplace.

There is another, more subtle effect of this chronic lack of control on orchestra musicians: infantilization. Forced to play the roles of children, musicians can behave childishly. Musicians who, when not at work, are perfectly responsible adults, can regress to the level of five-year olds at work, especially when the conductor is even less like the mythic omniscient father figure than is the norm for conductors. Moreover, these musicians tend to view their world, much as a child might, as a mysterious and threatening place. The paranoia that some orchestra musicians exhibit towards managers and conductors, and even towards those of their colleagues who serve on workplace committees, is a consequence of this world view. Yet the subjects of this generalized paranoia are not some anonymous "they" off at corporate headquarters; they are people who, on a daily basis, stand in front of these musicians, answer their questions, and find the money to pay them.

My points today:

...no group we have studied has greater internal motivation than [orchestral musicians]. Yet their overall job satisfaction, and especially their satisfaction with opportunities for continued growth and development, are not pushing the top of the scale. The professional symphony orchestra, it seems, does not provide as rich and rewarding an occupational setting for musicians as one would hope.

This post is getting long. i'll continue it. 

But wait. Shouldn't the board of directors be in ultimate charge, artistically? They legally govern the institution. And they're the ones who hire the music director. 

But in fact most board members wouldn't think themselves capable of taking charge artistically. And, in truth, they wouldn't be. So they won't try to set an artistic direction. Like the CEO, they might make their voices heard -- one of them, let's say, might complain, "Too much new music!" -- though short of firing the music director, the CEO, and the artistic staff, the board has no power to enforce its artistic views. 

One last situation. What happens if an orchestra doesn't play as well for guest conductors as it does for its music director? Or sometimes doesn't. Who has the power to address that problem? 

Well, the music director could. But he or she doesn't hear the concerts, as a rule, that he or she doesn't lead. So does he or she have standing to say the playing wasn't good enough? For what it's worth, I've never heard of a music director addressing this issue, though I'll be quick to say it may have happened. It doesn't seem to be the normal rule. 

The artistic administrator can't say anything. Well, maybe privately, to a few trusted musicians. But that's the kind of atomized way of dealing with artistic matters that I noted in my last post. It doesn't show the orchestra as a coherent, conscious institution, addressing an artistic problem openly, and as a group

The executive director, similarly, isn't likely to say anything. The musicians, in fact, might object. They might (as I've heard happen in a different though not unrelated situation) ask if their contract allows the management to talk to them about this subject. And I've been told by musicians that it would be in most cases an outright contract violation for the board to say anything.

So the problem -- if it exists -- might well not be addressed, unless the musicians themselves choose to address it. And if they did, again judging from what I discussed in my last post, they'll only do it privately, one on one, or in small groups, atomized, not discussing the situation openly, in any organized way. 

Greg - we talk about performance all the time - it's called rehearsal. While it's primarily led by the conductor, there are always side discussions within sections and sections taking time during rehearsal breaks or after rehearsal to go over passages. And - individual players can focus on their own performance during their own practice, which is informed by years of intense scrutiny. And and - we always talk about the way the orchestra is playing during breaks and between rehearsal and concerts. I think it's a big mistake to leave performance quality and artistic decisions as the sole province of the music director, but my experience is that musicians talk more about quality and the orchestra's shortcomings than any other topic, and we all make artistic decisions every time we put the bow on the string or make the air in our instruments vibrate. 

Orchestras, to summarize, do have artistic discussions, largely in private. But they don't seem to be organized as self-directing artistic entities. (Except, of course, orchestras like the London Symphony or especially the Berlin Philharmonic, in which the musicians are legally the owners of the orchestra.)

How bad can this get? I've been reliably told that in one not small American orchestra, there's a violinist who hasn't played a note for years, in rehearsals or performances. He/she plays air violin, miming the gestures of playing, but not producing any sound. 

And this, I'm told, goes uncorrected, though surely every musician in the orchestra must know about it. You'd think a musician who quite literally didn't play would be fired. You'd think the other musicians wouldn't stand for it. And, let's be fair, in many orchestras, or surely most of them, this situation really wouldn't be tolerated. 

But that it can exist -- if my information is correct -- in one not small orchestra would seem to demonstrate that artistic matters aren't (strange as this may seem) dealt with in any systematic way. 

Which compares to data from past generations, when the classical music audience was no older than the rest of the population. In 1955, for instance, more than half the Minneapolis Symphony audience was under 35. (That orchestra, of course, is now the Minnesota Orchestra.) 

If we are to be a creative form, not just a re-creative one, then we must work to attract creative people, as well as nurture the gifts of those already in our orchestras.

We need to be asking, what kind of talent must we include to create the musical experiences  that will usher in the next generation of people who passionately want us in their lives?

Young entrepreneurial musicians, some of them in our orchestras, are finding a following with audiences and funders by performing in small and often unlikely venues. 

They may cross genre boundaries, or simply rethink their approaches to traditional repertoire, but they thrive on intimacy and audience engagement. If we want -- and I think we do -- this next generation of creative artists involved with our orchestras, our current audition system needs to change to embrace a broader range of talents than just superb musicianship and technique.

I think that in past generations orchestral music wasn't considered at all abstract. Certainly in Mozart's time, people followed it easily, applauding the moment they heard something they liked. There are stories from the early 19th century of audiences -- when Beethoven's symphonies began to be played with anything like regularity -- crying out in wonder when they heard passages that amazed them.

And, in past generations, top-rank classical artists used to make up stories that they thought the great instrumental works they played would tell. And the audience did, too. For a wonderfully (and famous) example, look at the passage about Beethoven's Fifth in E.M. Forster's novel Howard's End, in which a family goes to hear an orchestra concert, most of them 20 or younger. One of them makes up a fabulous scenario for the Beethoven symphony. Forster doesn't write as if this was anything unusual. (And also as if the young age of the audience -- plus the way they applaud after every movement -- weren't unusual either. He wrote this in 1904.)

So in my view the idea that instrumental works are abstract, and thus need training and preparation to understand, isn't true. 

[The commenter talked about Hanslick, the 19th century critic, talking about instrumental works as abstract, but that wouldn't have been anything like a universal view in his time. I think we need to see his thoughts about that against the background, first, of Brahms vs. Wagner. Hanslick was emphatically on Brahms's side, and in fact fanned the flames of the conflict, making it maybe greater than it was. Wagner had thrown out the old forms, and Hanslick, defending them, elevated them to lofty heights they may never have occupied before. And the second piece of background here is the ongoing battle, in the 19th century, between classical music -- understood as Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Schumann -- versus popular music, understood as opera, especially Rossini. Plus concerts by virtuosi. One way of drawing the distinction was by elevating classical music to a superhuman plane. Hence the talk of abstraction.]

And the belief in this causes problems, I think, by (1) encouraging performances to be abstract, so that people don't easily grasp them, and (2) encouraging people to believe that classical music is difficult, that they need to learn a lot before they can appreciate. And, most damaging, (3) by encouraging people to feel that they shouldn't trust their natural reactions to what they hear. Which might well be to make up stories.

The classical forms in fact are very simple. Sonata form, which might seem the most difficult (though it can be explained in just a minute or two), is a narrative form, which means that it's likely to result in pieces which naturally shape themselves into stories. 

And even its more abstract elements may not be too hard to hear. When I worked with the Pittsburgh Symphony, hosting and helping to program a concert series called Symphony with a Splash, aimed at newcomers to classical music, we did the first movement of Mozart's Paris Symphony. Mozart wrote a letter to his father about that piece, explaining just what he did to get the audience to applaud (during the music, of course). I told our audience that they were free to applaud anytime they wanted, as soon as they heard something they liked. 

So they applauded while the piece was going on, and did it often. And the most striking thing was that the applause from one moment to the next changed a lot in its volume and quality. The most vehement applause came at the moment when the recapitulation diverges from the exposition. This was an audience that doesn't know sonata form. But they could hear that something new was happening. So they understand, on a gut level, one of the supposedly most subtle aspects of sonata form. Which means, I think, that these things are far less abstract and difficult than many of us think. 

A lot of us, especially those of us who are still in school, place too much importance on playing perfectly at the expense of thinking about the audience.  Of course a certain amount of technical precision is necessary to make a piece recognizable and enjoyable, but what is most noticeable to audiences is whether or not someone approaches the work with joy and spirit!  As a result I've pretty much developed 4 ways of playing.

1) The way I play in orchestra auditions - precise, mechanical, robotic.  In orchestra auditions it is more important to do nothing wrong than to do anything particularly well.  They are basically looking for a reason to eliminate you, and "bad intonation" is a lot more convincing than "plays like an automaton."

2)The way I play in juries/other auditions - there's a little room for flexibility and personality here, but not much.  I still know that I will get more points off for making a mistake than being boring, but they will notice if I'm totally phoning it in.  It's especially hard to play Bach in juries because everyone has his or her own opinion as to how it should be played.  I generally just play it as middle of the road as I can so that no one loves it but no one hates it.

3)The way I play in performances which my teacher is attending - I have two very wonderful teachers here at Juilliard and they both allow me a lot of artistic freedom.  But every once in a while, they put their foot (feet?) down.  If I really (and I mean REALLY) don't like what they want me to do, I will just pretend that I don't understand what they are asking me to do.  (I'm pretty sure they know what's going on though.)  If I'm ok with it but prefer my own way, I play it their way when they are listening.  And I can't help but think that it probably sounds a little unconvinced, but while I'm still studying with them I feel like I owe it to them to use their ideas when they really think it's important.  Do I really owe it to them?  I don't know.  But I'm graduating in two weeks so HA!

4)The way I play in any other performance - I try to just have fun!  Especially when playing on stage with friends, I think the audience has the best time when we really interact with each other and show that we are committed to the performance.  If something goes wrong, all the better!  It's also important for the audience to see that we are humans.  It's not easy to be so vulnerable in performance - I'm generally a little bit of a nervous performer. I usually try to remember what someone told me (I don't remember who) which is that when you get noticeably nervous in a concert it's almost better because the audience roots for you more. 

 

Anyways, hopefully my multiple personality disorder will one day be resolved - hopefully I'll have it down to 2 or 3 next year as I will be just performing and taking orchestra auditions.  And once I get a job and tenure, who knows!  I could very well finally become myself!

And -- a footnote to the above -- it used to happen in classical music, back in the days when an adoring Vienna crowd lined the railroad tracks when Toscanini left town. And when (as I've blogged) Geraldine Farrar gave her farewell Met performance, and her fans strung banners from one side of the balcony to the other. 

Can we bring those days back? (We'll need stars who get us excited enough.) 

Sondheim's lyrics (to quote him, earlier in the song, "no rose can compare"):

Careful,

Here's the home of

Beautiful girls.

Where your

Reason is undone.

Beauty

Can't be hindered

From taking its toll.

You may lose control.

Faced with such Loreleis

What man can moralize?