Christopher Small's evocation of the secret life of a concert hall is here.

With the help of Marty Fujita, an ecologist who founded a farm-to-school food program in local Ojai schools, and Green Team volunteers from the Ojai Valley Green Coalition, the Festival is reducing solid waste going to landfills, selecting merchandise and foods produced with minimal environmental impact, and supporting local farmers, merchants, and products.

Though of course they'll still have a carbon footprint -- maybe not a small one -- from flying artists to play their concerts. I wish they'd say something about that. You can read their complete press release here.

It's still scandalous -- and I really mean it  -- that other classical music institutions haven't done anything like this. If their concerts halls are green, they don't talk about it. And they don't even do Earth Day programming. In 2008, that's scandalous.

Maybe you'd like to riff on this a bit:

[D]o we really return to experience the music we value in the hope an expectation of hearing something new each time?  On the contrary, I believe we return because we hear nearly the same thing each time.?

(Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 1995, p.164)

I hadn't known the Burnham book, and I'm grateful to Steve for telling me about it. Thanks to Google Books, I was able to look up the context of this passage, and I'll quote it at length a little later.

But my reaction? I think it's silly. Especially when I read the fuller text! There's an old pop-spiritual adage, "You can't step in the same river twice," and even though this sounds by now like a shallow cliché, I think it's right. (I'm sure there are many people who've made the same point in more depth. One of them is C. S. Lewis, who has a charming take on it in Perelandra, the second volume of his Christian science fiction trilogy.)

We can't have the same experience twice. Each time we try to repeat an experience we had before, we add our memories and our expectations. And the fact of repetition gets added to the experience. We know we're repeating it. Often -- certainly in classical music -- there's a great comfort that comes from this. Especially when you've got an entire subculture, as we do in classical music, in which the central act is repetition, performing the same masterworks over and over. Everyone knows that this is what's going on, and a subliminal sense of this becomes as compelling (at least in my view) -- as much a central part of the experience -- as whatever we get from the music itself.

One sign of this was something I remember a critic writing years ago, about how he went to the New York City Opera to "bask" in Le nozze di Figaro. He feels that way because he's heard the piece so often, and knows how much he loves it. He knows what to expect. He wants to repeat a feeling that can only exist because he's repeating it.

In everyday life, this is harmless. If I'm flipping channels and I come across Independence Day, I always watch a few minutes of it, basking in my favorite parts -- Will Smith yelling "alien asshole!" and, later, flying the alien spaceship and saying, "I gotta get me one of these." Or the moment that got such a big laugh in the movie theater when I first saw the film, the bit where the US president says the Roswell UFO crash is a myth, and the creepy national security advisor clears his throat, and says (I'm paraphrasing), "Well, as a matter of fact, Mr. President..."

I love these moments more each time I see them, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I spend very few minutes each year basking in them, and I still see new movies. The problem comes when an entire art form consists mainly of basking. Now, I know I'm exaggerating -- I know that new works are in fact performed, and that lesser known old music is done as well. But I think my exaggeration tells more truth than the many pious statements about "our great art form" that I've heard recently from people in the orchestra world. (Sorry, everyone. But I really think we need to look at this.)

Besides, even unfamiliar music can make us bask. You can hear a Haydn symphony you don't know, and bask in it because you've basked in other Haydn symphonies. You can hear a Zemlinsky piece, and even if you've never heard Zemlinsky before, you can bask in it because you've heard Strauss, Mahler, and Gurrelieder. The classical music business, as we know it today, is among much else a glorious basking pool. We can love that, if we want, but we shouldn't confuse this with art.

Compare movies, where we do plenty of basking (me and Independence Day), but we also see new films -- and, most important, these new films can hit us where we live, because they mesh with the world we live in.

Here's a fuller Stephen Burnham quote, for those interested.

Why do we keep listening to our favorite musics? This is a very simple question that has never been answered adequately by the process model of the musical experience. Do we really return to experience the music we value in the hope and expectation of hearing something new each time? On the contrary, I believe we return because we hear nearly the same thing each time, because the music becomes for us a magical presence we are eager to experience again. That we are enabled to enjoy an experience repeatedly precisely because it remains basically the same may seem a paradoxical argument, and anti-intellectual in the extreme. But the musical experience is no ordinary experience; I would go so far to suggest that it is closer to the sense of uncanny presence felt by Hoffmann than it is to the tracking of a coherent process, however compelling that process may be.

 Of what does this presence consist? Sustained engagement is obviously an important part of such a listening experience, registering as a sense of involvement that persists, in the case of the heroic style, even when we start to hear Beethoven's voice assume a narrator's distance from the musical process. As noted in chapter 2, being engaged by the present moment translates into being faced with a presence. This is the source of the music's authority: the presence in Beethoven's music is simultaneously the uncanny effect of an actual presence and the engaging effect of being acutely alive to the present moment--at bottom these are the same. Music performs this merger of subjective presence and objective presence like nothing else. Thus our expectation of keeping cumulative track of the musical process and then reporting on it is epiphenomenal to the idea of our involvement in the present moment. This is not to deny that any present moment in music takes much of its meaning from what happened earlier and from a sense of what will happen next. But the primary experience is one of presence.

 This is why we can listen to the music we value so often: it always brings us to the same place, always invokes the same uncanny presence. Thus it functions like the unveiling of a Grail whose magic is never attenuated, no matter how much one analyzes its details. The musical experience seems to become timeless, because it involves a repeatable sense of place, of presence. In other words, the thrill of listening to music may be more a matter of simply being in the world of the piece, being in the presence of the piece. This is comparable to the pleasure of watching a favorite movie repeatedly. It is certainly true that we might pick up new details of the unfolding of the plot with each viewing, but what really keeps us there is the world the movie creates: we like being there. 

Here's the conductor's Gary's comment (and thanks to Lisa Hirsch for telling me that I'd misunderstood Gary's comment, and for telling me who he is):

The comments here all sound intriguing, but I'm confused about one thing.

Suppose I'm going to program Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on my orchestral season next year. I gather from the comments above that I should make sure I have "a distinct, notable, worth paying attention to" ideas about performing this very standard piece of classical music. Other than just really trying to do a good job of it (and making sure audiences haven't just heard the piece recently with the same orchestra) what is a conductor supposed to do? What constitutes a distinctive performance of Beethoven's Fifth? I mean, are the musicians supposed to use kazoos or something? I realize that a certain amount of subjectivity enters into performing a classical piece -- but this freedom doesn't compare with the freedom musicians have in other kinds of music.

Here's another (related thought): As a lay listener at classical concerts, I'm often annoyed with the program notes. Why don't conductors write their own program notes explaining why they have chosen these particular pieces and this particular order? I've been told that the music speaks for itself. But in the dramatic arts, where people actually do speak instead of mutely playing violins, the director never hesitates to tell me her thoughts about "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" or whatever theatrical warhorse is being staged.

And my reply:

Very good thought about the program notes.. I think you should go with it -- really make the notes something like what you're talking about here. You could also involve the musicians, have them say what they think about the piece.

But, speaking very honestly, your comments on Beethoven's 5th bother me. If this is all you can offer -- a professional rendition of a work whose meaning and contours seem, if we're to believe you, thoroughly known -- then why play it? I'd rather you didn't.

 So let me give you some suggestions, if not about how to perform the piece, then about what differences between performances might exist. First, and most obviously, you might look at some performances that are very different from the current norm. Maybe Stokowski, from generations ago, lingering (as I remember) over phrases in the slow movement, giving each an individual, highly personal treatment.

Or Mikhail Pletnev, from his recent recording of all the Beethoven symphonies. I'll get in a minute to the most remarkable thing (at least for me) about the way he does the Fifth, but you might listen to how flexible his tempi are in the first movement of the Eroica, and how strong a narrative he creates from the music. I gather, listening to him, that one thing very personal about his understanding of the piece is a sense of uncertainty at the end of the exposition, at the end of the development, and just before the coda. That uncertainty pays off wonderfully the first and second times, by which I mean the uncertainty at the end of the exposition, leading the first time into the exposition repeat, and the second time -- and somehow it sounds like a great surprise, a great expansion of what's gone before -- leading into the further uncertainties of the development.

Or, in the Ninth, listen to the unabashed joy Pletnev and his musicians bring to the first statements of the Ode to Joy tune. Could you do anything like htat in the Fifth? Maybe, most obviously, when the sunburst of the finale bursts out. Can you get beyond the routine of even the best normal performances, and make it glow from within?

Or listen to what Pletnev does with the opening of the second theme in the recapitulation in the first movement. The opening notes, so decisive in the horn in the version of the passage that shows up in the exposition, normally sound feeble in the recapitulation, now played on the bassoon. I've never heard a satisfying solution to that. Doubling the bassoon, or even using four of them (as I believe Carlos Kleiber does) only makes the sound more awkward (at least for me).

Pletnev's solution is wonderfully radical. He lets the bassoon statement be different from the horn statement in the exposition -- quieter, far less decisive, just as the nature of the instruments should dictate. And to make that work, he builds a nest of quiet both before and after the bassoon comes in.

Another moment to think about: the oboe cadenza in the first movement. How should that sound? (And a related question, rather radical in today's climate, but not in Beethoven's time: Should the oboist play the cadenza strictly as written, or should she ornament it?) There's a video called Beethoven Alive! about a New World Symphony performance of it, filmed by my friends Janet Shapiro and Philip Byrd. The principal oboist is interviewed in the first part of the film, and she talks about the cadenza. We see her practicing it alone. The film then ends with the full performance of the piece, and when that cadenza comes, instead of seeing the oboist in the middle of the orchestra, we see her alone in her studio, as she was when she practiced the passage. That suggests one interpretation of the cadenza, that it's meditative, even lonely. Would you want it to sound that way in your performance? And if not, how should it sound? Or is that something you'd want to work out with the oboist, the only goal being to get something personal, that spoke for both of you?

Or consider the famous set-piece in E. M. Forster's novel Howard's End, in which members of a family (all young) and their friends are at a performance of Beethoven's Fifth. One of them tells herself a story about goblins. That the goblins, evil little things, show up in the third movement, and then are banished in the fourth. But then -- in the famous passage where, in the middle of the last movement, music from the third movement returns -- they come back again! The moral drawn from this is that you can banish goblins, or evil, but it might always return -- and that this shows how powerful Beethoven is, and how deep his understanding of life can be. Would you want to play these passages with Forster's goblins in mind, or else thinking of your own image of trouble or dismay? This might mean making the return of the music very stark and shocking -- something you might want to do in any case, to convey what the passage must have meant to Beethoven and his audience, since in those days disrupting the normal texture of a symphony was practically unknown.

Finally, you might find your own meaning -- or your own narrative -- for the symphony. What if you thought the triumph in the final movement was unconvincing? Or the coda of the first movement too insistent, as if Beethoven was protesting too much?

To give you an example of how someone else thought about a Beethoven piece, I'll paraphrase what one of my Juilliard students said last week about Beethoven's Op. 59 No. 2 string quartet. I ask my students to make presentations about pieces they play, presentations that should be entirely personal, and full of feeling. This violinist picked this quartet, which he'd played a number of times, and came up with the following scenario. First movement: Beethoven emerges, for the first time in his oeuvre, as a full-fledged neurotic, a man torn by trouble. Second movement: state of grace, transcending any trouble. Third movement: cynicism, Beethoven answering his patron's request for a Russian folktune, by turning the tune almost into a parody, making it sound absolutely trivial. Finale: Beethoven in an uninspired mood, just churning out the notes. I don't say everyone has to agree with this, but it's a very personal description of the piece, which could generate a very personal performance. (And I should add that this violinist went into far more detail than I've tried to render here.)

 

Or, to be more honest, i made, in private conversation, a few provocative remarks, one of which I think is true beyond any chance of contradiction -- that none of the culturally central musical developments of the past 50 years happened in the orchestra world, or have even been reflected there.

But that's not the point! said passionate and honest people I have both affection and respect for. Orchestras are like museums. They display the art of the past. Or as one of these people got in my face (delightfully) and demanded to know, "What's the difference between Brahms and Rembrandt?"

But (and what follows is more or less what I e-mailed him, since we never got a chance to finish the discussion), the important difference is about how Brahms and Rembrandt function in the concert and museum worlds. Though one general point to make -- my wife makes it all the time, and Lawrence Kramer made it memorably in a piece in the New York Times Magazine -- museums are far more contemporary, as institutions, than orchestras even dream of being.

Here's what I e-mailed -- three big differences (at least as I see them) between museums and concert halls.

First, the museum world is way ahead of the concert world, chronologically. Or I could say that their center of chronological gravity lies about a century later. Major 20th century and postwar painters - Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, Gorky, Pollock, Rothko -- are core classics in museums. A Jackson Pollock show gets lines around the block. Museums of modern and contemporary art (MOMA, LACMA) are major institutions, on a par with museums that show classics from past centuries. The museum world, too, has kept up with developments in outside culture. In the last 50 years, elements of popular culture have been recognized as visual art - for instance, film, graphic design, fashion. All are represented in major museums. The Met has had a costume collection for years (aka fashion). That costume collection just opened a superheroes show. That might be the equivalent of an orchestra mounting a heavy metal weekend - which would actually happen, if orchestras functioned the way real museums do.

Second, a Rembrandt painting hangs on the wall, looking like it comes from the past. A Brahms symphony, played in the concert hall, isn't identifiable as music from the past, because it's so constantly repeated. It sounds like the concert-hall cultural norm, which in fact it is. That means we can't actually hear it. Key elements of it are lost to us, which doesn't happen nearly so easily with Rembrandt.

Finally, Rembrandt just hangs in the museum, costing nothing (except the museum's general expenses), demanding nothing, requiring nothing. Brahms has to be enacted over and over again at great expense by large numbers of musicians, who work together, drawing on their years of training and experience to act out Brahms's music. The audience, likewise, sits in silence for long periods, worshipping these reenactments. It's as if the museum hired 100 painters every day to copy Rembrandt works. I know this isn't at all a precise analogy, but it has this value -- it gives us at least a very rough measure of where the two institutions put their energy, and their creative effort. In the visual arts world, the energy goes into creating new work, and creating new understandings of old work (which is seen, as I said before, as part of the past). In concert halls, the vast bulk of creative effort goes into recreating old music, the same pieces over and over again. It's no wonder that the concert world turns away from contemporary culture, or that the visual arts world has more intelligence, more imagination, and more contemporary relevance. If the classical music world treated the performance of music of the past as something extraordinary - how strange! We're putting all this energy into recreating the 19th century! - then the focus on the past might be more invigorating.

If anyone wants to see what classical music is like when it functions like a real museum, listen to the "Evening Music" show on WNYC, New York's public radio station -- 7 PM, Mondays through Thursdays, when Terrance McKnight is the host. (Not that I haven't said this before.)

But I couldn't have known how musical Weisz's monologue would be. For one thing, she often spoke in musical phrases, with pitches - musical  notes - I could just about have written down in musical notation. But she also made music in a higher sense, gripping my attention simply with the sound of her voice, quite beyond the meaning of her words. Up to a point, this happened as her voice was pushed and shattered by her feelings, but as I listened - maybe because I'm a musician - the sound took on a force that was completely musical (understanding here a wider definition of music, which goes beyond the notes and chords of traditional music, and enters the wider world of pure sound.)

Listen to the monologue, and see what you think.

This, I thought, posed a challenge to opera - to new operas, that is. (And don't forget, in what follows, that I've written some myself.) The simple way to put the challenge might be, "Who needs opera, when a movie monologue carries this much musical conviction?" But that's too simple. Maybe a broader way to make a richer point would be something like this: in past centuries, when opera was a truly current art form, people understood (instinctively; this hardly had to be discussed, though perhaps it sometimes was) that opera created drama by stylizing it, embedding it in well-known forms of music.

As time went on, and as musical language developed, singing in opera could become less stylized - less dependent on full-fledged melodies, with a purely musical form of their own - and more realistic, more like the ways people actually speak. (Wagner of course had a lot to do with that.) But let's not forget that stage acting (and public speaking of any sort) was much more stylized in those days than it is now. So realism of the Blueberry Nights sort - music closely imitating speech - wouldn't bring dramatic music where pure drama is today.

I'll skip over the rest of operatic history (and especially Janacek, who tried harder than any other composer to render speech in music precisely as it's spoken), and simply observe that new operas these days tend to emphasize full-throated operatic singing. Which leaves them largely in the dust if you compare them to Rachel Weisz, who also outflanks them musically.

Which isn't to say that new operas are impossible. I tend to feel, though, that they work best when they're deliberately stylized. And since I think that, it can't be coincidence that Philip Glass's Satyagraha (stylized from beginning to end) knocked me out more than any new opera I've ever seen on stage, and that I wrote my own favorite among my operas, Frankenstein, deliberately as an affectionate (well, loving, really) and stylized take on Italian opera in the 19th century (which itself is stylized). If I wanted to write a realistic work - which really would appeal to me - I'd listen again, and very carefully, to Rachel Weisz, and be afraid.

...a funny thing happened during a panel discussion over at Peabody a few weeks ago: Someone asked me where new music was going and for the first time since I started covering the field in 2001, I realized a big change that I had personally witnessed had finally come to pass.

Picture it: The year is 1999. Where I am living in Brooklyn, many bands are rehearsing in cheap studio spaces. Many of them come from indie rock backgrounds and liberal arts educations, but they are seeking to put their own experimental twist on the genre.

Meanwhile...

Across the river and quite a few blocks uptown--or okay, fine, just as likely right next door--other musicians in other studios are finishing up pieces for their composition degrees at the city's prestigious conservatories. They've got a piece scored for Pierrot ensemble, but they are seeking to put their own experimental twist on the genre.

Sadly, except for the occasional happy anomaly, in 1999 Camp A and Camp B seemed to exist in largely separate worlds, sharing neither common dive bars nor common practices. And this always seemed a shame, because to me it felt like each side had information the other side needed and wanted. I'm not speaking in terms of music (though some wanted to travel that way, too) but more in terms of trading recording technique for orchestration technique. But that was then. These days when I look out, it's striking to see how close these two camps have come, and it looks and sounds great...

• Don't put "Press Release" -- and nothing more than that -- in the subject line of your e-mail. If I'm pressed for time (no pun intended), your release is this one I won't click on. Use the subject line to tell me something that might interest me.
• Don't send CDs tightly bound in tape-sealed bubble wrap, inside a protective envelope. My wife and I might get a dozen (or even more) CDs a day. None of them arrive damaged. So why an extra layer of protection? It's annoying -- first I have to open the protective envelope, and then get through the bubble wrap.
• Don't put the urgent flag on e-mail, unless you know for sure the content of your message really will be urgent to most people getting it. Often I get e-mail from large institutions, telling me (with great excitement I don't share) that the pianist who's supposed to play a concerto Saturday night has cancelled, and that someone else will be playing instead. I'm sure this is urgent for the institution -- i know the kind of backstage flurry these cancellations cause. But for a critic who gets the e-mail? Maybe not so important. Save the urgent flag for when you're doing business with me, and something has changed that I really, really have to know about.
• Don't use messengers or overnight delivery or even UPS unless you really have to. We get packages from UPS and other carriers, sometimes four times a day. Typically they're new releases from major record lables -- CDs which, to be honest, we might not listen to for weeks, if ever. So why the rush? Why not send the CDs by regular mail? And the point isn't just to save you money. You save me some annoyance. Here I am, sitting home, trying to get my work done, and four times during the day I have to stop my work to buzz the UPS guy through the downstairs door, and then wait for him to get to my apartment so I can sign for the CDs -- which, remember, I haven't any urgent need for (though I'm not saying I'm not glad to get them).