"The above ideas were hot research topics and were much debated in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now they seem to be commonly accepted as truisms."
I have always appreciated Kyle Gann’s website for its resources for Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3. Recently, I took time to investigate some of the other resources he freely provides, including his own compositions, as well as links to his many books and albums. Among the resources on the site is a terrific “Chronology of the Symphony: 1730-2019,” listing years and major symphonies composed and/or premiered that year.
There is a terrific new article in American String Teacher (produced by the American String Teachers Association) called “The Case for Rehearsing at Performance Tempo.” In it, author and teacher Paul Trapkus discusses a common solution applied by many conductors to improving difficult technical passages, that of working under tempo.
Rehearsal time is a precious resource when working with a large orchestra. Nowhere is that more true than when working on new music. Time may be short enough that even a conventional piece of music would be difficult to prepare in the time available. Added to that, the many complexities of contemporary repertoire may create a very long list of questions that conscientious orchestral musicians will come to rehearsal needing answers to before a read-through is possible.
“I wish you would have insisted...”
My wife and I are unashamed fans of Star-anything. Trek or Wars, it makes little difference. Recently, we watched an episode of Star Trek: Picard (our current favorite show) in which a character was able to hear the thoughts of others that was vaguely reminiscent of a gauche but memorable 90’s film with a questionable lead, What Women Want.
I was reminded of this while receiving feedback from the outstanding musicians of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra during a conducting workshop led by Marin Alsop. This took place a few weeks back. The musicians did most of the talking that day and they offered a wealth of valuable information - much of it information that might ordinarily get left unsaid. They revealed information about what musicians really want, information that often gets missed or otherwise garbled by well-meaning conductors like myself.
One of the musicians - a seasoned member of the group with a lifetime of orchestral experience, said the following to a colleague of mine in response to their conducting (although something similar could have been said to myself and most of the participants). The musician said: “I wish you would have insisted on ____.” This musician was saying out loud something I think is kept locked away in the minds of many musicians when there is not a forum for feedback.
“I wish you would have insisted on ____.” It doesn’t really matter what goes in the blank (something about tempo, rhythm, balance, sonority, phrasing, etc.) — it was clear to the musicians that the following sequence had taken place:
conductor wanted one thing,
the players did another, and
the conductor eventually capitulated.
To me, there is a lot to unpack there. It says that orchestra musicians recognize that there are certain outcomes in orchestral performance that no one player would necessarily prefer, but that happen when you bring the orchestra together - you could call it an emergent property or a group dynamic. Or, it says that there is a built-in, healthy tension between the orchestra and the conductor, a tension that the orchestra is expecting. Or a combination of both and possibly other factors.
Regardless, it was a reminder that individual musicians are rooting for and even expecting the conductor to:
have a reasoned, musical point of view,
be able to skillfully execute it, and sometimes,
be able to respectfully bring the musicians along through concise, informed persuasion.
Above all, musicians want to give polished performances that mean something for themselves and for audiences. The age of the imperious maestro is thankfully over. As conductors continue to attempt to address the failings musical autocracy, it is sometimes easy to set out to demonstrate a healthy, collaborative ethos, but sometimes cause counterproductive musical outcomes in the middle of an otherwise laudable pursuit.
Conducting the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in a conducting workshop with Marin Alsop.
I am not experienced enough to speak from personal authority about the world’s 100 best professional orchestras, but I can speak to a variety of experiences many other groups, and I think the advice from this musician is true with student and other types of ensembles as well.
We must make choices wisely and know when performance feedback reflects poor decision making on our part!! But so long as we have an intelligible approach, and the stick technique to enact it, we do musicians a service by sticking to our intentions in order to give those intentions a chance to be heard and tried on for size.
We can either become caught up in trying to reflect the wishes of the musicians back on them (this presumes we can always know what those might be), or unnecessarily and counterproductively capitulating, or worst of all, dithering and splitting the difference. It would be easy for a conductor of modest experience to feel that they should give in to an orchestra that at first seems to resist their apparent collective approach. But we have to remember that every individual in the group is just that - an individual - and they have their own unique views which may or may not match the rest of the group. That is not choosing to be a dictator, that is choosing to respect each individual member of the orchestra, and not just the totality of the… collective… (this is a Trek joke…)
And what those individuals likely want is a chance to give an excellent, authentic, unified performance with a clear sense of intent. And that intention must be adequately conveyed, sometimes even requiring that we insist! But don’t take it from me, take it from
Last year, I shared about James Clear's Atomic Habits a few times in public and private and a surprisingly large number of friends and colleagues have gotten in touch since then to let me know that they ended up picking it up and that it had a powerful impact on them. It's a darn good book and an easy read so maybe it shouldn't be too surprising. It continues to pay dividends for me.
Since then, I have continued on my journey of self-discovery, and one of the more impactful books I've tackled since then, and a great pairing with AH, is Cal Newport's Deep Work.
Cal suggests that we quit social media, drain "the shallows" of email and ad hoc messaging, and regain control over our phones in order to live more balanced, meaningful lives full of significant work contributions to our friends, our family, our professions, and our other goals. Among the concepts is "embrace boredom" - by which he means resisting the urge to *immediately* douse our discomfort with "ordinary life" by running back to our phones for another micro-dose of distraction dopamine.
Sherry Turkle explains it: “Boredom is your imagination calling to you.” Cal thinks we should heed the call. (Brené Brown does too; she quotes Turkle in her book, Atlas of the Heart.)
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Earlier today, I was reminded that I gave a TED talk at a TEDx conference several years back. The title was "Classical music is boring. So are the best ideas." I make the case for taking on big, "boring" things at slow time scales. I wanted to rehabilitate the idea of "boring."
It is interesting to see in hindsight that it came out a year after Deep Work, though I didn't know much about that book or Cal Newport in 2017. Now, I'm seeing that it's more of a reflection of the Zeitgeist:
I've talked with so many friends about our disenchantment with the form of modern knowledge work, the constant churn of back-and-forth ad hoc email, messaging, and social media, to say nothing of viral video apps like TikTok which "plays your brain stem like a harpsichord," that it seems like something virtually everyone is awake to it at this point.
I've talked to so many about it, it's not even interesting to talk about anymore.
I think we all want to come out of this undifferentiated sea of snackable, viral content, back and forth messages, contextless tweets, and seemingly meaningless work tasks, and move in the direction of books, records, marathons, no-tech camping trips, meditation retreats, long form journalism, 5000-piece puzzles, baseball, writing cabins, undistracted 2-hour coffee with a friend, and of course a night at the symphony or theater. Spending 6 hours assembling and filling bookshelves and beds has recently been one of those long form projects for Erin and I.
So in that context, though I hate to use a cliché, I think we need long form music, classical being one example, now more than ever, in this one particular way:
It seems to me that for colonial-enculturated folks for whom classical music is salient, a lengthy work by Florence Price or Anton Bruckner or Gabriela Lena Frank can be one place, a great place, to seek refuge from churn and a place to promote depth and meaning. This can can be applied to most types of music, though - we can for instance skip over the auto-recommendations of Spotify and YouTube and instead listen to an entire pop/rock/hip-hop/jazz/classical/etc album from beginning to end, with great headphones, no screens, and no interruptions. (Many have written about doing so in the past few years: see here and here.) Gamelan is one of dozens of musical cultures around the globe in which depth in the form of significant time commitment is a virtue.
Regardless of the genre, this commitment to depth or even "boredom" - lengthy time blocks with no context switching - gives us the time and space to get into something with scale and scope and story.
Scale, scope, and story - these are some of the finer things in life, and the things that our tailored algorithms that follow us around the internet know very little about, and in fact the things they actively try to distract us from.
As for evidence of its efficacy, so far this year, I’ve made a number of major changes, some of which seen my first peer-reviewed paper accepted for publication in the Journal of the College Orchestra Directors Association; I’ve written a total of 23,000 words (inclusive of the accepted paper) on rehearsal technique since January, many of which will show up in multiple future projects. I use this domain as one of the more tractable leading indicators of the effect the book has had on my ability to think deeply about the things that are important to me. I expect that in time, I’ll have more to say about the other ways in which this book has been transformative.
For anyone looking for a way out of the shallows, I found Cal's suggestions extremely helpful as I try to cultivate my best work.