Conductor's Notebook
Writings, including academic papers and music criticism, as well as videos, audio, notes, and other content.
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Essay
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.)
Boring speaks to craft. It speaks to craftsmanship. It speaks to long, laborious, often repetitive tasks that have great payoff, if only the craftsman will apply the time and diligence to see the project through to the end.
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.
Erin and I recently completed getting new shelves assembled and my score library fully reconstituted after the move this summer.
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.
Princeton musicologist Elizabeth Margulis and her colleagues convincingly provide strong and subtle evidence that the claims that music is the universal language remain, at best, significantly overstated, just as much as they were when Mehr et al published their most recent rehearsal in 2019.
Oklahoma keeps coming up this year as a theme in a variety of unexpected ways both for me personally, and for the nation. I recently took my dad to see the new production of Oklahoma! for his first-ever trip to New York, which certainly provided a great deal of added resonance when millions watched the many references to same in the alt-Tulsa of Watchmen (further resonance with Hamilton there!). Meanwhile, and unrelated, I’ve found myself becoming interested in the music of Jerod Tate, and thanks to the recent Supreme Court decision, we are all now learning more about Oklahoma's history with regard to First Nations. Oklahoma almost begins to serve as a of mental totem for a lot of other important ideas in understanding our history in the US.
Sister Knight was fully prepared for COVID-19
One place in which the twin threads of slavery and *Indian removal come up in particular is understanding the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921. A fact most of us (including myself) probably didn't have on recall until this week is that Tulsa was founded by the Lochapoka and Muscogee nations in 1836 when they completed the dreaded Trail of Tears (which was illegal even by US standards).
Tulsa, Oklahoma
To get there, we need one important fact highlighted by Rebecca Nagle's excellent podcast This Land. It is the uncomfortable truth that the Muscogee Nation (though not all American Indian tribes/nations) held slaves and allied itself with the confederacy. After the Civil War, it negotiated a new treaty with the US in which it agreed to free its slaves and in which it agreed to sell off another 3 million acres of its lands to give out to new freedmen. So, it's messy. Very, very messy! (By the way, Tate wrote the theme song for This Land.)
But then, something interesting happened. Muscogee Freedmen were added to the rolls of the tribe. They became citizens of Muscogee nation, and many of them settled in Tulsa. While most of the south began erecting massive structural barriers for black excellence (Jim Crow), the Muscogee Nation tried, for the most part, to actually do right by its former slaves. While they engaged in slavery as a practice, they lacked the racial animus to attempt to perpetually hold freed slaves back. Or, they at least lacked the strongest possible degree of animus, and did not mirror white governments in their policies toward former slaves.
Listen to this episode from This Land on Spotify. The geography of this country was reshaped in the late 1800s and depending on who tells it, it's either a story of good intentions...or one of outright theft.
Flash forward over 50 years, and thanks to efforts from folks like Booker T. Washington and O. W. Gurley, large chunks of land in Tulsa were purchased and sold exclusively to African Americans, many of whom were those original Muscogee freedman in an effort to create a Black majority area that could be impervious to the rise of Jim Crow. This for me was a bit of an "aha" moment: key to Black success was the mere absence of intentional white-erected barriers thereto. Tulsa eventually became more like the rest of white America, but its roots as a hub for First Nations folks allowed their ethos to permeate the land and create space free of the white gaze, if only for a vanishingly short period of time, for its Black citizens.
[Side note: For me, this ties very much into the history of Florence Price. As Rae Linda Brown documents thoroughly in her biography of FP, released posthumously just this past month, Price’s family history in Little Rock very closely mirrors some of the history exposed in Tulsa. It would be too much to get into all of that right now, but Florence's story represents a multi-generational project that was possible only in a brief window of time before the full devastation of Jim Crow and incessant lynchings made it impossible. Thus (with notable exceptions, also unique to their time and place), we mostly lack a succession of Black composers of the next two generations after Price that might otherwise have been expected. To be clear, there was no dearth of Black musical excellence during the period I just mentioned. I'm speaking very narrowly here. It nonetheless attests to yet another case where Black excellence is as much a staple of Black life as one would expect to see with any other conceivable group, absent the galling oppression of slavery and Jim Crow, to name just a couple of examples.]
“Some changes take centuries to reveal themselves.”
And again, land and messiness comes in, because these were tribal lands that were taken from Musogee, Cherokee and Osage Indians. And tons more was being sold off to white folks, and a great deal of land (I'm summarizing) was parceled out to Native Americans themselves with the goal of getting them to sell off some of it, and then lose other portions through squatters' rights, until there was nothing left.
[Another side note: for anyone who thought this was ancient history, it's not. Take a look at the commercial chicken farms being setup spuriously to this very day in reservation residential areas. In the process they are powdering whole communities with literal chickens***. All in the name of white profit on land promised to the Five Tribes (again, listen to This Land!).]
Back to Black Wall Street: The fatal flaw in the plan was the underestimation of the vile hatred and disdain that their white neighbors would feel and respond to at the sight of Black excellence. The brutal revenge for Black achievement was exacted in 1921 as millions of dollars of black wealth, and 35 city blocks were destroyed. At least 300 black citizens were dead, and an estimated 10,000 successful middle class Black Tulsans found themselves destitute overnight.
The messiness continue right up through to today (see the chicken farms!). I don't pretend there is some big insight here, but this week’s SCOTUS decision does at last give some room for dim hope that some positive steps may be possible going forward, perhaps more than previously realized. As US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (who is a Tulsa resident and Muscogee citizen) says, "Some changes take centuries to reveal themselves." Let us hope, though, that it does not take justice centuries to reveal itself.
Here is the 5-4 opinion from Justice Gorsuch in McGirt v. Oklahoma. Roberts dissented joined by Kavanaugh, Alito, and Thomas. https://t.co/hVq97zjcWh
— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) July 9, 2020
To achieve those steps, I think the very simple balm for that is massively educating ourselves about it. I, for one, was shocked that there was any way that Oklahoma could be restored or that lost sovereignty might be able to be somehow reconstituted to the First Nations in Oklahoma or across the country, which only shows that we need to learn more as a society, and to broaden our imagination about how to make our society just for all its members.
As a reminder, this is not a partisan issue, which would go far beyond the scope of a blog that is primarily here to serve music. There is not a single page of our history on these matters that looks great for white liberals. The Dawes commission was believed by liberals to be a great way to "help" American Indians by "integrating" (assimilating) them into American (white) culture.
Look, I'm no historian, I'm a conductor. Performing musicians use a (hopefully) rigorous process to analyze a variety of sources to seek broader truths for use in a specific application. Namely, performance. It is definitely not a science, and it is not really a part of the humanities in the traditional academic sense. It is art. Further, I’m a white guy myself. These two facts should help to situate this essay in the space from which it comes and speak to what it can and cannot achieve.
Nonetheless, it’s incumbent on people from every background to speak up about injustice, and use their own platform, however large or small, to add to the chorus of individuals crying out for change, especially around historic inequities that still reach into the present day. As an individual who works for change especially around the music and legacy of Florence Price, I am regularly reminded of the historic difficulties that musicians who are Black, Indigenous, and persons of color have faced in a largely white institution like classical music.
Recreative performing artists (people who perform composed works such as a play or a symphony), rely on data sources such as textual analysis, performance history and practice, original sources, cultural context, and community perspectives to try develop a working concept of the spirit of a work (a piece of music, say) so that they bring a moral core to their own performance. This moral core centers performers in a way that allows them to exudes authenticity and humanity in their work. Somewhere in that moral core must be a commitment to basic principles of justice. This is not a political commitment. I accept that different people can come to different conclusions about how to address the problems we face today. Rather, this is a spiritual commitment to deeper principles; a commitment that transcends parties, ideologies, elections, affiliations, and nations. This is a larger topic for discussion that I will have to return to some other time.
Let’s all continue to think out loud and in print about how to develop a moral core to our society, one that is rooted in an accurate and complete understanding of our history, one that can be a source for just living, and one that can serve as a source for humane art. In light of all that has come to light in a recent look at Oklahoma history, we should apply the motto of another state, one that is popular across certain sectors of our society. It is the same logic of, "don't tread on me" to all of our people.
Santayana. It's cliche because it's a great quote. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Perhaps this is our opportunity to refresh a few critical details so that our future doesn’t resemble our past.
*I use the word Indian freely here because most American Indians use the term freely and show a firm preference for it. It sounds like it may be an anachronistic word to white ears and it is undoubtedly just as colonial as just about any other aspect of our society, but I am assured by a variety of sources across several modalities that, on most reservations, that is mostly not the case. YMMV but I think we should call folks whatever they want to call themselves - which above all is to refer to the SPECIFIC nation from which they hail. (For more, start here and here.)
I will never pass on an opportunity to encourage folks to learn more about Florence Price! Read the first two chapters to dig deeper. Also take a look at this book of Poems by the US poet laureate.
