Italics are mine

Music Innovations

I was amazed by the many innovative ideas related to the performance of, and the teaching of, classical music described in the Winter 2012 issue of Listen magazine. Classical music has long inspired more groundbreaking thinking than it is usually given credit for – from trends such as atonality, which I am personally not enthusiastic about but does represent a radical shift in music composition, to the rise of the budget recording company Naxos, now twenty-five (and the focus on another article of the same issue).

It is wonderful to see classical musicians and managers try new ideas – especially technology-related ideas – to adapt to the twenty-first century and attract new audiences. Here are the articles that caught my attention. “Attack of the big screens” discusses the recent trend by organizations such as the Vancouver Symphony and the New World Symphony to use big projection screens in their concerts to add a visual arts dimension to concerts that, traditionally, have only been heard. There is of course a risk that the visual element will distract from the music, but since most people are visual rather than auditory types, how many concert-goers can’t help but have their attention drift to their work or their children during a purely auditory performance anyway? (Sorry, the conductor's hand gestures don't count as entertainment.)

Well-chosen visual elements can help sustain attention and perhaps give listeners new insights into the music. For instance, according to the article, the Houston Symphony included NASA-provided images of the solar system for performances of Holst’s The Planets back in 2010. The production has since then traveled to several other cities. Personally, I’d love to see someone combine some of the great symphonies of the modern repertoire with modern dance. Another idea that seems to be popular nowadays is for orchestras to play the score of films – in fact, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, led by Marin Alsop (about whom I’ve written elsewhere) recently gave a concert version of the 1938 movie Alexander Nevsky, with a score by the great composer Sergei Prokofiev.

That score happens to be mentioned in the Listen article, because a New York-based producer created a concert presentation of the movie, using a restored print and Prokofiev’s score, as early as 1987. Just the other week, I noticed as I was reading the credits at the end of the movie Lincoln that the score had been performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Opportunities for top music orchestras remain in high-quality movies, and could represent an interesting way to broaden audiences. (A young adult I chatted with when I attended the Aspen Music Festival last summer also seemed to think programming more high-caliber movie scores would increase the appeal of classical music. It seems the time is ripe for such an idea to take hold.)

“A multimedia maestro” describes an app created by Maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen (music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic until 2009 and now with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London), which the journalist summarizes as “a fairly comprehensive look at the inner workings of a symphony orchestra” using “eight significant pieces of orchestra music from the Classical period to the present” and allowing users to “run several windows simultaneously”, including some quite sophisticated layouts of the different sections playing as well as a scrolling score and “a graphical score of the sounds being generated,” whatever that is supposed to mean. This is only one of the technology projects that fascinate Salonen, who recently visited MIT’s famed Media Lab to learn about new interfaces that transcribe hand gestures moving in space, such as the conductor’s movement. I can’t wait to learn about what other innovations he will undoubtedly pioneer in the coming years.

Finally, the “Discovery – Outreach” section has a wonderful article about online music lessons provided by start-up ArtistWorks, which “has developed a roster of nearly twenty musicians who together have recorded thousands of hours of video lessons”. The lessons rely on one-on-one interactions: “student subscribers record and upload videos of themselves performing… A few days later they get a video response from the teacher.” A key selling point of ArtistWorks is that its teachers include musicians from the very best orchestras around, such as three Philadelphia Orchestra principals and a Los Angeles Philharmonic violinist.

The article provides the perspective of the classical guitarist who helped start the Curtis Institute of Music’s guitar department, quoting him as quickly amassing “more than a hundred” students. Many students who would love to learn an instrument may live in small towns with limited access to instructors, and this can encourage them along in a hobby that fosters a wide range of skills while giving them access to musicians at the top of their profession – what an amazing opportunity to connect with role models.

After all this talk of technological advances in music, I can’t resist ending this post with a mention of the Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming in Jackson, Wyoming, with its stunning surroundings in nature, with Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in the background. Not much tech there, but time for the musicians to "hike, bike and canoe" on their days off between rehearsals. 

A Quote By Mahatma Gandhi

For today, a quote by Mahatma Gandhi - I found it in True Refuge by Tara Brach, which I'm currently reading. Brach has also used the quote several times in her Wednesday meditation classes at Bethesda's River Road Unitarian Church, and every time I hear or read it I find it very powerful. It is timely that I would come across it again this week, since I've been examining my thoughts, actions and habits, and the path they are taking me on a lot lately. That quote is the best wake-up call any of us is likely to get.

“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”

      - Mahatma Gandhi

This version is also quoted on Goodreads. The Goodreads website has a second translation of the same quote, which is perhaps less concise but just as beautiful:

“Carefully watch your thoughts, for they become your words. Manage and watch your words, for they will become your actions. Consider and judge your actions, for they have become your habits. Acknowledge and watch your habits, for they shall become your values. Understand and embrace your values, for they become your destiny.”

       - Mahatma Gandhi

"The Juilliard Effect"

I'm not sure why I kept an old print-out of this 2004 New York Times for so long, but "The Juilliard Effect", about what became of Juilliard-trained musicians ten years after graduation, has always fascinated me, with its peek into the lives of successful musicians playing in big-name orchestras such as the San Francisco Symphony and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and other very talented artists who ended up leaving their passion behind and now make a living in careers ranging from insurance underwriter to fitness trainer to software engineer.

From the NYT article: "In the end, maybe going to a conservatory is like being a compulsive gambler: It is one big bet, but the drive to study music is so blinding, and doing anything else so inconceivable, that young players are oblivious to the risk. Sometimes it is hard to determine whether they are driven by single-mindedness or they live in self-denial... Inevitably, many will be disillusioned; some, enough so to leave the profession. But every one of those graduates has an indelible stamp."

Announcing My New Blog

For those of you who share my tastes (and hopefully if you are reading this blog, you share at least some of them), I'd like to invite you to give my new blog, DCtonians, a try. There will be one new post per week, each time about someone related to the Greater DC area who inspires me. (I picked DC because I'd like to move there in the not-too-distant future.) Comments, feedback and advice all welcome. Feel free to spread the word, especially among other people who like or live in the Greater DC area. Thank you!

Review of "A Chorus Line"

Last night I saw the musical "A Chorus Line" at Zoellner Arts Center and really enjoyed it. Young cast, good vibe, sharp execution - practically flawless. I particularly liked how many of the dancers are taking part in their first national tour - while any performing arts job matters to people who have chosen that career, a first national tour must mean a lot in terms of the opportunities it opens (success begets success, in any line of work), and it is only fitting that these actors' career would be launched with a musical about Broadway dancers auditioning for spots on a chorus line. (Or in the words of one of the original cast members, "about veteran dancers looking for one last job before it's too late for them to dance anymore.")

I only had the faintest recollection of the story, since I'd never seen the musical and watched the movie only once when it came out in video in Belgium in the late 1980s, but thankfully I'd read Joe Papp's biography not too long ago (you can read my review about it here) so I knew that one of the dancers was the director's ex-girlfriend who now desperately needed work and there was some tension as to whether she was going to get that job or not.

I didn't remember her name and it takes a while until she asks to talk to the director in private, which is the moment where the audience realizes that she might not be just any chorus girl to him, so at the beginning I had a hard time feeling drawn into the musical (it seemed that it would mostly be a series of disjoint monologues interspersed with dance moves), but the story began to move forward once Cassie made her request and I liked the musical more and more - in the end I loved it.

The dancers were excellent - all very much in sync, perfect timing, no fumbling of lines, no missed dance steps. It was a very strong ensemble cast. There were two small, annoying technical glitches (the microphone of one of the dancers malfunctioned during his long monologue, and there was some sort of droning sound during one of the best songs, What I Did for Love) but the dancers didn't let those little mishaps upstage them. They delivered outstanding performances from beginning to end. It seems unfair to single out any of them for special praise, but I was particularly impressed by Caley Crawford (Cassie), Eddie Gutierrez (Paul) and Lauren Alaimo (Diana).

The show resonated with me because it shows people who were misfits in their environment of origin, converged to the big city in a vain attempt to realize their dreams and now are staring at the end of their career, unsure of what to do next and, in some cases, even refusing to even consider what could possibly come next. The dancers really made this dilemma come alive in front of our eyes. I will never look at Broadway dancers the same way again, which is perhaps the biggest compliment I could pay to A Chorus Line. Catch it if you can.

Novellas

Happy 2013! I'll devote my first post of the year to an update on my writing and my life. If you've been following this blog for a while, or have known me for a few years, it should be fairly obvious that I've slowly been returning to the loves of my youth - public affairs, foreign relations, world literature, history, dictatorship, exile & the concept of home, as well as related topics. I blunted those interests of mine for many years because of the enormous mismatch between someone with that sort of preoccupation and the area I live in, and I attempted to remain true to myself by making über-frequent trips to New York City.

It didn't work. Don't take me wrong: my 8 1/2 years in my current town have provided me with valuable experiences and many opportunities to be of service through my work in higher education. I've also become an advanced meditator and taken up painting (acrylics), in addition to reading a wide range of books. I've made sure my time in PA wasn't wasted, because you only live once and there isn't any point in watching your youth fade with acrimonious tears of powerlessness while eating cookies. Instead, I've done my best to make every single day count and I may not have succeeded every day but I've come close. I guess you could call it useful hibernation. As a long-term solution, though, it had flaws from the start, and it was high time I came to terms with it.

Now that I've decided to make some serious life changes, I've also gotten more in touch with what truly matters to me writing-wise, and I've realized that:

1. the business side of the book industry sickens me, with all the book jackets talking about "harrowing" accounts and "mesmerizing" descriptions and literary agents who seem to think they are rainmakers when most of them are engaged in a rat race the like of which I have only seen in the most unsavory parts of academe (and I do feel their pain, since I spend a large part of my time in the ivory tower, but that motivates me even more not to deal with that sort of things in the rest of my life),
2. I have a ton of ideas and I don't want to write long books. I want to write the stories I have in mind, whatever number of words they end up being, and then move on to the next thing. I want to do that without having to resort to the large fonts and inflated margins you find in many books, especially nonfiction ones, because the publisher is determined to stick to its price point in spite of the book's lack of substance. If a book is short, it should have a small price. If a book is longer, it should have a bigger price. It's that simple. Maybe publishing houses would sell more books if their prices reflected the word count.
3. I'm European at heart, culture-wise. When I moved to the United States I tried to focus more on my adopted country, but as much as I love living here, my literary tastes continue to run the gamut from French to German to Russian authors. My favorite American authors are immigrants like Ha Jin and Dinaw Mengestu who write about exile or alienation. That should have given me a hint a long time ago, but I was too stubborn to see it. One thing the European literary scene has long accepted is that it is perfectly fine to publish short books, and in particular novellas. Short fiction volumes abound in today's French bookstores, and luminaries such as Stefan Zweig built their reputation on that literary form. It is time we considered seriously the novella as an literary form in the US. (I'm not the only one to think so: read this post on TheAtlantic.com.) Maybe it'll never be an American literary form, but there are enough interest in European culture to create for a fairly sizable market.

So, I'm in.

In other words: I don't want an agent. I want to write novellas. And that's exactly what I'm going to do. (What was I doing trying to find an agent anyway? I thrive on non-conformism. I cannot stand playing by the rules. Where did that idea of trying to fit in come from? That wasn't the real me by far. I feel so relieved now that I've decided not to pursue the agent route.)

In fact I recently launched into a third round of revisions of my book, cutting large chunks of it, and I'm much happier now that I don't have to worry about falling below the magical word threshold that made my poor little unpublished self of minimal interest to literary agents. I'm going to self-publish (a great way to also publish a lot of other things I have in mind and tie my personal life with my professional life as a business researcher), and that's the way it is. My novellas might only have ten readers, but if those are the right ten readers who will continue to read me over the years and find themselves moved by my books, that's perfectly fine.

This is going to be a year of change and transformation. It was high time I realigned myself with what matters most to me and makes me feel most alive. I hope you'll join me for the ride.