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Driving the Conductor Crazy

This is a story about an unfortunate concert experience that one of the former members of The Louisville Orchestra told me a few years back. I’ve witnessed a lot of bass section antics in my time, but few were as public and as funny as this one.

Several years ago, The Louisville Orchestra was playing Mahler’s second symphony for a set of concerts. Now, this piece opens with a very prominent melodic line for the cellos and basses. We low string players are often asked to play this line at orchestral auditions.

The piece begins with a pensive tremolo in the upper strings. The cellos and basses wait for a few tense seconds, then enter with an aggressive passage of fast notes.

On the aforementioned particular evening, The Louisville Orchestra bass section was poised and ready to go. The uppers strings started their tremolo, and the lower strings got their bows on the string.

All of a sudden, one of the bass players (an elderly bassist that I’ll refer to as Bill here) jumped in early with the low string line. Blat!

While jumping the gun on a major solo passage isn’t pleasant for either audience or performer, it does happen from time to time. I’ve seen Chicago Symphony musicians do the same thing during concerts (I even remember the late Sir Georg Solti trying to bring the orchestra in during the middle of a pianist’s cadenza in a Mozart Concert), and just chalked it up to a random brain freeze.

Things got worse for poor Bill, however. After blatting in early, he dropped his bow. The metal end of the bow hit the stage first, and the whole bow then fell flat on the floor.

Bang!

Slap!

Cursing under his breath (but loud enough for his fellow bass players to hear), Bill reached down for his bow. Maybe he had eaten too many beans for dinner that night, but as he bent over on his stool to pick up his bow he broke wind.

Loudly.

The one-two-three punch of jumping in early, dropping the bow, and breaking wind was enough to send the entire bass section into hysterical laughter. Trying to cover it and preserve some sense of concert etiquette only made it worse, and soon the whole bass section was red-faced, shoulders shaking from suppressed giggles, eyes tearing up, lips clamped shut to avoid guffawing, all during what was supposed to be a section solo.

Many times we orchestral musicians get away with goofing around without the audience or conductor catching on, but the sight of the entire bass section laughing and shaking and not really playing during their big moment was officially obvious.

__________

Intermission came, and the personnel manager came back to the bass section.

“The Maestro wants to see the bass section in his dressing room. Now.”

They all headed back, and the furious conductor demanded to know what on Earth was going on out there.

“Well, Sir, Bill came in early, then he dropped his bow and then he cut one.” It’s hard to argue with that. I would have been laughing my socks off, having gotten the giggles at least that much in concerts for things that were much less funny.

_________

The moral? Don’t come in early, don’t drop your gear, and don’t eat beans before a concert.

I stumbled upon the Basso Moderno Duo while clicking around, and the fact that they were playing a piece written by Yoko Ono immediately intrigued me. Here is information on the duo from their website:

The Basso Moderno Duo has commissioned over one hundred lyrical works for solo bass and piano by some of the world’s most prominent and exciting living composers. Composers from over thirty countries have written specifically for Allan Von Schenkel’s virtuosic and highly individualized manner of playing. Kristen Williams piano playing is a perfect complement to the intense voice of the solo bass. Williams is a focused musician who is able to share, with the listener, her devotion to the piano. Our program is designed to delight and surprise audiences with a combination of lush sounds, tasteful writing and lyricism.

Here is a video of a performance of Yoko Ono’s Secret Piece II with Allan Von Schenkel:

After reading about the Z-List from several bloggers, I thought that I’d give it a try. My blog already has a pretty decent page rank for my specialty, but I like the idea of being able to give a shout out to other bloggers. Any reciprocal links are always appreciated.

If you want to join the Z-List ranks, simply copy these links into your own blog post. You’ll probably get a spike in traffic as well as helping out fellow bloggers!

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On An Overgrown Path recently highlighted a Milwaukee Journal article by music writer Tom Strini. Tom makes some interesting points in this article on the target demographic of classical music and the lack of cultural centrality of this music. Here is an excerpt from his column:

The survival of larger classical musical institutions, particularly orchestras, is in doubt across America. But there are some hopeful signs.

A semi-underground classical recording trade is taking shape on the Internet. Musicians are making discs and marketing them on their own mini-labels, and small, creative recording companies are finding ways to stay in business.

The aging of the population is a good thing for classical music. People might well start looking for more substance as they hit 50.

In a related development, the revival of the American city is bringing the most likely audience - mature empty nesters with money to spend - back into the central cities, the natural home of high culture. Art museums, theater companies, opera houses and symphony halls appear to be main drivers of the urban revival.

Some classical music institutions are getting better at marketing, and the level of musical performance is much higher than it was 40 years ago. If you can get them to come, they’ll probably like it.

The economic elite of our cities have proved unexpectedly tenacious and generous about saving classical music, and musicians and managements have turned out to be more resilient and resourceful than we might have expected. Several orchestras have folded, but as often as not leaner, smarter institutions have risen from their ashes.

But will classical music regain the standing it had in society in the first half of the 20th century?

No.

Classical music and new music rising from that tradition will remain marginal. We can take comfort in the fact that almost every cultural commodity is marginal these days - marginality is a matter of degree.

Most of us are intensely interested in certain things and oblivious to many more things of intense interest to millions of our fellow citizens. We have sliced and diced ourselves - and been sliced and diced by media manipulators - into hermetically sealed demographic bits.

Once there were three TV networks and we all had them more or less in common. Now, cable and satellite offer hundreds of choices. The Internet expands and subdivides the spectrum vastly. Each channel and Web site has its target audience, and each slice of pie is thinner than it used to be. The result is that we all have less in common.

It’s not the size of the audience that counts anymore; it’s the target demographic and whether you hit the bulls-eye. Celebrities can pop out of the white noise and span multiple demos, but do so as often for freakishness as for accomplishment. Even I know who Paris Hilton is. I don’t care, but I do know.

John Adams, Andreas Delfs, Lorin Maazel et al. will never enjoy such notoriety, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Classical music must embrace its marginality and make a modest nest in a splintered marketplace.

Here’s the target demo: Thoughtful people with long attention spans and a little bit of money. It’s a small market, but surely sizable enough to keep the music playing in this country if the classical business is smart enough to draw them out and serve them well.

Read the rest of this excellent and thoughtful column here, and check out On An Overgrown Path’s comments here.

I agree with the thrust of Mr. Strini’s arguments. When classical music tries to become all things to all people, it is usually dumbed down, losing its core audience of loyalists (the type of people described at the end of the section I excerpted).

Does this mean that we should abandon all hope of winning people over to classical music? Of course not. There is however, a line between making things accessible and dumbing things down, and some organizations are better at it than others. A master music director can combine both successfully (the IRIS Chamber Orchestra’s Michael Stern is a great example), but too often directors go too far in one direction or another.

Some people remarked on my use of the term ‘chud’ when describing former Chicago Symphony Orchestra conductor Daniel Barenboim in a recent post. I was kidding around with the term, but in case anyone was wondering about the exact definition, here it is (via Wikipedia):

Chud is a term referring to urban homeless people, especially those who dwell in the tunnels, sewers and subway corridors beneath New York City. The term “C.H.U.D.” was coined in a B-movie horror flick of the same name, and was originally an acronym representing the phrase “Cannibalistic Humanoid, Underground Dweller.”

OK–perhaps ‘chud’ isn’t the right word for Mr. Barenboim. He does look a little like someone dragged him out of the sewer and slapped a suit coat on him here, though, doesn’t he?