by natchaitkin | Jan 27, 2015 | Uncategorized
“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” – Rogers Hornsby
I normally write about the classical music world and its evolution, but today I just want to share a fun story about the best day I ever had at work as a classical musician, thanks to baseball, and especially Ernie Banks.
Over the weekend, Banks died at the age of 83. Known as “Mr. Cub,” he was the most beloved player in the history of the Chicago Cubs, and a great ambassador for both the team and the sport. He was well-known as one of the most cheerful people around, and his enthusiasm is at the center of this story.
Shortly after taking office in 2001, President George W. Bush invited the entire Hall of Fame over to lunch at the White House, which frankly, is exactly what I would have done if elected President. At the time, I was in the “President’s Own” Marine Chamber Orchestra, which exists to play at the White House. Needless to say, the orchestra was excited (at least those of us who loved baseball), and there was fierce competition among the wind and brass players to get assigned to that job.
On the big day, we were reminded not to take pictures, and not to be distracted from our work. The first part was easy to enforce, while the second was impossible – I will only say that I have never played the cello as badly as I did that day, and I won’t apologize for it. I was in the presence of Reggie Jackson, for goodness sake!
All through the afternoon, we spotted players we loved and missed notes by the bushel. When I saw Sandy Koufax, I nearly dropped my bow. I got to chat with Phil Niekro, the great knuckleball pitcher, and saw Yankee legends like Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra, too.
But the highlight of the afternoon was when Stan Musial pulled out his harmonica, and we accompanied him on “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Well, accompanied isn’t quite the right word – he only knew it in the key of D and we had it in the key of G, so we just played it in both keys. Stravinsky would have been proud.
What made it work was Ernie Banks – he got right behind our conductor and started waving his arms like a helicopter gone beserk – he was having a great time, and it was one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen. Everyone started singing, in several other keys besides the 2 we were already using. A perfect ending to a great day. Thanks, Mr. Cub.
Hope thoughts of baseball help you keep warm – remember, pitchers and catchers report in 3 weeks! Next post, I’ll get back to music, I promise.
Till next time,
Nat
by natchaitkin | Jan 6, 2015 | Uncategorized
“The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music – they should be taught to love it instead.” – Igor Stravinsky
Regular readers of this blog know that I have little patience for the sanctification of classical music – my New Year’s resolution is to be even more focused on bringing this great music to people in as unpretentious ways as possible.
On Sunday night, I will be playing on Cincinnati’s version of Classical Revolution, in a bar. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be at the headquarters of Procter and Gamble, home of Crest and Pampers. And on Bach’s birthday, March 21, I will play his music in a club that is better known for country and heavy metal bands – should be a lot of fun. More to come about that in the weeks ahead.
Over the weekend, I read two articles which reminded me of the push and pull between tradition and innovation that seems to be particularly strong in the music world these days. The first was by Ian Bostridge, a well-known tenor who has written a book about Schubert’s great song cycle, Winterreise. He compares these great art songs to modern pop songs, and suggests that Schubert may have influenced Bob Dylan. It’s really interesting, and makes me hope that he will perform this great work in a club sometime.
The second gave me a little less hope – it was an article in the New York Times about performers who wait to play the music of certain composers until they feel “ready.”
In the article, Jeremy Denk, one of my favorite pianists and writers on music, said: “ ‘In a case like Schubert, who died at 31, he had enough sorrow for a lifetime. There is something about the subtext of his music — people say you have to suffer a little more.’ He recalled that when he attended Marlboro (the prestigious chamber music festival in Vermont now run by the veteran pianist Mitsuko Uchida), ‘there was a feeling that there were the seniors in the back row and they were grousing about how superficially the kids were playing the pieces — a get-off-my-lawn kind of attitude.’ ”
This reminded me of one of my own experiences as a student – one year at the Chautauqua Music Festival, my friends and I were playing quartets, looking for repertoire to play for a chamber music master class later that summer. We came across the “Grosse Fuge” by Beethoven and attempted to sightread it (stop laughing).
Don’t try this at home – anyone familiar with this piece knows how difficult it is to play (or listen to, for that matter – much of it sounds weirder than anything written since.) To me, it sounded like Beethoven had been listening to Jimi Hendrix – of course, we decided we had to play it, and spent the next three weeks trying to figure it out.
On the big day, we played it for the Festival’s resident quartet in the class, and the first violinist immediately said: “You are too young to play this piece.”
(Now I’m not going to name names here, but I would just like to point out that this violinist was well known for non-musical reasons, featured in a story for an ad for a violin case. He absentmindedly left his very valuable instrument in said case on the roof of his car and drove onto the highway – the instrument fell off into traffic and miraculously survived (in tune, according to the ad!). Says a lot about the case, not so much about his judgement. As my wife puts it, I’m just saying.)
Anyway, I guess he felt we didn’t have the life experience to play this great work, and I suppose he was right, but man, was it fun! Sure, we were in over our heads, but everyone is with that piece, and that’s the point. You will never be really “ready,” so get started!
Later in the Times article, Paul Katz, cellist of the Cleveland Quartet puts it perfectly: “ ‘We have a responsibility to probe, but at the same time it’s amazing how many young people are throttled and intimidated by that,’ he said. “It’s something I never felt myself. I was able to feel the greatness and sense of responsibility but not feel bottled up by it.’
‘No mortal ever feels totally ready’ for Beethoven’s late string quartets, he added. “ ‘Those works humble us. We grow into them.’ ”
Exactly. We don’t serve great composers (or ourselves) by being afraid to play their music. And aren’t classical musicians are always complaining that the audiences at our concerts are all old – is it any wonder with this kind of thinking?
And does it make any sense to say that profound music can only be played by performers who’ve reached an age that its composer never even got to? Schubert, as Denk reminds us, died at 31. Mozart, 35. Mendelssohn, 38. Schumann, 46. Beethoven was comparatively lucky – he made it to 57.
Let’s close with one more quote from the Times article, by pianist Jonathan Biss: “Musicians have anxiety about everything. A solution to my anxieties is that you step into the void. Just try. On the one hand, you’re dealing with truly great works of art, but at the same time you’re not a doctor — if you make a mistake, nobody will die.”
by natchaitkin | Dec 19, 2014 | Uncategorized
I know, I know, I said I wasn’t going to write about this anymore, but this issue won’t go away! Last week’s post was about Kyung Wha Chung, and her strong reaction to some coughing at her comeback recital. Well, she has responded to the criticism she received with an online article of her own in The Guardian’s music blog, and, well, she’s really not helping herself (or more importantly, classical music’s image problem) with it.
In the article, entitled “I have always welcomed children to my concerts,” Chung begins by saying how wonderful it is that a supposedly dead art form can still cause this much discussion. This is a standard line about classical music, which I personally hate, and does no good to repeat. It also has nothing to do with the subject at hand, her behavior onstage.
This is followed by a couple of paragraphs explaining how important the concert in question was to her. No one, myself included, has ever questioned this – her comeback was a great story and she deserves great credit for having persevered through what seemed to be a career-ending injury. Again, though, it’s not the point, and it reads like she’s looking for sympathy.
When she finally mentions the coughing and what she euphemistically calls “my surprised reaction” to it, I was ready for her to say that it was wrong or poorly handled or at least something acknowledging that she didn’t handle the situation gracefully, but no such luck. Instead, she pivots immediately to the idea that concert halls are “the last havens of peace; places in which it is still expected that audiences can sit, absorb, think and contemplate without interruption.”
The rest of the article builds on this idea, and Chung adds that “learning to listen is a life skill,” and that it’s important to help children learn this by bringing them to concerts appropriate for their age. Here’s the most important sentence, though: “Live performances hold a certain magic, and the concert hall still commands the ability to create a sacred world far removed from the bustle of everyday life.”
So, no apology – instead we get a reminder that performances are sacred. No wonder not so many people come! It bears repeating that this is not the image concert music needs, nor is this “sacred” space the concert hall Mozart knew.
Look, Kyung Wha Chung is not alone in what she thinks – there are lots of examples of performers with similar attitudes described in that New York Times article I cited in the last post. I don’t think people should deliberately make noise at a concert, but I definitely don’t think we should make them feel bad if they do so accidentally!
I just wish she’d suggested someone get the poor little girl a glass of water – it would have displayed another “life skill” – empathy – and it sure would have been nicer to write about that!
Till next time (and I promise I’ll write about something else!),
Nat
by natchaitkin | Dec 15, 2014 | Uncategorized
I am really excited to share a brand new video about Bach and Boombox, courtesy of my friend and awesome videographer Kyle McCarthy at Mean Key Productions! We filmed it at the Carnegie Theater in Covington, KY a couple months ago – much thanks to Katie Brass and her great staff, as well as Rob Craig and Wes Needham from Leadership Northern Kentucky. Hope you like it – please post your comments and share it with your friends! You can watch it here or on the video page, Vimeo or YouTube.
[vimeo 114545142 w=650&h=365]
To hear the audio clips mentioned in the video, click here.
by natchaitkin | Dec 8, 2014 | Uncategorized
I really hadn’t planned to continue this series, but more questionable behavior in the classical music world has given us a third installment. Today’s subject – audience noise at concerts and the out of proportion reactions it provokes from performers.
Nowadays, concert audiences are expected to be quiet, and any small disturbance by a patron can draw glares from their neighbors. It wasn’t always this way, as I’ve pointed out in previous posts – audiences used to be a lot rowdier. In any case, the “sit down and shut up” model of concert etiquette prevails now.
I am not against this entirely – it’s hard to play your best with a lot of ambient noise. I have also been momentarily distracted by some really out of bounds behavior in the audience – at one chamber music concert I played, an audience member opened up his newspaper (loudly) and read the entire time we played!
However, some recent reactions from high-profile performers to disturbances in the crowd suggest that maybe the desire for quiet has gotten a little out of hand (it sometimes makes me think of the Cone of Silence from Get Smart, above right).
Recently, violinist Kyung Wha Chung made a comeback from a long absence from the concert stage – an injury decades ago forced her to leave behind a very high profile career as a soloist. This was a really nice story, and I was very happy to read about her perseverance in an article in the New York Times in the days before the concert. However, what should have been a joyful occasion was spoiled – here’s the headline:
Apparently, there was a lot of coughing during the first movement of a Mozart sonata, and at its conclusion, Chung put her violin under her arm and looked at the child, indicating she would not continue until the coughing stopped. When it did, she is reported to have said to the parents, coldly: “Maybe bring her back when she’s older.” I wouldn’t bet on it – if I were that kid, I’d need a lot of convincing to ever set foot in a concert hall again. And I really hope she wasn’t an aspiring violinist!
You can read about the incident here. Critics who were there talked about the amount of coughing (a lot), and reminded their readers that Chung was under great pressure, giving her first public performance in many years. Doesn’t convince me she had the right to do what she did, but I agree it’s worth mentioning.
The article also recalls a similar incident a couple of months ago at an New World Symphony concert, where conductor Michael Tilson Thomas addressed a woman in the audience whose child was sleeping. Audience members say he asked the mother to leave, while Tilson Thomas claimed that he only asked her to change seats, as her patting the girl’s head was distracting. In any case, they left, and again, I’d be surprised if they ever came back.
There are many other recent examples of such imperious behavior in a very good article by New York Times critic Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim. The grand prize goes to Andras Schiff, whose playing I really admire, but whose people skills seem to need work – to a coughing audience member, he said: “I am giving you a gift – don’t spoil it.” Please.
The article also offers some examples of much better reactions from the stage – my favorite is New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert turning, smiling broadly and waving goodbye to two women sneaking out of a concert in between movements. The audience laughed – it must have been a nice change for them!
There are many people who say that absolute silence is required to truly appreciate the nuances of a performance, and I won’t argue that it is nice to have. However, most of the works we treat so reverentially were written long before audiences were expected to be so quiet! If Mozart expected noise when he performed his music (read my post about this here), maybe Kyung Wha Chung could live with some coughing when she plays it.
Many people already view the classical music world as pompous and overly serious, and it takes so little to fix that – a few words from the stage before a concert begins, or telling a story about the origins of a piece, or even just a bad joke are all that’s needed to break the ice! Make an effort, and please don’t act like people who paid to hear you are getting in the way – they are the reason you’re up there in the first place!
So, performers – an early New Year’s resolution proposal – in 2015, let’s behave more like Alan Gilbert, and less like Andras Schiff and Kyung Wha Chung!
by natchaitkin | Dec 1, 2014 | Uncategorized
Last week’s post was about Mark O’Connor’s attack on the Suzuki method, which I (and many others) found quite harsh, mean-spirited and a huge waste of energy. This week’s example of unnecessary squabbling in the string world is a similarly strident (and questionable) attack on El Sistema, the Venezuelan method of community building through youth music education, which has received tremendous attention in recent years and has inspired many new programs in countries around the world.
The father of El Sistema is Jose Antonio Abreu, who began working with 11 children in a Caracas garage in 1975. Since then, upwards of two million children have gone through the program, including Gustavo Dudamel, music director of the LA Philharmonic. The program is praised for paying both musical and social dividends, and is the hot trend in both education and community engagement efforts across the music world these days.
With such popularity, I suppose a backlash was inevitable, and it comes from a British academic. In an article in the Guardian newspaper, Geoffrey Baker, a music lecturer at Royal Holloway University who has just written a book on El Sistema, to be published by Oxford University Press, claimed that far from being the “beacon of social justice” as it is portrayed all over the world, in Venezuela it is viewed as “a cult, a mafia and a corporation.”
Full disclosure, round two: I am not trained in the ways of El Sistema, but I have done a lot of teaching at Cincinnati’s incarnation, MYCincinnati, a wonderful program run by the amazing Laura Jekel. Here’s a video about the collaboration between the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra and MYCincinnati, which is my favorite part about being a member of that ensemble:
http://youtu.be/wkM5_5Aei2g&w=320&h=240&start=15
In the Guardian article, Baker complains about El Sistema’s “lack of rigorous evaluation to quantify its claims of ‘miraculous social transformation.’ ”
“I found many Sistema musicians unconvinced by claims that the project was aimed at Venezuela’s most vulnerable children,” he writes. “Pointing to a lack of mechanisms for consistently targeting this demographic, they suggested most musicians come from the middle levels of society.”
The article also offers a countering point of view: “Reynaldo Trombetta, a Venezuelan musician and writer who has worked with El Sistema, in his home country and then assisting (cellist Julian) Lloyd-Webber, set up the programme in the UK, rejected Baker’s allegations.
“He said: ‘I’m not really sure who Mr Baker spoke to and I have my doubts about the reach of his research. I have to wonder if he spoke to any of the parents of the kids from the barrios, the slums, who are desperate to get their kids into El Sistema because for them the alternative is these kids getting involved in drugs or crime. You would have to ask them if they think El Sistema is a mafia or a tyranny. More than two million kids have been involved and we still see huge queues, all the time, of parents desperate to get their children into one of the 300 nucleos [community music schools]. Most of the people involved are not aspiring to be musicians, they are just in a country where you don’t learn much about excellence, you don’t learn much about teamwork, you don’t really learn what you can achieve when you work hard and El Sistema is absolutely still a beacon of light benefitting a lot of people, even in things like educational literacy and maths skills.’ ”
Baker’s main complaint seems to be that there is a lack of data to support El Sistema’s claims of community building and personal enrichment for the kids who pass through it. Anyone who’s paid attention to education knows how hard it is to show that sort of thing in numbers, but let’s allow him that one, and say that there could be some better number crunching done. In fact, Trombetta agrees, suggesting that it would be very helpful.
The Guardian also points out that Baker doesn’t offer numbers to back up his claims either:
“Marshall Marcus, former head of music at the Southbank centre and now the chair of Sistema Europe, also cast doubt on Baker’s allegations.
‘My experience over many years is that El Sistema certainly is mainly involved with children and young people from economically challenged circumstances,’ he said. ‘If it is thought by someone that El Sistema has become more skewed towards middle class students rather than helping those living in poverty then I would be interested to see any figures that show that. I have not seen any to date.’ ”
The article also adds: “Argentinian pianist Alberto Portugheis, who was responsible for bringing El Sistema over to play in Britain for the first time almost a decade ago added: ‘El Sistema has had a fantastic effect on education in general in Venezuela. But you cannot expect a musical education to make all the problems of poverty in the country disappear.’ ”
This is a crucial point, I think – learning to play the violin may give someone a great deal to help them deal with the difficulties in their life, but it does not make those difficulties disappear!
So, why am I writing about this? Like O’Connor, Baker seems intent on tearing down something that is very popular and does a great deal of good. Is El Sistema perfect? Of course not – no system is. And as someone who spent eight years working for the Pentagon, I can tell you that anything operating on a large scale has all sorts of problems! Most importantly, like the Suzuki method, for El Sistema to be successful, IT ALL DEPENDS ON THE TEACHER!
In any case, both O’Connor and Baker are doing more harm than good. As I said last week, music education is viewed by many as a luxury, and both the Suzuki method and El Sistema have convinced millions otherwise. We don’t have time for circular firing squads in our business – let’s leave that to others with less important work to do!
