A New Beginning

Last week I spent some time with my sisters Karen and Tamie in beach chairs staring idly at the Atlantic Ocean.  It’s late summer and the beautiful beach at Wildwood Crest, New Jersey, isn’t as populated as it is in the peak of the season. I can think of no more perfect way to unblock the mind and unschedule human endeavor (or my little piece of it, anyway).

I am suddenly struck with a memory—a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti titled “Wild Dreams of a New Beginning.” In the poem Mr. Ferlinghetti portrays a huge cleansing wave sweeping across the United States, wiping away all the vestiges of civilization and returning to the wilderness that once existed here.

School will be restarting in a very short time and I am experiencing that moment of hope, faith, and anticipation that precedes each school opening day.  As a student and a teacher, I have experienced 55 years of school openings, and no amount of rational thought and accumulated experience can make that sense of expectation go away. The cycle of school life is driven by the hope of growth and renewal. The subsequent and inevitable deflation comes from the unravelling of our old life.  

The growth that comes from learning doesn’t come comfortably. It shakes us. It tears us apart and rebuilds us as different people. It’s a messy business. We let go of our old ideas reluctantly. When the year is complete, we feel spent, exhausted, and defeated.

We are also changed and, in a cruel twist, we may not even notice the change at the time it happens.  Some time needs to pass before we have a chance to step back and gain the wisdom that perspective provides. Perhaps it is that perspective that allows us to dream again of a new beginning. It gives us the courage to let that wave wash over us once again and the faith to believe it will change us for the better.

                                                                                                                      Lawrence Davis

The Virtue of Rehearsal

Music is both journey and destination—rehearsal and performance.  The perfect rehearsal is equal parts discovery, affirmation, and reinforcement. With musical collaborations there is also a social dimension to rehearsal. The merging of multiple points of view into a single stream of expression takes skill, certainly, but also time and patience. Preparation of a finished performance takes the time it takes, even if that time exceeds the amount allotted to it.  

As a musician, one of the first things you notice when you arrive in New York is that there is a lot less rehearsing, in general, than in some other areas of the country. I don’t have scientific evidence but I do have the evidence of my own eyes and ears. 

It is easy enough to deduce why it may be true.  It’s expensive here.  Rehearsal halls are expensive, hiring musicians is expensive, renting instruments is expensive.  There are also a lot of very talented musicians in this area. Three of America’s best conservatories are located in New York City and they are all turning out very capable and competitive musicians.  In addition, a lot of musicians with big talents and big career aspirations still come to New York with the idea of “making it.”  

The New York music scene is a culture of capability, but something seems a bit out of balance. Financial pressures reduce the amount of paid rehearsal time creating a need for musicians with more facility.  It’s a wild spiral—more and more skilled musicians and less and less rehearsal time. At its worst, It all leads to a music-macho attitude.  Who needs rehearsal?  Only wimps.  

I sometimes need to hire musicians to supplement my orchestra performances.  I am amazed at the number of people who are prepared to step into a concert with no rehearsal at all.  I am astonished at the number of professional concerts I go to which are under rehearsed—even ensembles of highly skilled professional musicians.   

This past June we performed the Liszt Piano Concerto in E Flat Major, as I mentioned in a previous posting.  The soloist was a very talented pianist who is a student at Bloomingdale School of Music, so we had the privilege of having 10 rehearsals with soloist and orchestra together.  The performance was among the best our orchestra ever played.  We had enough rehearsal to get it right, but we also had enough rehearsal to experience the growth of collaboration.  As a performer and music lover, I wish that was always the case. 

                                                                                                                            Lawrence Davis

The Soul Speaks

As anyone who loves music can attest, there are moments when you can be transported to a different level of consciousness by performing or listening to music.  It is an unselfconscious moment when there is heightened awareness and a profound depth of appreciation.  In Japanese painting, the concept is called “ukiyo” which means “floating world” in English.  It is a time where the mind loses touch with mundane daily responsibilities and becomes engaged in something different—something beyond the moment and, at the same time, completely within it.  

Music is an activity in time, unlike a painting which can be experienced in a few seconds or observed over a much longer period.  For the sake of illustration, please consider music as a two-dimensional graph, with time on one axis and experience on the other.  Normally we move along the time axis and experience what is at the intersection of time and experience at any point in time. There are, however, moments when the motion of time seems to stop and we are free to experience a single point in time in a new way, moving up the experience axis.  It is a transcendental moment. The soul speaks.

The late Ross Wetzseon, a longtime editor of the Village Voice, once wrote a review of the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey, whose hypnotic circular movement he called “an emptiness filled with everything.”  He went on to describe the experience this way, “the transfixing serenity of ceaseless motion...the revolutions revealing that the center of a circle is synonymous with the whole. Timelessness has its own rhythms.”  

I vividly remember the first time I heard “Thanksgiving” by Charles Ives.  The piece, which is about 15 minutes long, is full of drama and mystery, building and growing, culminating in a hymn, sung to the tune of Duke Street, “God! Beneath thy guiding hand.”

"God! Beneath thy guiding hand, 

Our exiled fathers crossed the sea, 

And as they trod the wintry strand, 

With prayer and praise they worshipped Thee."

I was literally holding my breath as that tune was sung.

I can’t say I have had many of these experiences in my life as a musician, but when I do they are always unforgettable.  Last Friday at 6:00pm my talented young piano quintet came to my office to warm up before their concert later that evening.  They tuned their instruments and started to play the last movement of the Schumann Piano Quintet in E Flat Major.  As they played, I began to realize they had never played it better.  They were completely focussed.  They were free of self consciousness.  They were making music. I had to remind myself to breathe when they were done.

When we are transported that way by music and human endeavor, it is an evanescent moment. And when we return to everyday life with its multiple headaches and stresses, I can only hope we bring something back—something that is life affirming—something that proves that, even if it is only a moment, life can be perfect.

                                                                                Lawrence Davis

Learning to Love Liszt

I am conducting Liszt for the very first time in my life. One of my early encounters with classical music is when I saw a Tom and Jerry cartoon with the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody #2 as the soundtrack. I really liked the piece with its drama and its energetic melodies. I had no idea what a rhapsody was at that time. I didn’t even know what Hungary was. Still, I tracked down the sheet music from one of the two sheet music stores we had in my small Western Pennsylvania home town. When I discovered how technically challenging the piece was, I also invested in a simplified version which was more within the range of my abilities at the time. 

I ran into the Liszt Piano Concerto in E Flat for the first time in Boston in the 1970s when I heard the Boston Pops orchestra play the piece. It didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time, though I did very much enjoy the concert and my first experience with the Boston Pops in Symphony Hall. The rest of my largely negative impressions of Liszt came from a general dislike of Romantic music and of self-absorbed virtuosos specifically. Figures like Paganini and Liszt just seemed a bit over the top for me. During that period of my life, when I was much more opinionated than I am now, I found many musical things more interesting and focused on them instead.

Which brings us to 2012, when I had decided I did not want to program the Mozart G Minor Symphony for our spring concert. My selection to replace it was Beethoven’s First Symphony, but we had just done the third and two Beethoven symphonies in one year just seemed like too much of a good thing. When Stephen Lee, a really gifted young pianist, asked me if I would consider doing the Liszt, I decided to listen to the piece again for the first time in almost 30 years. I was quite surprised by it. We had recently done the Barber Violin Concerto, which is a stunning piece and there were a lot of things about the Liszt that reminded me of the Barber. There were four short movements, but it felt as though it had been conceived in a single vision. The piano and the orchestra felt connected in a unique way, just as the violin and the orchestra felt in the Barber. Melodies pass freely from soloist to individual players in the orchestra and back. The piano part was breathtaking. And in the end I was drawn to it for the very same reasons I was drawn to the Hungarian Rhapsody so many years ago. There is so much drama in the piece and it is real drama—not contrived or manipulated. There are fun little melodies that are full of energy and life. I decided we would do the piece.

When I started preparing the score is when I ran into some of its astonishing limitations—sloppy and inconsistent notation, rhythmic awkwardness, artless orchestration. The orchestra part made no sense on its own the way Beethoven’s concertos do. The lush and perfect orchestration of the Brahms piano concertos make the Liszt seem vacant by comparison. Even the Rachmaninoff piano concertos, which are every bit as virtuosic as the Liszt, seem to have a greater sense of orchestral integrity than the Liszt. Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff and Liszt were all celebrated pianists of their day, perhaps none more so than Liszt, yet the former three all achieved a greater balance and dialogue between piano and orchestra than did Liszt.

It was a conversation I had with my colleague Monica Verona over lunch that made me think a little differently about the Liszt.  She advised me to think of the piece as having its own kind of integrity.  “It is what it is,” she wisely pointed out. She’s right, of course. It simply makes no sense to judge a piece by what it isn’t. The piece is true to the vision of the composer.  

The way it is composed for orchestra is unique. Ideas about orchestral coloration and timbers are less important to Liszt, because the orchestra is just more piano for him. Like those 3-dimensional chess games Mr. Spock used to play on Star Trek, Mr. Liszt has expanded the piano keyboard horizontally into the high strings and piccolo and vertically into the trombone and double basses. In those maddening moments in the fourth movement where it is devilishly difficult to coordinate the piano and the orchestra, one gets the impression that Liszt wanted the pianist to play all of those notes—both the orchestra’s and his own. Understanding that has helped me conquer my resistance to the piece and actually learn to enjoy it.

I can’t say that the orchestra shares my love and understanding of the piece just yet. There are just too many key changes and chromatic passages to inspire immediate appreciation. I do have faith that they too will come to see what Liszt is all about, just the way Tom and Jerry and I have.

                                                                                                                           Lawrence Davis

There is Music in Everyone

Things don’t always turn out as you expect. I know that of course, but there is something willfully forgetful about my 60-is-the-new-40 brain.  Certain events in the yearly calendar evade easy characterization. The annual Album for the Young Concert, which occurred on February 13 this year, is the most prominent among those things which ought to be familiar to me, but which astonish me anew every year.  This year was the eighth year of the concerts and because it took place in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, the venue certainly contributed a new context for A4TY, as it is fondly known around the school community.

The Bloomingdale Student New Music Project was the vision of gifted performer and teacher Katy Luo, who noticed that her young piano students were completely unfamiliar with composers and composing. The music they played was largely from Classical music history.  Beethoven’s Für Elise, a student favorite, was written 203 years ago.  Even Bartok’s Microcosmos, standard student repertoire, was written over 70 years ago.  So Katy decided to ask students to create their own music and she arranged a concert for students to play music other students had written.  She also asked professional composers to write music especially for students.  An important part of the concert process was the interaction of student composers and performers and of professional composers with student performers.

I attended the first concert, which was held at our David Greer Recital Hall, and my very first impression was that it was a mess. Some of the compositions were under a minute long.  Some of the performers had never performed in public before and barely knew how to hold their instrument.  The number of stage set-ups was maddening and time consuming. By the end of the concert, however, I was a believer. Many of the pieces were hauntingly original. Some of the young composers had clearly been influenced by the music they were learning as student players, but some of them went off in completely different directions. The pieces eluded easy description. They represented the fits and starts of the creative process.  Each new composition, regardless of its state of readiness, was afforded the dignity of its own finished performance.  Some of the pieces were even performed by faculty members and that has always been a special part of the evening for me.  Experienced performers find the artistry in these fledgling compositions.  

The seriousness of these students’ first compositional expressions was brought home to me quite powerfully by the integrity everyone brought to the process of the concert from the very beginning.  One of Bloomingdale School of Music’s core values states “There is music in everyone.”  From the beginning of our A4TY concerts, as envisioned by Katy Luo and ably advanced by her successor and wonderful teaching artist Margalit Cantor, the current leader of the A4TY concerts, everyone who writes a piece gets that piece performed.  What better way is there to prove your commitment that core value “there is music in everyone”?

Weill Hall was filled to capacity.  It is a wonderful space and its history and traditions mean a lot to musicians and New Yorkers.  As the most recent concert began and the first young pianist came out to play the first 30 second piece, my first thought was very familiar to me.  “Having this concert here was a mistake.”  The usual parade of unfamiliar pieces and performances followed, each meticulously set up by the professional staff at Weill Hall.  As the concert progressed and I saw some very impressive performances of some very strong pieces, I realized that this was a completely appropriate spot to celebrate the power of human expression, at whatever level. I can’t honestly say that every piece was very good. It was not like Garrison Keillor's mythical hometown of Lake Wobegon, where all of the children are above average. I can say that it was a clear representation of our profound belief that there is music in everyone—and some of it is very good indeed. I have come to understand that there is a much larger continuum of musical expression than many people realize.

                                                                                             Lawrence Davis

Thoughts After the End of the World

I am happy to announce that the world did not end on December 21st. This means that the History Channel now has about a thousand hours of programming with the words “Maya” and “Apocalypse” in the title. They were played on a 7 day/24 hour endless loop on cable tv through the whole month of December. I wonder if the Mayans will lose their reputation, built over centuries, because this prediction just didn’t come true. I also worry about the History Channel, but much much less. I hope they will be turning their attention away from impending doom.  As one of James Thurber’s cartoon characters once said about the evening news.  “Why can’t they be more cheerful about the world?”

Of course, we don’t have to rely on ancient predictions from South America for dire apocalyptic visions.  We have Washington, DC.  I am also happy to announce that we did not fall off the fiscal cliff.  That’s awfully good news. The two lost tribes that inhabit our nation’s capital managed to terrify us with creepy threats to push us off the edge of the abyss, and then, at the precise moment we were dangling, our knuckles white, we found out there was no cliff at all.  Just talk of a cliff. It was all like a bad TV program that just ended. Now it’s on to something else.  As Dr. Neil Postman once observed, there are no priorities on television. Everything is equally important.  Take a typical evening news cast. “Thousands of people died in Syria today, the North Koreans sent a rocket into the atmosphere, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are having a baby, and now this from our sponsor, Pringle’s Potato Chips.”

Where does all of this leave us?  Each and every one of us is left to sort it all out.  We all look for those moorings familiar to us—values we can hold on to, things that we know and believe in.  Like when my student piano quintet plays Shostakovich. It is difficult to describe what it’s like hearing five wonderful young performers discover the majesty in that piece.  It makes all of the endless chatter about Armageddon and fiscal failure go away.  Such is the power of absolute expression.

                                                                                     Lawrence Davis

Listening to Music at Concerts

I have recently begun thinking about going to the opera again.  I saw three Stravinsky pieces at the Met a couple of years ago. The production strung together Le Sacre du Printemps, Oedipus Rex, and Le Rossignol, the latter being the only one of the three which is an actual opera. The production was designed by David Hockney and it was incredibly beautiful and impeccably performed. When you go to the Met to see an opera, you can be sure you will find an educated and motivated audience. How can I be sure? For one thing, tickets at the Met top out at $495. It’s no place for the unmotivated. Most of the people who go to the opera are there to listen to music.

I attend between 30 and 50 concerts a year and the reason I go is to hear music. I understand that there is a social dimension to concert going. I genuinely like people and love talking with them. It is not why I go to a concert, however. I am a musician. I love music and I go to concerts to hear music. 

The last concert I went to at the New York Philharmonic was a performance that included two pieces—Brahm’s Violin Concerto, with Sarah Chang as soloist, and the rarely-performed Persephone by Igor Stravinsky.  The first piece on the program was the concerto and it was very well performed by the orchestra and by Ms. Chang. I had heard the piece many many times, but it was wonderful hearing it live again. I did notice that the audience wasn’t quite as focused as it might have been. There was whispering and talking during the performance, including the seat holders on my right.  It was manageable though, until the orchestra started playing the Stravinsky. To my astonishment, my neighbors to the right began an extended conversation about the Brahms and about Ms. Chang’s performance. I then noticed that the attention of the audience, in general, had drifted substantially.

I could scarcely believe it.  I had first heard Persephone on a record album I borrowed from the New Castle Pennsylvania Free Public Library in 1968. I loved it immediately.  Now, some forty years later, I was hearing it live for the first time—played by one of America’s premier ensembles in New York City, one of the cutural capitals of the world, and the audience was about as attentive as a movie audience in a Times Square theater.

Have I become a concert snob?  Hardly.  I watched the Met’s production of Turandot at home in a comfortable chair in my pajamas.  The sound from my TV speaker is terrible, but I guarantee there was no talking during “Nessun Dorma.”  I actually don’t care what people do during concerts as long as it is quiet.  Please, text to your heart’s content, just remember to turn your phone to vibrate only.  Read a book, check your email, gesture to your neighbor in sign language, get some sleep—feel free to experience the concert as you like, but please realize that some people go to concerts to hear the music.

There was an exchange of letters in the New York Times recently between people who believed that classical music was dead or dying. One writer lamented that many people don’t know how to behave in concerts any more, because they have received no education about it in school. Another writer blamed parents for not teaching their kids how to behave in concerts.  And who will teach the parents?  Cities started cutting arts programs from schools in the mid-seventies. We are well into the second generation of citizens without any training or experience in music in the schools.

Is classical music dying? I grow impatient with these kinds of discussions quickly.  Who cares if the audience claps between movements? Keep it simple. Start with this. If you are not at a concert to hear the music, don’t go.  Stay home.  Download the Brahms concerto onto your iPod and eat corn chips out of the bag while you listen to Sarah Chang play the piece, but please, oh please, do not talk during the concert.

                                                                                                   Lawrence Davis

Peloquin and Ives

I once saw a painting at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, titled “The Earth Everlastingly in Transition.”  It was a very beautiful painting, but what has stuck with me since then is the title.  Life and art are also everlastingly in transition.  At any given moment we can capture the experience of art, but then, almost immediately, we move on.  Even the memory we may have of experiencing the art at that moment is subject to change. Canadian pianist Glenn Gould made a recording of the Bach Goldberg Variations in 1968, when he was 30, and another recording 20 years later.  Those bookend recordings are astonishingly different from each other, yet they are the same piece.  The transition came within Mr. Gould.  Each performance brings its own insights into the music—each the same, each different.

Last spring, my colleague and friend of over twenty years Marc Peloquin gave a performance of Charles Ives Piano Sonata #2 (“Concord, Massachusetts 1840-1860”).  The Concord Sonata is a piece of music that is almost unimaginably complex and beautiful and a piece of music that Charles Ives was endlessly absorbed in.  Marc and I are working on a web project revolving around the Concord Sonata.  It’s a part of an ongoing conversation he and I have had about Ives in general and the Concord Sonata specifically.  It’s a piece that deserves every bit of attention you give to it and rewards your efforts with new revelations.  

I have heard Marc Peloquin play the Concord Sonata three different times and each time has been a completely different experience.  For me, Marc has been a fearless Concord Sherpa, who leads his audiences to the peak of the mountain and guides them safely back.  Marc is passionate about understanding the piece—researching, thinking, discussing, playing through the numerous edits.  This sonata was everlastingly in transition for Ives, as he never seemed to “finish” the piece, and now also for Marc and his audiences.  

                                                                                                  Lawrence Davis

Solo Playing vs. Orchestra Playing

Richard Strauss wrote a piece called METAMORPHOSEN in 1945.  The instrumentation was 23 solo string players.  It is quite a striking piece in many ways, based on the second movement of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony—the Marche Funebre, it elongates and intensifies the rhythmic and melodic contours of the original.  Is it a wild Germanic musical Frankenstein, made from parts of a masterpiece?  Or is it a genuine metamorphosis—like a butterfly emerging from a caterpillar?  I urge you to listen to the piece and draw your own conclusions.  

What fascinated me about the composition was the distinction Strauss made by making it for 23 solo string players, rather than a string orchestra. In truth, when you hear the piece, the differentiation seems subtle.  I doubt that anyone hearing it for the first time without knowing Strauss’s description of the ensemble, would conclude it was written for any number of solo string players.  It is certainly not the first piece written with multiple string parts. The Romance from the 5th Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams has, with divisi, 16 different string parts.  

I work with a talented student orchestra, a chamber orchestra. I spend a lot of time talking about the difference between a large orchestra, which represents the experience of most young players, and a chamber ensemble.  In a large orchestra, the conductor is more of a director.  Time constraints and the need to work efficiently in a modern orchestra, means there is little time for consensus building or dissenting points of view.  In an ensemble of 85 people,  it would be disastrous asking for other opinions among the players. A chamber ensemble is a different story.  I coach a string quartet and one of my year-long goals is to encourage the exchange of ideas among the players.  We work on making specific suggestions.  Rather than saying the section of the piece starting near letter D is out of tune, I try to get them to be specific.  “At measure 330, on the D major chord, the second violin seems sharp.  While that is possible, even desirable, in a string quartet, it could mean bedlam in a large orchestra.  

In a chamber orchestra, I try to make it part chamber music and part orchestra.  Frequently I will pause the rehearsal and ask the players to comment.  With young people, the results are mixed.  Talking about music in a way that focusses on the specific is not easy.  Asking students to use words that more clearly communicate the point they are trying to make is the only way they will ever build those skills and, over the course of the year, many do improve those communication skills dramatically.  That focus on specifics and communication helps to build the most important ensemble skill of all—engagement.  Engagement builds a feeling of responsibility.  The more responsibility each player feels about the final results, the better the results will be.

In many (if not most) orchestras, stronger players tend to dominate and less strong players tend to recede.  If there is a particularly difficult passage, conductors often rely on stronger players to learn the difficult passage first and then bring weaker players along.  This system is really a matter of practicality in many cases, given the amount of rehearsal time there is.  

Unfortunately, this may be a practical solution, but it can also lead to a part of the group not fully accepting the responsibility for the musical achievement of the ensemble.  In fact I’ll go so far as to say the deeper into the ensemble that sense of responsibility goes, the stronger the performance will be. If you are a solo performer, there is no partner there to cover for you.  If you haven’t prepared every detail in the piece, those details will not exist in the final performance.  For a soloist, that responsibility starts at the beginning of the piece and ends with the last note.  That is exactly what every orchestra needs, engaged, responsible players, performing as if the responsibility for the quality of the final performance was completely in their hands.  In a real sense, it does.

September 11, 2003

“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped.”

Ernest Hemingway

The seemingly inextinguishable fire had long since been put out. The sickening smoke that drifted across the Hudson River to Jersey City (where I live) for at least six months had finally floated into the atmosphere.  The photocopied entreaties after lost loved ones that had once covered every lamp post and telephone pole in Manhattan were mostly in tatters.  The gigantic pit that was once the World Trade Center was clear of the remnants of absolute destruction.  Local trains were running on local tracks and express trains were running on the express tracks.  You could get on the west side highway and go all the way to the Holland Tunnel once again.  Our city, knocked to the ground for a long time, was on its feet once again, still a bit wobbly, but standing upright nonetheless.

In August we received an inquiry from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.  Could we provide some student musicians to play at the solemn September 11 ceremonies taking place at ground zero.  August is tough for us.  The summer session ends and the fall students are still scattered to the four winds.  However, we did find two wonderful players—a flutist named Elena Sandoval and a violinist named Joshua Rim.  They, along with many other student musicians from across the city, would play quietly in the background as the names of the nearly 3000 victims were read by family members and friends.  I would go with them to make sure everything went smoothly.  

We had to report to the intersection of Vesey Street and Broadway at 7:30 a.m. to check in and receive our credentials.  Both Elena and Josh were there on time.  We picked up our credentials (mine read “Guardian”) and we were led to a tent on the edge of the pit off of Vesey Street where we were asked to wait until they were to play. In the tent were folding chairs, a TV monitor tuned to the coverage of the ceremonies, and about 20 performers, parents, and guardians sitting quietly.  The atmosphere was pretty relaxed given the gravity of the event. We found out that Elena was going to be the first performer playing.  She was as calm as could be.  Shortly after, Josh’s father showed up and joined us.  He is a professor at Columbia University, a scientist.  

As the ceremony began, Elena, played (and was on camera on national television) and the first two family members began to read the list of names.  The reading would follow a pattern—Robert A, Sally B, Joseph C, and my beloved son...  In the meantime, Dr. Rim and I started talking about many things.  He really is an interesting man and we moved from topic to topic.  All the while people were swooping in and out of the tent.  Mayor Bloomberg stopped by and, in a very dignified way, thanked us all for being part of the day.  Assistant Commissioner Kathleen Hughes came by to ask my advice about something.  Governor McGreevey of New Jersey stopped by briefly.  Performers were coming and going and all the while the names continued, “my loving husband, my wonderful sister, ...how we miss you.”

As the hours rolled on, the situation was starting to seem a tiny bit surreal to me.  Everyone was going about their business, keeping things organized.  We were just a few feet from where people were performing and where family members were reading a very long list of names and despite that proximity, we saw absolutely nothing that we couldn’t see if we stayed home and watched it on TV.  I’m chatting away energetically with Dr. Rim on subjects far and wide.  

Finally, Josh played, really well as he consistently does, and we could leave. I said good by to Joshua and his dad. It was nearly noon when we left.  The whole area was heavily secured.  Police were everywhere.  Everyone seemed busy, even as I moved away from the immediate vicinity.  I walked the rest of the way across the island and caught a ferry to Jersey City.

When I arrived in Jersey City, I suddenly felt exhausted.  I sat down on one of the benches facing the Hudson River and I started to cry.  

And I could not stop.

Mr. Beeson's Piano

Composer Jack Beeson at his piano

One of my absolute favorite musical memories of all times was running into composer Jack Beeson in front of what used to be called the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center.  I had just been to an excellent performance of Mr. Beeson’s opera “Lizzie Borden” at the New York City Opera.  He was in a frame of mind I can only call transcendent.  He was floating on a cloud of joy and satisfaction and gratitude.  It gives me great pleasure just remembering the occasion now as I write.  

That encounter with Mr. Beeson was a magnificent way to cap a Sunday afternoon performance of a great opera. Lizzie Borden was everything you would expect from an opera that celebrates a woman who murders her mother and father with an ax.  It also had its own set of values, including some very dark humor. Mr. Beeson’s music always seemed perfect for whatever purpose he was composing.  The music for Lizzie Borden is powerful and energetic, brittle at times, exquisitely lyrical at times.  Like Benjamin Britten, Mr. Beeson captured the interior emotional drama that consumes his characters.  Unlike Benjamin Britten, Mr. Beeson was an American composer, born in Muncie, Indiana, and his music reflects American aesthetics and values without being self conscious in any way.  He was a part of the generation after Copland and Ives who wrote music that has distinctly American themes (Lizzie Borden takes place in Falls River, Massachusetts) without trying to write “American” music.

Nora Beeson, a former member of our Board of Directors, a devoted tireless worker for the school, and a very good friend to me personally was also the wife of Jack Beeson.  Nora and Jack attended many many concerts at Bloomingdale and contributed immeasurably to the school.  Sadly, Mr. Beeson passed away in June of 2010 at the age of 88.

Now, through the generosity of Nora Beeson and Miranda Beeson (Nora and Jack’s wonderful daughter), Bloomingdale School of Music has received Mr. Beeson’s beautiful Baldwin piano. which is now in our library on the second floor.  Through an earlier gift, arranged with Nora’s help, we already own composer Douglas Moore’s Mason and Hamlin piano.  What an honor it is to now have two of America’s foremost opera composers’ pianos in use at Bloomingdale.

I am a little intimidated by composers and the magic they create with their musical scores.  I can only imagine the alchemy involved with combining Mr. Beeson and his beloved piano.  The results speak for themselves—a legacy of wonderful music.  Now it’s up to us at Bloomingdale to continue the work of making music worthy of the gift.

Trusting Your Talent

Just what is talent, anyway?  The dictionary defines it as a “natural aptitude or skill.”  The idea of talent permeates the study of the arts at all levels.  It’s one of those ideas that some people use to pigeon-hole others, or, even worse, it’s an idea that some people use to limit themselves. All manner of achievement is attributed to having talent and any number of short comings are blamed on the lack of talent.

I have been working with young talented people since 1973.  Some of them were more talented than others, of course. A few who thought they were talented, were surprisingly limited. Others were amazingly talented, yet completely unconvinced that they could achieve as an artist.  Others have been incredibly talented but it meant nothing to them.  Something inside of them kept them from fully understanding what talent really is and the importance of making the most out of it.

How much talent do you have and how much do you need?  I love the quotation attritbuted to Samuel Goldwyn, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”  With a very small  change, that idea sums up my feeling about talent.  “The harder I work, the more talented I become.”

Two years ago I worked with a young string player named Robert (not his real name).  Robert was a hard worker, very musical (lyrical player), he also worked beautifully with other players. Being a good collaborator is quite a gift.  One day I asked him if he was considering making music a career.  He told me, with some sadness, he wished he had that ability. I was stunned. If any student had that ability it was he, yet his own vision of himself was not big enough to include his talent.

The biggest mistake I have seen young artists make is to censor their own talent.  An artist's life is about hard work and also about expectations.  When a player asks me if they are sharp or flat on a given note, I always turn the question back to them.  90% of the time, when I make them answer, they are correct.  They have the ability but they are not fully aware they have it.

If you have a powerful motivation to be a musician, trust that. Something about it resonates within you. Listen to that.  Believe in your ability to master your craft and then work really hard at it.  No time will be wasted. Every bit of work you put into it you will get back ten-fold.

That's it.  That's my pitch.  I hope you will forgive my presumption in offering it to you.  I hope your journey of self-discovery offers abundant personal rewards and satisfaction.

Playing Bach

The Bloomingdale Chamber Orchestra has been rehearsing the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 and we are having a tough time with it.  Modern orchestras don’t do as much Bach as they do other composers.  Bach’s music wasn’t really written for the modern orchestra.  It doesn’t quite fit.  The Fifth Brandenburg, for example, has no second violin part.  

What it does have is a lot of notes.  In Baroque music, the flow of a piece is governed by the musical line.  A line is a self-propelled musical entity, usually based on one or two short musical segments called motives which are transformed during the course of the piece.  Every line has its own kinetic energy which ebbs and flows, creating the expressive potential of the line.  The interaction of two or more lines is what creates the tension and release that both propel the piece forward and which lead to the overall drama in a piece of Baroque music.  The interaction creates a kind of polarity—equal and opposite forces trying to unite.  The whole process is called fortspinnung in German—spinning forth.  Its part of what makes Baroque music seem so restless and energetic.  Bach represents the epitome of this kind of Baroque music and the Brandenburg concerti represent some of his very best secular instrumental compositions.  

What Bach’s music doesn’t have much of are rests, which is one of the reasons it’s so challenging.  While lines are built of two or three simple motives, “development” consists mostly of transforming those motives--reshaping them, altering them with accidentals, moving them to new keys, playing them upside down, playing them backward, among other things. It means players need to be aware of the notes every moment they are playing, while at the same time musically shaping the line and being aware of how the line interacts with the other performers. 

A few years ago, I was given a book titled Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.  I am not going to pretend I understood much of that book, but what I loved about it was the idea that three magnificent creative thinkers in mathematics, art, and music could be linked through an understanding of thinking and awareness.  I love the idea that Bach’s musical lines have energy contained within them, just the the way the sweeping lines of a sculptor like Bernini contain energy, and those lines can uplift those who experience them.

For the performer, playing Bach is one of music’s extreme sports and one of music’s most completely satisfying experiences.  After you have finished performing the piece, you know you have done something special.
                                                                             Lawrence Davis

The Reality of Conducting

There are few jobs in the world of the arts that are more Romanticized than that of the conductor.  Egomaniacal, omniscient, tyrannical, pompous, short-tempered autocrats might be a general description from the mythology of conductors.  Carefully-cultivated conducting heros like Arturo Toscanini, Leopold Stokowski, and even Leonard Bernstein have helped perpetuate this vision of the genius/tyrant that exists even today.

I have been conducting for nearly 40 years and I want to spend a few minutes sharing with you the reality of conducting. I conduct the Bloomingdale Chamber Orchestra and right now we are working on two amazing and very different pieces.  The first is the Egmont Overture by Ludwig van Beethoven and the second is Elegy for Orchestra by John Corrigliano.  

The music for these two pieces is contained on the printed page—the conductor’s score and every instrumentalist’s part.  As I start every new piece with the orchestra, we begin a journey of discovery together.  I have conducted the Beethoven at least four times before, with four different orchestras, and four different performances and each time I have discovered new things with the ensemble with which I am working.  Having conducted a lot of Beethoven over the years, I have developed some insights into his orchestra writing.  For example, Beethoven’s crescendos frequently occur over many measure of music.  In the Egmont, there is a passage that begins as follows:

Over a period of eight full measures we go from pianissimo to fortissimo, but the actual crescendo begins on the fourth measure.  It is very tempting to start that crescendo earlier and get to the fortissimo too soon.  So I alert the players of this pitfall and we work on it in advance. 

Notice the first violin part has a quarter note tied to the first of a group of four sixteenths. It is very easy to be late with those 16ths after holding the first note for one and a quarter beats.  Then of course those 16ths need to be clearly articulated so that everybody is playing exactly together, else it just sounds sloppy.

Beneath that line, the second violinists and violists are playing very fast sixteenth notes and they have to be perfectly even and coordinated within the sections.

That is just a few measures of music!  There are 347 measures in the Egmont alone and 16 different instrumental lines going on at once.

Vytautas Marijosius, my conducting professor, used to call the conductor primus inter pares--first among equals.  What I have discovered in my years with all kinds of ensembles is that a conductor is problem solver and orchestra is a group of people who want to make music together. They want to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.  It is the ultimate collaboration built on faith and trust, to create something beautiful that goes beyond our expectations.

I once heard a leader described as someone who convinces you to do what you already knew should be done.  That’s my vision of a conductor, a musical sherpa--someone who trusts his or her players and in turn earns their trust.  It’s a far cry from the prevailing mythology of conducting.  I can’t think of anything more satisfying than revisiting a piece I thought I knew and hearing something totally fresh and new within.  No huge ego called for in that kind of transaction—more a large dose of humility!

                                                                                             Lawrence Davis