WHAT ARE YOU FOR?
Post categories: Ant's Rants
| 10:52 UK time, Saturday, 11 April 2009
.......a question asked of every conductor by every school party to visit us - invariably given some waffly sort of answer. I've never heard a conductor able define his role - not Karajan, not Rattle - which might partly explain the hedge of edginess that grows around conductors. I mean, if they don't know what they're doing, how are we expected to? We didn't have one last week......conductor, that is. And it was lots of fun. Sacking the conductor so that the leader can do a self-drive job won't work with a full size orchestra; but prune us down to a chamber band, give us an inspirational leader like Liz, and it all works fine. We switch into a different mode. Some things are much easier - things like hearing and playing! Which is just as well, because in a small group everything you do is in the spotlight. There's no hiding.
This is not the first time I've burdensomely blogged at you about this, and it won't be the last. It's at the heart of practical music making. There's a mystery wriggling under this stone. But, a health warning: for any single explanation of things, there'll be plenty who will angrily disagree. When arguments don't go away, it's usually because we aren't asking the right questions, we're probably making the wrong assumptions, and we don't want to be shown up wrong.....and certainly not by the likes of you.......
Apart from marvelling at the mysteries under this stone every time I go to work, my mind was fired up last week because of something I read in A Mind of its Own by Cordelia Fine. She's given me a paradigm shift, and I'm not going to the doctor to get it fixed. First, just so that you know where I'm coming from: if you think that we stare at the conductor's stick, and then just do it, and it's all wonderfully together and musical, then you are mistaken. If you're a conductor who thinks that's how it all happens....... For sure though, a large orchestra without a conductor is a rudderless ship. Cordelia Fine's book is not about music; it's about the mind, and how it's never what you think it is - and it's a very challenging book for those of us who like to think that we're in control of what we're doing. In a chapter called 'The secretive brain' she looks at the processes that lead up to even just the simplest actions. They (folk in white coats) seem to have proved that the simplest action - like lifting a finger to tap on the table, or to play a note, or moving my right wrist to start a note - is initiated a fraction of a second before I have any knowledge or perception of what's going on. It's happening before I know anything about it! That's my paradigm shift - discovering that. Our body 'knows' it before we do. Now, in fast music, a fraction of second relayed across a hundred or so players is a significant amount of time. If you're a bird in a flock of many thousands wheeling synchronously in the sky, a fraction of a second's mistake and you're probably dead - taking a few of your closest flying partners with you. If you had stopped to examine what you're doing, then your species wouldn't still be here to argue about it. If a player starts thinking about what he's doing, he'll disrupt that 'pre-knowing' bit, which all takes up valuable time, and so he'll be wrong, and so he'll clash with players near him, and I can assure you that's not a nice feeling.
Quite often, and more often noticeable in rehearsals, something akin to this happens in the orchestra. Suddenly - when the conductor is talking, only a few are listening (or would be if they could hear him), others are chatting about this or that, and some are finishing reading an interesting paragraph in their magazine - suddenly the conductor makes half a gesture, and lo, the whole orchestra does something absolutely together, perfectly balanced and satisfyingly musical. You get a lot of this with a self drive leader. Liz only gave a handful of conventional 'beats' in the whole concert; there was never any question of anyone beating time. And yet we played more together, and more musically than can normally be achieved. (No, we're not actually absolutely perfect all the time.) She did less explaining than most conductors seem to need. And that leads to an interesting example of all this (whatever 'this' is): quite often, when something isn't working, the conductor and the affected players start trying to analyse what's wrong, and how to fix it. We're all under pressure to get the music right, and so, urgently in the precious rehearsal time, we start trying to 'fix' how we're going to make it nice and right and safe - we switch to a rational and analytical mode - which immediately makes the music stiff and clunky and awfully unmusical. The wrong mode. Everyone gets irritated, bored with the conductor's talking, and the conductor wishes he hadn't said anything (except those who just love the sound of their own voice) - the point seems to have been missed - the wrong question got asked. Maybe we should just read magazines during rehearsals, and everything'll be fine.
There was a Karajan documentary on BBC4 recently. He was being quizzed about this sort of thing and he didn't want to be forced to define, or to be pinned down, so he became irritable (which is what conductors do) - so he said that the players have to "just play.....just play". He also used the flock of birds comparison. Radio 3's 'Music Matters' last week was a long interview with Simon Rattle, talking about his life with the Berlin Phil: the conductor can lead but not control, the players will play like a string quartet, which takes time and can't be quickly 'explained', he wants unalloyed passion, his need is to tell stories.... He said many other challenging things: British orchestras are not good at this sort of thing, nobody knows what a symphony orchestra will be in the 21st century, players fool themselves if they think they can stay in ivory towers, Berlin has the biggest Turkish community outside Turkey - engagement, engagement, engagement. He hasn't changed. His time with us ('78 to '80) was all too short: neither we nor the BBC were ready for him......how good it would be to see him back.......with a supply of magazines for us to read while he prattles on.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~01~RS~)
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"Sacking the conductor so that the leader can do a self-drive job won't work with a full size orchestra; but prune us down to a chamber band, give us an inspirational leader like Liz, and it all works fine."
Wasn't that Segerstam symphony you played a while back for full orchestra without conductor? If so, what was it that enabled that to work? (Was the music designed in such a way as to enable different sections of the orchestra to easily take cues from each other, for example?)
Derek
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That’s a good point, Derek, I’d forgotten……yes, Segerstam built the self drive into his piece. But he was also grunting around at the back, under the excuse of playing the piano. With so much experience, he knows what he is doing – apart from being one of the whackiest and most inspirational eccentrics I’ve ever come across. In that memorable concert of Sibelius 5, 6 and 7, every ripple of his massive hulk and beard told Sibelius’ story. Most of what we play would be awful without a conductor. Even given months of conductorless rehearsal on one piece, the performance would tend to level down to the lowest common musical denominator. Actually, I’m poking around at a slightly different aspect of this.
Anthony
One of the best complements that a player will make about a conductor is, “He lets me play”. This is strange, seeing how important conductors are meant to be. To be obvious, one function of the conductor is to get everyone else to shut up while a particular player or section has their say – and can do so comfortably, without having to force. But every player, certainly every leading player, has their own strong musical voice and their own idea of how a phrase should be – and that player just wants to be allowed to play – to be given space and encouragement. If you are saying something important, something that is precious to you, you would want to heard, and to be encouraged – certainly not to be frowned at and challenged – that would stymie you. I don’t have much time for the type of conductor who makes you feel that you are spoiling ‘his’ performance if you don’t do what he wants, or if you make a mistake. Hopefully, the conductor will set a mood, and then a musical player will instinctively interpret his or her phrase in accord with that mood – subtly different for each conductor. An orchestral player obviously needs to be open to discussion and suggestion, and also have the ability to embody someone else’s inspiration – to make another’s vision their own. I think that Simon Rattle was highlighting the fact that, in Britain, we have a culture that reduces rehearsal time to the minimum, so there is not enough time to let feelings mature in the cask. One result of that is that we players are forced to rely too much on instant instruction from the conductor, to the detriment of our innate musicality. At its worst, there is sometimes even a feeling that our innate musicality is to be discouraged, and it is labelled ‘inappropriate individualism’. However, the effect of a hundred players joyfully letting rip with their musicality is overwhelming (try the Simon Bolivar youth orchestra), even if at the quantum level they aren’t doing precisely the same thing. The effect of a hundred players religiously following some prescribed path.........don’t waste your money. (Why is making CDs, with its endless repetition, one of the most frustrating aspects of our work?)
The big question: How is it that each and every one of us knows how to phrase? And that includes you, in the audience. You know what is right and wrong. In the same way that you know that a politician, or a second hand car salesman, is not speaking from the heart. Every fraction of sound, every fraction of body language, registers without you thinking or analysing. Your body knows before you are aware of it. The exact timing, the exact shaping of the sounds, is something that we all learnt way back at the origins of our species. But as we learn to read and write, we learn to speak texts or play notes that haven’t sprung from our own body (our heart and soul), texts that someone else has given us – ‘White man speak with forked tongue’. And, very interestingly, that innate musicality is a common language to all babies in all cultures for about the first year of their life. And even more interestingly, there is now strong evidence that babies are born with perfect pitch, which they tend to unlearn in order to become fluent in their local language. Also, we all have the sounds of nature in our bodies –patterns and shapes that have been there since our earliest evolution. Maybe, or maybe not, this has something to do with the fact that you can play music with anyone of any language (try Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project). Maybe, or maybe not, music is a feast where we, several of us together, are able sit down together and re-connect with that inner person. ‘Inner’ and ‘outer’ is dualistic thinking – maybe I should have said, ‘reconnect with our whole person’. I am not a scientist, and I am not proposing any theories – I just find this stuff fascinating. I wonder if it would be possible to set up some sort of workshop to explore these things further.
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"with a supply of magazines for us to read while he prattles on."
Does that mean you don't really like Simon Rattle?
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"the simplest action ... is initiated a fraction of a second before I have any knowledge or perception of what's going on"
That's interesting Ant - I wonder if this is a combination of your instinctive musicality, and vast experience gathered over the years? So, for example, confronted with a modern and tonally-challenging piece, would this theory still hold, or does the conscious mind have to take over to compute the unknown or the unexpected?
In fact, the process is probably more transparent in a singer - I see a note and even before my mind computes where it is, all the mechanics of making that sound spring into action and I sing (hopefully!) the right note. I know that when I've had to learn particularly difficult music that initially makes no sense, there comes a point (usually after a sleepless night of having it run through my head) when I have it "in my voice" and it just happens without thinking about intervals, accidentals etc.
I must read that book - sounds like lots of food for thought - and put me down for the workshop!
Fi
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A few answers....
1) No Richard, Id just love Simon to come back for a concert or two. The magazine comment is just me being provocative Im focussing on the fact that this musicianship is innate, probably in all of our species, and that innateness can easily be messed up by talking. I know hed get the point of my jibe, and, judging from what he was saying in the interview, hed agree with me. Id love him to lead some forums for professional musos and the public talking about where were all going, talking about taking orchestras to Castlemilk or Ferguslie Park to get the kids to dance the Rite of Spring (what he did in Berlin and NY).......
2) Sorry about all the ?s in that last reply of mine (2, above). I certainly didnt write them even if I am a querulous old nark. The boffins tell me its because the independent company that processes blog replies to our website use systems that cant digest MS Word formatting! Well, if they cant handle MS Word, what planet are they from?
3) No Fi, its not a factor of my great age and experience, however heavily that might weigh on me. The point, I think, is: weve all got it. Most of us have it destroyed by our early nurture. I cant tell you how often Ive sat with musicians raving and ranting that learning to play the damn instrument boils down to UNLEARNING that early nurture and letting the body do what it knows best....and letting long buried feelings surface to enjoy the daylight. I sometimes wonder if playing a Paganini Caprice is really any more complex than running down a flight of uneven steps. Obviously, a professional instrumentalist or singer will (hopefully) acquire a range of highly specialised skills as would (hopefully) a brain surgeon or a trapeze artist. But were all born with the full starter pack of these skills (give or take some specific syndromes). What bugs me, as Ive hinted above, is the continental drift that is separating the country where music was something that the whole village did together from the country of brain centric classical music with the tsunami of commercialism raging through the straits between them.
Anthony
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