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Antsso

Listed below are comments made by Antsso between Saturday, 18th April 2009 and Saturday, 18th April 2009.

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WHAT ARE YOU FOR? 2:56pm on 18 Apr 2009 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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