http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcsso/2009/04/what_are_you_for.shtml en-gb 30 Wed 02 Dec 2009 21:52:51 GMT+1 A feed of user comments from the page found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcsso/2009/04/what_are_you_for.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcsso/2009/04/what_are_you_for.shtml?page=16#comment4 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 Wed 06 May 2009 21:11:51 GMT+1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcsso/2009/04/what_are_you_for.shtml?page=12#comment3 "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 Mon 04 May 2009 17:30:06 GMT+1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcsso/2009/04/what_are_you_for.shtml?page=8#comment2 "with a supply of magazines for us to read while he prattles on."Does that mean you don't really like Simon Rattle? Fri 01 May 2009 18:44:02 GMT+1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcsso/2009/04/what_are_you_for.shtml?page=4#comment1 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. AnthonyOne 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. Sat 18 Apr 2009 13:56:50 GMT+1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcsso/2009/04/what_are_you_for.shtml?page=0#comment0 "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 Wed 15 Apr 2009 11:52:08 GMT+1