Twistedchick s Free Speech Zone -- dispatches from within the Republic of Omelas -

People are trying to do their best for the music and for one another; the music is what matters, not someone's career or someone's ego or whose instrument cost how much. It's an entirely different experience from competition performances, where (even if the musician is performing privately for a panel of judges rather than in front of a general audience) there is constant pressure, where backbiting and emotional or psychological sabotage are not unknown.

Playing in an orchestra, at its best, is several experiences layered and woven together -- if my words are not as precise as usual, it is because I am still thinking in tone and rhythm; I could play you my meaning if you were here.

Music is an expression of and an invocation of emotion, so that in laboring over and learning to play Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony, I've managed in some small way to touch the emotions Mendelssohn had about his trip to Italy. In playing Glazunov's version of his friend Borodin's overture, I'm touching through the sounds they indicated on paper a small group of Russian composers who hung out together on weekends and composed things in their spare time, rewriting and reworking one another's compositions; the comparison to online fandom recasting and rewriting one another's stories is apt. Shouldn't there be a movie, somewhere, in which music acts as a time machine (the proper vibrations at the proper frequency, etc.

) to move a musician back to meet the composer? Or a story?

But orchestras and larger groups playing music are doing more than accessing the emotional states of people who aren't visibly in the room.

They're engaging in a specific kind of ritual. I'm defining ritual here as actions taken deliberately and sequentially (often repetitively), with intent, to accomplish one or more ends. Here, the actions taken are all individual ones, some of them minute, some grandiose, in a structure that provides room for everyone there to participate.

Every person's participation matters, from the seventh-seat cellist or fourth-seat second violin to the percussionist to the English horn player to the clarinets and flutes -- drop out one person from a section or one instrument and the whole thing changes. And two things are happening simultaneously: while everyone is relying on everyone else's playing in order to find cues and make entrances as expected, there's a sense of relaxation about how the music is actually being played. Nobody is going to listen for every single eighth note, especially in the background harmonies, especially since composers are careful to repeat harmonies and spread them out over several instruments.

Therefore, if I as a cellist have some notes that are difficult to hit precisely and I play them very lightly, it will still contribute to the sound without harming it -- because of those six other cellists playing the same thing, some of them better then I am and some struggling more with the music. The notes will be played, and it will sound right for us, and it works.

As we play the music, it plays us.

We learn it, and it invades our minds and our memories and affects our lives. I slept and awoke to the sound of the music we were working on for the last three months; it was in my mind constantly under everything else. I'm not quite the same person I was in September because of it.

For one thing, I'm taking a lot of the 'heavier' music more lightly than before. When you put all the pieces together, 'Prince Igor' sounds like nothing so much as a section of the score for Errol Flynn's Robin Hood, complete with Merry Men swinging through the trees. It's hard to stay serious while visualizing this.

And Mendelssohn's varied Italian experiences feel like a travelogue; I can almost see the PBS video.

So much depends on the conductor and the way he/she approaches both the music and the collaboration. In my not-that-vast experience I've been conducted by famous and not-so-famous people, and I prefer the ones who aren't all caught up in the glamour of their fame, who are interested in the music and the interaction between conductor and musicians and between all of us and the music itself.

The ones that view the score as a starting point and not an end point are the most interesting and fun to work with, as opposed to the precisionists who require that you play the forte at loud instead of strongly and the fortissimo at louder and then have to scratch for the fortississississimo (ffff is the notation) because there's nothing left rather than the breaking thunderstorm they want. I'd rather see a conductor ask why that increase in volume serves the music at that point, and consider if it's necessary to do it. Was it part of the original score, or added by some zealous arranger?

Conductors should know these things. And then there's the ever-present question of typos in the music itself; we found one in the cello part the rehearsal before the performance, where a ledger line was left off a high note to make it a third lower than it should have been. It wasn't a big thing at that point, but it does serve to show that the paper score is not the be-all and end-all.

It's possible that I'm influenced in all this by two experiences. One of these is playing and learning Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suites, in which much if not all of the interpretation of the music is left to the musician rather than stated on the page -- and every cellist recorded does it differently. Yo Yo Ma comes closest to what I try to do, which is to play them as dance music; Pablo Casals is furthest away and other recorded versions vary wildly in other directions.

Here the performer has utmost liberty to play the music. The other (diametrically opposite experience) is having been badly conducted by a (very young at the time) Michael Tilson Thomas when I was singing in a university chorus performing Bruckner's Te Deum, when he insisted during the concert in directing us to sing in ways that had not been rehearsed and then threw a hissy fit because we didn't do it. (Note to conductors: if you really want a group of sixty sopranos to hold a high C for ten measures instead of one, a little warning and some rehearsal would be much appreciated.

) That action was a violation of the trust that is required between conductor and performers for good music.

Because, in the end, it is a matter of trust and of faith. I have to trust that the conductor will provide the cues, that the horns will come in on time, that the double bass behind me won't run away with the rhythm, and that I will be able to get out of the way of my own playing.

And I have to have faith in my own ability to do justice to the music that I hear in my head and match my own performance to it as best I can. All of this creates self-esteem, collaboration and community in ways that a lot of "community-building" retreats and workshops can't quite match.

And that's the difference between playing music (or doing plays and musicals) and playing sports in school, as I see it.

The collaboration, the trust and the lack of interpersonal competitiveness are required in order to play the best possible music. High school sports seems to rely on competitiveness, tension, and stress to push the experience, not to mention the ritualistic invocation of theoretical localized deities through 'pep squads' and 'pep rallies' -- who exactly is the 'school spirit' being called forth? And what might happen if it actually manifested?

Why wasn't this covered on Buffy the Vampire Slayer? However, tension and performance stress only hurt musicians by making them tense up; you can't move your fingers fast enough to play Ravel or Debussy or Rachmaninoff or Mendelssohn or Bach or Beethoven if they're tense. It's harder to achieve tonal shadings if you're scared; your emotion comes through into the performance and pre-empts the music.

And then it's not good music, and it's no longer fun.

And if it's not fun, if it doesn't give you joy, if you don't receive something back from the experience that you won't find anywhere else, for God's sake don't do it. Go do something else that feeds your spirit and nurtures your life and your creativity.

Put the instrument away for a while and bring it out only when you want to play around, not for the sake of duty or because you "should" do it, but because you want to say things in sound that can't be said in words, and listen to the thoughts and emotions of people you won't meet in person except through the notes they left on paper, or because you want to be part of something larger than yourself that is creating something beautiful.