Couldn't resist

I've been avoiding commentary on Michael Jackson's death (because, given the coverage on all the major media outlets, what could there possibly be to add??), but I had to share this with you:







(Organist Robert Ridgell plays a Jacksonian postlude last Sunday at Trinity Wall Street)


The (modal!) fugal treatment of "ABC" is particularly stunning. And make sure to watch through the collegial Book of Common Prayer-thumping at the end!

Quarter for your thoughts

We've begun our epic Symphony for the Cities week that takes us from Hudson, WI to Plymouth, Winona and Excelsior, MN. They're all outdoor venues, which present their own very peculiar challenges (I don't usually have to fight gnat swarms on stage at Orchestra Hall), but also their very particular pleasures (including the throng of kids dancing on the grass right in front of the orchestra).

On Monday night in Hudson, I turned to the audience before starting "Radetzky March" to explain to them how I'd cue their "clapping entrance", how I would indicate a soft dynamic, a loud dynamic and, most importantly, how I'd cut them off. "Now, I want you all to stop clapping right on my cutoff. If I hear any clapping after the cutoff, you own me 25 cents." I've asked for dollars in the past (and something I've done with student orchestras playing, say, rhythmically complex pieces like "The Rite of Spring" - "don't fall in the hole!"), but I figured it's tough times for everyone, so a quarter would do. It garnered some chuckles from the audience.

The Orchestra and I then started "Radetzky"; I cued the audience to come in, they clapped as softly as I indicated, then went to forte on my cue. At my cutoff, a thousand people stopped clapping - well, OK, except a few stragglers, who I pointed out in the crowd, grinning. We went through the series of clap soft/clap loud/stop as we performed the piece, and at the last chords the rhythmic clapping quickly disintegrated into applause.

I thought nothing more of our little clapping exercise as we finished up the program (I have to confess I get tired of doing "1812"...). After our Sousa encore, as musicians began to pack up, I was chugging bottled water behind the bandshell when a woman approached me.

"I just wanted to give you this," she said, handing me a quarter.

"Actually, this is for my husband. He kept clapping after you stopped us, all three times. I guess he doesn't follow direction too well. Anyway, he was too embarrassed to give it to you himself, so I'm doing it for him!"

I had a good laugh. If this keeps up, maybe I can buy a soda at the end of the week...

Back At The Beginning Again

People who attend our Inside the Classics concerts often ask Sarah and me how long we spend preparing each show. We never know quite how to answer: on the one hand, we generally have only a single 2-1/2 hour rehearsal with the orchestra for each show, so in that sense, the whole production has to come together awfully quickly, no matter how complicated we've made the thing, logistically speaking. (This is usually accomplished by giving the orchestra only a bare minimum of information about what we're planning - just the facts and cues that they absolutely have to know. It's more efficient from a rehearsal perspective, and has the added benefit that the musicians are as surprised by the audience at some of the shenanigans we pull on stage.)

But of course, we start working on our ItC season quite a while before the orchestra shows up for that one rehearsal. The repertoire that we'll be covering over the course of a season, for instance, has to be finalized almost a year in advance, to give our marketing team enough lead time to plan strategy, design brochures and other ad campaigns, and solicit subscribers. After we finish that task, Sarah and I are generally immersed for the next several months in writing, tweaking, and executing the current season's concerts, after which we give ourselves several weeks to decompress. (Decompress being, of course, a relative term, since I spend those weeks continuing to play in the orchestra, and Sarah spends them jetting off to all manner of conducting engagements.)

Eventually, we reach a point in early summer when we schedule a big meeting to start planning the next year's shows in earnest. Basically, this involves each of us doing some preliminary research on the pieces and composers we've chosen to highlight, and then getting together to bounce ideas off of each other. Most of what we come up with at this meeting won't wind up in the actual concerts you see at Orchestra Hall, but some of our best bits have come from these early get-togethers. We also try to identify as many potential stumbling blocks as we can, and plot strategy for avoiding them. Lastly, we divvy up a few tasks that have to be accomplished before we can begin scriptwriting in earnest.

Today was that day. Today, as it happened, was also the day that we had a larger meeting with members of our upper management and artistic staff to discuss wider plans for the series, and try to determine which of the pie-in-the-sky ideas we all have for the future are workable, and which are probably best left in the pipe dream stage. And all of this is happening none too soon, because tomorrow just happens to be the day when Sarah and I will sit down in front of a camera and record the set of video clips that get scattered around our web site each season wherein we try desperately to explain just what we're planning for the year and why you should care enough to come to the concerts.

Looking at my notes for those video sessions, I see that I have several paragraphs of thoughts ready to go for one of our '09-'10 shows, and a few bullet points for another. For the third show, my note pad says, and I quote: ".......uhhhhhh." So, that'll obviously need to be fleshed out a bit before the camera rolls.

In any case, we're now officially off and running on a process that won't hit its first major deadline until nearly Halloween. I keep thinking that maybe one of these years, we'll learn how to bang these shows out in a week or two, but I'm not holding my breath. Besides, everybody needs a good summer project, right?