1) Variety. The success of every composition depends on the proper balance of unity (what you can predict) and variety (what you can’t). Too much unity and the listener is bored. Too much variety and the listener is frustrated. A 50/50 balance is just right, where the listener can guess what’s coming next about half the time.

[big snip]

2) Expression. None of the tracks were unaccompanied. All vocal lines have a band supporting them, contrasting with them, providing solid beat (predictable) plus phrase end fills, occasional bridge choruses, and rhythmic punctuation along the way (variety) against which the vocal lines can create their magic.

(Read the whole post–it’s worth it.)

This balance of steadiness and freedom, of predictability and surprise, about which Jeff writes so clearly, is one of the essentials in a great free improvisation. Which is why, I suppose, I love improvised melodies over drones or ostinatos (repeated patterns), which provide a solid platform to be creative over.

I’m reminded of when years ago I played in a small orchestra backing up Smokey Robinson.  Smokey toured with his own rhythm section and added local strings, as I recall. (Maybe winds, too.  I’m not sure.  But bless him for hiring those of us he hired!)

We locals had a rehearsal with his music director, who played a Dr. Beat metronome, set to its most clanky setting, through an amplifier.

“Ladies and gentleman, there is no interpretation,” the m.d. announced, with obviously-practiced authority, seeming somewhat grim about having to retrain yet another set of overly-lyrical musicians.

“There is no rubato.  There will be no slowing down or speeding up. You will stay exactly with the beat”   Resigned but determined, he worked to make sure we knew the charts and kept everything steady.  (OK, there may have been some ritards as songs ended, and some cued entrances and holds. But 99% of the time, we were amazingly rock-solid and did not adjust to what he was doing.)

It seemed obnoxious in the rehearsal. In the concert, I got it. We hadn’t rehearsed with Smokey.  Didn’t need to.  Because there was no interpretation on our parts.  He did his magic over the solid foundation his music director made sure we gave him.   We were steady so he could be free.

And here he is, in the most recent video on his website, in which the virtues of a steady-as-a-rock rhythm section are in abundant evidence:

45+ students at 9:00 PM on a Sunday night, with no “recital attendance” credit.  They came just for the experience. Many were lying down, eyes closed, throughout the event.  Some multi-tasked, working on laptops or smart phones. The ones I spoke with loved it. “We should do something like this once a month,” one told me.

I could go on and on, and perhaps will tomorrow.  Meanwhile, the purpose of this post is so those who attended can add comments sharing their experience, and ideas for future engaging, inviting, and unconventional performances.  If you were there, add a comment.  If you weren’t, ask a question.

We’re dimming the lights, lighting some candles, and, most importantly, making as much floor space available in the sanctuary as possible.

Floor space?

Yes, so the audience, most of whom we expect to be college students, can bring comforters, blankets, sleeping bags, and pillows, and listen to the music lying down. Pajamas are welcome, even encouraged, if not required.

You know what?  There’s some buzz about it.

A bunch of young people who would not voluntarily sit for 90 minutes in a church pew or an auditorium seat are excited about being able to experience Bach while lying down. There’s a legend to this piece: that it was commissioned by a wealthy insomniac patron, for the latter’s keyboard-prodigy servant (Goldberg) to play while his master tossed and turned trying to sleep. So it seems apropos to offer a similar opportunity to a larger group.

And, of course, listening to music while lying down is wonderful.  People do it at home all the time; in a public space, very rarely.  But how extraordinary it should be to stetch out, relax, and experience a world-class pianist making music.  I’m really looking forward to it.

We’re framing the event as a study break and a time of meditation.  We want to balance the informality and novelty with the idea of a peaceful, quiet space, and not have it devolve into a silly pajama party.  It’s all come about through conversations between Katya, me, and members of the first-year seminar class for music majors I teach at DePauw, in which one of the topics is the question of how to get college students to enjoy classical music.

I’ve just read through Greg Sandow’s recent series of posts (here, here, here, and here), and the 93 comments to date (many voluminous and all surprisingly civil in tone), on outreach, education and what I think is Greg’s brilliant insight, one that’s changed my life, which I’ll paraphrase: hey, before anything else, let’s get our peers to listen to our music. My head is still spinning from the discussion, which roams through white colonialism, the brilliance of hip hop, the lack of African Americans in classical music (with notable exceptions).  Images of a graduate course on “Rhythm” at SUNY Stony Brook, where I couldn’t understand most of what people were saying, or why they were saying it, came to mind.  (I sat in on the first session and did not register for it.  I do remember, though, that most of what I couldn’t understand, which flowed forth spontaneously from eager-to-impress theory, musicology, and composition students, was quickly dismissed as the bullshit it was by the professor, although he didn’t use that word.  It was just more bullshit than I thought I could handle.)

Which is not to put Greg or any of the commenters down. Greg started off by saying that while outreach and education are great, we, especially young musicians, need to be getting “people like us” to come to concerts. The conversation, though, does seem to want to avoid the question (perhaps not surprisingly, since it’s so hard to answer) of how we engage new audiences–especially people under 40–without sacrificing artistic quality.  That’s not exactly how Greg phrases it.  For me, though, that’s the question.  My sabbatical in New York, the hundred or more different performances I went to, Greg’s Juilliard course that I sat in on, and everything else?  What I got from it was a question. This question. For me, the question.

Questions are more important than answers.

And so I’ve been asking it of lots of people, including those who play and sing in concerts I organize. Katya’s one of them.  So are my students.  We imagined this together.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.

No matter what you’re (not) drinking, Baby Got Bach returns to lpr this Sunday morning at 11:00 AM.  The wonderful carnival of musical exploration in the Gallery Bar space will once again precede an interactive concert in the main performance area. Orli, mother of pre-school twins, knows her audience–kids, parents, and grandparents alike–and puts on a fun, engaging event with top-level music.

I had a great time at BGB last April, even without kids in tow.  (Hey, I just remembered who I know who has kids in the city–I’m going to email them. If I had kids (and we were in New York), I’d definitely be taking them this weekend to hear Orli and a woodwind quintet play music by Bach, Berio, Schumann, Ligeti and others. My youngest child is no longer a child (a college junior), and my oldest is teaching English to first and second graders in China. Were I in New York, I might show up anyway, just to hear that combination of musical voices, and take delight in the delight of the kids.

My friend Greg Sandow has written a series of posts (here, here, here, and here) criticizing aspects of the outreach/education imperative in institutional classical music.  I’m just starting to wade through the discussion.  One thing that’s clear to me, though,is that it’s OK to play music you love for as many types of audiences as possible.  

And that’s one of the things I loved about Baby Got Bach when I attended an event last spring.  It didn’t feel like some contrived let’s-do-an-education-project-to-get-a-grant thing.  It’s a mom, who’s a fabulous musician, putting together concerts for kids, hers other people’s, and their parents. A terrific family event. In, of all places, a trendy Village venue.

Where, usually, “alcohol is our patron.”

But not for Baby Got Bach. Art isn’t free, and they aren’t selling drinks.

So if you’re in New York, take your kid or grandchild or niece or nephew, buy tickets (they aren’t expensive) have a great time, and think about making a donation.  Because this is worth it, not so someone might one grow up and one day subscribe to the symphony (although they might, or help reinvent the symphony); because it’s just a great way to share music, and kids deserve that as much as anyone.

My tai-chi approach to practicing the left-hand pizzicati pieces for tomorrow night’s concert is working.

But I’ll admit that a couple days after my previous post, I was feeling dismal about it, and suggested to the composer, Gene Pritsker, that we not list the piece on the program in case it didn’t get together.  Gene, a great guy, said, “Don’t worry, we’ll make it work.”  And so he and Dan Barrett, my cello buddy of long standing and a cofounder of the International Street Cannibals, and I got together yesterday and went through it.  We slowed the tempo down a bit, found that some of the most awkward of the notes could be be omitted and keep the musical effect.  It’s basically a cello quartet Dan and I are playing, two arco (bowed) lines, two pizzicato lines, with the pizzicato being down by available fingers of the left hand.  And it’s working–it’s going to be fun.

Then another curveball from the universe.

At today’s big rehearsal for tomorrow’s concert, I played through what I thought was Dan Palkowski‘s entire new solo cello piece, Gayageum, for him (this is the other left-hand pizzicato challenge work). I finished and he said something about looking forward to the “the fast part.”

What fast part? I asked.

“What do you mean, what fast part?” he said, and he showed me his copy of the part, which was about four pages longer than the one I had.  Turns out I was mistakenly sent the PDF of an the early version, with only the slow part. Luckily, it’s something I was able to sightread a bit under tempo and will have learned by tomorrow evening. (We’re doing with added percussion in this concert, which I’ll blog about in my next post.)

It’s been a stressful week for personal reasons, aside from the left-hand pizzicato nightmares.  At our late group lunch after the rehearsal, I told Dan that I had joked to Gene that at one point I thought I might need a Xanax and a martini.

“A Xanatini!” Dan replied.

Exactly.

But I’ve practiced, so I don’t need one after all.

So first the universe said to me, “and you will greatly expand your left-hand pizzicato skills this week.”

Last week and into this scores have been arriving via email for this coming Sunday’s 7:30 PM International Street Cannibals Tai Chi Cha Cha (how could you miss that?) concert at St. Mark’s in the Bowery in Manhattan.  (The New York one.  We probably have an Indiana one somewhere, along with our own Brazil and Poland.) It’s Fall Break, a whole week, at DePauw, and, having played on two of the Cannibals concerts while on sabbatical in New York last winter/spring, I invited myself to play in this one.  So I’m flying up there in the morning.

Two of the pieces have lots of left hand pizzicato.  If you’re not a string player, pizzicato is the fancy-pants Italian word for plucking.  (Classical musicians still use Italian terminology with each other because in the the 1600s opera started in Italy and became really popular.) 95% or more of the time we pluck with the right hand, the one that holds the bow.  But sometimes we are playing a note, or notes, with the bow and pluck other strings with the left hand, which is also holding down a string or strings.  This is just about as difficult as it sounds.  Maybe a bit more, especially if you haven’t done a lot of it for a while.

One of these pieces almost put me over the edge yesterday.  I can’t play this a voice said somewhere in me.  Keep calm answered another.  First learn the slightly awkward double stops and then figure out how to add in the pizzicatos. 

Took a break.  Laid down on the couch and Figaro, one of my cats, plopped down on my belly.  “Help!” I posted on Facebook.  “I took a practice break and now there’s a cat on my belly and I can’t get up.”  A friend added a comment to the effect that cat therapy is good for the playing.  Eventually the cat moved on, I got up, and returned to the cello.

Just did everything in  s  l  o  w    m  o t  i  o  n.

Very, very calmly.

My thoughts went quickly to Dale Stuckenbruck, the wonderful violinist (and musical saw player) who was my RA when I was a 16-year-old high school junior at the North Carolina Schoolof the Arts.  Dale would help me practice, bless him, and he taught me more about practicing (calmly, intelligently, methodically, and focused) than anyone else.  Thank you, Dale! (Isn’t that great . . . we can still be learning from our earlier mentors 35 years later?)

It’s going to be alright, it turns out. Just have to work out the choreography–which finger will pluck which string when.  And then it will speed up on its own. (And it just occurred to me that I’m practicing in tai chi-like slow motion for the Tai Chi Cha Cha concert.  Neat, huh?)

So that was handled.

Then the universe said, and you will be humbled.

I made a quick trip to the DePauw recording studio this afternoon, to record the Prelude and Gigue of the Bach G Major Suite for a doctor friend who is making some educational videos and needs some music for them.  Oh, I’ve played these movements a zillion times, it will be a piece of cake.  Ha!  As I listened to the playback of the takes, I kept thinking, man, I’d like to give this guy a lesson!  We’ve got something useable, and I may like it better a year from now, but I really need to do a lot more recording of myself. Holy fuck, this music is amazing and needs something more than me winging it.

OK, now back to practicing that left-hand pizzicato.

I’d never seen someone do a painting live, with a music performance, until I saw it done at Joe’s CD release party last year (on which I played).  Then I saw it done on one (or was it two?) of Mike Block’s GALA NYC concerts last spring, and at the opening Summer Stage concert by Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble in New York’s Central Park (Times review here).  It’s a fascinating collaborative, creative component for a concert. Does it add anything to “the music”?  Not really.  To the overall human experience?  Sure!  I definitely want to program it this coming summer on a Greencastle Summer Music Festival concert.

Anyway, I love Joe’s music.  Enjoy.

(BTW, if you like the cello playing in the intro, the player’s initials are “E.E.”  If you don’t, then, uh, I don’t know who the guy is.  The wonderful violin/viola playing is definitely my dear friend and former spouse, Allison Edberg, who did the string arrangement.)

And Roger Bourland, another favorite blogger, recently wrote about how little he’s been blogging as he’s gone through professional and personal transitions and started a sabbatical. And then his blogging picked up.

I just looked at my list of posts and realized how little I’ve blogged since last spring.  It was so exciting, writing about my explorations in New York, and then once I came back home to Greencastle (I’d been on sabbatical) I found it hard to write. While school’s in session, I find it hard to summon the mental energy to write blog posts–there’s usually just too much to do and I am stressed by all the things that seem at times more than I can handle.

It was hard to write even before I left, though, because I’d fallen so in love with New York I was sad about coming back and, frankly, depressed.

Now I’ve just begun 9 days of fall break, counting the two weekends, and find myself in a reflective mood.  The end of the sabbatical from teaching brought a sabbatical from blogging, I see.  So who knows how long this will last.

One thing I’ll say is that I’m happier than I can remember being.  A year off from teaching, and when I started again I discovered, to my delighted post-burnout surprise, just how much genuinely I love it. I love teaching cello and teaching classes, and that there’s a special magic in sharing with others the special magic of playing in and leading drum circles, and in improvising music in a supportive environment.  My job is great.  Much of this fall I’ve felt, “I have the best job in the world!”

I absolutely love New York and for quite a while I was dreading going back to the small town of Greencastle, the supposed “nowhere” which is an hour’s drive from the “somewheres” of Indianapolist and Bloomington, which many people regard as “nowheres” anyway.  But Greencastle is a wonderful small town and it has gives one what New York can’t–a sense of true community, where almost everyone knows everyone else, and where you can run into friends wherever you go (while delightful, this can be annoying , it turns out, to someone you’re dating who is new to Greencastle and can get a little impatient when nearly every dinner out or trip to the market is interrupted). And it’s not insanely, absurdly expensive, like Manhattan, where I rented a large room with a private bath, in a large Upper West Side apartment, and paid, at a slightly below-market rate, more than my mortgage, taxes, and insurance combined for my nearly 3000 sq. ft. 1888 house in Indiana.

What I’ve found is the secret is balance.  I love small-town life and need the big city, too.  So I’ve started what I call my “GETFOOG” project: Get Eric The F–k Out of Greencastle.  Just now and then.  Labor Day weekend I spent in New York.  A couple weeks later, an overnight trip (with a wonderful friend) to Chicago.  Later this week, 5 nights in NYC, including playing a concert.  (Which, I guess, will make it all tax deductible, too.)

Sabbaticals are wonderful things, a colleague mentioned to me after asking how mine had been, and I’d told him both how stimulating the sabbatical experiences themselves were and how much I was enjoying being back.  Among other things, it brought me a clearer sense of who I am, clarity about what I love doing and am good at, a renewed sense of purpose, and an understanding of what kind of balance I need in my life.

More, I hope, to come.

A recent post prompted by Labor Bureau statistics (“what is she writing about now?” I wondered) develops into a wistful meditation on invisibility.

(The Invisible Violist.  Now that could be a great name for a blog. And I know, fodder for innumerable viola/violist jokes.)

I imagine that most people who are not musicians have no idea about how hard “classical” musicians work in order to, as Trey Anastasio puts it, spend “countless hours of work just to be invisible.”

What a fascinating way to put it.

Elaine, like many of our generation and one or two that preceded us, is proud of her invisibility, at its purest when other people play her compositions. She’s a bit dismissive, it seems to me, of others who embrace their visibility, most of whom, in my experience, are younger than we are. Elaine doesn’t frame it as a generational issue, but it seems quite clear to me that it is.  And I have a different sense of where these young musicians are coming from than she does.  My comments in blue italics:

There are “classical” musicians who are trying to break through the cloak of invisibility that covers us most of the time. It’s good Elaine put “classical” in quotes.  Because lots of them don’t think of themselves as “classical” musicians.  They are musicians who play, among other things, the music formerly known as classical, and they don’t like labels. They wear wild clothes and make up, play rock music, and/or go for sex-appeal in order to have respect of the people who they believe (or their managers and advisers believe) need some kind of extra-musical stimulation in order to pay attention to music. They are dressing like their peers, and they embrace rock and other musics not out of insincere calculation but because they like it and often find it not just as engaging and stimulating as classical music, but often more so.  And the “extra-musical stimulation” isn’t extra-musical to them, because their generation hasn’t grown up listening to LP albums in the dark, like we did.  

(Me again.) Learning a new piece? They watch a performance on YouTube.  The visual aspect of human beings making music is, to these younger generation, integral.

The new culture(s?) is/are very visual.  The technological revolution of audio recording created the phenomenon of musicianless music–the invisible musicians of which Elaine writes.  But before radio and the phonograph, that didn’t exist.  And now the ubiquity of video has put the musicians back in the music making.

It was nice while it lasted, I guess.  But, “the times they are a changin’ . . .”