Saturday, November 21, 2009
He Said It, Not Me
John Adams said it, and with it he might have dropped both Little Boy and Fat Man into modern discourse, and nobody can take it back now. He says that our nation's anti-intellectual hostility to high culture, and with that the glorification pop culture, is 'puritanical' and redolent of 'religious zealots.' After decades of being grouped as a repressed and uptight stuffed shirt for liking classical music and all the accompanying high culture, it really is nice to occasionally have a spokesman capable of showing that we arty-farty types make life more interesting, more enjoyable, and more downright fun than you'd ever find it without us.
...Just sayin'.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Fucked Up Moments In Opera #2: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
A brief example of why Dimitri Shostakovich is the greatest composer of the 20th century. I don't even think I need to say anything about this. Credit here must go to the wonderful Antonio Pappano and the Royal Opera House Orchestra of Covent Garden for getting this moment to sound so wonderfully graphic. Perhaps the staging lags behind the music in getting every one of these incredible effects to match visually, but it's certainly not a bad shot either.
Fucked Up Moments In Opera #1: Salome by Richard Strauss
Salome, stepdaughter of Herod, recently did the Dance of the Seven Veils for her stepfather, which depending on the fitness of the star generally makes many in the audiences pray to God for something or nothing to be under the Seventh Veil. Many sopranos have in fact opted to have nothing under and pictures from the opera house have found their way around the internet.
As a reward for her dancing, Herod grants her one wish in which she may ask of him anything she wants. Salome had recently begun to lust after Herod's prize prisoner, John the Baptist. But the Baptist rebuffs her advances by calling her the 'Accursed Whore of Babylon.' And so Salome replies that she wants the severed head of John the Baptist, to which Herod complies and has brought to her on a silver platter. Salome proceeds to get it on with the severed head in full view of the Judean court. Herod is so disgusted by the sight that he orders her killed immediately. And thus ends what is still one of the most fucked up scenes in the history of art.
Theresa Stratas sings the titular role (extraordinarily well) and is accompanied by the Vienna Philharmonic and master Straussian Karl Bohm.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Robert Byrd Plays the Fiddle.
Johnny Mercer's centenary took precedence. But Robert Byrd became the longest serving member of congress in history yesterday. I guess even KKK recruiters can be celebrated occasionally, if ironically. So here's Robert Byrd playing the fiddle, as bizarre as it is surprising: it's clear he mastered Robert's Rules more fluently, but he's surprisingly on the competent end of terrible. c/o DeAngelo.
100 yrs Johnny Mercer
I didn't know I knew this much about Johnny Mercer either...
It was the centennary of Johnny Mercer yesterday. It would have completely passed me by had I not caught a celebration of it from Terry Gross while I was in the car.
God knows I'm waiting for the right day to do an arrangement of One For My Baby. Meaning in Mercer's songs will always be elusive. When Dean Martin did One For My Baby, it was as insipid as American Pop Culture ever gets. When Frank Sinatra does it, it is the saddest possible form of magic. Indeed, there was something about the Mercer/Arlen songs that spurred Sinatra to places that no contemporary of his ever went. He was more vulnerable, more raw, and more heartbreaking than any mere crooner could ever be.
There was something about Sinatra, somewhere in his delivery, that made him the ideal vehicle for Great American Songs. Other candidates you say? Well look at Sinatra in one of the great Johnny Mercer songs and compare him to a few others. Just listen to him do Autumn Leaves and take my word for it about everybody else.
Let's not kid ourselves. This isn't Mercer at his best. It's a sappy sentimental lyric only remembered for a downwardly arching melody that imitates the experience of lovesick depression perfectly. The music is what makes this song work. Many singing giants of the Postwar Era covered it, and a few non-singing giants as well. Yves Montand delivers the original French lyrics a sort of ironic distance as though he were winking at us that he couldn't possibly believe a word of it. Edith Piaf, ever the force of nature, seemed to throw herself headlong into the song as though she were trying to convince herself that the sort of romantic love associated with so many of the ballads she sang really exists. Nat King Cole sings it like a sort of confidence man, trying to sell you a heartbreak he doesn't really believe in. And then there's Sinatra, who is the only singer who makes this song worth listening to (for me at least). He plays the triteness of the imagery for all its worth, lingering on every phrase with weepy strings swelling right underneath him. And yet it is the very triteness of it that makes it work. Sinatra never strains to convey things the way Piaf did. Instead it is understated - like a reluctant confession.
In the age between opera and rock, the evolution of the popular song into the form as we now know was one of the great musical happenings of the 20th century. The music of Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Richard Rogers, Irving Berlin (make your own list) is as much in our bloodstream as Schubert is Viennese and Faure is Parisian. That weird artistic neither-region between absolute music and absolute poetry is always where the genius of hard-working professionals flowers. They were always too wrapped up in what they were doing to worry about whether or not it was brilliant. Their songs never impress or draw attention to themselves. They just do their job, and that job is to move the listener.
And no singer in recorded history was better at carrying out that intention than Sinatra. He wasn't the first singer to realize the potential the microphone gave to phrase everything in a completely different way - that would be Louis Armstrong. But Satchmo, great as he is, always sounds like himself. Frank Sinatra sounds like what every American man hopes his singing sounds like when nobody's there to critique it. So often when Sinatra sang, it was like a kind of confession. Before the age of the microphone, singers had to project to their audience with only their voices. During these years, there was no such thing as a vocal performance that was not larger-than-life. Opera succeeded so wildly for 300 years because it gave that larger-than-life style a suitable platform.
But what the microphone did was to give us singers that can sing our favorite songs the way we sing to an audience of a few friends, or even when we're alone. In front of the mike, all you have to do is be yourself, and the mike will project everything that makes you unique. And so for the first time in history, great performers could sing to an audience of thousands and sound every bit as personal as it would be to hear a friend who sings to an audience of ten.
(Thomas Mann had a bit of an obsession with this song. Der Lindenbaum by Schubert. Today Thomas Quasthoff can fill an enormous concert hall to sing it. But a hundred years ago it would more likely have been heard in the confines of a private drawing room, with a pianist who played scores of wrong notes and a singer who might have sounded as bad as untraditionally classical as Bob Dylan. And yet in such settings, Schubert seemed to move people more forcefully than ever.)
And in that way, the three minute song has not changed. Beethoven and Wagner always did the job of stunning the listener (and still do), but it was to Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Hugo Wolf that Germans turned to in their most personal moments. We now gather late at night in front of the i-pod (often fueled by alcohol) and play for one another our most favorite songs in the hope that someone else can appreciate it as much as we do. A hundred years ago, the alcohol would be the same but the it would be the piano we'd gather around with reams of sheet music. And we'd read through it with the same hope of mutual understanding.
But unlike in the 19th century, the heyday of the composer, it is the lyrics that we ultimately remember. Schubert made reams of great songs out of Goethe, and songs just as great out of poets that even academics don't read anymore. But when you recall the Great American Songs, what do you recall first? The music, or the lyrics?
Inseparable you say? Perhaps. But think of Moon River. Maybe as great a lyric as America ever has had, and how was it done? What is it about? It's a wonderful melody, but it's workaday enough that three years later Henry Mancini would reuse the first three notes (the hook) of it for the opening motif of "Goldfinger." In the context of Audrey Hepburn singing it in Breakfast at Tiffany's, it's straightforward enough: The shock of a lonely party girl at her first exposure to the excitement life may soon have in store for her. "Two drifters off to see the world; There's such a lot of world to see." is a justifiably famous line. But the lyrics are so open-ended that they can mean anything at all we say they mean. It can convey heart-fluttering excitement, but who says it has to be something positive? The song became perhaps even more devastatingly effective when Pedro Almodovar used it in his film Bad Education, in which a boy sang the song right before he was molested. In a context like that, how can one view the line "you heart breaker, Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way." with anything but horror?
Or think of "I'm Old-Fashioned." When Rita Hayworth sang it to Fred Astaire in "You Were Never Lovelier", it was exactly what it seemed. Fred Astaire, the original Wall-E, ever the romantic optimist on the edge of forlorn, trying to woo ever-so-bitchy Rita Hayworth. And then she opens up with this song and confesses her belief in the sort of deathless romance that never exists outside of Fred Astaire movies. Fast-forward forty-five years to Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters. Dianne Wiest plays the coke-addicted black sheep in a family of theatrical royalty. Never having had any acting talent, she tries to rebel only to find herself continually trying out for parts she has no hope of obtaining. But she steels herself for an audition and sings the exact same song Rita Hayworth sang with a voice that can only be described as pitiful. As she sings the song (she doesn't get through much) you can feel her note-by-note clamming herself up in anticipation of her inevitable rejection. Again, who remembers the melody? Does it even matter when put next to lines that virtually everybody quotes without realizing?
In different contexts, these songs can convey anything. They are completely value-neutral, with every interpreter supplying their own context. These songs can be used for two-dimensional entertainments to take them at face value, yet they practically beg great artists to stand their meanings on their heads. The melodies are endlessly malleable. There isn't a single song from the Great American Songbook that wasn't indispensable to bebop musicians like Bird, Coltrane and Blakey, who used the simplicity of these old standards as a lynchpin on which they could stretch their musical material past recognition. But if you change one word of a song by Johnny Mercer, or Oscar Hammerstein, or Ira Gershwin, or Lorenz Hart the meaning of the song becomes unrecognizable. They are what make the old standards unique.
It was the centennary of Johnny Mercer yesterday. It would have completely passed me by had I not caught a celebration of it from Terry Gross while I was in the car.
God knows I'm waiting for the right day to do an arrangement of One For My Baby. Meaning in Mercer's songs will always be elusive. When Dean Martin did One For My Baby, it was as insipid as American Pop Culture ever gets. When Frank Sinatra does it, it is the saddest possible form of magic. Indeed, there was something about the Mercer/Arlen songs that spurred Sinatra to places that no contemporary of his ever went. He was more vulnerable, more raw, and more heartbreaking than any mere crooner could ever be.
There was something about Sinatra, somewhere in his delivery, that made him the ideal vehicle for Great American Songs. Other candidates you say? Well look at Sinatra in one of the great Johnny Mercer songs and compare him to a few others. Just listen to him do Autumn Leaves and take my word for it about everybody else.
Let's not kid ourselves. This isn't Mercer at his best. It's a sappy sentimental lyric only remembered for a downwardly arching melody that imitates the experience of lovesick depression perfectly. The music is what makes this song work. Many singing giants of the Postwar Era covered it, and a few non-singing giants as well. Yves Montand delivers the original French lyrics a sort of ironic distance as though he were winking at us that he couldn't possibly believe a word of it. Edith Piaf, ever the force of nature, seemed to throw herself headlong into the song as though she were trying to convince herself that the sort of romantic love associated with so many of the ballads she sang really exists. Nat King Cole sings it like a sort of confidence man, trying to sell you a heartbreak he doesn't really believe in. And then there's Sinatra, who is the only singer who makes this song worth listening to (for me at least). He plays the triteness of the imagery for all its worth, lingering on every phrase with weepy strings swelling right underneath him. And yet it is the very triteness of it that makes it work. Sinatra never strains to convey things the way Piaf did. Instead it is understated - like a reluctant confession.
In the age between opera and rock, the evolution of the popular song into the form as we now know was one of the great musical happenings of the 20th century. The music of Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Richard Rogers, Irving Berlin (make your own list) is as much in our bloodstream as Schubert is Viennese and Faure is Parisian. That weird artistic neither-region between absolute music and absolute poetry is always where the genius of hard-working professionals flowers. They were always too wrapped up in what they were doing to worry about whether or not it was brilliant. Their songs never impress or draw attention to themselves. They just do their job, and that job is to move the listener.
And no singer in recorded history was better at carrying out that intention than Sinatra. He wasn't the first singer to realize the potential the microphone gave to phrase everything in a completely different way - that would be Louis Armstrong. But Satchmo, great as he is, always sounds like himself. Frank Sinatra sounds like what every American man hopes his singing sounds like when nobody's there to critique it. So often when Sinatra sang, it was like a kind of confession. Before the age of the microphone, singers had to project to their audience with only their voices. During these years, there was no such thing as a vocal performance that was not larger-than-life. Opera succeeded so wildly for 300 years because it gave that larger-than-life style a suitable platform.
But what the microphone did was to give us singers that can sing our favorite songs the way we sing to an audience of a few friends, or even when we're alone. In front of the mike, all you have to do is be yourself, and the mike will project everything that makes you unique. And so for the first time in history, great performers could sing to an audience of thousands and sound every bit as personal as it would be to hear a friend who sings to an audience of ten.
(Thomas Mann had a bit of an obsession with this song. Der Lindenbaum by Schubert. Today Thomas Quasthoff can fill an enormous concert hall to sing it. But a hundred years ago it would more likely have been heard in the confines of a private drawing room, with a pianist who played scores of wrong notes and a singer who might have sounded as bad as untraditionally classical as Bob Dylan. And yet in such settings, Schubert seemed to move people more forcefully than ever.)
And in that way, the three minute song has not changed. Beethoven and Wagner always did the job of stunning the listener (and still do), but it was to Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Hugo Wolf that Germans turned to in their most personal moments. We now gather late at night in front of the i-pod (often fueled by alcohol) and play for one another our most favorite songs in the hope that someone else can appreciate it as much as we do. A hundred years ago, the alcohol would be the same but the it would be the piano we'd gather around with reams of sheet music. And we'd read through it with the same hope of mutual understanding.
But unlike in the 19th century, the heyday of the composer, it is the lyrics that we ultimately remember. Schubert made reams of great songs out of Goethe, and songs just as great out of poets that even academics don't read anymore. But when you recall the Great American Songs, what do you recall first? The music, or the lyrics?
Inseparable you say? Perhaps. But think of Moon River. Maybe as great a lyric as America ever has had, and how was it done? What is it about? It's a wonderful melody, but it's workaday enough that three years later Henry Mancini would reuse the first three notes (the hook) of it for the opening motif of "Goldfinger." In the context of Audrey Hepburn singing it in Breakfast at Tiffany's, it's straightforward enough: The shock of a lonely party girl at her first exposure to the excitement life may soon have in store for her. "Two drifters off to see the world; There's such a lot of world to see." is a justifiably famous line. But the lyrics are so open-ended that they can mean anything at all we say they mean. It can convey heart-fluttering excitement, but who says it has to be something positive? The song became perhaps even more devastatingly effective when Pedro Almodovar used it in his film Bad Education, in which a boy sang the song right before he was molested. In a context like that, how can one view the line "you heart breaker, Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way." with anything but horror?
Or think of "I'm Old-Fashioned." When Rita Hayworth sang it to Fred Astaire in "You Were Never Lovelier", it was exactly what it seemed. Fred Astaire, the original Wall-E, ever the romantic optimist on the edge of forlorn, trying to woo ever-so-bitchy Rita Hayworth. And then she opens up with this song and confesses her belief in the sort of deathless romance that never exists outside of Fred Astaire movies. Fast-forward forty-five years to Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters. Dianne Wiest plays the coke-addicted black sheep in a family of theatrical royalty. Never having had any acting talent, she tries to rebel only to find herself continually trying out for parts she has no hope of obtaining. But she steels herself for an audition and sings the exact same song Rita Hayworth sang with a voice that can only be described as pitiful. As she sings the song (she doesn't get through much) you can feel her note-by-note clamming herself up in anticipation of her inevitable rejection. Again, who remembers the melody? Does it even matter when put next to lines that virtually everybody quotes without realizing?
In different contexts, these songs can convey anything. They are completely value-neutral, with every interpreter supplying their own context. These songs can be used for two-dimensional entertainments to take them at face value, yet they practically beg great artists to stand their meanings on their heads. The melodies are endlessly malleable. There isn't a single song from the Great American Songbook that wasn't indispensable to bebop musicians like Bird, Coltrane and Blakey, who used the simplicity of these old standards as a lynchpin on which they could stretch their musical material past recognition. But if you change one word of a song by Johnny Mercer, or Oscar Hammerstein, or Ira Gershwin, or Lorenz Hart the meaning of the song becomes unrecognizable. They are what make the old standards unique.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
John Williams Medley - 1 man a capella
The Ghost of Gustav Holst will haunt you until you admit John Williams is a blatant ripoff.
That being said, this is entirely too fantastic for a John Williams medley.
....and many thanks to Gary Thobaben for the free publicity.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Romania Romania
Oy. If only there were a way to figure out how to arrange this for chorus. And nobody would notice this but me.....but the writer of this had to have based this on the one famous piece of classical music to ever come out of Romania.
conducted with lots of toches by the great Sergiu Celibidache. Go to 5:15 to see where it really starts to get similar.
Romania is on the cusp of the Balkan region, and the Balkans are fairly unique in Europe for being the only region of the continent that never produced more than its share of great composers. The reasons for this are more obvious than would ever meet the ear. The Balkans have an incredible oral musical tradition that pre-dates classical music (and may post-date it as well). It is, in so many ways, the tradition out of which classical music sprang. The debt was in no way acknowledged until the arrival of Bela Bartok and many still wish it were not so. But classical music is hitting the 'crunch time' in which it has to settle all its old accounts or it is in danger of disappearing. When the time soon comes to fuse classical with more popular forms, Eastern European Folk will continue to be the first in line.
And just in case anybody needs any help remembering just how awesome the music of the Balkans is.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Greatest Youtube Video Ever
Yes. It's time for it. I'm just that lazy right now that I have to resort to the single greatest youtube video of all time. Those who do not get why it is can join another chorus.
Joke for Hard-Core Choral Nerds
A singer dies, goes to heaven, and asks permission to sing in the heavenly choir. An angel ushers him into the choir rehearsal room, and he notices a famous blue cardigan sweater draped over the conductor's chair. The singer is stunned. "Does that mean what I think it means? You guys are so lucky!" The angel rolls his eyes. "No, that's God's sweater. He only thinks he's Robert Shaw."
c/o Fredosphere, world's best choral director blog.
c/o Fredosphere, world's best choral director blog.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Debussy plays Debussy
(Debussy plays Golliwog's Cakewalk in 1913.)
An awe-inspiring document, in incredible sound. What does it tell us? Nothing for certain, but it's a safe bet that the popular image of Debussy as a maker of a 'piano without hammers' isn't quite the whole truth. Debussy plays the loud sections with Lisztian brio, and even the small sections don't conform to the popular and slightly condescending image of Debussy as a French composer of hyper-perfumed music that does little but shimmer.
(Pierre Boulez conducts the massively exciting central section of Fetes from Debussy's Nocturnes for Orchestra. WTF is with the Hunter Thompson sunglasses?!?)
Pierre Boulez is generally a name to be yawned at, but no musician ever did more to establish Debussy as a great composer rather than a great colorist. Debussy seems to be the only composer Boulez never had an unkind word for, and Boulez seems to conduct his music with a naturalness and affection that he rarely drums up for any other composer. More than the color, Boulez revealed what every musician should respond to: Debussy was complete package of all the elegant things to which every French artist seems to aspire: (quoth Sondheim) order, design, tension, composition, balance, light, harmony. It's debatable whether Debussy was the greatest French composer, but what is not debatable is that Debussy was the most French.
(The hammerless pianist. Walter Gieseking plays Debussy's The Sunken Cathedral in the watery way that most of the world thinks of him. Probably very far from what Debussy actually had in mind, but great pianism nonetheless.)
French music had a comparatively dreadful 19th century. Virtually every European country to their east produced great composers in droves, yet this extremely musical nation produced it at a trickle: feting all sorts of great foreign composers but sending Berlioz abroad for recognition, sending Bizet to an early grave, forcing Franck and Faure to toil in obscurity until their dotages, and refusing to acknowledge Debussy or Ravel's genius for decades. The reasons behind this were manifold and complex, but in a sense they can be boiled down to two words: Saint-Saens.
(One of my least favorite pieces of music in the world. The Organ Symphony by Saint-Saens. Listening to it conducted by the great Charles Munch makes it almost tolerable.)
Camille Saint-Saens was the great white hope of French music from the cradle to the grave. He was polymath active in a dozen different fields, but made his home in music, which he played and composed with greater facility than any other composer in the generation after Mendelssohn. But his impeccably crafted music abolished any originality and he held his contemporaries to the same rigid standards. At the beginning of Saint-Saens's career, Berlioz lamented "Saint-Saens knows everything, but he lacks inexperience." At the end of his career, he left the Theatre du Champs-Élysées after the first six notes of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, shouting on his way out that Stravinsky misused the bassoon.
(Would that all his music sounded like the Carnival of the Animals.)
Saint-Saens wanted French music to be like German music, without its ability to grip and challenge. He spent his career crafting perfect neo-Beethoven and neo-Mozart. Aping their structures, aping their harmonies, but filtering both of their originality.
(The ecstatic piece that changed everything. The second half of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. The here 90-year-old Leopold Stokowski was definitely of the Debussy the colorist school. But my god...this is the X-rated version.)
A generation afterward, Debussy came along and stripped classical music of all its German contraptions. Gone was the endless repetition, the compulsive restatements of small motifs in every possible pattern, the cud-chewing cliches of development, and the melodramatic bombast. With Debussy, not a single note seemed wasted, construction was so perfect that each note seemed to stand on its own as an equal contributor, every one as important as the one before and the one after.
(Let no one say that Debussy was incapable of writing dramatic music. The last movement of La Mer. Done by Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony in 1962. Has there ever been a greater conductor of French music?)
Debussy hated being called an impressionist, and if you listen closely, you can see why. His music isn't just a melangic wash of color, his music is made of contours so perfectly balanced that the color seems all the more vivid. Like Mozart and Chopin before him (his two great idols), he's often accused of being a constructor of 'sissy music.' All three are routinely accused of writing musical china dolls that are incapable of expressing anything that isn't pretty. So much the loss of the people who actually believe that. But what they really express is musical greatness. The battle scars are not proudly displayed but concealed just beneath the surface, devastating anybody who can listen closely to find them.
(Messiaen teaching his students about Debussy's opera: Pelleas et Melisande. Who would ever leave a classroom with a teacher like that?)
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Barber of Seville in Hand-Whistling
How is it always the weird guys with the enormous beards that learn useless things like this (says the choral conductor who used to have a six inch beard)?
Toscanini mangia l'orchestra - that's the title of this video
It makes for somewhat hilarious listening now, doesn't it? All that screaming and yelling like a coddled child too exhausted to realize how tired he is. It's like hearing about Khrushchev's shoe-banging at the UN or his tantrum when he found out he couldn't visit Disney World. You feel like you want to find a guinea pig that looks like him and pet it every so often.
But then it occurs to you that there but the grace of 'god' go you to a clownish boss like them to whom your livelihood, perhaps your life itself, depends. And only then do you begin to understand what a black joke it is. It's difficult to realize now, but until 1933 Adolf Hitler was the most hilarious punchline in international politics. Kim Jong-il is a punchline that never fails at a Washington party, yet it's all to easy to forget that the ability to laugh at people like him is still not a fundamental right for billions.
Mussolini made the trains run on time, Toscanini rid orchestras of sloppiness and exaggeration. In real life they were mortal enemies and Toscanini was one of the world's most famous anti-fascists. But what is not often realized is that they arrived at the pinnacle of their professions as close collaborators. It was only when Mussolini began to interfere in Toscanini's artistic decisions that Toscanini fled to America, a country that gave him the freedom to terrorize musicians in whatever way he saw fit.
It's ironic that the era of the podium tyrant reached its apogee in mid-century America. Serge Koussevitsky refused to let the Boston Symphony unionize for the duration of his tenure, and was shocked when musicians protested his proposal to have the entire orchestra live in the same apartment co-op with a special bell that he would ring a half-hour before he wanted to schedule a rehearsal. Artur Rodinski would arrive at New York Philharmonic rehearsals with a loaded pistol in his back pocket. George Szell would routinely fire musicians in the Cleveland Orchestra for mistakes in the middle of rehearsal. Fritz Reiner would force individual musicians in the Chicago Symphony to repeat the same difficult passages a dozen times over until they'd trip up and he could fire them publicly. And this was allegedly the Golden Age of American Classical Music.
But let's be honest here. What present-day conductor hasn't listened to the Toscanini tantrums without a twinge of envy? Hell, what conductor hasn't fantasized about taking sloppy players into the green room with a loaded pistol? Musicians are widely known as flaky inconsiderate people on their best days, and the reputation is not entirely undeserved. A conductor should never mount a rostrum without being prepared to see their musicians in the worst possible light.
But pity the poor conductor. The mentality of musicians to conductors will always be guilty until proven innocent. A conductor is like a boss who not only watches your every move but also has the responsibility to correct your mistakes in front of all your co-workers. If a conductor wants to succeed, power must be displayed without exerting it. Through a mixture of competence, psychological manipulation and insight, he must earn the players' confidence and may only get cross if he lists justifiable reasons right in the middle of losing his temper. To all the musicians who play under him, his mentality must be innocent until proven guilty. It is now the 21st century, and the age of the podium tyrant must be brought to a close.
For the legacy of Toscanini sadly lasts to this day in all too obvious ways. And any musician to ever play under a stressed-out conductor is quite likely to have seen it in practice. In the fifteen years I've played under conductors I watched a number of them reduce individual musicians to tears after the eighth repetition of the same passage. I've seen a conductor single out a fifteen-year-old violist in an orchestra of eighty at the top of his lungs for crossing her legs in the middle of rehearsal. I endured a conductor who promised to fire musicians at the third rehearsal of twelve if he found anyone better. I even went through one conductor who successfully coerced me into military style workouts for being late to rehearsal (I assure you it didn't sound that weird at the time). I'm sure that others have seen far worse than I did, and the truth was that I generally got on swimmingly with every one of them. They were all fine musicians and quite nice people away from the podium, always happy to oblige a curious music student. Toscanini was said by many to be quite a nice man away from the podium too. But his legacy is that decent people feel unencumbered by the rules of decency when given positions of power.
If you are a musician who plays under a conductor, please try to understand that your conductor is charged with a task that by definition cannot be fulfilled, and it will sometimes make him quite stressed. But if your conductor is singling you out for unfair treatment then you owe it to yourself to leave. Once upon a time, behaviors like the ones you're subjected to were used to justify far worse things than a wrong note. A field like classical music that has so many stains from collaboration with authoritarian regimes cannot allow for authoritarian practices to continue.
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