Another week passes, and I’m still the director of Kol Rinah.
If you have musical ability, there really isn’t much to being a good conductor –
you just have to make your musicians sound good and do what it takes to make
that happen. Any responsible conductor realizes that his job is 1% musical
creativity. It takes years of patient work, constant attention to detail, correcting
your musicians in the most effective possible way, and compromise, compromise,
compromise. The only way for an organization to make progress is to have a
leader willing if necessary to bang his head against the wall, and every dent
is its own victory. Even a conductor with the very highest level should count
himself lucky if a single performance over the course of a 50 year career turn out
exactly as (s)he dreamed it. Those of us who work with amateurs simply have to
lumber along as best we can, getting our groups as close to first-class
performances as possible while still realizing that people willingly giving of their
time, their efforts, and their passion to make music owe us absolutely nothing.
We their teachers owe them our respect for the privilege of our being able to make
money through music, not the other way around.
Seemingly as always with my conducting jobs, I was naïve. I
really thought that if I got this group performing at a certain level, people
would start noticing how much better they sound right away, and offers for more
prestigious, better paying concerts would come in right away. People who’ve
listened have certainly noticed that this chorus sounds better than ever (their
words inevitably, not mine), yet the new offers I thought would magically
appear from the ether are not coming in. At yesterday’s rehearsal, I had them sing
a half-dozen songs from memory which they had not sung for a full year. On the
first run-through, they sang each piece on the voice, almost perfectly in tune
throughout, with fantastic diction, responsive to my requests both verbal and
non-verbal, and singing with a real sense of phrasing and dynamics. For an
amateur singing group, it doesn’t get any better than they did yesterday. Yet
who will know other than us?
There is one thing in life that’s guaranteed to never
compromise, and that is compromise itself. Compromise is the fundamental state
of all life, and it is merciless in what it compels from all of us. Goals are the
only orderly thing about life, and achieving them doesn’t often give us the
sense of accomplishment we’d hoped. But having goals does simplify life – “if I
achieve this goal,” we all reason, “my life will be better.” Yet there is no
guarantee that life will be better when the goal is met, achieving goals is
often a messy, messy process, and there’s no guarantee that the goal itself is
worth all the effort – all too often, the chalice at the end of the long, windy
road is poisoned. In order to achieve your goals, regardless of what they are,
you will probably be asked to do things you’d never have countenanced if you
didn’t want to do something so badly.
(Call me any name you want, but DON’T CALL ME SALIERI!)
More than anything else in the world, I’ve wanted to be a conductor
since I was three years old. For my whole childhood and adolescence, I dreamed
of nothing more than serving music, probably in the way that more religious kids
dreamt of serving God. It was more than just a vocation, it was a calling, and
it was what I was clearly put on earth to do. Teachers who saw how much I loved
the music, how much I knew about the literature, and how comfortable I was in front
of crowds could only agree with me. There was only problem: I couldn’t produce
great results on paper.
Thanks to a whole battery of learning disabilities, I couldn’t
get into anything but a third-rate music program (my professors would call it
that at least as often as their students). It was not a music school or even a
music department; it was a music program within a performing arts department.
My training in theory was two years long, and I could barely eek out B’s and C’s
even though I slaved hours on every assignment just so I could learn all the
technical names of chords and harmonic progressions that my extreme perfect
pitch (I can pick out every note of a hexachord) allowed me to understand
implicitly. I applied to music graduate schools around the world in conducting
and composition, and was rejected from every one of them no matter how fourth-rate.
After all that effort, I still couldn’t pass a basic theory exam.
For all these reasons, I can say with a completely straight
face that if there is no place in classical music for a person like me, then to
talk of classical music’s future in this country is a colossal joke at best. The
fault is not me, the fault is them. Local symphony orchestras double as assisted
living facilities, patronized by an elderly population of World War II vets and
their wives whose numbers dwindle every year. Most musicians don’t complain if
they have to play the same 50 pieces, and always in the same standardized
interpretations which they heard as kids on a Karajan or Rubinstein recording. Classical
music is the world’s saddest nostalgia act, insisting on reducing its evolvolution to as slow a crawl as possible. What
we now call classical music, once the musical lingua franca of the world,
shrinks into an ever more insular niche. In a generation, there might be meaningful
classical ‘scenes ‘ in big cities like New York, LA, and Chicago, but when the
older generation passes away, there will be hardly any need for classical music
in regional cities, because America has its own classical music. What sense of
a transcendent experience can Bach possibly give these people that Bob Dylan
and Otis Redding can’t? The meaning of European Classical Music is virtually irrelevant in a country whose own music has a fully developed culture,
identity, and sense of history. Along with American Popular Music, European
Classical Music is now the prized music of the rising middle class of East Asia – and in
less than a century, the Asian middle class will have have grown its own
indigenous music. Where will Beethoven be appreciated then?
Once the world’s dominant music, classical music is no
longer even the first (or tenth) among equals. While the classical world grew
smaller and smaller, the world of other genres grew ever larger, now long past the
point that it’s assimilated classical music into its own vocabulary. What
sense is there of talking about classical music which assimilates things from
Rock and Pop music when Rock and Pop have long since assimilated much of the best from the
vocabulary of classical music. In Eleanor Rigby, The Beatles (or George Martin)
used the String Quartet to better effect than Elliott Carter. Hell, Brian
Wilson arguably used the theremin (or is it an Ondes Martinot) more memorably
than any composer save Percy Grainger (or was it Messiean?). The difference in
quality between the best young American classical composers like Nico Muhly or Timothy
Andres and the best non-classical composers of various indie genres like Sufjan
Stevens and Dan Deacon is staggering. The classical scene is merely excited because
they have now produced composers who have even a small hope of breaking into
the indie-rock scene and being treated as a lesser peer to Animal Collective or
The Decemberists (why anyone would want to compete with either band is a
question for another day.). Let’s face it, classical music has lost the battle –
and it’s now a small tributary river, simply waiting for the dam to be broken
and the final pouring into the bay that is the American Popular Tradition.
And meanwhile, I’m finally doing that thing I’ve been
resisting since I first played with a rock guitarist at the age of 16: I’m
taking something approaching a full plunge. For the time being, I’ve given up on a career in
classical music, and am passing my time in the family business before I can (I hope) perhaps become a jobbing jazz and rock violinist. Eventually so much compromise is necessary that it simply
becomes a byword for surrender. It’s the universe’s way of telling you that you
have to switch gears and find another outlet. Three months ago I put out an ad
on Craig’s List ‘Good but rusty violinist looking for musicians to play with.’
A gypsy jazz guitarist got in touch, and apparently I’m now a gypsy violinist
who plays gigs a couple times a month with Baltimore's premiere 7-piece Slovak Gypsy Jazz Band.
At our first concert, I had absolutely no idea what I was
doing. I barely knew the material and anyone who listened would realize that my
solos were horrible. Yet it was the most fun I’d had with music in five years.
Suddenly, and without warning, all the anxiety of failed plans with choruses and
classical music washed away, and I remembered why I loved music in the first
place. I can only hope I find half a dozen bands to play with that are this
much fun, but as always, compromise is necessary, and one has to take what one
gets even if the honeymoon ends.
When I finish this post, I will be heading to my second open
Jazz Jam of the week. It’s a great way to meet other musicians, to get my
fingers back in shape, to learn more music, and to simply enjoy making it. Like
most great musicmaking, it doesn’t exist to be respectable – you won’t find jams
like the ones I’ve been to lately at a Church or a concert hall. It’s simply good
musicians finding ways to make music enjoyably and viscerally, wherever they’ll
have us. This jam will be at a strip club, the first jam of the week was at the
lounge of a gay bar. Like all great musicmaking, these kinds of jams challenge
our views of how great music is made - it
can be made anywhere, and is much easier to make in places that don’t have to
worry about what’s proper.
So until something less anxiety provoking comes along on
Tuesday nights, I’m guaranteed to keep going with my little patch of conducting
land at Kol Rinah. If stay, if I leave, few people will care much either way – perhaps
least of all me. I’m having too much fun otherwise, and whether or not
classical music disappears in my lifetime, the music plays on, regardless of
genre.
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