In the spirit of blogger self-referentiality, I must take this moment to declare my shock that the same amount of people (about 650 a day) visit my blog whether or not I post something. I have gone on long hiatuses before (is that right? hiatusES?). And each time, I return with the same results. Is it because I blog about newsworthy stuff that pops up on Google a lot? Is it because you all really like me? I'm happy in all cases. And of course, feeling like I owe something to this new world that, unlike publishing, doesn't just forget you if you take a break. So allow me to add some historical context to all the discussions on Alex Ross's blog and in both the LAT and NYT about online classical music. I began covering this world in 2000 for the NYT and The New Republic Online when sites like Classics Today, Global Music Network, and Andante launched. At the time, forward-thinking TNR was even paying me to review webcasts as a new form of music listening experience that deserved a new kind of criticism (I can thank my brilliant editor at the time, Jeremy McCarter, for indulging and supporting this interest; Jeremy is now NY Mag's stellar theater critic). Anyway, you can read some of these prehistoric online music pieces below the jump, including essays about Pierre Boulez introducing Andante and Pinchas Zuckerman teaching online masterlcasses. And you thought taskmaster-induced fear wouldn't transmit over broadband Internet fat pipes.
The Launch of Andante.com
ONLINE MUSIC | "Open All Night"
by Adam Baer
Only at TNR Online | Post date 04.09.01
A few weeks ago, in a wood-paneled chamber of the New York Public
Library, the city's largest public collection of tangible information,
the forward-thinking French composer-conductor Pierre Boulez spoke to a
select group of wine-sipping socialites and arts administrators about a
new classical music website, andante.com. "Everybody is aware that if
you want to keep an audience coming, and [interest] a younger audience,
and renew your audience, you have to really give some thought to the
environment of a concert," said Boulez, who sits on andante.com's
advisory board. "Orchestras are like restaurants: they open at eight
and they close at eleven--before you cannot, and after, you cannot. And
that is not very attractive, let's say, because you are dependent on
the cook all the time."
Boulez was getting at the idea that classical music needs to do more to
engage with the world, instead of watching from an elitist sideline.
"You know, during the war, Schoenberg was in the army," Boulez added.
"And, once, he saw a captain or something like that. And the captain
asked: 'Oh, you are Schoenberg?' And Schoenberg answered: 'Somebody has
to be Schoenberg.' And so, I say, why does andante exist? Because it
has to exist. Simply that."
Boulez, having served as the cook himself most of his life, had a
point, no matter how grandly put. Why not offer music and music-related
information for the public to access whenever they want. Hence,
andante.com: a website that presents classical music and hosts of ways
to learn more about it on demand.
But, from the looks of it, andante.com won't exactly be a palatable (or
entirely free) resource like the building in which it premiered and the
description Boulez offered. It is a content-rich, virtual ivory tower,
designed by and geared toward aficionados who desire in-depth,
genre-specific information and who agree that it will be worth
something in addition to what they already pay their ISP to access
everything the website has to offer. The site includes exclusive
webcasts; curriculum-development tools; insider criticism from Fanfare,
International Record Review, and andante staffers; academic-minded
essays from the Grove Dictionary, archived music pieces from The New
York Review of Books, excerpts from the tomes of Michael Steinberg,
music's liveliest annotator; all to buttress the world's
classical-music knowledge and, surprise!, to sell CDs. Beginning in
September, the site will institute a subscription model not unlike that
of cable television: andante users will have to pay to access parts of
the site, including the webcasts themselves, it seems.
Andante is one of a new breed of Internet animals. Like Global Music
Network (which is a free Web resource), it is a record label as well as
a website, and, as such, an experiment in e-commerce. Andante aims to
become what the marketers call a "brand": a company explicitly named
for quick identification that functions on a multitude of platforms
which fuel one another. But charging people admission doesn't quite
jibe with Boulez's populist mission statement--it will limit the size
of his Web audience, and may even represent an impediment to generating
interest in a subject matter that is, at present, doing no more than
grazing the interests of most global citizens.
Logistical and commercial issues aside,
andante.com's first webcast is a diamond in the virtual rough: a
concert from Linz's Brucknerhaus of Pierre Boulez leading the Vienna
Philharmonic through Wagner's "Prelude and Leibestod" from Tristan and
Isolde, and Bruckner's bear of a Ninth Symphony. It is far from rare to
hear such music on today's concert stages, but it is almost unheard of
on the Internet. Can such difficult music work online? And does Pierre
Boulez pull it off?
Wagner is difficult music for obvious reasons. It is thick. It is
longwinded. And it is harmonically complex in its form of chromaticism
(its chords ascend in half-steps, blurring any sense of tonic), an
approach that turns the ideas of traditional tonality on their heads.
When people conjure images of "The Opera," envisaging homely, pigtailed
Teutonic women wearing Viking caps, they are thinking of an archetype
cemented by Wagner's Ring cycle. Taken in small doses, however, as it
is offered on andante, Wagner's orchestration and moments of arrival
are actually quite effective and beautiful.
Boulez's reading of these strictly instrumental Tristan excerpts is as
lyrical and approachable as a late Wagnerian "music drama" can get. He
unearths Wagner's humble sensitivity and exuberance in a work famous in
the Western tradition for one conflicted chord that never quite returns
home. Nevertheless, although the audio stream of this concert held
together fairly well, the video stream was indecipherable on my
narrowband 56k connection. Can such expansive, expressive music really
work in this medium, at this point in its development? One hates to
adopt the dot-com mentality that short, quick "bites" of content work
best on the Internet. But Wagner's incredibly rich writing deserves an
arena that will do it justice, one in which audiences can truly allow
the music to envelop them. Unfortunately, it seems as if that the
virtual pipes through which Net-music currently streams are simply too
narrow to make even abridged Wagner pieces work.
The dilemma multiplies exponentially for Bruckner, who is about as
close as the most famous nineteenth-century composers got (albeit
superficially) to the principles of Gustav Mahler, the best
expressionist composer in the canon. Bruckner, more difficult and less
interesting than Mahler, was also prey to manic mood swings, and his is
a disjointed music that demands the even keel and emotional patience of
a pricey shrink. In this webcast, Boulez artfully articulates each of
the piece's extremes--the bizarre games and egregious aches--but the
music still misses coming from a PC's speakers.
Bruckner's Ninth Symphony is far more problematic than Wagner. Think
more confused ideas, more elaboration, more philosophical rambling,
more sound. It therefore becomes more of a challenge to ingest this
music without having it wash over your eyes, ears, and neck, from a
live orchestra. (I'd even question how well it works on CD.) Bruckner
is music that demands to be seen as it is performed. But not even the
clearest streaming video (like andante's on a broadband connection) can
do justice to the richness of this sound-world. To truly get it--and
I'm not sure that most would want to--you have to be in the same room
as the performance.
Wagner and Bruckner are, of course, too vital to classical music to
call this webcast an exercise in elitism. But without a T1 connection,
this art just doesn't approach the realm of the digestible. The sad
truth is that heavy, longwinded, Expressionist music just might not be
Internet material right now; this is a limitation (or virtue, depending
on your view) of the medium that classical webcasters like andante need
to consider. If Boulez and the andante staff are serious about their
populist mission, they might settle for clips, good commentary, lighter
repertoire and hope to hook people that way. In the distribution of
music, the medium is the message. And no matter how much this makes
musicians cringe, the Internet's ability to broadcast, right now,
stands for "less"--less weight, less size, less time, less confusion.
Clearly all concerts aren't fit to be encoded for online listening in
what some say is still the Internet's infancy. In streaming this
high-fat dish of a concert, Boulez doesn't seem to be offering
classical music the help on the Web that it needs or accomplishing his
stated goals. Certainly there are ways to maintain high standards of
artistry while not pandering to a lay audience. (Andante does a decent
job in this respect with its commentary, which sews together
interesting, if heady, comparative writing that has appeared in print
separately.) The andante team is right to argue that the classical
music world needs to take seriously the challenge of finding new
listeners and that it must do a better job of opening wide its doors to
let them in. The trouble is, you could say the same thing about andante.
--------------
My first NewMusicBox Webcast review...
ONLINE MUSIC | "Make It New"
by Adam Baer
Only at TNR Online | Post date 05.25.01
Calling new work written for the concert hall "classical" is about as
helpful to the plight of living composers as calling a car a Nova was
twenty years ago to Chevrolet in Latin America. (Bisect "Nova" and the
result, in Spanish, is "No va"--"No go"-- not a great tagline for a
car.) "Classical music" is a term, its composers and promoters and
performers are beginning to fear, that may drive away as many potential
listeners as it draws. The term presumes two unfortunately popular
misconceptions: that music called "classical" must depend entirely on
its connection to the great (and thus, to some, hopelessly ancient)
works of the Western tradition, and that listeners who want to enjoy
new music should have extensive background knowledge of the canon.
This creates quite a dilemma for those inclined to write new concert
music and attempt to make a living from it. But apart from breaking
down the linguistic walls that isolate the music from so-called
outsiders (who may in fact enjoy it as much or more than the typical
"classical-music" listener) where can living American composers turn to
get their music out? A website called NewMusicBox.org posits the
Internet as its solution. From a concert by the Eastman School of
Music's Musica Nova ensemble (here, it means "new") held on February
15, 2001, NewMusicBox has produced a customizable webcast (streamable
through Quicktime players) that features a program made only of living
American composers and that includes a few world premieres, one of
which is courtesy of a student, to boot.
Jennifer Graham, a bubbly, brown-haired undergraduate, whose
world-premiere "Eight Minutes" is featured on the webcast along with a
warm, meet-the-composer interview, cites two pieces as her impetus to
move from a childhood of rock-music influence to Eastman, a
conservatory whose reputation is almost synonymous with the academic
study of Western music theory and composition. The two pieces are
Stravinsky's primeval romp, "The Rite of Spring," and Steve Reich's
minimalist paean "Music for 18 Musicians." Is this surprising?
Somewhat. That Reich's work can serve as an inspiration for someone to
compose concert music these days is significant: Today, when most
people hear this piece, an acoustic braid of repetitive
electronic-sounding cells, they think they are listening to
cutting-edge work. They're not. Reich recorded his work in 1978 and
could be considered an elder statesman of living composers: That's how
far new music is removed from people's minds. Music that sounds new to
the concert-music newcomer (like Reich's) is now actually old enough to
serve as a student's inspiration. We are no longer Modern in our
musicmaking, no longer Postmodern, even.
Graham's "Eight Minutes," her first work written for large ensemble,
shows promise, with strong ties to the pop and minimalist idioms.
"Technically speaking, 'Eight Minutes' reflects my fascination with
rhythm and pulse," she says, in her online interview. To Graham's
credit, her piece weaves disparate layers of texture that work with one
another via a give-and-take sort of action. There is particular merit
in her use of the piano's tonality--her juxtaposition of glassy and
urban sounds and some of her vibrant ostinati, lower-pitched patterns
that loop underneath higher-pitched, expansive lines. The weakness of
"Eight Minutes" is its melodies, which, though purposely sparing, are
tedious: They don't seem to go anywhere and often land on a pitch that
is, perhaps, a step or two away from the most satisfactory one.
Steven Stucky's "Nell'ombra, nella luce (1999-2000)," crisply performed
by the Susie Kelly Quartet, a group whose is attire is colorful enough
to match that of a troupe of big-top clowns, is indicative of Stucky's
fascination with what can be done with stringed-instrument tricks and a
controlled palette of tonal hues. "Nell'ombra, nella luce (1999-2000)"
is unevenly segmented, making for an exciting intellectual experience,
and pins brilliant colors against darker, personal ones. Stucky,
Graham's professor at Eastman, head of the music department at Cornell,
and New-music Advisor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, says that his
interest lies in the sonic possibilities that exist between
instruments, not in a traditional use of melody. He'd prefer, perhaps,
to mix musical colors on his palette and splash them about the
manuscript in a way that leaves the linear, narrative function of the
melody by the side of the road. Stucky's work is raw art, not art
motivated by narrative. What's more, it is convincing. Hearing Stucky's
quartet, I don't miss melody. I am drawn to the colors, to the buzzing,
insect-like ponticellos (achieved by bowing very close to the
instrument's bridge). I wonder what this piece is about when I am done
listening to it. It works.
Part of Stucky's appeal is the challenging nature of the work. Two
pieces on the program make listeners work a little too hard, though:
"x=x (in memoriam, Iannis Xenakis)," a world premiere by Musica Nova's
conductor Brad Lubman, and the third movement of Peter Alexander's
"Thranobulax," also a world premiere, commissioned by the
Manhattan-based New Millennium Ensemble. Lubman's composition adopts
Stravinsky-ian woodwind timbres and Xenakis' penchant for percussion,
but it lacks a clear invidual voice. The result is a stale piece that
doesn't communicate the composer's sense of mourning. "Thranobulax," an
atonal virtuosic rambling for small chamber ensemble, calls for as much
work from its performers as it does from its listeners. It seems
difficult for the sake of being difficult.
With Robert Morris's premiere work, "In Concert," it is possible to
focus on the multitude of involved techniques that Morris utilizes to
construct his music. But it isn't easy. His musical effects work so
well together, I hear the piece as an organic whole, as a statement.
Morris, who chairs Eastman's composition department and has served in a
similar capacity at Yale, has run the gamut of musical expression in
his career, from toying with non-Western musical elements to those
produced by computers. According to Morris, "In Concert" throws four
instrumental groups together, sort of an atonal experiment in how they
can coexist. Alto flute and bass work in tandem against a somewhat
disturbed-sounding piano, which stands alone. Strings converse
dissonantly with woodwinds by means of musical phrases that stab
experimentally at each other as if to see how the other will counter.
The strength of "In Concert" is that it doesn't seem static in the way
that similar experiments occurring on today's concert stages do. There
is connectivity, a motion, between these abrupt clips of discourse as
they come to a close with a high, flute whistle.
What's good about NewMusicBox is that it fuses concert music with jazz
and seems even to be suggesting that new music is indeed its own genre,
one that transcends the "classical" or "jazz" pigeonholes. Yes, the
argument that new music is suffering isn't new. What is something new
to consider, however, is the notion that perhaps new music is so "new"
that, although it might alienate members of the classical-music
audience, it could possibly speak to concert- or art-music newcomers.
Sitting next to the Nutcracker on the CD store shelf certainly doesn't
seem to be helping it. So perhaps it should sit elsewhere. Given the
chance, good, new concert music speaks so powerfully it shatters the
myth that you need to understand everything about Bach's Well Tempered
Clavier to enjoy it. Perhaps new concert music is the place for
listeners disgruntled with cotton-candy pop and a dying community of
quality songwriters. Perhaps, one day, they may even stumble upon some
in the front of a record store.
ADAM BAER writes frequently about Internet music for TNR Online.
-----------
My first piece about Onlineclassics.com
ONLINE MUSIC | "He's Bach"
by Adam Baer
Only at TNR Online | Post date 08.28.00
Though you'd be hard-pressed to hear it above the melée of Napster,
Internet radio, and MP3.com, it's possible for newbies and connoisseurs
alike to find worthy (and legal) classical music online. A British
website called Online Classics provides classical sound-hounds free,
live, streaming webcasts, which remain online and available for future
viewing. Like those at the comprehensive Global Music Network, these
multimedia classical-concert experiences -- sponsored by artists and
underwritten by corporations -- sidestep the copyright issues that
plague other forms of performance on the Web.
Watching Mozart's Die Zauberflöte live from the Vienna Staatsoper
without leaving your bedroom takes some getting used to, but it's worth
it. A trip to Austria via a broadband (or even a prehistoric 28.8)
connection is an easy way to see concerts inaccessible to aficionados
unable to hop on Lufthansa at the drop of a hat. Can it take the place
of a first-tier box at Carnegie Hall? Well, no. But, quite honestly,
what can?
My venture into this virtual concert space commenced with a series of
performances -- recorded and live -- that displayed a powerful ability
to bring a global community together: an 18-hour webcast of concerts to
mark the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of J.S. Bach's death, July
28. The performances took place mostly in Germany, where the yearlong
celebration of this milestone culminated in a multitude of full-day
church concerts, centered mainly in Leipzig, the city in which Bach
died.
Bach, as almost anyone drawn to the arts knows, is the true cornerstone
of modern music history; his exhaustive (and pedagogical) inventions in
polyphony -- never mind his melodic genius -- have made it possible for
everyone from Mozart to the Beatles to interpret sound as a language
and to speak with it. Bach's music is the first substantive repertoire
that child pianists of any nationality are usually assigned. Other
musicians and composers, from Britney Spears to Leonard Bernstein, may
be more accessible, but Bach's brilliance and the universality of his
work make him much better suited for a global medium like the Internet.
Online Classic's Bach-day virtual menu began with the Chaconne from the
Partita no. 2 in D Minor for solo violin, BWV 1004. The performer, a
black-clad Viktoria Mullova -- the virtuoso forever trailing the
success and charm of the classically glam Anne-Sophie Mutter -- stood
alone on stage with a fixed sense of purpose. The venue, Bach's own St.
Nicholas Church, proved apropos as well: as Mullova pulled
well-articulated chords from her instrument, the camera filmed her from
what must have been the rafters, and the historically imposing
architecture of the Baroque room melded with that of the piece. The
Chaconne is the fifth and final of the partita's dance movements; based
on a three-beat motif, it's underscored by a repeating bass line, which
identifies it as a type of passacaglia, or variations on a bass theme.
It's also a renegade in the violin repertoire, composed of knotty
technical hurdles that make it difficult for many performers to pull
off. But they didn't faze Mullova. With a delicately precise left-hand
facility and a bow arm as artful as they come, she expressed lucid
musical constructions of form and function: hidden lines sang, and
harmonies rang clear. Yet despite her flawless technique, Mullova
seemed disconnected from the emotional currents of the score. Her
utilitarian approach lacked a certain fire and gave one the sense that
she was celebrating Bach more out of obligation than of love.
This passion was clearly not lacking in the devoted Keller Quartet's
prerecorded performance of György Kurtág's contemporary sound essays
interspersed with movements from Bach's Art of the Fugue. I found the
unisonic chemistry the quartet's members displayed in the tender
sections of Kurtág's essays even more gripping than the way they
handled moments of stirring agitation. Bach's last -- and unfinished --
work, this collection of counterpoint studies was written without a
definite instrumentation: the manuscript specifies the clef that each
part should be played in, but not which instrument should be used to
play it. That musical legroom is what convinces many that further
manipulation -- breaking up the piece and lacing it with Kurtág's
music, say -- is not a blasphemous act. As staid as he appears to us at
times, it's worth remembering that Bach was essentially a flexible man.
The verve of the Keller Quartet notwithstanding, it is this flexibility
that made the Kurtág-Bach marriage the most captivating part of the
celebration. Kurtág is a living Hungarian composer known for fusing the
mathematical trials of Webernian serialism (otherwise known as
twelve-tone composition) and the folk-driven, exotic flavors of
Bartók's modernist oeuvre. His profoundly fragmented works --
Ligatura/Hommage à Bach, Twelve Microludes, Perpetuum Mobile, and
Officium Breve in Memoriam Andreae Szervánszky -- radiated in their
juxtaposition with the Baroque master's harmonic treatise; the two
composers actually appear more intriguing next to each other than
alone. This is the purpose of Kurtág's postmodern departures. They toy
with art of the past: high-register whispers stab low, guttural
utterances; pitches bend with angular trajectories; vertical notes
assault hushed tone clusters; atonal chords shift direction from line
to texture. The result is an engaging image-in-sound of how Bach
translates in one of music's busiest minds; when one hears Kurtág next
to Bach, it's difficult to sense which of them is the rebellious Other.
Many performers opted for a more "respectful" approach. Some played in
the Baroque style, using techniques and instruments from Bach's time.
The Freiburg Baroque Orchestra -- a gifted band of standing, swaying
period players -- donated all six Brandenburg concerti. Purist Anner
Bylsma played the G major and D minor cello suites with fluid drama;
and Ton Koopman, the academician known for drafting Yo-Yo Ma into his
early-instrument brigade in a Sony Classical release, exercised the
great Silbermann Organ in Cöthen's St. Marien Cathedral for the G Minor
Fugue. The program even included a black-and-white video of lauded
Fantasia conductor Leopold Stokowski dictating one of his overly
Romantic arrangements of the Toccata in D Minor, the tune most often
used to suggest the supernatural in Saturday-morning cartoons.
In all, the concerts were a mixed bag, well-deserving of the ticket
price and therefore certainly worth the monthly rate of one's ISP. The
problems, for now, are technical. The tiny screen of the Windows Media
Player makes it difficult to concentrate sufficiently without a good
pair of headphones and a deserted, dark room. Even if those hurdles are
overcome, Net congestion makes pauses and delays an unfortunately
frequent problem. Classical elitism aside, these minor problems loom
even larger when they involve Bach. His art relies on interweaving
musical lines -- an intricate braid of voices that require unfettered
freedom to sing. Certain pop stars, such as the aforementioned Spears,
do not rely so heavily on the continuity of their phrasing. Their acts
use other hooks. Bach, thankfully, does not.
Despite Internet music's current shortcomings, it's a pleasure to see
classical music burgeoning in this most accessible arena. One wonders
what Bach, a man who supposedly traveled hundreds of miles on foot to
hear his compositional heroes, might make of it all.
ADAM BAER writes frequently about Internet music for The New Republic Online.
----------
My first piece about Global Music Network
NLINE MUSIC | "Virtual Yo-Yo"
by Adam Baer
Only at TNR Online | Post date 09.25.00
For people who dream of a career in classical music, the path is pretty
clear. You begin studying your instrument at an unspeakably early age
with a pricey conservatory pedagogue. You try to master the solo
repertoire, which you'll toil at for more than five hours every day.
Then you enter a cutthroat international competition and, win or lose,
hope that a jury of celebrated musicians will think you've got talent.
If you're lucky, you'll be offered a grand metropolitan debut. If
you're really lucky, that debut will go so well that the critics will
like you and make presenters in other cities think you're enough of a
draw to give you a chance to play there. If you're really, really
lucky, this will happen a few times. And then you'll have the start of
a career.
Though the Internet has changed the road to success in commerce (thanks
to the phenomenon of the dot-com IPO), it's unlikely to have as
far-reaching an impact on the path to a career in music. But the rise
of Internet concert venues, such as Web Concert Hall and Global Music
Network, may one day create some shortcuts. Concerts broadcast via
streaming webcasts have exposure that is both broader and more lasting.
If music-industry executives begin to pay more attention to online
performance, we may see talented newcomers make names for themselves
more quickly. The downside is that the number of critics in the
audience is bound to grow as well. Combine the two, and an Internet
concert becomes a very big deal for a young artist on the way up--like
a Nasdaq IPO every night.
If there's one up-and-comer who's likely to benefit from the Net
anytime soon, it's Edward Arron. The 23-year-old cellist is both
prodigiously talented--having studied with renowned Juilliard teacher
Harvey Shapiro and a slew of other classical masters--and fortunate
enough to share the stage with no less than Yo-Yo Ma. Arron's June
performance with Ma at the Caramoor International Music Festival
(online September 25-October 5) is the latest offering at Global Music
Network's smorgasbord of classical- and jazz-concert webcasts. I was
not fortunate enough to attend it in June and therefore welcomed the
news of its electronic availability. Yo-Yo Ma's appearance on the
Internet was no surprise: he's built a reputation in part on his forays
into crossover realms such as bluegrass, Baroque period practice, and
interdisciplinary humanities. What did raise an eyebrow, however, was
that he arrived on the Internet holding the hand, so to speak, of the
lesser-known Arron.
Its career-building aspects notwithstanding, the concert is
one of the finest gems available on the Net. The program, conducted by
ex-Tokyo Quartet leader Peter Oundjian and the Orchestra of St. Luke's,
combined Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Cellos in G Minor, RV531, and
Elgar's E Minor Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 85. Though the
two pieces lacked a genuine connective thread, they did complement each
other nicely and seemed appropriate to the opening of an idyllic summer
festival like Caramoor.
A Venetian, Vivaldi wrote his double-cello concerto early in the
eighteenth century. Like The Four Seasons--four thematically related
concerti written to evoke the changing seasons--this piece traverses a
liberal spectrum of effects. The musical chiaroscuro--that is, the
contradictions in dark dramatics and light moods--is characteristic of
the Baroque style; Oundjian gave these shades a painterly brush through
use of an element that was still new when this work was born: the
orchestra. Ma, armed with his earthy Montagnana cello (yet another
product of the early 1700s), paid homage to historical practice despite
using the present-day technique of expressive vibrato and rich
phrasing: his bow crossed the cello's strings with just enough speed to
infuse the resulting sound with wisps of Baroque-style air. Arron
mimicked Ma with a tone and stylistic sense only slightly less
centered: Compared to such a natural (and experienced) partner, he
couldn't have sounded better.
With commitment to Vivaldi's linear motion, both utilized the structure
of the piece to fuel its inherent drive. Fast movements of Baroque
concerti are often composed in what is known as "ritornello form," in
which a catchy, momentum-charged tune returns after moments of episodic
elaboration. The duo, ensconced in the forward progress of the final
Allegro, rode it through moments of dueling technical feats and
intuitive cadential climaxes: In parts, it sounded--and this is meant
as a compliment--like the very best rock and roll.
The Elgar, while performed with as much pomp, read from a different
design. Defying stereotypes of stifled British music, Elgar's concerti
for violin and cello travel the brooding routes of the inner self. But,
like all grand concerti written in the Romantic tradition (utilizing
the orchestra as a symphonic partner and not merely an accompanist),
Elgar's Cello Concerto is built on tempestuous instrumental effects.
Pieces like these are Ma's specialty, and this live performance did not
disappoint. Ma is one of the few artists who can give their all to a
work of this magnitude, drawing full-bodied lines of lyric poetry from
a wooden box while avoiding dramatic self-indulgence. Even over the
speakers attached to a desktop PC, Ma's performance of the Elgar could
compete with any of his famous recordings. He played it the way it was
meant to be played.
In addition to the virtues of the webcast's content, its form is worth
noting as well. GMN.com took the unusual step of presenting the live
concert without a video feed: It is available only in streaming audio.
Because pure audio demands much less bandwidth than audio and video,
the sound quality is much higher--still not as high as a CD, certainly,
but greater than a live radio broadcast. It also represents a
compromise in terms of availability: It enjoys an advantage over the
radio because you can listen to it 24 hours a day; but, unlike a CD, it
has a limited shelf life--the concert will be available online for only
ten days. The concert suggests that the massive bandwidth of broadband
technology might not be necessary in order for the Internet to join CDs
and the radio as ways to enjoy high-quality sound. Over the next few
years it will be a development worth watching.
It's unclear whether Yo-Yo Ma's performances will appear on the
Internet with any regularity, but I hope that they do. Despite media
skepticism about the "authenticity" of Ma's more rebellious projects,
one thing is clear: Music is in his blood. He often connects to the
written note with more honesty and openness than a listener imagines
possible. His stature as one of the premiere musicians playing today
would seem to make him a credible judge of who deserves a shot at
building a career like his. Edward Arron hasn't just found friends in
the right places--he's found the best friend you could hope for. The
question now is whether his music will one day share the same humanity,
devotion, and insight as that of the talented elders with whom he keeps
company.
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My first piece about online masterclasses...
ONLINE MUSIC | "Masterclasses for the Masses"
by Adam Baer
Only at TNR Online | Post date 11.02.00
Say the word "masterclass" to a rising performer and be prepared to
watch him cringe. Since the advent of the one-on-one instrumental
lesson, the masterclass--a personal coaching session in front of a live
audience--has incited fear in beginning and experienced musicians
alike. Its purpose is to simulate live-concert conditions for students,
and to allow others to benefit vicariously from a teacher's critique.
It works very well, generally. But to play in one can trigger terrific
anxiety: it's like submitting to a CAT-scan of your soul and then--no
matter how serious the findings--broadcasting the diagnosis.
In the past, masterclasses were held behind closed doors, which meant
that embarrassments were mercifully limited to a small audience,
composed mostly of peers. These days, however, things are different.
Celebrated violinist Pinchas Zukerman--a performer-teacher in the
spirit of the late virtuosic deity Jascha Heifetz--is spearheading the
resurgence of masterclasses by increasing their scope. Zukerman's three
most recent masterclasses, held in cooperation with Canada's National
Arts Centre Orchestra, were webcast free to the public in an
interactive distance-learning effort. With Zukerman on one continent,
his students on another, and the audience potentially everywhere, the
experiment became something more consequential than an open
conservatory lesson. Something slightly scarier, as well.
"Do it. Do it! DO it!" Zukerman sounds stern, but not quite angry. He
is seated in a room in Hannover, Germany, his shiny Guarnerius on his
lap, his gaze fixed on a monitor in front of him. Courtesy of broadband
technology, Zukerman is addressing a student in Canada--who is also
glued to a monitor--on his playing of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto.
"Energy, energy, energy. Ennergeee..." The student's posture stiffens.
He hunches his shoulders nervously and--as fast as he can without
dropping his violin--tries to follow Zukerman's instructions: Take more
time on this measure, slow the bow speed, build the crescendo
gradually, relax.
Is the student considering who might be watching him? I wonder. Until
recently, concert violin-playing was one of the few professional
pursuits that hadn't been affected by the Internet. For hundreds of
years, high-level violin pedagogy remained a well-kept secret, its
magical methods under the lock and key of old-school, ivory-tower
instructors. The majority of great soloists--from Joseph Joachim, the
violinist to whom Brahms' Violin Concerto was dedicated, to Sarah
Chang, Juilliard's prodigy-diva of the 1990's-- have been privately
escorted through elite channels from early childhood. They've acquired
extraordinary skills, inhumanely stretched tendons, and digits stained
black from the ebony of the fingerboard. They've withstood vast amounts
of criticism and perpetual tests. And they've done it all, chiefly, in
a vacuum.
Aside from pedagogical implications, the specifics of how these
interactive lessons occur are intriguing. Called "video-mediated
communications" to facilitate "collaborative learning" by its
organizers, the operation utilizes broadband "fat pipes" to connect
people at different sites through streaming video. Three Zukerman
masterclasses have been webcast, each lasting about an hour. In two of
them, he divided the time into a series of lessons with different
students--some in the same room with him, some, like the student in
Canada, half a world away. (The third webcast was more of an
intercontinental question-and-answer session than a teaching
encounter.) Visitors to the website can see and hear it all, but they
cannot contact the participants or take part in the musicmaking. For
spreading the news on how to tackle a piece of music, this use of
technology is in many ways a first. "We are much more a global village
in music presentation," Zukerman says.
The webcast of Zukerman's masterclass in Cologne, Germany, is the most
conventional of the three: both student and teacher interact with one
another in person on the same stage. The first student--a college-aged
young woman with a sunny disposition--presents Beethoven's "Fourth
Sonata for Violin and Piano," a stormy piece from the composer's middle
period. Finishing the first movement's exposition, Zukerman stops her.
There is plenty to work on. While she plays cleanly, the violinist
seems (understandably) self-conscious and therefore not involved deeply
enough in the music. Zukerman attacks her skills and sense of
Beethovian spirit. His cure for her tame interpretation relies both on
technique and temperament--that is, on a natural method of using the
arm as an economical lever and on an intuitive musicality. Zukerman
works on her musical problems with mechanical means and with his grasp
on Beethoven's inherent anxiety. "Sounding point," Zukerman proclaims
into the air as if the two words conjoin to produce a profound
sentence. The term refers to the place at which the hair of the bow
meets the string and at what angle--and with what amount of
pressure--it strikes. "The bow is your bank account," he continues. "If
it sounds good, they're going to hire you to play, which means you're
going to make more money."
Zukerman follows with a discussion of how to draw the most intense
sound possible from the instrument's strings in a "piano" or "forte"
dynamic marking: apply and discharge pressure with the right hand's
index finger to negotiate the sound quality and articulation. "Power
doesn't come from pressure; power comes from release," he says.
Zukerman's ideas are based on his late teacher's, the maverick
pedagogue Ivan Galamian (1903-1981). They stem from these maxims: soft
playing should never neglect a core sound; one should use vibrato
(shaking the hand to make the notes oscillate and, in turn, sing) at
all times unless instructed otherwise by the score; and one should
always let each string on the violin dictate the level of the right arm
when crossing them in the music. This efficient system is why
Zukerman--and a good number of Galamian disciples--can produce an
enormous range of effects. The fact that few can produce half as much
excitement, or half as many soul-stirring phrases, as Zukerman, doesn't
hurt either. On stage, the student stands humbled by Zukerman's
suggestions and practical wizardry. At home, watching through a
RealPlayer SureStream--my violin in my hand--I do too.
Zukerman's masterclass from Paris differs from the Cologne and Hannover
sessions in that students linking from France's Lycée Jules Verne and
from Ottawa's Lycée Paul Claudel could work not only with Zukerman but
also with each other. This class is less traditional: no one plays.
Students from Canada and France only ask the maestro and National Arts
Centre Orchestra members questions. A student in Ottawa asks, "Do you
ever suffer any nervousness, and assuming you don't, is this the result
of playing so many concerts you aren't nervous any longer?" Zukerman
laughs. "Adrenaline flows, you feel in control but are always
apprehensive because, whenever you go on stage, you are always
vulnerable," he replies. "And the minute vulnerability leaves, I close
the [violin] case. That's it."
Though interactive masterclasses are helpful, entertaining, and
certainly out of the ordinary, their mere occurrence is not the vital
issue; the fact that they're being archived for on-demand access is.
For violinists who aren't in conservatories, the only readily available
masterclasses are taped recordings of Jascha Heifetz's classes at the
University of California in the 1950s (there's also an obscure set of
Galamian lessons from the 1970s). Filmed in black and white, and
brimming with budding virtuosos--one of whom, Erick Freidman, would
become Heifetz's most famous protégé--these classes open a window to a
world that very few could ever see: an authoritative, order-driven
realm where Heifetz runs the show and no one dissents, where Brahms's
harmonic rhythm is expertly parsed, and the tension is thicker than a
Wagnerian chord. Yet these classes serve more as a socio-historical
document of virtuosity and its harsh training grounds than as an
instructive tool. The students radiate with fear whether they're
performing or watching; it's an exercise in adhering to a strict
regime, in mimicking a very affected interpretive style, and in not
having your own say.
Fortunately for us, while Heifetz is at least as authoritative and
masterful as Zukerman, Zukerman's classes are superior because he is
more concerned with teaching students how they can harness an
intrument's power. I, for one, hope Zukerman plans more of these
events, and that the audience for them (currently 1,600 visits a day)
grows. At around two hundred dollars an hour for a top-tier lesson, I
imagine other violinists will keep their tired fingers crossed too.
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Another Online Classics piece
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ONLINE MUSIC | "Danses Russes" by Adam Baer Only at TNR Online | Post date 03.05.01 Those who doubt that hard times produce great artists might do well to take a quick look at the Russian 20th century in music, which yielded an extraordinary number of the century's most important classical musicians--especially violinists, pianists, and conductors. In Russia, musicians train like athletes: they're fed essential nutrients (e.g., Bach, Glinka), drilled endlessly on exercises (scales, arpeggios), and disciplined to approach clutch situations (symphonies, solo concerts) with the utmost confidence in their technical preparation. Years after their deaths, names like Horowitz and Oistrakh do more than ring bells for the classical-music audience: they sprinkle virtuosic pixie-dust. Hearing their music, we are reminded of images of their performances captured on black-and-white reels--respectful, determined, humble--and, in turn, how much of themselves they gave to their music. Enter two of today's best embodiments of the Russian musical tradition: conductor Valery Gergiev, the artistic director of St. Petersburg's Kirov Opera; and violist Yuri Bashmet, perhaps the only man since William Primrose (the Jascha Heifetz of the viola) to coax a celebrity lifestyle from an instrument that's served as the butt of almost every classical-music joke. (For example: What do you call someone who hangs around musicians a lot? A violist. Etc.) Presently, Online Classics offers a video webcast which presents both artists working together in renditions of music from their homeland: a concert with the Vienna Philharmonic at the 2000 Salzburg festival that features Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, Schnittke's Viola Concerto, and Stravinsky's Firebird. Gergiev's reading of the Prokofiev floats like a ballet, as it should. The piece is an example of neoclassicism--a school of thought that reinvents the modern composition with structured elements of antiquity: four-movement symphonic form (expository first movement, slow second, sprightly third, and rousing fourth); stately dances from the Baroque era (like the Gavotte); and crystallized themes that would have worked better, architecturally, in Mozart's era than in that of serialist Arnold Schoenberg. Prokofiev's trademark orchestral sheen and modern wrong-note technique are everywhere in this piece: he takes seemingly harmless musical idioms from the era of powdered wigs and inserts into them dissonant chords or unexpected cadences. We also find Prokofiev's use of strings as percussive elements, and his woodwind solos that sound for all the world like a carnival merry-go-round. To understand the creativity of Prokofiev's work, think of how Picasso's cubes look convex when viewed one moment, and concave when viewed another. The nature of Prokofiev's game is punning on, and simultaneously paying respect to, the past. It was once a given that conductors--guest conductors in particular--are strong figures who come to orchestras with clear-cut ideas of what they want and the ability to articulate it forcefully. But since the rise of musicians' unions and tyrannical taskmasters like Toscanini, who almost single-handedly spurred these organizations along, conductors are expected to be less autocratic than they were in the past. Today, a good conductor has to treat his musicians with more respect--he can no longer simply dictate an interpretational blueprint and expect them to follow. The strength of Gergiev is that he seems to get what he wants without demanding it. His gift is an ability to make a full orchestra perform with the same cohesion as a small group playing chamber music, while contributing to the finished product as a player himself. He dances on the podium like a marionette--his darting arms give musicians cues that are at once sharp and sensitive. The strings respond with uncanny ensemble; the winds whistle and laugh as if each instrument was not a piece of metal or wood held by a person, but some sort of animated jovial spirit. Playing these games makes sense, especially considering the next piece on the program: Alfred Schnittke's Viola Concerto, a torment-riddled piece which Bashmet premiered in 1986, and is led here by Gergiev with dark severity. A prolific composer of music for films, the German-Russian Schnittke (1934-1998) wrote serious music best known for a kind of philosophical inconsistency: it's music that, due to its melange of conflicted ideas, seems to be thinking about itself. Schnittke's deconstructionist body of work also heavily relies on a tendency to meld different cultural idioms and musical motifs from throughout history, much in the way Borges used history and myth. The viola concerto is at times a musically hollow experience with only a few similar timbres at play over an imposing silence. In some moments, however, it is thick and Romantically tonal. Its peace often presents itself in wide-interval leaps, and yet it returns to traditional scalar steps to speak with fury. This is music with an identity crisis--but one that we want to come to terms with. Bashmet, who is arguably the most talented violist playing today (with Kim Kashkashian taking a close second), looks like a postmodern vampire. Blessed with Paganini-esque locks and talent, his probing eyes and disturbed grins match his stark, black apparel. He is a cross between a showman and an undertaker: one minute, his attacks can sound like that of a mechanical brainwashed soldier and then, snap!, he is his own victim, a whimpering 10-year old balled up in the corner. Bashmet is a masterful technician: he can wring from his viola truly gut-wrenching sounds. But unlike other artists, he doesn't want merely to send them out into the auditorium--he seems intent on inflicting them upon himself. Take, for instance, the moment in the first movement of Schnittke's concerto when he traverses all four of the instrument's strings in repetitive arpeggiated double-stops (two notes played at once, like on a piano), or when he drives the lower quarter of his bow into the meaty part of the viola's deep C-string, extracting a syrupy, almost dirty, sound. Bashmet, a renowned interpreter of the classics, fares even better with music like Schnittke than he does with Mozart. He plays a compositional role, as a performer, in music that is written for him. Audiences at his concerts get their money's worth, as I'm sure the people of Salzburg would attest. Bashmet is not so much a vehicle of the music as an embodiment of it. The final piece on the program, The Firebird, one of Stravinsky's early works written for the Ballet Russes, is a work that musicians like Gergiev and orchestras like Vienna's can play on autopilot. But here these veterans offer it with a rarely heard freshness. Stravinsky's musical lacerations and exotic colors--a combination of his Romantic mentor, Rimsky-Korsakov, and his own latent modernism, soon to erupt in Le Sacre du Printemps--pixellate and morph into one another. Quality playing from the entire orchestra and the precisely executed polyrhythms of Gergiev's stick convinced me from the beginning to listen to a work I'd heard hundreds of times. In fifty years, Gergiev and Bashmet will be legends, and their outdated CDs will be revered by music students everywhere. At present, they provide classical music with something it desperately needs: excitement. Both take musical expressions, marinate them in their own emotions and faculties, and return them, better, with a personal stamp, to the world from which they were borrowed. That these performances can be heard so readily at Online Classics strikes me as the best news to reach classical-music audiences in a long while. We're finally sending our best troops to the front lines. ADAM BAER writes frequently about Internet music for TNR Online. |
