For those of you who don’t use Facebook or Twitter…
The Minnesota Orchestra’s Carnegie Hall performance will be broadcast on WQXR on Thursday night at 7pm CST. Details here.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
OMG SO EXCITING Y’ALL
Filed under Minnesota Orchestra
I’m busy packing for Carnegie today (PACKING FOR CARNEGIE, GUYS) (PACKING. FOR. CARNEGIE.). But amidst the madness of spare socks and dress-wrapping, I’m excited to announce that I’m writing for classical music website Interlude HK!
I’ll be writing essays, 500 to 600 words or thereabouts, on topics having to do with classical music. If you have any favorite stories you’d like to see covered, let me know!
My first Interlude essay is called “Music by a Medium: The Story of Rosemary Brown.” It’s about a woman composer, yes, but with a twist: Rosemary Brown believed she was channeling the music of the dead.
I will link to new entries on SOTL’s Facebook and Twitter pages as they’re published. For those who only check the blog, I’ll try to remember to post an entry at the end of each month containing links to my Interlude essays.
Be sure to explore the Interlude archives! There are lots of great stories there about the personal lives of great composers and musicians. Also, former Minnesota Orchestra cellist Janet Horvath is a long-time contributor, and she has written some great essays about behind-the-scenes life at Minnesota. Here’s her contributor page.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to vacuum the cat hair off my suitcase…
Filed under My Writing
How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Two options:
I chose the second option. Practicing can be a drag, and I’m good at screaming in concert halls.
*
The Minnesota Orchestra and guest soloist Hilary Hahn take the stage at Carnegie Hall on Thursday, March 3rd. This past weekend, they performed the program they’ll be bringing on tour. I went on Friday and Saturday nights to get a sense of how the orchestra is sounding in this benchmark repertoire.
The program begins with Sibelius’s underplayed third symphony. Osmo recently described the piece in a Minnesota Public Radio interview: “I love all of the symphonies, but in this context I would like to give something which is almost totally unknown piece, but great piece of music.”
Filed under Minnesota Orchestra, Reviews
The Minnesota Orchestra performed Jean Sibelius’s Kullervo last weekend, and I still haven’t recovered.
Music is always difficult to describe, but this piece verges on impossible. It’s long, for one. Its scope rivals a DeMille-directed Biblical epic. It is a glimpse into the very heart of terror and savagery and ice. It enshrines the ghost of a young Sibelius. In Kullervo, Sibelius began to chop a road through a dark and snowy forest. He may have abandoned that road, ultimately preferring another path of tighter, leaner construction. But his decision makes the road untaken all the more fascinating. As listeners, we stand at the edge of Kullervo and peer into the vast unexplored darkness beyond.
Filed under Minnesota Orchestra, Reviews
I.
A year ago today my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and six weeks later she was dead. I try to hold her hand in my memory, but it’s not working; it’s not working. Every day she becomes less human, more ethereal. I signed a lease on an apartment in St. Paul recently. It has bay windows and French doors and a glass porch. A young person’s first place has no right to be so beautiful.
The juxtaposition of the two events is jolting and sad. Numbing.
I hear you’re not supposed to “put a timeline” on grief. But I want to. Because grief hurts and whips and drains like a motherfucker, and I want to be done with it. Or at least be able to regard it knowingly, and from a great distance.
Sometimes I feel like I’m making progress. Like I’ve come through intact. But then every time I’ve caught my balance, I trip on something else.
Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m feeling until it’s too late. Then I realize I’ve been putting on a facade for other people.
Or, more likely, putting on a facade for myself.
Filed under Minnesota Orchestra, Reviews
Today is a big day in the Connecticut arts scene. Absent major musician concessions, tomorrow the Hartford Symphony will begin the process of “clos[ing] its doors – for good.” Today’s firm deadline has been repeated in the press again and again and again.
Less clear, however: what management means by shutting down. Not giving concerts? (A lockout?) Bankruptcy? (What kind?) Dissolving? Or destroying the old organization to create a new one in its wake? No one in the mainstream media has asked.
Here are some more questions that have been bugging me:
Filed under Labor Disputes
It’s a little before one o’ clock in the morning on January first. I’ve just attended the Minnesota Orchestra New Year’s concert, and I’m in the atrium at Orchestra Hall. I’ve forgotten my coat on the rack and I need to get it before heading out into the icy new year.
Just inside the door, right beyond the dissipating crowds, there is a table loaded with CDs. Staff and volunteers are packing up boxes, but there is still a Minnesota Beethoven cycle left.
I stand and consider it. I think of the possibilities owning a complete recorded cycle would present. The Minnesota Orchestra is traversing all nine symphonies and all five piano concertos over the course of three weeks this January, and I have a ticket to every program. This CD set seems like a suitable memento.
Then I have an idea, and I step up to the table before my responsible side kicks in.
“Can I still buy this?” I ask the disassembling staff. “Sure,” they say, and they smile and hand me my change.
Looking at the set, I resolve to have my own Beethoven marathon…but as a listener. I promise myself I will find a day free from distractions and listen and follow the score to all nine symphonies, first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth: all of them, straight through, no breaks, except for meals. I am inspired by the idea of a marathon. I am curious if these masterpieces speak differently together than singly.
So this morning…
Filed under Minnesota Orchestra
Twelve hours ago, the Facebook page Save Our Symphony Hartford posted an FAQ that is hosted on the Hartford Symphony’s website. This FAQ is available to the public, but it’s not linked to on the Hartford Symphony’s main pages, so it’s unclear at this point how widely it was meant to be distributed.
But the cat is out of the bag now, and so here is a screenshot of the first two paragraphs.
If cell memory from a previous life is tingling… Here’s why.
Filed under Labor Disputes
Well, that was a year.
That existed.
That is now over.
Thank f*ck.
Do I get a prize for surviving??
I don’t have much time to write – I’m entertaining today, and I’m going to the Minnesota Orchestra New Year’s show tonight – but I had a few tidbits I wanted to share before the celebration starts.
Filed under My Writing
If you spend any time in the online orchestra world, you’ve probably seen the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s infographic about American orchestras’ 2014/15 seasons. A few days ago, the BSO released figures tracking the 15/16 season, and this year, the data net has been cast even wider. Writer Ricky O’Bannon describes the methodology:
This season we collected programming data for both major American symphonies as well as smaller regional orchestras — 89 in total — to give a more holistic view of symphonic repertoire in the United States.
My thoughts after reading that:
Oh, cool! With so many more orchestras included in the data-gathering this year, surely the proportion of living and historic women composers has skyrocketed, or at least inched upward gradually!
Hahahaha. Hahahahahahahaha.
Last season, the works of female composers accounted for 14.3% of the performances of living composers (and a mere 1.8% of the performances overall). This year, even with the wider field? 14% and 1.7%, respectively.
And then there’s this little asterisk at the bottom of the graph.
…
…
*deep breath*
Look, I know it’s hard for orchestras to program works outside The Canon. And at this point, pretty much every orchestral work by women is outside The Canon. But no one in the bunch of eighty-nine orchestras wanted to program a single work by a female composer once? No one thought that would be musically or historically or politically or culturally interesting? No one thought that would be unique or exciting? No one thought that would be fantastic press release material? No one thought that would excite donors? No one thought that would advance orchestras’ missions to broaden audiences or educate communities? No one saw this as The Easiest Way Ever to outperform peer organizations? For crap’s sake, a random orchestra could program a dead lady’s ten-minute overture once, and wow, suddenly they’re playing 100% more historic women than any other orchestra in America! Congratulations, random orchestra! Your commitment to underrepresented demographics is palpable.
The 2015 Song of the Lark Award for Demographically Diverse Orchestral Programming
And hell, it’s not like I’m asking every orchestra to throw an annual month-long Vagina Festival. It just would have been nice to see one orchestra play one work by one woman at one point. I thought that someone, somewhere, would throw us a pity Gaelic Symphony or Farrenc third or Clara Schumann concerto. But, nope.
Anyway. I would love to offer probing analysis. But it’s pretty f***ing hard to analyze the number zero.
Filed under Women In Music
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Song of the Lark 