耶魯開放課程-聆聽音樂(12)-客座指揮-塞布魯克管弦樂團

Let us begin, please. Today should be a fun day for us. We've got some visitors. It's always this particular exercise is one of the ones I enjoy most in this course because we get to talk with real performers and find out what's in their head when they perform a concert for us. So our aim today is to continue along this path to make you, in this case, educated critics so that you can go to a concert of classical music and you'll be able to engage it in a productive sort of way, in an educated way. Now there are lots of things we could think about in terms of do's and don'ts when we evaluate material musically in a critical fashion, and we're going to be going through some of those in sections starting this evening. And we'll have a big, long list of this is what you put in a review and it's probably not so good to put this in a review. But generally speaking, when you go to a concert and you review it, whether you do it just for yourself or whether you review it and then write down your thoughts and publish them as a published review, you do the following. You're essentially reviewing the performance. How well did the performance go? How did the players do? You're not engaging who the composer is. You're not engaging when the piece was written, the history of the piece, the historical context. You're not engaging even, oddly, the meaning of the piece, the meaning of the piece. Now on our concert for Saturday night, we have three pieces, one by Mozart, one by Brahms and one by Beethoven. What's the meaning of the Mozart, the opening piece? Well, the meaning there is its function in a sense. It's in trying to get the concert going. Originally, of course, it was trying to get the opera going. Oddly, the music there in the overture has nothing to do specifically with the music in the opera. There's no music in the opera that's also used in the overture, but it does have a lot to do psychologically because it's a very intense, compressed overture. And the opera itself, if you begin to study that and the way he's linking scenes and the way he's moving his harmonic progressions along, it's also a very compressed, intense opera. So some of the psychological state of the opera is encapsulated in that opening overture, but that overture can open other things as well. So there the meaning of the Mozart in essence is the function of the piece, to get people in, to get them quiet, to get them focused and to give them a heads-up in a way as to the psychological import of the opera that's to follow. Now we have also the Beethoven, the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven. What do you suppose the meaning of that is? Pretty straightforward. Anybody want to take a crack at it? Anybody know anything about the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven? What would you guess? What's it sound like? Does it sound like a train wreck? Does it sound like midtown Manhattan? Elizabeth? Yeah, the countryside, a kind of leisurely embrace of the countryside, maybe a walk through woods on a beautiful spring day, that kind of thing. And each of the moments, movements, plays this out in a different way, an introduction and an introduction to the birds of the forest in the second movement, a peasant romp in the third movement, a storm gathers in the fourth movement. That we have an extra movement in this particular symphony because we've got Beethoven writing a bit of pictorial music here in the form of a fourth movement that's a storm, and then a hymn of thanksgiving that plays out in basically a rondo variation form there at the end. So that's the meaning of that, how an individual might embrace the countryside. What's the meaning of the Brahms? Well, we've got these variations and they're simply sonic patterns, sonic patterns. And we have patterns, I suppose, in lots of different art. Think of abstract patterns in de Kooning paintings or Jackson Pollock. We have a beautiful Jackson Pollock over in the Yale Art Gallery. Well, that's just sort of abstraction, visual abstraction. Well, you can have sonic abstractions as well. I was talking with our conductor that we'll introduce in a moment yesterday about this. What's the meaning of the Brahms? Or he got to this in a different sort of way, and maybe I won't let the cat out of the bag with that, but it seems to me that what we've got here is an individual or an experience in which we have the same frame of reference, the same context, in other words the theme, but we're going to engage it in six or seven really different ways. And think of all the times in your life where you may go into the same context. You may go into your dorm room and you've had a terrible day and you're furious and you're storming around, or you've had a very pleasant day, or it's been a rather revenue-neutral day in terms of your emotional content, so maybe it's not particularly moving one way or the other. You can have the same item that you engage intellectually or psychologically in radically different ways. So this is the same item played out in rather radically different ways musically in this theme and variation set, and we'll say more about that later. But generally, oddly, you don't write about these kinds of things when you write a review. What you're writing about again is how well they played the piece, only if they play it in a way that seems to subvert the meaning as you perceive it. The meaning of the piece is does the performance really impact on the meaning of the piece? Then you might say, well, this performance was not successful because, as I say, it countermanded or subverted what is the meaning of this particular piece as you, the listener, perceive that to be. Oddly also, you don't talk about the form in the pieces. We've been spending all this time on form. Form is a way of getting in there so we can follow along intelligently what's happening in these compositions, but we don't write a review in which we say the orchestra started out and we engaged the first theme and then we had a fine transition that went to the second theme, and I really liked that closing theme. It had a lot of harmonic bang to it. We don't want to sort of be led by the nose, if you will, through the form of the piece. But we'll be saying a lot more about this in section, and as I say, we'll have another, yet another sheet to hand to you. It helps when you go to a concert to know a little something about the composer, right? What do you know about Beethoven? What do you think of when you think of Beethoven? Yes. The pinnacle of all music. Okay, good. That's an interesting way of putting it, and actually even if you look at the textbook that you're using there, you've got this, you've got an entire long chapter devoted just to Beethoven there. And when people write history books, Beethoven is kind of the linchpin. You work up to Beethoven and then you work away from Beethoven. So Beethoven for the nineteenth century was an icon. It was the pinnacle of what the artist was supposed to be like. But it's not just the musical artist. Beethoven represented more than that. Was he a neat and tidy guy? Was he a sort of uptight guy? Did he wear a necktie and look sort of constrained in the appropriate system of the day? I'm the ultimate corporate guy, right? Was Beethoven the ultimate corporate guy? No. What did he look like? He looked like the prototype of the genius, and on the basis of how Beethoven looked and how Beethoven acted, people then began to build this concept of the genius in the nineteenth century. Beethoven was the building block for this whole idea about what a genius was, how he was supposed to behave, how he was not necessarily to be held to the same standards as the rest of humanity in terms of his behavior to other people. If it's necessary to be dishonest, be dishonest. Beethoven wasn't necessarily dishonest, as sometimes Richard Wagner was, but it was excused because he was a genius. Well, this sort of idea begins with Beethoven here in the nineteenth century. What did Beethoven write? Well, as you can see on your sheet there, everybody pick up your sheet. I think I've got it. I find it useful to do this from time to time, just sort of the basic Beethoven, if you will, and a list of things. If you want to buy particular pieces or you want to explore a particular repertoire of Beethoven, well, you can do it in this fashion. So there is what we need to know about Beethoven on that particular sheet. Brahms, we talked about. We talked about his pieces. Mozart we will be talking a lot more about as time goes on. Now we have, let's turn to our big sheet here. What are you going to do with this big sheet? Isn't it? You could do a couple of things with that big sheet. An energetic student might want to go out and go to iTunes and do what? Before the concert. Yeah. Get the pieces ahead of time for ninety-nine cents, except with the Beethoven. Why would the Beethoven cost more? Yeah, you've got to pay for each of the movements. That's the way they sell the stuff to you. And once again, they'll call them songs, right? Each of the Beethoven. And you can go to the music library because Linda has been kind enough to put all of these on reserve for us, all these pieces on reserve for us also. So you have this big sheet and you can take this, you can engage this material ahead of time with the pieces. We don't have any of these pieces on our CDs. There are thousands of, zillions of classical pieces of music. We can't put them all on our CDs. We have Beethoven's, all of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for example, but we don't have the Sixth Symphony, but you can get it there on iTunes if you want to. And then you can follow along and ask yourself these questions as you're listening to a recording before the concert. That would be a really serious type of preparation for this. Failing that, you could simply bring this to the concert, simply bring this to the concert, and then follow along discreetly as the concert is going on and ask yourself these questions and maybe write on it. It'd probably be good if we didn't have a hundred people going like this during the middle of the concert or we'd get on a change of piece or some change of movement. So try to keep the ______. I've seen also students sit there with computers sort of taking notes during ______. That's a bit over the top, it seems to me. So it'd be really neat somehow. What I do, actually, what do I do when this is going on? Because I have to read these reviews, right? I've got to read them, so I've got to know, and the TAs have to know what happened. What I do is I take my program, and I do have a pencil there, and I take my program and I'll write little notes on my program so that I can remember what the orchestra did at a particular spot. And generally speaking, the sooner you write your review after a performance, the better. So do you have questions about that? And we'll be talking more a lot about that in section starting again this evening. Yes, Daniel. How long do the reviews be? Five hundred words, two pages. Very good question. We're going to hold you to that. So they're not long, but it forces you to think about what's important and what's not important when you write. Roger. Basically, you're writing about how well they perform. At the end of it, you could throw in a sentence or two to the effect that they met your expectations as to the meaning of this composition as the composer intended it, or they did not. But I would not spend a lot of time engaging in the review the meaning of the piece. So we'll have the five pieces here and we'll be going over some more of them in section and getting you up to speed in terms of the repertoire as time goes on. Any other questions before we introduce our first guest? Yes. Student response. That's to be encouraged. In other words, if you hear this opening overture going, da, da da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, that's way too slow. I'm not feeling compressed, I'm not feeling excited, I'm not feeling energized by that tempo. So you should say there, then, I think the tempo was too slow. Yeah. It didn't even have energy. It didn't excite the listener because the initial tempo was If not, let's go on to introduce our first guest then, Bradley Naylor. Here's Bradley's name up there. Bradley is the principal conductor for tomorrow night and we will be listening to the Saybrook Orchestra. And the rest of our discussion today is basically between you and Bradley, with me feeding Bradley questions. I'm trying to think about the kinds of things that you might want to ask, but don't hesitate to jump right in, raise your hand and ask Bradley a question at any point. So Bradley, you're a student at the School of Music, right? So tell us about your musical training. How did you get started here? Bradley Naylor. I sang in choirs. Gosh, I was probably eight when I started singing in choirs, but it wasn't until middle school that I started getting serious. My middle school music teacher said, Hey, Brad, why don't you try out for this regent choir thing? I thought, well, okay, I'll submit a tape. And I got there and here I was in this room of 25, 15-year-old tenors and they were all singing the same notes at the same time and I thought, well, that's just a miracle. And so I felt at that point I'd really found what I wanted to do, went to high school, went to undergrad where I majored in music, just down the road in Providence. And I got a master's degree in choral conducting at Indiana University out in the cornfields and now I'm back in New England getting an MMA, Master of Musical Arts in Choral Conducting at the Institute of Sacred Music. So your preparation for this is a little bit unusual for most conductors because I think rarely or only exceptionally do you have people beginning in music through vocal music that come around. Now you're leading an orchestra here. So doesn't that put you at something of a disadvantage? I would think to be an orchestral conductor it would be really good to have started with the violin or maybe the French horn so you're listening to intonation issues and things like that. Yeah, I would agree with that. I can't, well with the exception of maybe Robert Shaw, I can't think of a single big-name conductor who started as a choral conductor and now is in charge of a major symphony orchestra. The vast majority of them are either string players, keyboard players, a few wind or brass players here and there. But I've done a few things to try and supplement that perceived lack of knowledge. When I was an undergrad I took an orchestration class to try and get a sense of what the capabilities and limitations of all the instruments were. A couple of summers ago I spent a month at Bard College in New York at an instrumental conducting workshop where I worked with various conductors. So I tried to supplement that initial choral leaning. But what about piano now? I mean I'm always surprised how good pianists these conductors are. So you must have had to practice piano, take piano lessons. I do, I've studied piano, I wouldn't say extensively, but consistently throughout my young career. Because you have to, in order to engage the music, and we'll talk about this, you have to be able to do what with the score? I think you have to be able to play or realize the full score. So it might be the kind of thing, we would put a score with maybe 20 lines up there on the keyboard here, and Bradley would be able to read through this and digest all these twenty lines at once, which doesn't sound all that difficult, except a lot of these lines are not actually written, the notes that are written there are not the ones you play because they're transposing instruments such as the B-flat clarinet and the B-flat trumpet. So it's really complicated. And, in fact, in this Brahms piece there are four clarinets. Ooh. Ooh, that hurts. That would be like reading a text in four languages at once. One word is in Cyrillic alphabet, the next a Latin alphabet, the next Hebrew alphabet. So your mind has got very quickly to change. It's really hard. It takes years and years of preparation. But what do you, what's your goal here? What do you want to do with this? Where do you want to be fifteen years from now? Oh, gosh. Well, I don't know if there's a white picket fence, but I would like to be teaching at a university, directing choruses, working on choral orchestral works like maybe Haydn's Creation or something like that, a great piece from the same period as this Beethoven symphony. So working at a university or college level as well as maybe a professional chorus or orchestration. Okay. Now here's a question for you. It might seem like a rude one but I get, it's my class, I get to be rude if I want to. What makes you think you can do this better than anybody else? Who says that you get to be the boss here, the leader here? Isn't that a bit of hubris on your part? I think that any conductor has a bit of hubris in him or her. I guess the short answer to that is that whenever I sit in a rehearsal, I'm using my ears, whenever I sit in a rehearsal and I'm not conducting, I'm using my ears to try and evaluate what's coming back. And I always find myself forming an opinion. You know, this could be louder, this could be softer. I want to hear that more than I want to hear this other thing. So the only place you can achieve that goal is if you're in front of the ensemble. Yeah. Oddly, that's what they will be doing, though, when they go to this concert. You guys will be listening and say, gee, why didn't I love that flute line there? Why wasn't that flute line louder? So he's kind of a critic but he wants to apply his critical facility here to interpretation. So that's to impose his concept of the music on others for the benefit of others, I suppose. Well, what do they have to have to conduct? What's it take to be a good conductor, you think, just that you've got good insights into the music? Well, I have, I think, just as good insights into the music as you do, Bradley, but I don't think I would be any good as a conductor and I kind of know why. So what do you have to do, what do you have to have to be a good conductor? I think it's a varied skill set. I think, and don't tell my colleagues I'm saying this, but I think at its basis, the conductor is really just a glorified traffic cop in certain ways. Traffic cop. You have to make sure that there are no accidents, you don't want the oboes to crash into the bassoons, nobody wants that. You have to make sure that people yield when they need to. If you need to hear the viola line, you've got to have the violins yield. And you just have to make sure that everyone gets to their locations without incident and as fluidly as possible. Yeah. Okay. Good. Now here's another component of this, though. I've heard people talk about in terms of, well, I have absolute rhythmic, sort of an absolute sense of rhythm. I can tell what a particular pulse is, I can identify that for you, and I can keep that, and that's why I'm interested in becoming a conductor. Or let's say you're conducting, and this is where I would always, I have done some conducting. I used to conduct the Collegium here at Yale. But where I got in trouble was when something was out of tune, I could hear, hey, that doesn't sound good. But I couldn't tell them why or what to do to make it sound right. My ear wasn't good enough. So how good an ear do you have to be to be a conductor? How good of an ear do you have to have? I think you have to have an ear not just for pitch, particularly with an orchestra, but also for timbre, which is the property that distinguishes maybe an oboe sound from a clarinet sound. Of course, if you're playing a piano, then you can't change the timbre of a single piano note. But if you're playing it on a clarinet, it's going to sound very different than if you play it on the trumpet. So you have to be able to balance timbres. And I think before the downbeat of the first rehearsal, a conductor really has to have the sound of the piece in his or her ear. So I know what needs to be pulled out. Maybe the third clarinet is a little bit sharp, so I say, third clarinet, your B-flat, make sure it doesn't sit too high. So I think you have to have the piece in your head. There's an old conductor's mantra, always have the score in your head and not your head in the score. Well, okay. There are all kinds of things I could ask you about there. What are you going to do? Now, you're the principal conductor. You're doing two of the three pieces. You're doing the first half. You're doing the Mozart and the Brahms. And then Lauren Quigley will come out. She couldn't be with us today, but Lauren Quigley will come out and lead the Beethoven. Are you going to try to conduct any of this without a score? And what advantages and disadvantages? Sometimes you go to concerts and a reviewer might notice that. Generally speaking, if you see a conductor conducting without a score, what does that indicate? Well, I think it's always impressive to the ensemble when a conductor is able to conduct without a score. Last year, Helmut Rilling, who's a famous German conductor, came and worked with some of the ensembles and did Mendelssohn's Elijah, which is a huge, romantic oratorio about two and a half hours long. The dress rehearsal, he came to the dress rehearsal, put his score down on a music stand, conducted for three hours, never opened it, and we're like, wow, this guy knows the score. My task is to try to get four and a half minutes of Mozart into my head so I don't have to open that score. We'll see tomorrow if I'm able to do it. Yeah. So that's sort of talent. I mean, so that's a kind of combination of a photographic memory and a phonographic memory, that you've got a, you've got it locked in there. You can hear something just once and it's locked in there. That's the kind of thing Mozart could do, and we'll talk more about that later on. And so your orchestra will respect you more if you've got this all memorized. What does it sort of free you up to do then, obviously, if you've got, if you're conducting without a score? Well, I think, I think at its essence, conducting is communicating to the people in front of you, and anything that you can get out of the way between you and the people who are playing the music is an advantage. So I think getting the music stand out of the way, getting the score out of the way, making sure that at all times you can actually see the people who are making this music. I think anything you can do to do that is an advantage. Yeah. Great. I want to go back to this question, though, of ear, because I think it's so critical. You were talking about the third clarinet. Don't play too sharp. Well, once again, I'd be sitting there, who's playing what that's wrong? And I'm wondering, all right, is it the oboe maybe? Is it the clarinet being sharp? The oboe's flat. All I hear is a problem. I don't know what or where the problem is. So but so you would have to have a pretty keen sense of pitch. Do you have what we call absolute pitch? I don't have absolute pitch. I have pitch. Okay. So I always enjoy playing this type of music. particular game with musicians and people generally, where we do an ear training drill. And I need somebody. Is it Mike? I just need somebody to come up and play the piano, just bang some notes on the piano around. Who? Daniel, you know your way around a keyboard? You're a guitar player. So anybody play? A gentleman here. Come on up. Okay. Come on up. And you know what? I can't see the key. Yeah. So we're going to be over here. And Adam, come play this game also. Linda, you want to play this down-you-go in terms of pitch? Your name is? Rahul. So and Jacob, come on out here also. Play it. Start around middle C and we'll see if anybody can identify any. Linda, you don't want to play? I'd like to have some ladies up here too. Santana, will you come on up and play the name that pitch? So this is a pitch game and we'll talk about absolute pitch and we'll talk about relative pitch. So play a note and we'll see how we do. Oh. It's up. Can we play a note that's a little lower? Okay. Does anyone think they know what the note is? But don't have anybody up here think they know what it is? Bradley, do you think you know what it is? Yeah, but I have two guesses. I think it's either a G or a G-sharp. What do you guys think? Okay. Notice how cagey I am here. I haven't committed. Yeah. But just at the outset, he played that initial pitch and then what did he do? He dropped it down an octave. Okay? So we think that that's a-that probably is an A-flat or a G-sharp. Is that correct? Okay. Now knowing that, play another pitch. Go ahead. Right. Does anybody know what that is? So then the question is, why is this guy teaching this course? Why is he in this profession to begin with? Because he's wrestled with this issue all his life. He says, Why me? Why can't I do this? And tried to figure it out, tried to use other tricks to get around this, to overcome this handicap. And to hang around with musicians and sort of explain things that they do, that they take in sort of quickly and intuitively and sort of break them down and explain what it is that they're doing. So at this point, Bradley seems not to be having a trouble with that pitch. I don't know what it is. I could G. No. All right. So I'm out. Down I go. But what was that pitch? C-sharp. Okay. All right. So let's see now, knowing that that's a C-sharp, let's see how about it. Let's go and we'll go a little faster here so we don't take up too much time. Another pitch. Who knows that? Bradley? Jacob? We should have them write it, don't we? Who doesn't know what it is? Santana? Anybody know who or what do you think it is? What do you think it is? Okay. All right. So what was it? Was it a G? Okay. So it seems to me that actually Bradley seems to be winning here. He's hit T. This is interesting. So maybe there is a reason that he's the conductor here. The rest of it, I'm out. The rest of us are kind of negotiating with each other and maybe pegging off of what Bradley was saying there, so we'll stop this. But yeah. Okay. Thanks, guys. So for a person that doesn't have an absolute pitch, like whenever I do hear a note, or is there a chord or a sonority with it? So do you mind if I just go playing? Sure. So for instance, that first note is a G sharp. So I know that the first aria in Handel's Messiah starts with a really prominent G sharp in the melody, and I kind of know how that sounds. So that's how I figured that was a G sharp. The second note he played was a C sharp or D flat, and there's this great foray piece. It starts with this great D flat. So I kind of find a piece that I can latch on to. That's very interesting. In all the years I've been doing that, I haven't heard that particular explanation for it. Most people that have absolute pitch, boom, they hear it instantaneously. There is someone in this room also who has absolute pitch, but I don't want to go into it. Instances of absolute pitch are about one in ten thousand, one in ten thousand, sort of instantaneous recognition. He's getting that but in a different way. He must have some kind of absolute recollection of particular pieces that are intensely impressed on his oral memory somehow, and he then plays off of those. That's an interesting way of doing it, but as I say, it's not something I've encountered before. Okay. Well, so that's kind of important though. You've got to have a good ear like that to be able to tell these people you're sharp or flat. Now let's say you're in the middle of things and something goes wrong. You have a sense that you know that your clarinet is a little bit flat. You can't just hold up a sign or an arrow going like this, can you? Or maybe you can. How do you get in real time as the piece you're conducting and the piece is unfolding, how do you get somebody to correct something in terms of intonation? I think that there's a difference between what you do in a rehearsal and what you do in a performance. In a rehearsal you'd say, hold up the grand pause and say clarinet three, fix that. In a performance you hope that you have inculcated in your performers a sense of pitch and a sense of what their function is in a chord. So that if something's going wrong you just look at them and say, yes, you know you're wrong, fix it. Because you can't stop. The traffic cop, if you don't look at the Subaru over here, he's going to crash into a tree. So you have to take care of everybody but the guy who's running the stop sign, you have to take care of that person first. Okay. So let me ask this. Oftentimes you go to a concert, particularly nonprofessional concerts, at the end of a movement they will stop and tune. If we hear in the Beethoven the tuning between movements, is that a sign that the intonation in the previous movement wasn't all that it might have been? Hmm. I think it's a bigger problem with early instruments that are a little bit more temperamental. But certainly if we stop in the middle and you hear Gabriel Ellsworth give us a... And we retune, then yes. So that would be... He does have a pitch. I just heard the G sharp from earlier and it's a half step up. No problem. Okay. So there are some things that you can do in real time and things that you just hope that you've prepared for properly. But keep an eye on that, whether they actually tune between movements. Now I think we have some other folks that are going to demonstrate some things here. I think we have Katie Dryden, a viola player, the principal. Okay. Katie, come on up. And I don't know if Alana Kagan is here or not. Is she here? Flutist? Oh, my. Maybe she's sleeping in. Oh, too bad. I doubt it, knowing her. What? I don't think so. I don't know. I guess it's only five after. So we do have... Let's talk about the Mozart. We've got this opening piece. First of all, which piece of the two frightens you the most? You're the conductor. What are you worried about? What scares you when you step out there? Well, what's easy about the Mozart? Okay, no tempo changes. Fine. So the whole piece is in the same tempo. Problem, if you don't set the right tempo, you're screwed for four and a half minutes. So when I do... I have to get that dead on so that the whole ensemble knows exactly what the tempo is. Okay, but let's say I mess it up in the first couple of beats. Can't you correct it? I think a good critic, as you will all be, would say, well, this is classical music, Mr. Naylor, and there's nothing in the score that says rit or accelerando, so actually you should keep whatever tempo is established at the beginning. Okay, yeah. So you're not tempted to get out there and go like that. I'm always impressed when conductors, they come out, they kind of look at the orchestra and they go, and they just start without much in the way of preliminary beats, but that's kind of risky, isn't it? But one of my conducting teachers told me, you know, there's no part in the score that's labeled conductor. So you shouldn't do anything other than what's going to get the people in front of you to play. So there's no point in the beginning going one, two, three, four. Because then you have a conductor solo for two bars and it's not in the score. Okay. So let's see. Katie, come on up. Do we have a stand for you? I'm sure we've got one inside here somewhere. Oh, you brought one? Okay. Get your stand up because we've got the beginning of the overture to the Marriage of Figaro here. Shall we play a CD of it or maybe we could? Let's talk about Lynda. Well, I tell you what, while Katie's getting her stand, let's talk about Lynda. She's got a bassoon part here. What happens at the beginning of this, Bradley, in terms of the texture? Monophonic, homophonic, polyphonic. It's monophonic. Why? Because all of the instruments, there are many instruments playing but they're all playing the same line at the same time. Okay. But isn't that a little bit awkward because some of these instruments sort of speak a lot faster than other instruments. What would the fast-speaking instruments be that could play very agilely? What would they be? I think the violins probably have the easiest time of this, whereas the celli and the bassoon probably have the toughest time of this because it takes lower instruments longer for them to speak and make their sounds. So the cellos and basses and the low part of the woodwinds might have a difficult time here. So we, Lynda, has been good enough to be a sacrificial lamb for today and bring in her bassoon. And she sent me an e-mail last night saying, oh, disaster, I cracked my only good reed and I'm not going to bring in, I can't bring in my bassoon. It just won't work. So I said, come on. I'm really counting on this. Please bring in your bassoon. So here is Lynda with a broken reed. And hi. Are you Elaine? Okay. Come on up. Great. So just come on up and take out your flute and we'll get out the music here in just a second. So let's, can we have the beginning of the figaro? Do you want to conduct this or no? Oh, heavens, this is chamber music at this point. I see. Okay. How about I give you a tempo and then you guys go to town? Okay. And again, I thank Lynda for doing this because it's not an ideal situation. All right. So here's a safe, conservative tempo. Not that fast. One, two. Cool. Wonderful. Bravo. This is great. The Music 112 Orchestra. Now, you said, well, here's a conservative, safe tempo. But what happens if you don't take a safe tempo? What kind of disasters might befall us? Well, I think in this case there wouldn't be a disaster. It just wouldn't go as fast as I had set up. So I have a recording of, I think it's James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, highest paid orchestra in the country, and they take this at a blistering tempo. Really fast. Let's see how close we can get. No. How fast you can take something sometimes is conditioned by the acoustical environment that you're in. And maybe we'll come back to that about the acoustics of Battelle a little bit later on. Now, let's see. Katie, you're a violist and you're the principal violist. And I wanted to ask you, your job is to kind of ride roughshod over the rest of the violists here. And how do you do that? Isn't that like herding rattlesnakes or something like that? Supposing you want to get your section to be really precise and really exact and all those bows going up and down at the same time, the articulation exactly the way they should be. How do you go? You lead by example but in the actual performance, how do you keep your rest of those violists with you, the principal? Great. How do we know that they know their parts really well? What would you imagine might be a tip-off? And you're at a concert and you're watching, looking, what's going on. What would be a tip-off that maybe they don't know their parts really well? They're sitting there with their nose in the music rather than watching the conductor. The more the orchestra's watching the conductor for the cues and the interpretation, the more that says, hey, they've really got this almost committed to memory and they can get in, they can get beyond the notes into the question of interpretation there. Another thing, just a very basic thing that Katie has mentioned here, is watching. She wants to have very prominent bow strokes, I guess, so that everybody, the whole section, will be in sync. If you see this kind of thing in terms of the bow movement, maybe the articulation really isn't all together there. They should all, each of these sections should be going pretty much the same way. Is that right? Yeah, and particularly with string instruments, there's a different sound with an up-bow as opposed to a down-bow. So an up-bow will start very small. A down-bow you can start very gruffly. So it does make a difference. So, Katie, let me ask you this. Generally speaking, violists don't have solos in the repertoire. So what's the hardest thing for you to play there Saturday night? What scares you? Yeah. That's a good point. You're kind of like the glue and particularly, I would imagine, rhythmically. Is that if you might be setting, really setting the tempo and these other extremes, high and low, are playing off of the rhythmic tempo that you're setting there in the middle. What's the most difficult? Is there any moment that you sort of get to soar with some music that you like? Particularly what's your favorite moment, the most beautiful moment for you? Can you play a little of that moment? Uh-huh. Yeah. Well, I guess it's like maybe the right guard or the left guard on a football team. Nobody ever notices but they're absolutely crucial to the overall running of this operation. Okay. Now we have also with us, thank you, Katie, we also have with us the principal flutist, right, Elena Kagan, and you've got some heavy-duty exposure, particularly in the Beethoven second movement with all of those solos there. So here's a question for Katie with, excuse me, Elena, with these solos that you have to play. Do you ever get nervous? Of course, definitely. I mean, when you really have a solo on your fingers and you're nervous, it makes it even more fun and you always play better when you're not so focused on that. So I certainly try to get beyond being nervous but it's definitely there, and the trickier it is, the more nervous I get. But what happens to the playing when you get nervous? How can we recognize that you're nervous? Hopefully you can't. What? But I mean a lot of times messing up is a sign of being nervous. Uh-huh. There are a lot of players who will get it right every time in rehearsal and then just the nerves of the principal. Yeah. That was me. I always said I was the world's greatest warm-up pianist. And then you get to the moment you have to play and nerves kick in. You know, it's just these little fractions of inches on these instruments. It's a question of life and death. So if your hand is at all quivering, you can imagine on the violin, you've got this huge vibrato. So where did this come from? Okay. So let's hear if we may, Alana, some of the lovely, lovely imitations of bird calls there in the second movement of the Beethoven. What would be good for you to play? Choose anything that you like. So this is Beethoven, second movement, theme and variations. And you have an interesting, I guess, duet with the clarinet, that sort of thing, or is that what you're talking about toward the end? The clarinet and the oboe. There's a lot of intricacies between the wind instruments And then you'll hear lots of cascading other woodwinds, as Alana said, with the oboe and the clarinet sort of dialoguing against this. Intonation here. Do you guys practice this individually? Do you have what we would call sectionals, where you get together and work this out, or you only do this with the full orchestra? Well, we actually haven't had sectionals. That's certainly very common to have sectionals to work it out, but this semester we mostly just work on it on our own. One thing, if instruments are out of tune, is it, Bradley, what do you think, is it often the woodwinds that get out of tune? I think that, you know, I don't want to lay blame where it's not due, but I think that sometimes it's easier for instruments that you can press down a key and know more or less what the right support, what note's going to come out. But if you have a string instrument with no frets, like a guitar has frets on its fingerboard, but violins and all the string family don't, so that's a little bit more guesswork. So it's really difficult, especially in fast passage work, like Katie was playing earlier, to get a uniform intonation across the section. So we have really only about two more minutes left and I'd like to make the following point. One of the things you should be able to look out for is balance over there and what the French horns are doing, because this is a really exposed instrument and they're probably going to be up there on risers and that sound tends to blare forth in Battelle. So keep an eye out for the French horns. They'll really, really be exposed. I have one other line of development here, but I want to, before we go, does anybody out there have a question that you would like to ask Bradley or Katie or Alana? All right. Let me ask them this question. Where should we sit? What are the acoustical issues involved in Battelle? Do we want to sit so we can see? And that's not bad. You might say, hey, well, I'll get way up in the front as far as I can and watch this intricate orchestra, this great grand machine firing on all cylinders here, or do I want to go all the way to the back and maybe just push away the visual and just enjoy the sound? Because oftentimes in concert halls the best sound is not up front, sound sailing right over your head. It's coalescing in the back of the hall. So where should we sit? Well, my favorite place to sit in concerts is somewhere where I can see that interaction between the different, I guess, gears in the machine, as you put it. So I would sit somewhere not directly behind the conductor, so somewhere where you can see the players because they're the ones actually making the music. Yeah. So if you want to go second balcony all the way down as far as you can go, you can actually get up in front of the conductor. You can be almost be in the orchestra that way. Now what about the acoustics? Last issue here. The acoustics in Battelle. Are they pretty good, favorable? Well, it doesn't matter. Do you have trouble hearing? Yeah. It's resonant. It has a very long reverberation cycle. How do we cut down? How can you help the orchestra? What would you guess? What would be the best way you could help the orchestra to bring clarity to their sound and actually allow them to play faster, get that tempo of the Mozart to go faster? If you've got a long reverberation cycle in a hall, your tempo will go slower. What can you do to help out here? Now what do you think? What would you do? Wear a sweater, bring a teddy bear, bring your friend, bring your mother, grandmother, bring as many people, get as many sound-absorbing bodies in there as you possibly can. So we'll see you then Saturday night, 8 o'clock, and thanks to our guests. Thank you. Applause.