Buzzing Reed- Classical Music & Clarinet Culture

Check out the discussion over at “Rebirth: Future of Classical Music”. The comment quoted below is a great idea to help listeners connect with the “experience” of classical music, by blurring the sacrosanct “rules” of traditional performances. I am all for this, and look forward to hearing more on this discussion. Advocates for New Ways to Listen to Classical Music – Rebirth: The Future of Classical Music.

The following comment is by Kim Diehnelt, conductor in Finland and Switzerland. Her professional website is HERE.

I’d love to tell you about the Classical Connoisseur presentations I began this summer.

I take a wine-tasting approach to music. I hope to get the next one on video, as it is rather difficult to explain what i do. I’ll let you know when that happens! —from my website blurb:

Classical music is one of the world’s pleasures: an art to explore, savor, and enjoy. As the Classical Connoisseur, Kim guides listeners through tastings of qualities, styles, and characters of music and performers. With a focus on music as an event to experience, rather than an object to dissect, she provides insights into tuning-in, comparing sound events, and building a hearing-vocabulary and sensitivity to metaphor. In this ground-breaking approach – and in her dynamic personal manner – Maestra Kim “conducts” listeners to greater perception and enjoyment of this great art.

(Presentations can be paired with actual wine-tastings)

“The Classical Connoisseur fills an urgent need of today’s listener. Audiences are hungry to explore what it is they are hearing – not in terms of the anatomy of music, but through discovering music’s ability to create metaphor – and enchantment.”

Image Credit

Nature and Music as Tempering Forces

To be a great performer and interpreter of music, one thing is certain; you must be a guru of patience. Patience is intended broadly here, covering both physical patience (self-awareness) and mental patience (attitude).

When I saw the photo above, it spoke to me on many levels. I saw in the image a seasoned veteran of nature, a man (and his dog) ripe with experience, tough, tempered.

I also something else, a dream of sorts being experienced by the man and his dog from that very real perch on the gnarled stump of an ancient tree. Both man and dog appear to be following the huge winged creature (perhaps a great heron, which symbolizes balance and contemplation?) flying away from them over the tree tops.

The lake or pond over which the great bird flies seems to curve beyond into some unknown, perhaps a little stream, something beneath the bird but in the shadows of the woods.

The man seems comfortable watching the scene. He is at peace with himself, with the miraculous flight of the great bird, and with the unknown beyond. He knows nature’s powers first hand from his life in the woods. (in the image, he seems as if he lives there in those woods) And he also feels a reverent respect for the never-ending magic of all nature’s beauty.

Nature is both hardening and liberating in this image. It is the giver and taker, so to speak. Only by basking in its beauty can one find the courage to endure its hardships.

This image spoke to me on those levels. And I saw that the metaphor of nature and the message of this image could also aptly describe the tempering effect of being a classical music performer; the mind-bending tedium of detailed practice, the (relative) physical danger of so much repetition and tension and fear which every performer must master in order to thrive.

It is only in the past few years that I truly understood the nature of the musical “forest”, it’s tempering double edged sword; one edge offering a dynamic emotional redemption seemingly hidden in a great piece of music (even more from a great performance of such a piece); the other edge simultaneously gnawing away at sanity in the often impenetrable thickets of music’s technical mastery, the land-mines of over use, or of even slight misuse over decades.

No one comes away untested from the choice of performing music for a career, just as no one who lives in nature goes unchallenged by her forces.

But the great bird can occasionally be seen majestically floating over the breathing forest, into an alluring but uncertain future.

Is it a question of like or dislike? “Yes!”, I say. I’ll take the awe of magnificent beauty whenever it happens, whether it be from Nature or Music.

And I will try very hard to remember that awe when I am soaked and cold and fearful of a future. Sometimes I forget.

Sonnet, by Elizabeth Bishop, from the collection Music’s Spell, edited by Emily Fragos.

A lovely, if not terribly original, sonnet. It merits reading out loud, to hear and feel the delicate rhythmic sounds of the words as they flow from one to the next. Try it.

Sonnet

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, felling finger-tips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the sub-aqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

Enjoy.
Ahlin Min, piano.
David Thomas, clarinet.

For those interested, I’m playing a Richard Hawkins B model with a Legere Signature 4.25

This comment by Gretchen Statthoff appeared on another comment post “How much theory is too much for an audience?” A valuable addition to the discussion of connecting classical music audiences to the music we perform for them:

Hi David,

I have been speaking to audiences for a few years, seeing how engaged they might become. After trying out that approach several times, I’ve decided that NO audience is stupid… being friendly and inviting them in makes a big difference.

They like being included. When they feel like participants, you can program contemporary music. They end up liking it, and coming to meet me afterward to discuss the concert!

Over the past year, I’ve performed one group of 4 Messiaen Preludes in NYC and CT (2 places), as well as in a country church in MA. All of those situations worked.

I try not to use jargon ~ turns people off. To accomplish that, I just visualize myself in, say, a hardware store. Audience members do have experience, just in fields other than ours.

Great post!

Gretchen

I just posted several YouTube videos of a preconcert talk I gave on Stravinsky L’Histoire du Soldat, the arrangement for clarinet violin and piano. I also posted the performance.

From an excellent and well established music blog “On an Overgrown Path”. Well said:

Was Britten’s holy triangle of composer, performer and listener working its magic?

As that holy triangle tells us, great music making only happens when creative energy can flow freely between composer, performer and listener. Yet almost all of the current efforts to reach new audiences involve building the very barriers that block the vital energy flow. Classical music does not need a celebrity culture, it does not need inane presentation, it does not need to be markeketed like cornflakes by PR agencies, it does not need note perfect performances, it does not need national flags on the platform and it does not need the other brands of consultant created snake oil currently doing the rounds.

What it desperately needs is for the energy to start flowing again from composer to performer and listener. But that can only happen after all the middle feeders and other crap currently blocking classical music’s arteries have been flushed out. As the Suffolk Youth Orchestra proved so convincingly last night.

On An Overgrown Path: Unblocking classical music’s arteries.

This perceptive comment appeared on a post about how much theory is too much in the attempt to deepen the understanding of classical music by novice audiences. It’s a fine line. Not enough, and the richness of the music is glossed over, too much, and it turns them off. Of course, it is impossible to please everyone.

In a recent recital I gave, I described the Debussy Clarinet Rhapsodie and Stravinsky L’Histoire du Soldat with what I felt was just the right balance. Those pre-concert talks are posted on this blog and on my YouTube channel, for those interested.

I played a Webern piece on a recital once, with my grandparents in attendance. They were polite but, unsurprisingly, baffled. But after a quick explanation of twelve-tone composition, they were fascinated and wanted to hear it again.

Webern may be an extreme example, but any art music has some barriers to entry (and pays corresponding rewards). If you aren’t aware of the idea of, for example, musical form–the idea that a theme may return later, or be transformed in some way–then a symphony seems like a long, rambling, and pretty boring experience. Audiences attuned to popular music may not realize that the symphony has a large and meaningful underlying structure.

Imagine looking at a photograph and not realizing that it depicts a three-dimensional scene, seeing it instead as only a piece of paper with colorful splotches. I think novice listeners sometimes hear classical music this way–pretty colors, but no meaning beyond that. I think audiences are smart enough to grasp and appreciate an idea like, for example, musical form (even without a Peter-and-the-Wolf-style program), if someone just takes a moment to point it out to them.