A completely overused statement “thinking outside the box” needs to be reworked and soon.  I used to love using it, but now I feel it is a cop out statement as if to say we are going to try something new and different and if it doesn’t work, well at least we tried! Also my new Audience Connections class has begun (16 students!) and like I do every year I am asking for requests of arts related topics and current events for us to discuss in class, and I will post the audio!  Bottom left is the Audience Connection tab if you want to listen to podcasts and read related articles…now to the box….

Two things got me thinking about the commonly used box analogy.  We discussed in class this week my post Context not Urtext, and next week we open our season here in Springfield with an all Beethoven concert.  The point in my post was to make suggestions to take music to not a level of understanding in the pure artistic sense, but to make it relevant to people by applying it to their interests with genuine connections back to the music.  When studying Beethoven, I don’t think of him as someone who broke barriers/boundaries, broke rules, or who reinvented music.  I think of him as someone who expanded barriers/boundaries, who added to the rules (he still used Classical forms)  and who re-purposed music.  He made the music about us, he didn’t go outside the box, he just took the box that already existed but made it much much bigger so that we could all fit in!

So much marketing is about being exclusive, being different and about being (cue deep movie trailer guy voice) like nothing you have ever experienced before….. Now not that there is anything wrong with that (life is just one big Seinfeld episode!) but I say music should be inclusive, feeling like it could become familiar and like EVERYTHING you have experienced before….but in a new way!  Now that is exciting to me because it promotes relevance, which I believe is the key to sustainability.

We need to not re-build but instead remodel with innovation that connects back to what we do and who we are.  That to me is a way to move forward.   So like Beethoven, instead of thinking outside of the box,  let’s start to work out how to make the box big enough for everyone to fit inside.

Please send topic requests!

Two interesting situations are developing that on the surface may not seem connected but are actually deeply related.  For better or for worse.

Detroit.  Charleston.  One’s a biggie.  The other’s a ……… not so biggie ……… though I’m sure that the musicians in Charleston who rely on those jobs to make a living would argue otherwise, and I can’t really blame them.  What they have in common is that for years no one has taken adequate responsibility for the long term health of these organizations.  Now they’re paying for it.

Charleston is in the worse situation.  The orchestra actually closed down in March and is currently exploring ways in which it can be reconstituted.  With the debacle in Honolulu fresh in everyone’s memory this cannot be an easy time for the Charlotte Symphony musicians.  The announcement of this new Chamber Symphony/Ensemble venture is not going to make anyone sleep any better.  No matter how this is spun the truth is that if it goes ahead it will divert precious resources away from the CSO at this most crucial time in the organization’s history.

Of course, there is a long and distinguished history in Classical Music of organizations moving in when they detect a wounded comrade.  Just look at the situation in Florida – there used to be several orchestras up and down the East Coast.  Now there are residencies by (insert name of Über-orchestra here).  Hardly ethical in my book, but that’s the way things go.

Detroit is also at a crucial phase, and once again the usual arguments are being trotted out on both sides of the dispute.  There is one argument, however, which I feel has become less and less powerful as the years go by – the “if we aren’t paid as much as everyone else the quality of the orchestra is going to nose-dive and we’ll turn into a intermediate stop for musicians aiming for the big gig.”   This is the position posited by the musicians’ negotiating committee, as well as industry guru Drew McManus.

Politely, I disagree, for a couple of reasons.  First, it ain’t so easy getting a decent paying gig in this business.  For every person who gets that job there are now hundreds of people auditioning.  It’s essentially a crap shoot most of the time, but the general quality and number of people who could do these gigs is so high now that the competition is ridiculous.  Those people who are so outstanding that they could win any gig they want are few and very far between.  It’s also not like there is a 40% turnover in personnel every year.  Even if the DSO took a massive pay cut this year I hardly expect that the industry mag would suddenly become replete with page after page of audition notices for the band.

There’s another argument, however – 10 years (or farther) from now the gap between the Haves (Chicago? Boston? etc.) and the Have Nots (everyone else) is going to be much wider than it already is.  There are going to be a very, very, very few orchestras who can survive with $40 Million+ budgets, paying their musicians six figures plus benefits, with tours, recordings, etc.  For the rest of us that is simply not sustainable.  That’s not defeatist – that’s realistic.  While the big boys were jacking up their salaries over the past 40 years, and everyone else was trying to Keep Up With The Joneses, some serious systemic imbalances got contracted into the picture.  No one seemed to mind deficit after deficit after deficit.  But, unfortunately for us, only the Government has license to print money.  The general economy is retrenching and the orchestra business isn’t going to be far behind.

The admittedly excellent orchestras like Detroit are now in the position where decades of deficit spending and endowment raiding are going to come home to roost.  Whether we like to admit it or not, we musicians have been complicit in this debacle.  At some point the long-term health of an organization must be more important than how much the salary will increase during the next year of the contract.

I don’t think Detroit need worry about artistic quality being impacted by what the salary is.  Much more dangerous to the artistic quality is a $6.5 million dollar operating deficit.  A couple more of those and they’ll never have to worry about the artistic quality again, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

After a week of decompression (and a quick trip to Tulsa) following my 6 week Lake Placid stint, Wednesday begins my new Audience Connections class with podcasts and audio highlights starting next week.  An interesting article about the role of the Assistant Conductor came out recently, I have a lot to say about that, plus a fellow Australian sounds off on what audiences should be focusing on…oh my, if you have read my postings, I think for the most part it should be the opposite.  All of this and more coming up soon!

The Red Hour has struck, and the 2010 Edinburgh International Arts Festival is open!!! Time to lick my wounds.

It has happened.  Porgy has taken over Edinburgh.  Not without a fight, though.

Friday was an interesting day.  I had lunch with Serge Dorny, the head of Opera Lyon.  Serge is a mover/shaker/candlestick maker who has had his fingers in the music business for years.  He started off turning around the LPO in the ’90s, a job of near biblical proportions.  None-the-less, he was successful, and then he moved on to Lyon.  I’d tell you about all the secrets we discussed but then I’d have to kill you.

The General Dress Rehearsal was Friday night.  There’s an old adage which says a bad dress rehearsal leads to a good concert.  For some reason we thought we’d put it to the test.  The rehearsal was frustrating to me in the extreme.  I don’t know whether it was the different acoustic, or the “familiarity breeds contempt” thing, or whether Venus was suddenly in the 4th house, but it went from bad to “fer Godsakes what are we doing?”  The problem was people weren’t paying attention to me.  Or, to be honest, the problem was people weren’t paying attention to the conductor!  So I had a fit.  It wasn’t quite a full-on conniption fit, but it was a fit.

In opera, with everything that’s going on, you just have to pay attention to that central figure.  For better or worse, the conductor is the final arbiter of all things.  If the conductor doesn’t know what he’s doing it essentially doesn’t matter what the quality of the rest of the cast is.  It’s not going to be a good performance.  If the conductor is good and the cast doesn’t pay attention, same result.  If the conductor is good and the cast pays attention then you have a chance of pulling something off.  Friday’s rehearsal left me wondering if we were going to fall flat on our faces at the most important summer arts festival in the world.

Some little bird had told me days ago that on Saturday I would need to do something else, something non-Porgy related.  I booked a ticket for a performance by the Gentlemen of Leisure for that afternoon.  Their show – An Hour of Too Much Culture – was quite entertaining, and managed to incorporate references to Peter Gabriel, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and a rap version of A Tale of Two Cities.  Perfect way to take the mind off of opera.

Saturday night, and I show up at the Festival Theatre with my iPod cranking Parliament Funkadelic – Like in Oakland, 1975.  This was important.  I needed some inspiration, and hearing that grand collection of lunatics put everything on the one! was just the thing to get me in the mood. (If you ain’t gonna get it on, then take your dead ass home!!! huh!!!!!!!)

Once we got started I could feel the difference immediately.  The cast was locked onto me, and because of that we put in one of our best performances of Porgy over the last 2 years.  Very satisfying, and one the audience seemed to enjoy very much.  Our next two performances are Monday and Tuesday, and our competition are a bunch of mucks from Cleveland (that last sentence written by a Buffalo boy, mind you).  Don’t know if they’re sold out, but we are.

My best news is that my family lands in Edinburgh in a couple short hours.  After the festival we’re going to spend three days at Loch Ness.  We’re going to kick our boys outside and tell them not to come back until they’ve caught The Monster!  Here we come, Nessie!

Funny how life sometimes imitates Star Trek.

There’s a classic 1st season original Star Trek episode – The Return of the Archons.  Long story short – a planet locked in war turns their fate over to the philosopher Landru.  He builds a machine to manage the planet which rules for 6,000 years.  The inhabitants are kept in a quasi-zombie state, and they stalk around asking “are you of the Body?  Are you one with Landru?” At least they do until the Red Hour, when  at the striking of a gong someone screams “FESTIVAL!!!”  and the whole planet dissolves into an orgy of physical and sexual aggression, only to revert to their near zombie status an hour later.   The Enterprise crew promptly ignores the Prime Directive and liberates the planet.  The Red Hour would be Edinburgh in August.  The population of this city triples during the time of the two major festivals here, and let me tell you traffic is a real &*@#%.

But only here could you have a day like I had Thursday.  First thing I went over to the Festival Theatre to check out our temporary digs.  From the outside it’s a modern hall.  From the stage it’s a classic early 20th Century theatre.  This makes me nervous because what usually happens in this situation is that there’s an older run down hall that gets a major revamping.  Some ridiculously expensive plan is drawn up to completely renovate the place.  The only problem is that it costs way too much money, so they start paring things down.  Can’t disappoint the patrons, so the foyer gets a complete make-over.  Can’t have it looking bad inside, so the hall gets completely renovated.  Money starts running out.  We’ll do a few things to make the stage OK, but forget about modern set moving machinery.  The dressing rooms?  Who cares?

Sure enough the foyer is magnificent, the hall is beautiful, the stage is closer to rudimentary, and the “Conductor’s Suite” looks like it was designed in the early Alcatraz style, complete with concrete block walls, prison bed and a bathroom/shower that immediately makes one nervous about dropping the soap.  Won’t be spending a lot of time there.  Since the first rehearsal of the day is in the mid-afternoon I make a break for it and hit the bus.

1 Hour later I found myself in the little town of Rosslin where the famous Rosslyn Chapel resides.  If you are a fan of history, architecture, and/or the Knights Templar, to go to Edinburgh and not see Rosslyn Chapel would be a travesty of near biblical proportions.  This astounding building was built in the mid-15th Century by Sir William St. Clair and he went all out with it.  The carvings at Rosslyn are amongst the most amazing stone work found in the world, replete with angels, devils, dragons, musical instruments, and the famous Green Man.  It has recently seen a surge in interest due to the fact that it was used in that ridiculous dreck known as “The da Vinci Code.”

The chapel carvings are a source of great mystery.  The St. Clair’s had strong connections with the Knights Templar which is reflected throughout the stonework.  Some of the meanings of these carvings is lost to time and some present great mystery.  Clearly carved over a south window is a group of maize, while aloe vera shows up elsewhere in the chapel.  What’s the big deal, you may ask?  Well, keep in mind that maize and aloe vera are indigenous to the Western Hemisphere, but they appear in the carvings of a mid-15th Century chapel in Scotland several decades before Columbus supposedly “discovered” America.  This leads to all sorts of questions about the veracity of the stories of the Knights Templar journeying to the Americas in the 14th Century, along with various conspiracy theories about the location of The Holy Grail, The Arc of the Covenant, and the body of Jimmy Hoffa.  Whatever your proclivities there, Rosslyn Chapel should be on everyone’s no miss list.

Back to the Festival Theatre for the afternoon tech/piano rehearsal.  One of the major problems with taking an opera on tour is adapting to different stages.  Did I mention that the Festival Theatre’s stage is somewhat rudimentary?  The scrims and curtains are all manipulated by hand! Quaint, but definitely something that needs to be rehearsed.  The 3 hour rehearsal is taken up by making sure everyone knows that getting in the way of the set here could lead to a long and intimate discourse concerning the efficacy of the U.K. health system.  We all got out of there alive, and I took our pianist on a short tour of downtown Edinburgh.

Back, again, to the Festival Theatre for the evening rehearsal.  Now the orchestra is in place and we really must check acoustics and balances.  The pit here is much larger than the pit in Lyon, and the orchestra is thrust farther into the hall.  It’s a good acoustic but some changes in how we play must be made.  The new acoustic also makes certain co-ordination things quite different than in Lyon.  It’s a looooong 4 hours, and at the end we’re all exhausted.

It’s 11:30.  I need a beer.  Probably two.  Heading back to our digs on the south campus of the University I pop into a little pub I have previously found called The Reverie, just in time to catch the last set of a band in for the Fringe from Sydney called The Crooked Fiddle Band.  These kids were having WAY too much fun.  Bass, guitar, drums and violin, with a post-apocalyptic hoedown folk style with nods to jazz, King Crimson, multi-meters, and outright hilarity, I think they’re a band to watch.  I cornered the violinist, Jess Randall, and found out she studied at the music school in Sydney.  Not much of a surprise to me, because just watching here I could tell she had excellent classical training.  You don’t pick up a bow arm like that fiddling in the streets.

All in all an amazing day in Edinburgh.  Tonight, that being Friday, is our dress rehearsal.  Tomorrow, that being Saturday, we open up the Edinburgh Arts Festival 2010!  Wheeeeee!

Once in a lifetime everyone should have the opportunity to do something that very, very few other people can claim to have done.  It’s my turn.

I’m in Edinburgh, and to quote a writer friend of mine – “Scotland is not for the squeamish.”  After a long bit of travel from Minneapolis the first thing one should do when you hit the Isles is to have the local breakfast, whether that’s Irish, English, or Scottish.  For the record I’ve had Haggis before, and I actually quite like it.  Of course being a male of the species I can compartmentalize very easily, so when eating it I do not dwell on what it’s made of.

While enjoying my haggis I opened up the info pack about the Edinburgh Festival and, lo and behold!, the first thing in it is none other than our production of Porgy & Bess.  So come this Saturday I will be able to claim that I conducted the opening show of the Edinburgh Festival!!!  Not bad for a kid from Buffalo, N.Y.  On my excursion into town today I dropped by our venue, the Edinburgh Festival Hall, to check it out.  It’s a good spot larger than the opera house in Lyon and definitely from a different era.  The hall here is in the old classic style from the early part of the 20th Century, where the hall in Lyon was decorated and designed by Darth Vader in his Black period.  None-the-less I think the acoustics here will be just fine.  One thing I noticed immediately though – the stage is narrower here.  That will take a little getting used to by our cast.

But the surprise today is that somehow I had forgotten that the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is going on simultaneously to our festival.  The Fringe is tremendously cool, with well over 200 venues dotted around the city (including, to my great amusement, the local mosque up the street!).  There are tons of street performers everywhere along High Street (the main road between Edinburgh Castle and the Parliament building) and a really fun atmosphere abounds.  I shall try my best to take in a couple Fringe shows, just to say that I did.

The schedule for P&B is very compact.  We start Wednesday and we open Saturday night.  In between we have the Piano Filage, staging rehearsals, a pre-dress, and our dress rehearsal.  It’s going to be every man for himself for a couple of days but fortunately we don’t start rehearsals until the afternoon.  With mornings free there is blessed little excuse to miss some of the late night Fringe-ing.  And since I’ve mentioned it, it’s time to go get some food and get out on the Fringe!