Date: February 2, 2010
Editor: Karen Kimber |
Vol. 59 –31 |
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Club Program
Past, Present & Future |
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| Last Week: |
Maestro Kerry Stratton - The Conductor’s
Perspective Toronto Philharmonia Orchestra |
| This Week: |
Rick Mewhinney Pres Newmarket
Rotary – Uganda Water Project |
| Feb 9: |
Herman Pfaller –
Classification Talk |
| Feb 16: |
Gary Murphy –
Crime Stoppers |
Maestro Kerry Stratton - The Conductor’s
Perspective
In his introduction of our speaker,
Kerry Stratton, Conductor and Music Director of the
Toronto Philharmonia, Gene noted that Kerry is a skilled
chef as well as a violinist.
Kerry began his spell binding presentation with: If
he were to meet us outside of this room he might be
questioned as to what do you do? Kerry would respond
that he is a Conductor. He would either get - that's
nice, that's interesting, or how interesting! The next
question would be: What do you really do? Some think
he keeps time in which case they would really
be in trouble. Kerry's function is to give time, as
he performed a live demonstration for us by conducting
us in different ways to say "ta".
To become a conductor requires technique which makes
the job a lot easier. There is no teacher like experience.
What is it like to conduct? Eugene Goosens said it best
'with a perfect orchestra you can do what you like,
you can draw a sort of immense emotional throb out of
the air merely be curling your hand. You can get brilliant
waves of sound merely by a twist of the wrist. You can
make sudden and absolute silence by a gesture. It is
the most wonderful of all sensations that any man can
conceive and it ought not to be allowed".
Musicians create a compelling performance when they
believe in the work they are playing, when they know
the audience cares about the music and their efforts
and when they believe in the conductor's ability to
communicate the music's message.
What is the score? It is the map. It
is time travel. It is to know history, culture, literature.
It is an object of precise data. Many
things can be noted precisely, many things are beyond
notation. Certainly there is a fair amount of information
about pitch, duration, attack, volume, register, colour.
What makes great conducting are the things that cannot
be taught. Without a personal grasp of the score, you
will conduct notes but never do justice.
The opposite extreme is that you may do the composer
injustice by using the score as a vehicle for feelings
which may be out of context. Beethoven's Fifth is either
fate knocks at the door or three g's and an e flat.
Any conductor exists in relation to factors not determined
by him. The period in which he or she lives. Kerry prefers
to live in the past because it is cheaper.
One doesn't learn painting by looking at the landscape.
It's a romantic concept but not true. One learns to
paint in part by looking at other paintings. One doesn't
learn music by listening to the wind, an equally romantic
notion. We must be taught.
Can conducting be taught? Reading the score is an exercise
in grasping information and conveying it. Do you read
all those lines? Pierre Monteux said "we must know
which cards to throw under the table". Study, exercise,
plan and then at rehearsal our culture is absorbed by
our instinct and the result could be a desirable spontaneity.
Do not consider formal musical training to be destructive
of artistic sensitivity. There are, however, always
those who put up intellectual road blocks to enjoyment.
Respectability. Music was not written to be respected,
it is much better than that it is to be loved. Understand
the principles and the details will follow.
Paul Valery said 'intelligence is the capacity to reduce
things to manageable dimensions. It is not the capacity
to deal with ever increasing complexity".
What a musician needs is no different than what a good
listener needs. Developed spirit and qualities of the
spirit which are above all a function of personality
and of taste. Development of our personal culture permits
us to receive the emotions evoked by the music. Music
without emotion is something that Kerry does not want.
Stravinsky "music is only capable of expressing
itself". Bartok "I cannot imagine music that
expresses nothing".
Performance lives in the personality of the musician
but nowadays there is a curious need to conceal this
personality behind the carefully literal execution of
the printed score. Personality instead is expressed
in provocative photos. Any suggestion that a performer
is in a sense more important than the composer will
not be well received. Yet the argument in favour of
personality is supported by public response.
We learn a lot more about people by listening to them
than by seeing them. You can't not communicate. What
tells Kerry about people is not so much what they say,
not how they say it but how they sound when they say
it.
The kinds of sounds people make are apt to tell more
about what is going on inside them than the sense of
their words.
Sound is the supreme means of conveying human feeling.
You use music when you communicate. You respond to pitch,
articulation and register. It's the truth meter. It's
what y you listen to when you said "it doesn't
ring true" Trial lawyers use it and so does every
mother when she asks the question 'are you telling the
truth?'
Many good listeners have no musical training but hear
better and significantly more than many educated musicians.
We have entered an age of seeming desperation for orchestral
music. The desperation for Kerry is best reflected in
the marketing of the arts and the programming. Best
expressed as anxiety. Biggest dilemma for one programme
committee is not what would be played but what they
would call the concert.
Music can be great and good and serious but it can also
be silly, vulgar and a little unbalanced. Music is simply
too personal to support just one hierarch of values.
The best music is the music that persuades us there's
no other music in the world. One morning for Kerry it
was Dvorak's 6th Symphony. One night it was Someone
to Watch Over Me. He can no more rate his favorite music
than he can rate his favorite memories. Yet there are
those who insist on ranking music.
Listening on Air Canada headset - channels are classical/popular.
By implication, classical is unpopular - but there is
another channel, popular classics. No wonder stories
of its demise are everywhere. Demise inidicators...record
companies curtailing classical division, Horowitz/RCA/tangos/brothel.
Orchestras facing deficits. Music barely taught in public
schools. Musicals, plays, ballets and museums all have
wealthier audiences. If you really want to see Swiss
bank accounts, head to the box seats at a Celine Dion
concert.
Brilliant new talents keep coming along. On average,
the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic are younger
than the Rolling Stones. What would help this music
are a few words from the heart. It's easier to analyze
ardour than to express it. It is an art of grand gestures
and vast dimensions and it is playing to mobs of the
quiet and the shy. It's a paradise for passive aggressive.
It has a hard time expressing itself in the age of Dr.
Phil.
We seem to be listening now to be civilized. Kerry prefers
listening to escape civilization.
Concerts before the fatal phase of the 20th century
were eclectic hootenannies, opera arias, parts of sonatas,
just the loud bits. Walt Whitman described grand opera
as the great barbaric yawp. By 1802 the first significant
biography of a dead composer, Bach by Forke. Has all
the characteristics of romanticism, longing for lost
worlds, adulation of a God like entity, horror of the
present \, a need to return to imagined good old days.
With the rise of the commercial middle class in the
19th century, Beethoven was the escalator to socialites.
Concert halls grew quiet and reserved, habits and clothing,
more formal. Improvisation, phased out. Discouragement
of applause.
Theodore Thomas was in many ways, the founder of modern
American orchestra. Parks and beer gardens, infatuated
with cultivated persons.
The ultimate American phenomenon was Gershwin who transformed
the idea of what a composer was. Having a classical
composer write a popular song does not seem impossible.
After all, it was Ravel who wrote Fascination. But having
a popular composer write orchestral and operatic music
is an unexpected crossover. That's what Gershwin was
doing. An astounding accomplishment.
Perhaps Bergs admonition to Gershwin is for all of us
and particularly for those listening to music for the
first time. The romantic hero just might be you after
all.
Rocco thanked Kerry for his passionate speech which
truly showed his love of music. Kerry then told us that
he received a Rotary Scholarship three years in a row
and bought a Harley Davidson motorcycle. In the end,
however, Kerry sold the bike and went on to study at
McGill.
President Mike presented Kerry with a cheque for his
Orchestra.
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