Studio Class Notes 5 Feb 2010

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Feb 052010
 

Upcoming concert: Thursday, Feb. 11, 7:30 at Wharton Center. Wind Symphony will be playing (among other things) Jennifer Higdon’s Oboe Concerto. Please attend if you can to support our colleagues in the band department who support us. Higdon (whom Kevin presented last week) also won a Grammy award last week.

No studio class next week. We will return to the regular meetings on Feb. 19 with a presentation by Mark Sullivan.

The salsa band (including Nate Bliton), Feb. 18 in Hart Recital Hall.

Deadlines are approaching for participation in the Premieres concerts: Feb. 8 – Premilinary deadline for grad students. Feb. 15 – Program information deadline for undergraduates.

Discussion of SCENE&heard: we should all be better “entrepreneurs,” make performance opportunities for ourselves. The performance was successful. [Thanks to all involved and all who attended. -Dave]

Discussion of the DSO readings: it was a great experience for everyone. Thanks to the 5 composers whose works were read for accepting the criticisms in front of the group. Slatkin and the orchestra were quite generous with their time. It was great to have the two composers there. Cindy McTee in particular sent individual comments to the composers.

Corigliano discussion: Corigliano’s music is based on simple, large-scale structures. On a smaller scale, complexity is evident. Large scale dictates the smaller structures. “The oboe concerto, I think is the piece that finally pushed me into another world of composing. From then on, I have used this method of composing. I have made the big decisions first instead of the small ones…to me the idea of the bigger shape being governed by the smaller shape just seems backwards. I have come to realize that what the piece is about is the larger shape, from beginning to end.” In the last movement of the oboe concerto, Corigliano uses a special technique to imitate the sound of the “rheita,” a traditional Middle Eastern double-reed instrument.

Listening:
Corigliano: Oboe Concerto (1975)
perf. Humbert Lucarelli, oboe, with the American Symphony Orchestra, c. Kazuyoshi Akuyama
album: John Corigliano: Poem in October/Oboe Concerto/Three Irish Folk Settings (on Amazon)
[This recording appears to be out of print.]

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Three Things I learned from Leonard Slatkin

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Jan 262010
 
A great revelation has been visited upon me due to Leonard Slatkin’s lecture on Monday January 25th.  The main thing that he was trying to get across was that orchestras such as  the Detroit Symphony Orchestra are important cultural institutions that should be supported.  According to him, the generation of our parents and grandparents have dropped the ball.  They did not know how important it would be to us to have these orchestras.  Now the parent and current generation must spring into action and make sure that all these hundreds of musicians that are graduating from our numerous educational institutions will have jobs. Their dreams of being musicians should not be crushed due to lack of the cultural support for orchestras. He also said that the private sector has the responsibility to care for the arts.  He mentioned something about the orchestra being like a time machine that recreates the past.  I wonder whose past he meant.  The 95% white (mostly middle aged and older) audience and rest made up from the international students belonging to upwardly mobile asian and south-american families responded with enthusiasm.
“Change is a good thing, but in the arts, not so much”, said Leonard Slatkin.  Thus we must hold on to the values passed down to us from the dead western european cultural establishment and accept them as the American culture and preserve them and propagate them through education and donations to the orchestra. Before this lecture, I did not know who the participants were in the American Culture.  I think I have a better understanding now.   Don’t worry, its not the immigrants.  Most of them are upwardly mobile and can be uplifted through the education at schools to participate in the culture in power for at least one or two generations. But, it was interesting to hear about Mr.Slatkin’s hobnobbing with Bill Clinton and Alan Greenspan.  Whether the Orchestra serves a vibrant and culturally relevant role in the modern American Society comprising of so many different cultures is a question whose answer we did not learn yesterday.
The major revelation came when Mr. Slatkin said,
” Public doesn’t like composers whose names it can’t pronounce.”
And apparently, he himself would rather be spared the difficulty of mumbling someone’s name at the orchestra rehearsal, because he could not be bothered to have to learn how to pronounce it.   The audience chuckled complacently with his comments.
My dear friends, colleagues, professors and general public at large,   I SEE THE LIGHT.   I have been doing you a disservice. Art may be about individuality and creativity as Mr. Slatkin says, but it is not about having weird difficult foreign names. I feel sorry for all those eastern European, dutch, danish, scandanavians and others from asia that my new American name is going to put out of business.  By the way if you are an African with a click in your name, you might as well take the boat back.  Boy, I wish there was an ellis island like old-time situation for immigrants, so that they can be assigned popular American names, to guarantee success in the American Culture.
I have raked my brains all night yesterday to come up with a name that Mr.Slatkin and his culturally elevated public could pronounce.   I almost went with O.  I think people just about everywhere  can pronounce it. But then how would the people at one place have the satisfaction of branding me as one of them, as distinct from the others.
But this is a hard task.  What if the culture of power changes towards hispanic people in the near future.   I am thinking of getting a different name for each culture that I encounter. I might also have to learn shape and skin shifting.
But, for now I think I will change it to John Washington. Its easy for Mr. Slatkin to pronounce and the public will come crashing in to hear the music.  It might become un-American to not do so.
I look forward to plying the DSO with hundreds of scores in the near future.
Change is indeed a good thing as long as it toes the line.
THANK YOU LEONARD SLATKIN.
-Artist formerly known as Navjot Sandhu
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