Jordan. Conductor.

Symphony Number One "When in Rome, do as the Romans." jordanrsmith.com Subscribe on YouTube Listen in iTunes

[jordanconductor]

Deborah Vance on the Value of Rehearsal

If this is your first time to visit my blog, welcome! My name is Jordan and I’m a conductor, teacher, and music-lover. This is my blog, the Conductor’s Notebook. To get an overview, visit About the Blog.

My wife and I love the hit HBO series Hacks; we’ve watched it from the beginning and it’s been wonderful to see the plaudits coming in this season as the audience has continued to grow.

Oversimplified, one-sentence premise: a once rising star comedienne loses everything early on, but continues to work hard, hone her craft, and build her business until she begins to experience a renaissance later in life, with no small number of setbacks and antics along the way as she begrudgingly mentors a young comic writer. Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder deliver brilliantly as Deborah Vance and Ava Daniels, respectively (and pictured above, L-R.)

Jessica Goldstein does a good job of covering the important beats in her Vulture Recaps of the show - here’s the recap of the most recent pair of episodes (Season 3, Episodes 7 & 8, which were released together last week).

But in watching this past episode, I was fascinated by the scenes where Deborah joined an improv comedy troupe for a performance, and it seemed like maybe there were some lessons for us all about how to work on a team and how to both lead and follow. In short, it seemed like there were some lessons about rehearsal worth exploring.

The Magic of Improv

Cards on the table: I believe that one of the most useful ways to think of rehearsal leadership is as a form of improvisation. Starting last summer I began to think of the way in which the score, the ensemble, the space, and the time constraints of a rehearsal all provide a framework for something akin to jazz. There are chords, instruments, melodies, and rhythms that might be appropriate, and the soloist is free to try many things, but there are differences between deeply seasoned improvisors and young students, for instance.

Put another way, our nephew CJ is a fantastic tenor sax players. But there are differences between C.J. and Coltrane, you could say. (Though in all candor, there is no difference between the two in terms of my enjoyment level!)

Point being, you have degrees of freedom, but jazz is built around some structure, some freedom, and the expertise necessary to artfully surf those structures in realtime.

Back to Hacks

What does this have to do with Hacks? Let me unite these two strands around the idea of improvisation:

Last week, we saw Smart’s character, Deborah Vance, put into a novel scenario: as part of a PR blitz related to a larger story arc, she goes to a university to receive an honorary degree, and included in her visit is an invitation to participate in the university improv troupe’s evening performance. Goldstein for Vulture:

Ava tells her correctly that “improv has never made anyone look good.” The whole improv scene is terrible, by which I mean perfect, from the dopey alliterative introductions to the use of “Who Let the Dogs Out.”

In short, it’s terrible because Deborah has never done improv and doesn’t understand how it works. I’m telling you, it’s a great scene.

How Improv WorkS

According to Second City, the fundamentals include: “impulse & spontaneity, listening, being present in the moment, taking risks, finding agreement (making & accepting offers) and other basic building blocks of improvisation.”

According to Preston Smith (no relation), the core aspects of comedy improv include:

1. Listen – As simple as this seems, it is probably one of the most difficult skills to master. Listening will free you from having to think of what you are going to say a head of time.

2. Agreement (Yes, And…) – Assuming you have listened, you will be able to agree with what was said AND add information. Agreement is what allows a scene to progress!

3. Team Work (Group Mind) – Improv is a vast mechanism of give and take and support. The group mind is greater then the individual.

Deborah wasn’t able to produce any of these qualities. The scripted comedy came from the juxtaposition between her attempt to control scenes that were meant to be spontaneous. Yet, spontaneity came with structure.

For me, this episode also contained an element of kismet. This weekend I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. There is a section of the fourth chapter titled “The Structure of Spontaneity,” which opens on an improv comedy group performing a Harold - in which they take a topic suggestion from the audience and, "without so much as a moment's consultation, make up a thirty minute play from scratch."1

This was the same type of scene which Vance ruined (and Smart nailed). Why was Deborah so bad? For this, let’s return to the scene just before the dumpster fire and look for clues…

Talent or Preparation?

We already glimpsed Deborah’s many failures in their warm-up, where she had no idea what to do.

Clue 1: Deborah was not familiar with the warm-ups – drills which help the troupe warm-up their minds and bodies. Step 1 would be to regularly practice these warm-ups so that the pre-performance warm-up is a mere reminder, a pointer to all of the work she had done in the past. Here is a famous stand-up comedian asked to work in a different comedy discipline where her many years of skill were of no use. In the warm-up, we see that the students, on the other hand, were extremely well-prepared. This wasn’t wasn’t a case of lack of talent, in other words, this was a lack of preparation.

Gladwell summarizes it thusly:

The truth is that improv isn’t random and chaotic at all. If you were to sit down with the cast… you’d quickly find out that they aren’t all the sort of zany, impulsive, free-spirited comedians that you might imagine them to be… Every week they get together for a lengthy rehearsal. After each show they gather backstage and critique each other’s performance soberly.

Far from a talent driven act of play, actors treat improvisation as serious work full of rehearsal, discipline, and critical reflection. Back to Gladwell:

Why do they practice so much? Because improv is an art form governed by a series of rules, and they want to make sure that when they’re up onstage, everyone abides by those rules.

This brings us to Clue 2: Deborah doesn’t know the guiding philosophy. Preston Smith explains the importance of acceptance - of “yes-and”-ing your colleagues to keep the flow going. Deborah immediately negated this flow, which forces the troupe leader to explain it to her.

In Blink, Gladwell’s troupe goes on to compare improv to yet another domain, basketball. Basketball was a favorite sport of mine in elementary school, though I was not great at it - and the reason I wasn’t great probably has something to do with the problems that Deborah Vance faced. Gladwell explains:

Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyonee first engages in hours of highly receptive and structured practice – perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again — and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court.

In short, he says:

Spontaneity isn’t random… How good people’s decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.

Deborah, skilled as she was as a comedian, had no chance of success given that she worked in a different medium (stand-up), and had no experience with improv, making this failure howl-worthy.

Lessons for Musicians

This brings me back to jazz and finally back to rehearsal.

I believe that the skills conductors need in rehearsal are neither ephemeral nor insubstantial; to the contrary, they are thick and laden with challenge. But they are frequently difficult to discern without experience.

Some of that is unavoidable. But I think that some of it is also due to the lack of available literature on the topic. Because young conductors often have few opportunities to conduct, it behooves the profession to do what we can to make visible those aspects of rehearsal which can be described and explained. These include some issues such as sonority, phrasing, articulation, balance, and precision which do come up from time to time in classes and workshops.

In addition, there are a wide variety of procedural questions about:

what to say,

how to say it,

when to stop and fix something, and

what to do next,

…as just a few examples of the tactics which receive very little discussion.

And if described fully, they would reveal the improvisatory character of rehearsal in a way which score study alone would not. As critical as conducting technique and score preparation both are, there is more to it than that.

However, Deborah, for all her lack of skill in improv comedy, shows tremendous procedural knowledge at the top of the episode during a photo shoot, just one of many examples of the lessons that she teaches her young apprentice. When Ava compliments her tremendous skill, she responds almost by rote with a crisp and clear procedure for striking the perfect pose:

Ava: Fierce! You’ve gotta teach me how to take a photo like that!

Deborah: Chin down, nose forward, eyes up, and hum the national anthem, keeps the jowls tight.

Life is full of little procedures which are not rigid, but provide a structure for interesting variation. Rehearsal is a perfect place to take stock of the many procedures we use to get the work done and collate, consolidate that knowledge, to spread better and better practices across the music world.

Many terrific teachers and thinkers are working out the shape of these things.

Many terrific teachers and thinkers are working out the shape of these things. One of my personal favorite thinkers is Rebecca Roesler, who has tackled this challenge from the perspective of problem solving. She utilizes a variety of interesting approaches, but one that caught my attention was her focus on string quartet rehearsals.2

Chamber music research seems to be one of the most interesting places to look for interesting writing, due in part to the limit on the number of people and interactions to try to monitor. It's also a great place to go because, as Gary Lewis frequently points out, orchestral music is at its best when it is approached like large-scale chamber music. The Claudio Abbado-founded Mahler Chamber Orchestra might seem like a contradiction, if not for this strong connection. And lastly, it is fascinating for our purposes, for all of the same reasons that improv comedy is fascinating - it is another pure enactment of the three core principles we learned from Preston Smith: Listening, Acceptance, and Group Mind.

And rehearsal is where the groundwork is laid for that magic, as Roesler and others continue to document.

I hope that the next 10 years will be a time in which many such resources will be created. I am working on some of those myself. In the meantime, what can we do?

To answer that we might ask, given what we’ve learned, what Deborah Vance and Malcolm Gladwell might advise. I think it would probably be that young conductors should take some time during score prep to rehearse their rehearsals.

Rehearse your Rehearsal

Far from fiction or a tangiential metaphor, that is exactly what I’m proposing. But don’t take it from me.

Marin Alsop often says that when she was just starting out, she would sit with her score, make a rehearsal plan, then sit and time herself with a stopwatch as she practiced verbalizing a suggestion for an anticipated rehearsal challenge, working out both the wording, and developing a sense for how long it took to fix things as she tried to assemble her rehearsal plan. That’s right: she rehearsed her rehearsals!

Gladwell goes on in the book to describe one of the important benefits of Alsop’s suggestion: by preparing those elements of rehearsal that we can, it frees our limited cognitive resources to attend to many other issues that emerge during rehearsal.

Marin would be the first to tell you that, as she would say, “if things don’t work according to plan, you need to get a new plan, fast.” That is (borrowing from our three metaphors), just as you move through the “chord changes” of a jazz chart, or execute the various “plays,” or utilize various routines like “the Harold,” so to do conductors have certain tactical procedures which they can use almost without thinking in order to achieve certain outcomes.

One classic example would be the root-fifth-third method of tuning a chord. This sequence is well-known and well-subscribed by many excellent conductors as a tried and true method for quickly getting a chord in tune by following the laws of acoustics. There are many procedures like these that we can quickly turn to when the need arises, yet very little of this has been systematically explored. It seems to me that in order to advance our craft, we need to get a better handle on what is going on in rehearsal, both for ourselves and in order to ease the path for our students.

When I would get picked up from Basketball practice as a kid, my Dad would cheekily ask “how was basketball rehearsal tonight?” Though in hindsight, perhaps he wasn’t as cheeky as I suspected at the time. After all, and perhaps not totally coincidentally, one of the NBA’s teams is the Utah Jazz.

1. Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (New York: Black Bay, 2005), 111-115

2. Rebecca Ann Roesler, “Development and Application of a Framework for Observing Problem Solving by Teachers and Students in Music,” (PhD diss.: University of Texas, 2013), https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/21569.

3. Rebecca A. Roesler, “Toward Solving the Problem of Problem Solving: An Analysis Framework,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 26, no. 1 (October 1, 2016): 28–42, https://doi.org/10.1177/1057083715602124.

4. Rebecca A Roesler, “Fantastic Four! Problem-Solving Processes of a Professional String Quartet,” Psychology of Music 50, no. 2 (March 1, 2022): 403–21, https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735621998746.

Cover Image Courtesy HBO

[jordanconductor]

What is a Rehearsal?

If this is your first time to visit my blog, welcome! My name is Jordan and I’m a conductor, teacher, and music-lover. This is my blog, the Conductor’s Notebook. To get an overview, visit About the Blog.

The following is an adapted version of a thread that originally appeared on Twitter in June 2022..

I’ve been writing a lot recently, and most of it about a passion of mine, which is the rehearsal process. But, what exactly is a rehearsal? This might seem like a facile or even pedantic question, but it’s a big one for professionals and music educators alike. It’s difficult to determine how to have a good rehearsal if we don’t first agree on what a rehearsal entails.

Music, like many disciplines, sometimes suffers from a pileup of overlapping meanings for the same or similar words. This is made worse by some of our better literature, which is often neither consistent with the world or itself. One example is the concept of Rehearsal. What is it? This pretty basic question is surprisingly difficult to answer.

First off, there are many different kinds of rehearsal, at least as many as Schechner's 8 "kinds" of performance.1 But, even within the "in the arts" kind, theater and music are quite different in structure and culture.

Within music, rehearsal remains ambiguous. It can refer to the act (let's rehearse this passage) or the activity which is a session containing many instances of the act (rehearsal is at 7 PM). One definition is a container for the other - similar to a synecdoche.

Yet, somehow "I'm going to a rehearsal with my children's choir" and "I'm going to rehearsal at the Met" are both perfectly formed sentences. Those usages share something in common, vastly different though they may be.

Paul Scanling did a nice job of identifying two of the commonalities: productivity and purpose.

Rob Dietz agrees that it has something to do with goals, prioritizing, and coordinating between individuals - work that can't be done alone.

Jamie Kennedy, a scholar and professional trombonist in Brisbane, has a nice definition: "the personal and interpersonal process of progressively constituting and reconstituting musical performance."2

Curiously silent on the matter: both of the relevant Harvard and Oxford dictionaries. There are other oddities. Grove has an entry, a decent one, but it is almost entirely focused on opera, without ever really declaring it so. They do a good job outlining some of the general difficulties on documenting the topic.

Conductor Emily Freeman Brown is to my knowledge the only source that has tried to really pin down some of the more subtle distinctions. Terms such as "rehearsal technique," "rehearsal strategies," and "rehearsal plan" have entries. Progress! More clarity is still required.3

"A gathering of musicians in order to practice the music for a concert performance. (Fr. La répétition, Ger. Die Probe, It. La prova, Sp. ensayo.)"  -- Brown: A Dictionary for the Modern Conductor

Rousseau had an entry for rehearsal (répétition). This translation is not good, but, he seemed to capture the importance of a musical rehearsal as a workshop environment when working on a new work with the composer in the room.

Scholar, conductor, and journalist Elliott Galkin wrote a commendable tome on history and theory of conducting, but weirdly doesn't dwell much on rehearsal. Rehearsal is a context for conducting, and not an object to investigate.4

But, he did notice a parallel set of omissions when tracing the history of conducting. Conducting is a bit more understandable as the "baton conductor" (as Galkin calls it) is a more recent phenomenon. But group musical preparation is much older when looking at other cultures, still quite a bit older in Eurocentric traditions, and also more ubiquitous: string quartets lack a conductor but do not lack for rehearsal, for instance.

What's the story here? I think it as at least partially due to the limits of language to describe music, which (as an act, i.e. performance) is a fundamentally different way of knowing.

It's also so central to the culture of music-making that it's often difficult to see. We feel its effects without clearly seeing how it works. Or, we know we're in rehearsal because we showed up to the time and place on the rehearsal schedule, with further associations building in our unconscious.

Lastly, I think it has to do with the materials-ontology of music that reifies the composer and “the work” as the alpha and omega of music, ignoring all of the many other aspects of music-making that Small glorifies in Musicking.

As I have travelled the country to talk to conductors about developing their rehearsal technique, I always like to ask the room about the training they received in their degree programs. You would think it would be front and center in any musical degree program, so central as it is to musical life, but many students can get a diploma in music from a reputable institution without ever receiving any training in rehearsal technique, other than experiential learning. It’s just not a thing. And the few that do, don't get very much at all. As with any skill, rehearsal requires experience, as well as a basis for that experience.

If we can’t agree on a definition, or even that there needs to be a definition, then we will struggle to pin down its attributes and train them effectively.

In the meantime, many of us will go on rehearsing and honing our craft. For my part, I’m going to keep chipping away at that question, rehearsing with as much vigor and skill as I can muster, and learning from others as I share what I’m learning.

I’m unsure about many of the fundamental questions that have continued to come up in my research, which has included rehearsal observations, interviews, and literature review. What I am sure about, is that we could do this work a little better if we could become a little more systematic about how we develop this important and often overlooked skill.

To do that, we will need an agreed-upon system!

1. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2013), 31.

2. Jamie L. Kennedy, “Learning In Professional Orchestras” (Griffith thesis, Griffith University, 2020), 104. https://doi.org/10.25904/1912/3952.

3. Emily Freeman Brown, A Dictionary for the Modern Conductor. (Rowman & Littlefield: 2015), 285.

4. Elliott W. Galkin. A History of Orchestral Conducting: In Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Pendragon Press: 1988).

[jordanconductor]

Knowing When to Stop and Fix

If this is your first time to visit my blog, welcome! My name is Jordan and I’m a conductor, teacher, and music-lover. This is my blog, the Conductor’s Notebook. To get an overview, visit About the Blog.

Yesterday, I explored some ideas on running a rehearsal from none other than [George] Bernard Shaw. I shared a few ideas of his that seemed to directly connect with music rehearsals and added a few thoughts of my own and those of other musicians. One that stood out to me was Knowing when to Hold and When to Fold.

Essentially, Shaw’s suggestion had to do with knowing when to accept an error in rehearsal and when to continue to drill it a little while longer in the hopes of improving it. You can read the quotes and my analysis here.

Today, I’d like to talk about a different situation to try to recognize: the appropriate place to stop the music and begin to rehearse. In Shaw’s context, just as in ours, the answer to when to stop in rehearsal had to do with a number of factors, including which rehearsal in the cycle it was. When it comes off-book rehearsals after the read-throughs and blocking, Shaw said this:

you must leave the stage and sit in the auditorium with a big notebook, and from that time forth never interrupt a scene, nor allow anyone else to interrupt it or try back.^1

This, interestingly, marks a stark divide between concert music and the stage, mostly due to the memorization factor which is largely absent in concert music. In short, here’s an example where Shaw’s advice doesn’t really hold per se for musicians (though perhaps to an extent for opera). If these rules for memorized rehearsals don’t apply, how should musicians think about when to stop?

The legendary German-American conductor, teacher, and writer Max Rudolf had this to say:

“With the rehearsal under way, it is for the conductor to decide when to interrupt for corrections or discussions. Experience alone teaches him up to what point his gestures and facial expressions will suffice to communicate his intentions to the players, and which details make verbal clarification imperative.”^2

It is for the conductor to decide, but how can a conductor know? For Rudolf in 1961, the answer is “experience alone.” However, Annie Murphy Paul has convincingly demonstrated a variety of evidence-based ways to lend our expertise to others, to draw it out of experts, and to simulate experiences in ways that help later. Experience in conducting at least partly boils down to having a repertoire of strategies available, and observing and recording the moves of other conductors is one way to enact one of Paul’s findings: "copiers get access to the best strategies in others' repertoires."^3

Some of this boils down to expertise, having a plan, and having an easy-to-read clock to help stay on the plan. That said, it’s helpful to have some idea of what the norms look like, perhaps with a heuristic or model or guidepost.

For some help, we turn to conductors Evan Feldman and Ari Contzius. They write:

"Directors with an acute ‘conductor ear’ will always find something that needs attention, but eventually we have to move to the next rehearsal objective. Moreover, remember that learning technical facility is a gradual process. Be sensitive to when the group has reached its limit and revisit the passage another day. Use phrases such as ‘This has made improvement today,’ and ‘Practice this at home and let's revisit it during the next rehearsal.’"^4

This has made improvement today, I love these suggested phrases for situations with young students. What about other contexts?

Last year, I was backstage ready to go on for a concert with an orchestra of seasoned musicians. The concertmaster was also waiting to go on, but he stopped to say what he had appreciated most about me during rehearsals:

“It was great during rehearsals, after working a spot for a minute or two and right before it was time to move on, you would say, ‘that was the best one yet.’ It implied improvement but it also implied that we could go further.”

That really meant a lot to me! Any conductor worth their salt knows to respect and show deference to the concertmaster. But any time a concertmaster appreciates the conductor, it’s a sign that healthy things are happening, and the concert seemed to bear that out.

But it was especially great to be able to bank that phrase as a reliable and fairly universal phrase as a succinct way to help convey:

progress,

lack of final satisfaction,

belief in the orchestra’s ability to eventually get there.

Not only does it imply that the orchestra can go further, but it almost implies that the orchestra will go further. It does a lot of work! I’m glad it was brought to my attention because to be honest, I’m not sure I had put that much thought into it.

When I work with my coaching clients, I talk about knowing when to stop and talk as a matter of goals and priorities, and understanding not whether the orchestra has perfected a spot, but whether you are satisfied with the progress now, relative to the other work you need to get done in the time allotted. These conditional statements already open up a pretty significant decision tree. While conductors are almost certainly not literally working through a decision tree in real time (instead “chunking,” using intuition and recognition, and/or processing tasks in parallel), it is helpful to be reminded of the factors at play to help train our intuition. See diagram, right. Happy rehearsing!

1. Bernard Shaw, The Art of Rehearsal (New York: S. French, 1928). https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b304399

2. Max Rudolf, “Rehearsal Techniques,” in The Conductor’s Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 275–92.

3. Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), 172

4. Feldman, Evan and Ari Contzius. Instrumental Music Education: Teaching with the Musical and the Practical in Harmony, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2021), 227-228.

[jordanconductor]

Notebooks, Part 2: Thinking on Paper

If this is your first time to visit my blog, welcome! My name is Jordan and I’m a conductor, teacher, and music-lover. This is my blog, the Conductor’s Notebook. To get an overview, visit About the Blog.

In part 1 of this 2-parter, I discussed the importance of writing as a form of thinking for musicians of all types. Check it out by visiting Part One: In Praise of Paper. Here’s Part Two: What to Write About • Growth

Thinking on Paper: What to Write About

Returning to notebooks: as I said, being the good minimalist that I was, I missed out on the original Moleskine craze in the 90’s, so since then, I’ve been making up for lost time... While I started this essay by mentioning my love of writing, I have to admit, personal writing was not a part of that interest until recently. If you wold have put this bug in my ear in 2018, I might have said: “Ok! You’ve convinced me. I’ll start writing more often. But what should I write about?” Here are a few ideas.

I’ve already mentioned rehearsal observations, interview notes, and notes from special events like lectures and even concerts as a go-to use case for professional use. Here are some others that show up for me in the music world.

First, I have become much more serious about reflective practice: regularly sitting down with my notebook (and occasionally a voice memo if it’s a week with too much driving and not enough sitting!) and try to reflect on how my most recent rehearsal or conducting class went and try to work out what I can do to improve my work next time. This could also be paired with watching video. I’ll often sit on our deck (pictured above) and listen to the birds sing and the trees shuffle while I write. There are at least three categories of activity to think through on paper when aiming at professional reflection:

What worked/didn’t work this time?

What should we work on next rehearsal/class?

What should I work on in the meantime to improve my rehearsal technique/teaching?

Second, I am deep into my DMA at this point and currently gearing up to write my terminal document (colloquially known as a dissertation, although what I will produce is a bit different and idiosyncratic to music and Peabody-Johns Hopkins). These notebooks have been helpful to no end in helping me work out my thinking about the broad topic I’m tackling, which is rehearsal technique. This might look like an individual topic-specific page to collect short thoughts, a quick dated memo to look up a source or collect notes about a source, or an idea that came to me while coaching a conductor.

Third, I recently recalled a long-forgotten detail about my dear teacher, Gustav Meier. Mr. Meier was well-known as a copious note-taker on each conductor he worked with. It was a massive upgrade to working memory, but I have to believe that the “thinking on paper” principles discussed last time (and discussed at length in The Extended Mind) played a major role as well. Since that time, I have come to use that same method to extend my thinking, making notes on the conductors I have the privilege to work with: everyone from the world’s finest, to the wealth of colleagues and mentors who I learn from, to (more recently, and like Mr. Meier) my conducting students and coaching clients. How I wish I could have asked to see a few pages of Mr. Meier’s notebooks to see how he organized the information! While I don’t know how specifically he used them, I know how I have used them. Not only have they helped me to recall what I saw, they have forced me to think about what I saw. Here are some examples:

I’m observing a teacher, colleague, or student and I’ve noticed an effective gesture I’d like to add to my repertoire. While I can’t really diagram it per se, I can certainly label what I see! Phrases like “thrown open,” “medicine ball drop,” and “Jazz 3” appear in my notes. These won’t mean much to you without some explanation, but they reinforce to me what I saw, when, who, and with what repertoire.

Later when I’m trying to develop my approach to a passage during my score prep, I might recall those same terms to help me create a plan of attack. That still doesn’t mean I will necessarily use that gesture, but it will call to mind the spirit of the gesture in a way that I find meaningful and specific, helping me to avoid becoming too mannered about my approach. This harkens to the “Power of Metaphor” one of the Sources of Power (our best cognitive resources) detailed by Gary Klein in his bestselling book by the same name.

I hear an interesting quote or story. I’ve been thinking about musical epistemology, which relies heavily on apprenticeship, tradition, received wisdom, and reverence. These are all valuable forms of knowledge which can be interrogated and integrated alongside more rigorous methodologies, and they are particularly valuable when trying to work in a humanistic pursuit like music. I have found it useful not to expect that I’ll be able to recall these stories later if I don’t note them down - and try to add a word or two about the connections I draw - to add my own thinking to the mix.

I want to argue. A great deal of conducting is about disciplining ourselves, both to ourselves, as well as to our teachers, the needs of our students and colleagues, and the requirements of our positions. Sometimes, we learn things that we don’t understand or even disagree with. It’s great to get these down on paper so that we remember to wrestle with them later, and try to glean as much as we can out of that disagreement.

A few miscellaneous points:

Importantly, notebooks don’t represent a breach of etiquette the way that hopping on tablets and phones while talking with friends or listening to a talk or class. Unlike the digital, no matter how innocently intended, notebooks on the other hand create a sense of heightened intimacy! They say:

What you’re saying is so important to me, I want to write it down, but I also want to stay away from my distracting devices so that I can be completely focused on what you have to say.

I’m not alone. My dear friend and wonderful conductor Chris Dobbins prefers handwritten rehearsal plans. Friend and outstanding composer Jamie Leigh Sampson writes every day. Depending on who is reading, this may seem quite banal and obvious, or it might seem like we’re a bunch of revolutionary luddites. What’s interesting to me is that, much more than a style or personal preference, I believe notebooks represent a time- and science-tested way of thinking more clearly, in the physical world, something that goes far beyond merely capturing data into digital storage, as Annie Murphy Paul so successfully demonstrates.

These are just a few ways to use these notebooks to think clearly in the context of professional work. There are dozens more! All that to say, where I once passively observed rehearsals, now I actively glean from rehearsals, attempting to suck the marrow from each suggestion, gesture, and event as it unfolds, marking not just my score, but also writing in my notebooks.

Growth

Lastly, like everyone reading this (well, almost everyone), I’m a human being. I have been using my notebooks to figure out all kinds of personal decisions, in part, by slowing down long enough to really think clearly. A great way to do this is to inscribe my thoughts on paper. In other words, the slowness of handwriting isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. I embrace the slow!

I have found that the time it takes me to slow down and patiently handwrite to myself in complete sentences, in a place that is not meant for public consumption online, has been one of the single biggest game-changers for my mind and spirit in the past three years in terms of clarifying my thoughts and feelings on everything from personal stress, to ideas for artistic ventures, to programming an exciting concert, to deciding whether and when to propose to my spouse—I did, it was December 21, 2022, and she said YES!! This idea veers strongly into the personal and spiritual domain for me, and I have engaged in deep reflections on not just my teaching and conducting but my marriage, my family, and my friends and other important relationships. I’ve also investigated difficult moments of rejection as well as tried to think clearly about moments of success: both to memorialize the highs as a balm for future challenges, and to think clearly about those highs, which sometimes can lead to new challenges that require careful thought.

What I have found most interesting is the way in which these efforts, many of them meant solely for my own personal edification and growth as a human being, have unwittingly redounded directly to my skill as a conductor. Conducting as a musical and physical skill requires an enormous number of related skills, but conducting as a profession requires all of those and many more - and high reflectivity, intellectual curiosity, and emotional intelligence are among them. These journals have helped me to cultivate these areas, throwing a net around fleeting thoughts, and consolidating and organizing all of the many streams of thought that go floating by.

In short, what I started doing mostly for personal reasons, has quickly morphed into an enterprise of growth in other domains, and a cornerstone of my daily practice as a human being. And the results have been noticeable to myself and others. I started something like “morning pages” on January 1, 2021, in the heart of the first full winter of the post-COVID world in which we all now live. This provided a natural experiment - where I had some time away from many of the individuals I know to grow - returning and trying to see what is landing for others. As undesirable as the time apart from so many friends and loved ones due to travel and gathering restrictions, it gave me time to grow. By 2023, say, many people who hadn’t seen me in person since before the pandemic had remarked to me not only about my improved centered-ness and grounded-ness as a person, but of my improved presence on the podium.

—

I can’t say there is a single quality of a conductor that I’ve mastered, but I can say that these notebooks have helped me accelerate my growth in all of them, and I can’t recommend them highly enough!

While this blog will always be a place to share rough drafts and other serviceable ideas, for me, it is not the place to develop my thinking from absolute scratch. Along with some digital tools, I rely on my my beloved Moleskine notebooks to do that job - in short, they are a delight to write on, and their premium quality is a signal to summon my best thinking on the matter at hand. Are you a paper and pen person? Get in touch and let me know what you’re planning and how you’re planning it!

[jordanconductor]

One Conductor's Notebooks

If this is your first time to visit my blog, welcome! My name is Jordan and I’m a conductor, teacher, coach, and writer. I’ve never really used this space to introduce itself before, so I thought I’d take a moment to tell you about myself and about this blog, which I call the Conductor’s Notebook. Then, I’m going to talk about actual physical notebooks and the joys of thinking on paper.

You can use these links to jump to each section:

About Me • About the Blog • In Praise of Paper • What to Write

About Me

At the center of my professional life is the orchestra, its people, and its repertoire. I can’t get enough of it—and believe me, I’ve tried! For me, it matters not whether I’m working with the youngest students or the most seasoned professionals: I’m grateful to get to make music with people who want to work hard and break a sweat to serve others with the power of astonishing music. I believe strongly in music’s enduring power to change lives for the better, and I try to orient my musical activities around my belief that musicians have a “duty to care”—that, much like doctors, we have an active responsibility to use our gifts to the very best of our abilities to help others.

Orbiting very closely nearby, perhaps equal with opportunities for music-making, is my love for teaching and coaching others to make music. This primarily comes in the form of teaching university classes such as conducting, instrumental music education methods, and orchestral performance. More recently, I also opened up a coaching practice where I work with practicing professionals to help them improve their rehearsal technique and I’ve been enriched to cheer on my colleague-clients as they have reached for greater success through our work together.

About the Conductor’s Notebook

When my conducting and teaching isn’t keeping me busy, I also love to write about music. This journey has led me to write a number of peer-reviewed articles, work as a contributor for Baltimore Magazine, and share my thoughts here at the Conductor’s Notebook. I imagine a reader who is interested one or more of the things I’m interested in: music, composers, conducting, culture, books, and philosophy.

I’ve written a number of pieces about Florence Price, one of my all-time favorite composers, as well as articles that speak to philosophy, programming, other favorite composers and works, and other moments and cultural touchstones that have stood out to me. I’d invite you to check out the backlog.

I chose my cheeky, pun-y (🎵-book) title more than anything because I see this as a place to think out loud, in a quiet space away from social media, about the musical issues that come up in my life as a conductor. I think of it almost like a journal: as a collection of drafts and log entries, open letters, interesting links, personal discoveries, music and books I love, and other ephemera that I think might be valuable to others. It is still a place where I try to maintain the ideals of the early blog movements the few remaining independent blogs: informative middle/long-form essays written with a mixed formal/informal style, and sprinkled with personality. I know I must have mentioned my cats once or twice! It’s a place to get my ideas online, but away from the freneticism of social media. As AI becomes an increasingly dominant force, I think it becomes all the more important that humans take time to think and communicate with other humans.

In Praise of Paper

Now, I’d like to praise another kind of notebook and another kind of writing. That would be the personal writing I do using my Moleskine notebooks.

Now, an interest in paper and pen might seem to date me as a Luddite to some. To tell you the truth, I used to be a committed minimalist in the mid-aughts, dutifully digitizing, selling and giving away most physical media, and getting my first iPad. I did this with the belief that I’d one day have everything, even my scores, all mashed down to a single magic screen. What an innocence we all had back then! In addition to depriving our senses of adequate stimulation, it turns out that after a while, minimalism can become a little mundane… to say nothing of the dangers of being sucked into our devices.

Since that time, I’ve become a big believer in tactile objects in the physical world as the key driver to learning and even basic mental health. Minimalist as I became, I could never get over the hurdle of my physical scores, but now I’ve proceeded in retrograde, back to the very beginning, relying heavily on physical scores, physical books, and physical journals to write in. Screens are great in moderation, but they are just one tool in the tool belt.

Since my turn to the tactile, by my count, I’ve spilled ink on over 1,200 pages in the past three and a half years, in which time I have made the paper and pen my go-to method to collect and sharpen my thoughts. What do I write? I’ve captured countless rehearsal observations everywhere from the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic, to the Pittsburgh and Baltimore Symphony Orchestras, to the best high school orchestras in Texas. It’s also my go-to place to take notes when I’ve had opportunities to conduct interviews with conductors like Mei-Ann Chen, Leonard Slatkin, and my dear teacher Marin Alsop, all of which led to my forthcoming article in the Journal of the International Conductors Guild.

Most importantly, my notebooks are the place where I write down my thoughts. I’ve become convinced that some very olde ideas about written notes and journaling turn out to stand the test of time: Writing your ideas down, on paper, in complete sentences, is one of the single most productive and efficient ways to organize your thinking on any topic. There is copious evidence to suggest that this is the Cadillac of learning methods. To examine this evidence for yourself, I want to highly recommend Annie Murphy Paul’s 2022 book, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. It is a great place to explore some of the more recent research into several related types of extended cognition (handwriting being one), told in an engaging way through interesting stories that examine the practices of artists and intellectuals from Robert Caro to Richard Feynman and explore the way that the body, space, and other people are not just add-ons but important core components of what it means to be a thinking human being.

In her chapter on “the space of ideas” she demonstrates convincingly that we need to transfer ideas out of our heads and onto artifacts like maps, models, and notebooks that we can manipulate and evaluate. That, more than help us think, these artifacts allow us to think in a far more expansive way than we could ever hope to accomplish on our own. They allow us to “offload” a great deal of information out of our heads, embedding and encoding that information into our “map” so that we can add additional thinking without having to store that information in short term memory. She takes us through well known “maps” like Darwin’s notebooks. Conductors often create elaborate diagrams of movements or whole works in order to try to comprehend the overall structure of a challenging part of the repertoire. Describing his diagram for Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel, conductor John Devlin wrote, “I had so much fun filling in the details of this story, accounting for every bar of the piece in my own narrative.” In my own narrative. This is critical - John isn’t merely transferring musical ideas onto paper, he’s thinking through these ideas with paper.

While citing research into extended cognition, Paul illustrates her point by recounting an episode in which the renowned physicist Richard Feynman described thinking with paper to a skeptic who thought it was merely a record of thinking:

"No, it's not a record," not really. It's working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?"  -- Richard Feynman, quoted in The Extended Mind, 158

I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about score study and particularly about the ways in which our score is our map, and the way in which it may require a significant amount of score marking to prep it for rehearsal. This, too, is working. I have to work on my score and this is the score. A fully marked-up score does not equate to a fully learned score, but the marking certainly is a major contributor to the process of learning them. In fact, many conductors approach marking in a relatively heavy and methodical way, I think, for good reason.

What to Write

In my next post, I’ll describe some of the other ways I personally use my notebooks to work out important ideas in my daily life. Stay tuned!

[jordanconductor]

What Good Does Research Do?

I have been in the still fairly early stages of a longterm research project centered around rehearsal technique for about 18 months. As I've gotten to chat with colleagues and friends, most folks have been really interested in the informal bits I've discussed so far. Occasionally, I'll hear from friendly folks who are a bit skeptical, not of the topic, but about the entire enterprise of engaging in research as a means to improve practical podium skills as a conductor.*

I get it! If I want to get healthy, should I go for a walk or read a book on fitness? The answer seems obvious: go for a walk!. Speaking as a person who has been trying with modest success to get healthy, I can tell you, there are a few things I wish I had learned 3 years ago that would have eased my journey and prevented injury. A quick skim through a short book might have been a good idea, actually.

Back to the research itself: What do I say to teachers who are skeptical? This is not completely rhetorical: I'm primarily a practicing conductor and music educator. And while I love to write, I'm not primarily a scholar, so I don't really know for sure.

But I think from now on I'll just direct them to this quick read by Margaret Schmidt. She catalogs the many ways that music teaching (her lens) has changed over her 50 year career as an elementary school orchestra director (citing each change according to the relevant research that fueled those changes. Here are just three examples she cites:

“Now, educators seldom espouse a “banking” model of teaching, opting for more constructivist approaches that recognize both the benefits and limitations of experiences individual students bring to their learning (e.g., Kelly McHale, 2013; Wiggins, 2015).”

“Similarly, teacher education classes recognize the influence of preservice teachers’ prior experiences, and balance peer teaching and early field experiences with reflection prior to student teaching (e.g., Orzolek, 2018; Powell, 2014).”

“We recognize the importance of individuals’ home cultures in learning and teaching and are developing more culturally responsive pedagogical approaches (e.g., McKoy & Lind, 2016; Soto, 2018).”

After the end of the longer list, she writes of it, "The above ideas were hot research topics and were much debated in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now they seem to be commonly accepted as truisms."

She concludes by making it practical - as a call to action for active teachers like herself: "What small contributions might you be making to help us forge paths leading to ever more inclusive and expansive music learning and teaching research and practice?"

I picked out the bits that are appealing to me for my current purposes, but what you mostly have is a beautiful and brief reflection of a lifetime of teaching and research-about-teaching and the beautiful interplay between them. It's an easy read for any practicing musician.

Go read the rest of the article here.

If you don’t have access, I’d be happy to send it along! Get in touch here.

Citation

Schmidt, Margaret. "CONTEMPLATIONS ON MUSIC EDUCATION: On the Value of Research and Community, Or what Good does Research do?" Contributions to Music Education 48 (2023): 203-9.

Note

*I use conductor to encompass any kind of music ensemble leadership involving professionals, amateurs, and students of all ages. Vocal coach, chamber music coach, jazz band director, rock band teacher, and percussion ensemble director also count!

[jordanconductor]

Kyle Gann's Chronology of the Symphony

I have always appreciated Kyle Gann’s website for its resources for Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3. Recently, I took time to investigate some of the other resources he freely provides, including his own compositions, as well as links to his many books and albums. Among the resources on the site is a terrific “Chronology of the Symphony: 1730-2019,” listing years and major symphonies composed and/or premiered that year.

This is a valuable programming tool! As many conductors have their 2023-24 seasons increasingly locked in, I thought I’d look ahead to interesting anniversaries that might be of relevance for the 2024-25 season to list, by way of example. This is a treasure trove of information which would be of use to a wide assortment of other purposes. For instance, I sometimes included important works by other contemporary composers in my Florence Price chronology, and I’m tempted to use this to add in a few more examples.

It is also just one of the many jewels living on this Gann’s website, alongside his many compositions, writings, recorded albums, and books. I was concerned that, as with any website, there is a longterm certainty of link rot, which led me to want to archive this page. I was equally relieved to see that it had already been archived 134 times.

2024 Anniversaries

The 200th anniversary of Beethoven 9 and Mendelssohn 1 (1824)

The 150th anniversary of a symphony by an unfairly obscure American composer George Frederick Bristow, whose Symphony No. 4 “Arcadian” premiered in 1774. Gann personally engraved a score from the composers manuscript, which is held by the New York Public Library and provides a thorough analysis. Bristow has aroused the interest of a number of other scholars in recent years. Just two examples:

Douglas Shadle details this important chapter of American musical history in an excellent book titled Orchestrating the Nation.

Katherine K. Preston edited the A-R Editions score and parts to his Symphony No. 2 in D Minor, Op. 24 (Jullien) in 2011.

The 125th anniversary of Sibelius 1

The 100th anniversary of Sibelius 7, Prokofiev 2 (but premiered in 1925), and Gustav Holst’s Choral Symphony

The 75th anniversary of Bernstein 2 (“The Age of Anxiety”), and George Antheil’s 6th Symphony

2025 Anniversaries

The 175th anniversary of Schumann 3, as well as a terrific and less well-known composer, Ludwig Spohr, whose 9th symphony (“The Seasons”) also premiered in 1850.

The 150th anniversary of the composition of Dvorak 5 (but premiered in 1887), Tchaikovsky 3 (Polish), and John Knowles Paine 1 (but premiered in 1876)

The 125th anniversary of Scriabin 1

The 100th anniversary of Copland’s Organ Symphony, Copland’s Dance Symphony (but premiered in 1931), and Shostakovich 1 (but premiered in 1926)

I don’t know Gann, but he seems like an exemplary scholar and teacher, as evidenced in part by his many humorous sayings fondly collected by students in his courses. Just one example from Kyleisms:

"Tenor clef is not in my contract - I don't have to do more than five sharps or flats, or tenor clef."  -- Kyle Gann

I have increasingly sought to use this website as a repository for a lot of the music and musical doings that I find interesting and important, with an eye towards creating resources for others, so it is a joy to spend time talking about another person’s website which in many ways captures what I am aiming for, which includes providing valuable resources for others to use and build upon. Thanks, Kyle!

—

…But don’t take my word for it; make sure to visit Kyle’s site, or check out some of his books and recordings!

Recordings

Books

[jordanconductor]

Be Cautious with Rehearsing Under Tempo

There is a terrific new article in American String Teacher (produced by the American String Teachers Association) called “The Case for Rehearsing at Performance Tempo.” In it, author and teacher Paul Trapkus discusses a common solution applied by many conductors to improving difficult technical passages, that of working under tempo.

In my visits to school orchestra programs across the US, I see this technique used frequently. The logic seems generally to make sense and in some passages, it can be an effective tool.

However, I agree with Trapkus that it is used too frequently and often ineffectually. He takes readers through the literature to show how slowing music down for string players is often not just a difference of speed but a fundamental difference of kind. That is, playing fast music slowly often requires a fundamentally different approach to the instrument in a way that makes it ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.

Trapkus points out that it can sometimes be effective, and I agree here too. In my own experience, there are certain types of rhythmic passages that benefit from the time and space of under-tempo work. This has shown up for me with everyone from middle school students to seasoned professionals. I have observed Marin Alsop frequently use this tool with top professional orchestras in very specific passages. She will ask them to “play it a little under” and the musicians will generally not have a problem. Being a violinist herself, she knows these limitations, and I have observed her use this rehearsal process in places with fast detache 16ths and with complicated rhythmic passages in which the other techniques of the bow are generally conserved under tempo. As usual, it’s a great tool to keep on the belt. But it’s no panacea.

Trapkus does an excellent job briefly sketching the history of the under tempo rehearsal method, then discusses its shortcomings in more detail, before providing alternative methods, organized in a useful chart.

These include what he calls a “group loop,” as well as others like the “group chain" and the “independent chain.”

Of particular interest to me was the “task breakdown.” An example would be seperating right and left hand and focussing on spiccato on one open string at the correct performance tempo, ignoring the left hand for the time being.

I like the term “task” because it breaks down the final musical execution into all of the constituent parts. When I teach rehearsal technique to undergraduate music students, I am more prone to use the term “isolation,” as in a case when you momentarily isolate your bow from the challenges of fingering, or the challenges of even string crossing. You could say that a “Task” is the object which is being isolated.

This concept is important for non-string players like myself to internalize. Each instrument and instrument family operates according to their respective relevant physical principles, and that leads to cases where certain techniques of rehearsal may be more or less transferrable to different sections of the orchestra. In this case, it is perhaps unsurprising that I first heard this perspective in a less formalized way from my undergraduate violin instructor, a terrific musician named Mark Miller.

Further, different levels of musical development may also limit the effectiveness of certain techniques. I believe that it is almost more dangerous to overuse under tempo rehearsal with younger students than with collegiate musicians, say. More dangerous because they may not have the skills or experience to understand how to contextualize and compartmentalize that technique as merely a technique, and may develop bad habits formed from trying to apply an incorrect technique (from the slow repetitions) to an incompatible (fast) tempo.

"...practicing at performance tempo can be a much more efficient way of learning music, even for young ensembles..."  -- Paul Trapkus

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, excessive under-tempo rehearsal can cause inexperienced musicians to internalize the faulty logic of the slow tempo, and fundamentally mangle the intent of the music. I love the first movement of Beethoven 5, but I never want to hear an under-tempo rendition of this music played by students who are playing it under tempo. I don’t want a student to be forced to play something poorly when they could be playing another piece of music that is equally rewarding but more appropriate to their ability level. I’d rather hear Dragon Hunter played with verve than Dvořák played badly! Our students deserve a chance to play whatever they play well.

Feel free to use this link below to access the article for free, though I hope readers might consider becoming members!

Citation

Trapkus, P. (2023). The Case for Rehearsing at Performance Tempo. American String Teacher, 73(2), 13–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031313231166022

[jordanconductor]

Maximize Rehearsal Time with Performance Indications

Rehearsal time is a precious resource when working with a large orchestra. Nowhere is that more true than when working on new music. Time may be short enough that even a conventional piece of music would be difficult to prepare in the time available. Added to that, the many complexities of contemporary repertoire may create a very long list of questions that conscientious orchestral musicians will come to rehearsal needing answers to before a read-through is possible.

Some common and vital questions (including tacit questions) include:

Are the 5/8 bars grouped 2+3 or 3+2? (Similar questions for any odd meter bar.)

After the meter (and/or tempo) change, does the beat stay constant, the pulse, or is there an unusual (or no) relationship?

Does the rallentando elide directly into the next tempo or is the next tempo faster (or significantly slower) than the end of the rallentando? (Reverse for accelerando.)

Will the conductor be in 1/2/4/8//1/2/3/6/12/etc.?

Is the following movement played attacca?

All of this comes before we get into individual part questions.

To save hours of collective time, I use a performance indications document (I’ve sometimes seen this called a flow sheet). I try to make an attractive document using a template I create in Pages that maps out tempo, meter, beat patterns, tempo relationships, and occasionally gives stylistic insight in passages that may be hard to decipher on the individual part.

Now, in a professional or university context with weeks of lead time to communicate with librarians, get markings in parts, and get parts in folders, this document may be mostly superfluous, but perhaps not entirely. For instance, there may be program note information that would be of use to the musicians, and bring them into the creative process, and certain indications that probably shouldn’t be marked into their parts, but would serve as a useful reference.

However, there may be many other times where this approach might be useful. For instance, the example I include below comes from a piece I recently premiered after three rehearsals and only 9 days with the score, and in which I could not rely on librarians, nor could I delay part distribution, which had taken place at the same time I received my score. It was part of a new music reading session with the Peabody Symphony Orchestra.

In other cases, one might encounter a set of parts in which it would be inappropriate and/or impractical to erase them fully with the time or resources available. Again, a performance indications document like this may come in handy to help cut through the noise of an already marked part.

In all cases, musicians appreciate knowing the upper tempo ceiling on faster technical passages, and the lower end for slow sections requiring special control, so one way or another, those tempo markings should be given whenever possible, or at least expressed as a general range.

Lastly, even if it isn’t meant for distribution, it is a great way for conductors to be forced to reckon with a lot of the important information about a composition that can serve as a scaffolding. In those cases, I’ve increasingly turned to creating a version of this in my personal notes system so that I can review the functional aspects of a large composition at a glance.

In my performance indications document, I try to provide the following.

Basic Details of Performance

Title

Composer Name

Information Compiler (me)

Ensemble

Summary of Rehearsal and Performance Dates, Location, and Circumstances

Work Summary

I try to provide a summary that is not necessarily identical to the composer’s note in the score (though that might be an alternative or a preference for some). Instead, I to keep my focus on the mostly practical, while still giving the briefest outline of what the piece is about or how it works in just a sentence or two. Anything to help the musicians hold the entire piece together in their minds.

Movement Flow

For each movement, I try to walk the musician chronologically through the major touchstones that reflect issues that every musician will want to know. Some steps might include the following:

List the movement name (if it has one) and number.

Name the opening tempo marking in the score and provide a tempo or tempo range.

Give an indication of the beat pattern I plan to use.

Continue providing similar information at each major section, including key/meter/tempo changes.

Indicate odd-meter bar groupings.

Indicate whether there is a pause before the next movement.

Explain any major details that may only be clear when looking at the full score.

For a sample, see the image above. I’d be happy to send this template to any conductor who would find it useful. I’m also interested to know how other conductors manage some of the same issues of performance that I’ve described here. Do you use a similar document or have you found other circumstances dictate a different procedure? Please get in touch and let me know what you do or how you think about it!

[jordanconductor]

Strategies for Diversifying Concert Programs

For years, the music community has discussed the importance of diversifying the composers that students learn and that audiences hear. However, in large ensemble genres, progress has often been slow-going. As a Creative Director of the International Florence Price Festival with a background in music education, Smith will offer a firsthand perspective as participants work together in identifying key opportunities for diversification of concert programming and strategies for finding and preparing difficult-to-access music.

In particular, participants will break down the phases of the programming cycle and examine each phase to identify strategies that will help directors adopt inclusive repertories over time. Through acknowledging the difficulties that persist, directors will better be able to tackle those challenges, while at all times maintaining complete artistic integrity.

Presented to NNAfME Eastern Division Conference - April 24, 2021 - 4:00 PM EDT

Clinic Materials

Handout

Download the clinic handout using the button below.

Slide Deck

Take a look at the presentation deck below

Playlists

Use the playlists below to begin the journey in exploring the widest possible range of repertoire. Stimulate your love for great music and feed your imagination.

Join the Club

One of the most critical components of enriching our concert programs in this difficult terrain is making sure we’re not going it alone. Join the Friends of ICD (Institute for Composer Diversity) Facebook group and start seeing more great repertoire in your feed. You can also just visit the website directly at composerdiversity.com.

Case Study

Learn more about one of the pieces I’ve found and adapted for performance with students, the Quartet in G major by Florence Price.

Repertoire Diversity Consulting

Schedule a free personal meeting with me to schedule to explore and strategize about your repertoire needs for your ensemble. Use the form below to select an available time, and I will respond via email in order to prepare for our time together. If you don’t see a time that works for you, send me an email.

[jordanconductor]

Oklahoma, the Muscogee Nation, and Black Wall Street. And Florence Price.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and Black Wall Street. With special guest, Florence Price!

Oklahoma keeps coming up this year as a theme in a variety of unexpected ways both for me personally and for the nation. I recently took my dad to see the new production of Oklahoma! for his first-ever trip to New York, which certainly provided a great deal of added resonance when millions watched the many references to same in the alt-Tulsa of Watchmen (further resonance with Hamilton there!). Meanwhile, and unrelated, I’ve found myself becoming interested in the music of Jerod Tate, and thanks to the recent Supreme Court decision, now learning more about Oklahoma's history with regard to First Nations. And Oklahoma also serves as a of mental totem for a lot of other important ideas in understanding our history in the US.

One place in which the twin threads of slavery and *Indian removal come up in particular is understanding the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921. A fact most of us (including myself) probably didn't have on recall until this week is that Tulsa was founded by the Lochapoka and Muscogee nations in 1936 when they completed the dreaded Trail of Tears (which was illegal even by US standards).

To get there, we need one important fact highlighted by Rebecca Nagle's excellent podcast This Land. It is the uncomfortable truth that the Muscogee Nation (though not all American Indian tribes/nations) held slaves and allied itself with the confederacy. After the Civil War, it negotiated a new treaty with the US in which it agreed to free its slaves and in which it agreed to sell off another 3 million acres of its lands to give out to new freedmen. So, it's messy. Very, very messy! (By the way, Tate wrote the theme song for This Land.

But then something interesting happened. Muscogee Freedmen were added to the rolls of the tribe. They became citizens of Muscogee nation, and many of them settled in Tulsa (pictured above). While most of the south began erecting massive structural barriers for black excellence (Jim Crow), the Muscogee Nation tried, for the most part, to actually do right by its former slaves. While they engaged in slavery as a practice, they lacked the racial animus to attempt to perpetually hold freed slaves back. Or, they at least lacked the strongest possible degree of animus, and did not mirror white governments in their policies toward forcer slaves.

Flash forward over 50 years, and thanks to efforts from folks like Booker T Washington and O. W. Gurley, large chunks of land in Tulsa were purchased and sold exclusively to African Americans, many of whom were those original Muscogee freedman in an effort to create a black majority area that could be impervious to the rise of Jim Crow. This for me was a bit of an "aha" moment: key to black success was the mere absence of intentional white barriers thereto. Tulsa eventually became more like the rest of white America, but for a time, its roots as a hub for First Nations folks allowed their ethos to permeate the land and create space free of the white gaze, if only for a vanishingly short period of time.

[Side note: For me, this ties very much into the history of Florence Price. As Rae Linda Brown documents thoroughly in her biography of FP, released posthumously just this past month, Price’s family history in Little Rock very closely mirrors some of the history exposed in Tulsa. It would be too much to get into all of that right now, but Florence's story represents a multi-generational project was only possible in a brief window of time before the full devastation of Jim Crow and incessant lynchings made it impossible. Thus we mostly lack a succession of Black composers of color of the next 2 generations after Price that might otherwise have been expected. To be clear, there was no dearth of Black musical excellence during the period I just mentioned. I'm speaking very narrowly here. But, it attests to yet another case where Black excellence is as much a staple of Black life as one would expect to see with any other conceivable group, absent the galling oppression of Slavery and Jim Crow, to name just a couple of examples.]

"Some changes take centuries to reveal themselves."  -- Joy Harjo

And again, land and messiness comes in, because these were tribal lands that were taken from Musogee, Cherokee and Osage Indians. And tons more was being sold off to white folks, and a great deal of land (I'm summarizing) was parceled out to Native Americans themselves with the goal of getting them to sell off some of it, and then lose other portions through squatters' rights, until there was nothing left.

[Another side note: for anyone who thought this was ancient history, it's not. Take a look at the commercial chicken farms being setup spuriously to this very day in reservation residential areas. In the process they are powdering whole communities with literal chickens***. All in the name of white profit on land promised to the Five Tribes (again, listen to This Land!).]

Back to Black Wall Street: The fatal flaw in the plan was the underestimation of the vile hatred and disdain that their white neighbors would feel and respond to at the sight of Black excellence. The brutal revenge for Black achievement was exacted in 1921 as millions of dollars of black wealth, and 35 city blocks were destroyed. At least 300 black citizens were dead, and an estimated 10,000 successful middle class Black Tulsans found themselves destitute overnight.

The messiness continue right up through to today (see the chicken farms!). I don't pretend there is some big insight here, but this week’s SCOTUS decision does at last give some room for dim hope that some positive steps may be possible going forward, perhaps more than previously realized. As US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (who is a Tulsa resident and Muscogee citizen) says, "Some changes take centuries to reveal themselves." Let us hope, though, that it does not take justice centuries to reveal itself.

To achieve those steps, I think the very simple balm for that is massively educating ourselves about it. I, for one, was shocked that there was any way that Oklahoma could be restored or that lost sovereignty might be able to be somehow reconstituted to the First Nations in Oklahoma or across the country, which only shows that we need to learn more as a society, and to broaden our imagination about how to make our society just for all its members.

As a reminder, this is not a partisan issue, which would go far beyond the scope of a blog that is primarily here to serve music. There is not a single page of our history on these matters that looks great for white liberals. The Dawes commission was believed by liberals to be a great way to "help" American Indians by "integrating" (assimilating) them into American (white) culture.

Finally, I'm no historian, I'm a conductor. Performing musicians (perhaps conductors especially) use a (hopefully) rigorous process to analyze a variety of sources to seek broader truths for use in a specific application (namely, performance). It is definitely not a science, and it is not really a part of the humanities in the academic sense. It is art. But performing arts, especially recreative performing arts (i.e. non-improvisatory forms) rely on a musical analysis, cultural context, original sources, and community perspectives as just a few of the data sources to try develop a working theory of the spirit of a piece of music so that they can have a "moral core" to their performance that exudes authenticity and humanity. Somewhere in that moral core must be a commitment to basic principles of justice.

I don't know if this will hold water for everyone, but that's what I think I'm trying to do here, in a way: think out loud about how to develop a moral core to our society, one that is rooted in an accurate and complete understanding of our history. Not for everyone, but for myself and anyone else who stumbles across my little internet garden today. And I think the moral core is that we should apply the same logic of "don't tread on me" to *all* of our people, not just to the certain groups that explicitly emphasize it.

Santayana. It's cliche because it's a great quote by : "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Maybe this is our opportunity to refresh a few critical details so that our future doesn’t resemble our past.

I hope you’ll reach out and let me know what you thought of the recent SCOTUS decision and the connections you’re drawing.

*I use the word Indian freely here because most American Indians use the term freely and show a firm preference for it. It sounds like it may be an anachronistic word to white ears and it is undoubtedly just as colonial as just about any other aspect of our society, but I am assured by a variety of sources across several modalities that, on most reservations, that is mostly not the case. YMMV but I think we should call folks whatever they want to call themselves - which above all is to refer to the SPECIFIC nation from which they hail. (For more, start here and here.)

Book

I will never pass on an opportunity to encourage folks to learn more about Florence Price! Read the first two chapters to dig deeper.

[jordanconductor]

Music by Jerod Tate

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, I have frequently been posting lists of repertoire on social media under the name “Power Rankings.” From time to time going forward, I’ll share them on my blog as well. In light of today’s great news out of Oklahoma, I thought I’d open with one of my recent lists with some important resonance.

A new favorite composer of mine in the past 6 months is Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate. In every bar of his astonishing music, you’ll find energy and vitality and craftsmanship and deeply enjoyable music. I hope you join me in excitement over his excellent music. Check it out! 

Shakamaxon for String Orchestra Standing Bear: A Ponca Indian Cantata in Eight Tableaux Lowak Shoppala' (Fire and Light)  Ghost of the White Deer (Bassoon Concerto) Tracing Mississippi (Flute Concerto) Taloa' Hiloah (Thunder Song) - for solo timpani Iholba' (The Vision) - for Solo Flute, Orchestra and Chorus MoonStrike, for String Quartet and Narrator Chokfi': Sarcasm, for String Orchestra and Percussion Inchokkillissa - for Guitar and Percussion

Please learn more about Jerod’s music on his website, from the couple of videos below, or by purchasing his album or sheet music.

[jordanconductor]

Notes on Haydn

One of the great joys of living life as a Haydn fan and a devoted new music practitioner is that he is essentially a living composer as a matter of personal experience. By that, I mean that there is no doubt that the most prolific Haydn performers go to their graves having never even heard all of his music, let alone performed it all. Folks like myself will be only too grateful to spend time with just a tiny fraction. Therefore, over many years, you will constantly find yourself experiencing works that are new to you, as if they are all world premieres. 

Long ago, I had my last opportunity to hear a Beethoven symphony for the first time, for instance. Not so with Haydn! He wrote over 104 symphonies, and that is merely one genre among many. Haydn's Creation is merely a single work. Step back for a moment and recognize how astonishing that is. At every point along the musical journey, you find yourself blindsided by some other A-list-level piece of his that you've not once heard in your life. There are just too many! 

Haydn is just a delight to listen to, like a crisp sav blanc (and by the way, he's a perfect summer seasonal!). At turns he can be ruthless, violent, silly, vibrant, sentimental, mannered, tortured, lamenting, gentle, and most importantly: much of his music is genuinely funny, without ever resorting to slapstick. That is not easy to do! I never cease to experience childlike surprise when I enjoy another Haydn symphony for the first time.

It gets worse: not only are there too many works, they are all fantastic. Ordinarily, I might expect some pieces by any fine composer to strike me as dull. I keep looking, and I have yet to find a single dud in this bunch, something that cannot be said for Mozart, by the way! 

Here's my latest "new music discovery" – Symphony No. 52 in C minor, "l'imperiale" (or "The Imperial"). Although, now that I think of it, I guess we could also call it "the halfway point."

Check out this fine 2015 rendering, conducted by Rebecca Miller (pictured above) and performed by the Royal Northern Sinfonia. It also contains Haydn’s Symphony No. 59 which is a perrenial fan favorite.

As conductor, mentor, and friend Steven White would say, "this is the music I find most necessary today." Enjoy!

Purchase

[jordanconductor]

Juneteenth and Joplin

Juneteenth and Joplin Juneteenth is a good day for reflection and consideration of the official ending of slavery as the very last slaves in the US were notified of the emancipation in Galveston, Texas in 1865. Is it appropriate to say “Happy Juneteenth”? Maybe? It’s not a day for white folks to relax and think about grilling burgers.

Something good happened that day, no doubt. But between peonage, Jim Crow, housing covenants, redlining, the carceral state, and sub-prime lending, we have a lot remaining on our plate. 155 years later, what durable process has been made towards making the independence we celebrate on July 4, applicable to those whose whose freedoms we commemorate on June 19? Has it been enough? Surely 155 was enough time to unwind the sins of our past, but instead many seem to want to forget about and even compound them. I’m FROM Texas and I didn’t really know what it was about until my late 20’s.

Anyway, for composer Scott Joplin, who was born in 1968 in Texarkana (or maybe Marshall?), Texas, this wasn’t an intellectual debate, this was his life. Imagine turning 6, say, in 1874 and coming to the realization that literally everyone who looked like you in your home state, just 10 years earlier, were considered to be property rather than persons. This thought never fully left Joplin’s mind. If you’ve been spending too much time online, reading me spend too much time online talking about Florence Price, you’ve probably heard me mention that she came into wider recognition thanks to the performance of her first symphony at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. Joplin’s history is similarly tied to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, an event which played a role in the spread of popularity of ragtime. Flash forward to 1907, and Joplin had moved to NYC to work on his second opera, Treemonisha. Treemonisha is a wild tale that takes place back initially in a forest of a former slave plantation near Texarkana. The eponymous character, Treemonisha, is a freedwoman who is taught to read, defends her town against “conjurers,” and ends up being elected by the townspeople as their new leader. This, sadly, is a bracingly powerful tale, far more than we would wish it would be in the year 2020, but doubtless even more so in 1907.

Joplin’s wife, Freddie Alexander, is thought to be at least the partial inspiration for it. She was a suffragette and black culture activist. The score and libretto were written completely by Joplin. For those outside of the music business: THAT IS A BIG DEAL. Word is that he was introduced to the music of Wagner in St. Louis and learned that Wagner wrote his own libretti, so he thought he’d do the same. As a black man at the turn of the previous century, it is widely believed that he never himself had the opportunity to attend a grand opera production. Yet he composed two himself. What a tragedy that Treemonisha was never performed during his lifetime, and the one opera that was (his prior opera), is now lost to us.

Main image from the promotional materials for the 2020 production with Volcano Theatre Company, Moveable Beast Collective. Weyni Mengesha, stage director. New orchestration by Jessie Montgomery. Reza Jacobs, Conductor. Neema Bickersteth, Treemonisha. [Planned but tragically put on ice by COVID-19]

Listen

Purchase

[jordanconductor]

Strategies for Diversifying Concert Programs

For years, the music community has discussed the importance of diversifying the composers that students learn and that audiences hear. However, in large ensemble genres, progress has often been slow-going. As a Creative Director of the International Florence Price Festival with a background in music education, Smith will offer a firsthand perspective as participants work together in identifying key opportunities for diversification of concert programming and strategies for finding and preparing difficult-to-access music.

In particular, participants will break down the phases of the programming cycle and examine each phase to identify strategies that will help directors adopt inclusive repertories over time. Through acknowledging the difficulties that persist, directors will better be able to tackle those challenges, while at all times maintaining complete artistic integrity.

Presented to the PMEA 2020 in a webinar format.

Playlists

[jordanconductor]

The Music and Legacy of Florence Price

The following remarks were given at Susquehanna University on January 22, 2020 as part of a Martin Luther King Jr. Teach-In. The text has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Good Afternoon. Today at Susquehanna University, we examine the legacy and impact of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and renew our efforts to break down the systems of oppression and marginalization for persons of color, for women, and—as Dr. King urged—the poor of our society generally. Today, we investigate the plagues of racism and sexism on our society. As we process these fault lines, it is important to consider the many different ways that a range of important figures have made critical contributions to a more just and equitable world. In learning about them, we increase our ability to make our own contributions. 

In this hour, we will discuss one such figure, the composer Florence Price, the first African American woman composer to see her music performed by a major American orchestra. To do so, we must learn about her life and place her in historical context. However, given her life as a composer, we must honor her work by sharing her work. Music offers a way of knowing the world that no speech could ever replace. Therefore, we will spend much of our time in celebration of her remarkable musical output.

To the professional and student musicians in the room: it is my hope that when we leave this room, you will join me in including her music in your recitals, concerts, and recordings. To the lovers of music in the room, I hope you will join me in treasuring every opportunity to immerse yourselves in her musical worldview.

Let us begin our exploration with a small sampling of Price’s œuvre in order to help place her sound world in mind. As this will be the first listening experience of her music for many in attendance, I will not be presenting an analysis of the music itself, instead leaving it to the listener to appreciate it for its more affective and autobiographical qualities. Here is Price’s arrangement of “At the Feet O Jesus,” further arranged for Tenor and Marimba Ensemble and performed by Marquese Carter and the Georgia southern marimba ensemble. (The selection begins at 9:00.)

Florence Price was everything that a classical composer wasn’t supposed to be. She was black in a sea of white faces. She was a woman in a male-dominated space. She was a mother in a community of libertines. She was an American at a time when European imports were uniformly preferred. She was biracial living in the south just decades after the Civil War.  And she grew up in Arkansas, the heartland, which is about as far from the coastal classical establishment as one could be. In short, Price was the quintessential American Maverick. 

Florence Beatrice Smith was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887, just one generation after the Civil War. This lovely perspective map does much to put a gloss on the savagery of the time, so we’ll have to discuss it. we see the sobering fractures of that conflict in our society all the way to the present day. By contrast, in 1887 the ground was still being painted red from the spilt blood, in this case, of lynched former slaves aspiring to rise from their former circumstances. 

This was the same year as Eubie Blake, Arthur Rubinstein, and Nadia Boulanger were born.

The young Smith attended the same elementary school and had the same school teacher as William Grant Still, who also grew up in Little Rock, later would. She had a promising musical childhood which included highlights such as her first published composition at the tender age of 11. For reference, Beethoven was 12 when his first work was published. 

We will now listen to another of her compositions, her piano Concerto in one movement. While it is called a Piano Concerto in One Movement, it is divisible into three main sections. We’ll listen to the first as performed by the Chamber Orchestra of the Springs and Karen Walwyn.

In addition to showing ability as a composer, Price was a gifted pianist and organist.

She entered the New England Conservatory in 1901 at just 14 where she double majored in Piano and Organ  and studied with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse. Chadwick was the Director of the conservatory and was known to accept only a few students. As a teenager, she composed her first string trio and symphony in turn-of-the-century Boston. Nearby in Boston, at the Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds in 1903, the Boston Americans beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in Game 8 of the inaugural World Series. 

Price went on to graduate from the New England Conservatory with an Artist Diploma and a teaching certificate 1906. She was hired at age 19 to begin teaching at Shorter College in Arkansas, to which she had returned after graduating.

Price’s tender teenage years were not devoid of racial resentments or the tragic self-abnegation required of citizens growing up black in America, then or now. Her black mother listed her biracial daughter as Mexican when helping enter her into the Boston Conservatory. That said, from the documentary record, her early years appear to have been relatively free of the most strident excesses of the burning racial resentments which characterized life in turn-of-the-century America. 

All of that changed after the lynching of Homer G. Blackman, leading to what is known as the Argenta Race Riot of 1906. (Argenta is now North Little Rock.) For a young black woman simply attempting to return to her home and lead a peaceful and productive life, this was the homecoming from hell. 

Life carried young Florence Beatrice Smith to Atlanta for a brief time before returning her again to Little Rock in 1912. That same year, Florence married a lawyer by the name of Thomas Price. The couple soon had two daughters together.  

For context, musicians might remember the twin riots from around the same time period: one following a Vienna concert featuring music by Schoenberg and his disciples (the Skandalkonzert), and a later riot following premiere of the Rite of Spring in Paris. These both took place in 1913, just one year later. Certainly, one cannot help but feel a bit of trepidation in using that same word “riot” to refer to the events in Arkansas and across the south, events denoting massacres of persons fighting for their right simply to live in peace, and those in Europe, among over-cultivated taste makers. That said, the juxtaposition becomes all the more visible in so doing.

The south continued as a broiling cauldron of racial resentment on  the part of white America and untold horror for black America. The Elaine massacre of 1919, which took place in Phillips County, Arkansas, claimed the lives of 237 African Americans and is considered one of the deadliest acts of racial terrorism in U.S. History and doubtless so when counted alongside the other riots of the “Red Summer” of 1919.

As we continue to progress, let us again return to Price’s catalog. Bear in mind that these works of profound beauty and intricate structure came forth from a mind and soul that persevered through the poisonous atmosphere in which she was brought up.  

We will now turn to one her most beloved works, her string Quartet in G Major. This two-movement work will offer us an extended opportunity to engage with her music through active listening.

It was in this context of racial brutality that the Price family was eventually uprooted from Little Rock to Chicago in 1927. Her move is part of a larger pattern of black migration of former slaves moving to northern cities in an attempt to escape the genocidal assault on their lives and basic human dignity throughout much of the south. Chicago became particularly well-known as a hub for black life and black thought, and had its own Chicago Black Renaissance comparable in many respects to the more well-known Harlem Renaissance.  

Price was an inveterate entrepreneur and already counted many influential black Chicagoans of the time as acquaintances and friends, evidence of which comes to us from vast troves of her correspondence. However, moving to Chicago, her circles expanded to include W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Frederick Douglass, who frequently passed through the major cities, including Chicago. 

Price would integrate deeply with a number of important musical organizations, several of which were founded in Chicago during her lifetime. She would assume a variety of leadership roles. Here, for instance, we see a picture of her with the National Association of Negro Musicians board members.

Price’s rise to prominence began in earnest in 1932 when Florence took home first prize in the Wanamaker Foundation Awards for her Symphony in E Minor. Let’s listen to an excerpt from her first symphony, performed by Akiko Fujimoto and the Minnesota Orchestra. 

Price came into her own in 1933 on the occasion of the Chicago World’s Fair. The fair was titled “A Century of Progress.” While this claim of “progress” may have fallen a bit flat when it comes to considering the way that Jim Crow had all but wiped out the temporary gains of the Reconstruction era, in at least one narrow regard, some laudable was being made.  

Iconic Chicago symphony conductor Frederic Stock had programmed a concert of music by (almost) all African American composers  in Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. 

It is important to bear in mind that Price was a brilliant artist and mover and shaker in her own right, and her success is built not on white beneficence but on her own black perseverance. 

As the women's rights movement grew in the late 19th century,  many African American women experienced increased political consciousness, and "began to re-imagine and implement new strategies anchored in strategic performance of black femininity in public acts of protest," according to Treva Lindsey, author of Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in D.C. This connection was observed last year by Price scholar and activist Alisha Jones.

This “strategic performance” is noticeable in the Price saga when considering further episodes, such as one in 1939. Famed Contralto Marian Anderson was originally to have performed a recital in constitution hall, but an organization called the Daughters of the American Revolution barred Anderson from performing in Constitution Hall, utilizing loosely-enforced segregation laws against her. In response, Anderson was invited by Howard University and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to perform a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. 

Now, rather than singing for a few dozen racist socialites, Anderson would sing before 75,000 attendees. This was a sizable upgrade.

Importantly, Anderson chose to close her historic Lincoln Memorial concert, which also featured with Price's arrangement of "My soul's been Anchored in de Lord.” Jones noted that, unlike the male composers on the recital program, Anderson made a point to list Price’s full name, revealing her gender. Let’s listen:

Anderson later performed this work in a broadcast setting, on the Bell Telephone Hour, expanding the reach of Price’s coloristic harmonizations and rhythmic characterizations to millions.

The First Lady later supported Price by writing about the premiere of her Symphony No. 3 in her syndicated column, “My Day.” The Susquehanna University Symphony Orchestra will be performing  her 3rd symphony, which celebrates its 80th anniversary this year, on February 29.

There is not adequate time to delve into many of the issues and problems facing  Price’s music today, but some time after her death in 1953, much of her music was lost, and what extant music there was lived in relative obscurity, in part due to the dismissal of the white establishment. (Important scholars like Rae Linda Brown kept the torch burning bright during the interegnum. )

That all changed when a large cache of her music was discovered in a small cabin in St. Anne, Illinois in 2009. Since that time, her music has slowly but certainly been brought into a wider light, work by work, including world premiere performances of many works which Price went to the grave having never heard. One such example is her glorious second violin concerto, which received its world premiere recording less than two years ago with Er-Gene Kahng performing the violin solo with the Janáček Philharmonic.

In view of Price’s tremendous accomplishments, it is time for the academy to shed the prevailing images of classical music and musicians that persist to this day. No longer can can it remain a safe space exclusively of, for, and by white men. Much progress has been made (see here and here) in the process of bringing these riches into public consciousness, but much remains to be done.

It (almost) goes without saying: the music of composers like Beethoven and Brahms isn’t going anywhere. Cherished repertoire of the past will always have a welcoming space in the concert hall. That said, it is time to finally and fully celebrate the vibrant history of all women and all persons of color who have been the creators and performers of some of music’s greatest riches as a regular part of the concert going experience. We must endeavor to honor Florence Price as a pioneer and secure her place in the musical canon through a rigorous exploration of her music and a zealous advocacy for her legacy. 

[jordanconductor]

8 Winners and 2 Losers in the Great Beethoven Debate

The music world has been tying itself in knots over Ludwig van Beethoven recently. In the year of his 250th birthday, some are calling for a boycott of organizations that perform his music. Others are offering a counter-reformation of sorts, with hashtags and memes in defense of the celebration. Here are eight winning ideas and two losing ideas to consider.

Counterproductive Ideas

Shaming Beethoven. Spending energy criticizing and even shaming people and organizations for performing Beethoven in the year of his 250th birthday seems misguided, and disconnected with industry practice. That’s not to say anyone should feel obliged to pay him any extra mind this year if they don’t want, but there is no need to criticize those who wish to or ask them to change their plans at this point. Like it or not, Beethoven’s music has had a deep impact on the trajectory of classical music writ large. He is a shadow-casting figure who wrote profound and far-reaching music, music that has served as the anthem for peace and freedom across a once-fractured Europe and has inspired children on every continent to take up instruments and glory in the music and the message.

Defending Beethoven. Equally, making a particular effort to defend Beethoven seems unnecessary, counterproductive, and lacking an intellectual foundation. First, any honest look at concert programming statistics will reveal that, even if Beethoven performances were cut in half and then in half again, he would still rank in the top 10 most performed composers this year. Cutting his performances merely in half would still leave him at number one. That’s a lot of Beethoven. Even in an average season, performances of his music are often more frequent than to performances of every woman composer combined. Given the scale of the expressions offered by those in opposition to the celebration, there is no chance that his big year will be diminished much. In short, the most-performed composer in classical music does not require a defense of any kind.

Winning Ideas

Championing underperformed music that you love. The best path to seeing a change in classical music tastes is to spread your enthusiasm for music you don’t feel gets performed enough. I make no secret of my relatively newfound love for the music of Florence Price. I think it would be great if every musician and music-lover found a composer who they believe is deserving of more attention and drag people to concerts of their music.

Understanding music history. We must learn to abandon the idea of ”greatness” as an intrinsic quality of certain music and instead accept it as a historical fact. Beethoven’s music is great because historically, the culture surrounding it has decided that it is great. Other cultures don’t agree. In fact, plenty of classical musicians either don’t agree or aren’t as enthusiastic about it as one might imagine in the present day. It is perfectly acceptable to write about and marvel at the quality of Beethoven’s music! There is no doubt of that, and I join you in it. But, it is not possible to chauvinistically “prove” Beethoven’s superiority over other the music. In composition, as in performance and in the arts generally, the best and most interesting comparisons are internal to the individual artist, and the best evaluations are done on the artist’s own terms.

Supporting new music. We cannot changes a long history of sidelining women and persons of color as artists, but we can and we must take responsibility for being the change we want to see in the present generation. That starts with supporting new music, and we must especially take care that we support a diverse range of composers in all of our work. With the depth and breadth of quality music available in 2020, this is exceptionally easy to do.

Encouraging decision-makers. Conductors, curators, recitalists, presenters, and other key decision-makers should be encouraged and incentivized to improve the diversity of their concert programming. (Many great organizations, such as Sphinx Organization and Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy spend their resources doing exactly that.) For reference, the ideal time to express concerns for concert programming in 2020 would have been between 2017-2019, depending on the level of planning for a given orchestra or organization. Therefore, organizers should consider looking ahead to future anniversaries in the out-years and engaging in a dialogue with local organizations now. Discuss how those anniversaries (disproportionately organized for white men), if they are celebrated, might be conducted in conversation with the broad concerns many have for the lack of diversity in major concert halls.

Voting with our wallets. We do a great disservice if we push decision-makers to change their programming and publishing habits but then fail to actually distribute our economic resources to such concerts and works. We must all strive to live our values and practice what we preach.

Performing Beethoven with love and care. One related complaint worth considering more frankly (I’ve seen this most among critics) is that many Beethoven performances are often performed without the energy and vitality that they seem to deserve. If we feel it important to perform Beethoven, we need to make certain to have something valuable and original to say with it. This is even more generalizable to: Only perform music you believe in, and only attend concerts of the same.

Celebrating #Beethoven250 with all the passion that you have. If you are inspired to perform an extra helping of Beethoven this season, do so with joy. If you decide to listen to all of his music in one year, this is a laudable project. If you are a first-year, first-generation university student performing Beethoven for the very first time this year, as many of my students are, then I hope you relish the experience and nothing diminishes that for you. If you lack enthusiasm for it, that’s OK too!

Considering a #Breakthoven. Once the 2020-2021 season has passed and the last of the birthday cake is eaten, consider if there are other composers who might be deserving of all of this attention in the following couple of years. Conductors: consider a new music festival or a season in which every concert contains music by women, say. Maybe the next time there is a major composer birthday we all want to celebrate, it will be one of them.

And with that, I leave you with two Symphonies No. 3 that I love. Listen to one, both, or neither.