I did a pre-concert talk this past weekend for the Seattle Symphony. After a beautiful opening work by Anna Clyne, the orchestra performed Schumann’s piano concerto and Mendelssohn’s “Scotch” Symphony, easily my favorite of his large-scale works.

An acquaintance who heard that I had given the talk asked what my area of expertise was, and the best I could come up with was “charm.”

Cheeky, I know, but the fact of the matter is, we conductors are generalists who immerse ourselves in research for specific projects for short periods of time, and after enough years and enough projects, all those mini-spates as experts at up to an interesting and personalized view of the repertoire and of music history.

This was a great talk to give because there was so much to explore in the relationship between these great composers. They were total bros! Almost exact contemporaries (Mendelssohn: 1809-1847; Schumann 1810-1856), they both grew up in “Germany,” and they were both on the early edge of Romanticism in music.

And yet, given that narrow set of constraints, they were about as different as you could get. Mendelssohn came from immense wealth and privilege. His grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn was considered the ‘Father of the Jewish Enlightenment’, a period in history when the German states were liberalizing their laws towards Jews, and Jews were liberalizing their stance towards assimilation into German society.

When Moses was born, he was named in the conventional Jewish system as Moses ben Mendel, but he Germanized his surname to Mendelssohn. He raised his children with a very liberal brand of Judaism, such that his son Abraham raised his children—including Fanny and Felix—with no religion at all.

Abraham became a banker, and he went to work at his family’s branch in Hamburg, then an independently governed city-state. There, he set about financing the smuggling operations that would bring an end to Napoleon’s “continental system,” a blockade of goods between Britain and Europe. Fearing retribution when Napoleon’s forces invaded, the Mendelssohn family had to escape Hamburg in disguise under cover of night. Which is how Felix ended up back at his family’s seat in Berlin. (The Mendelssohn & Co. bank lasted well into the 20th century—until, 1938, in fact, when it was liquidated by the Nazis and its assets were folded into Deutsche Bank.)

In Berlin, Abraham and his family were taken in to his wife’s mother’s estate. The maternal line of Felix Mendelssohn’s ancestry is just as interesting as the paternal. His maternal grandfather had been Court Jew to Frederick the Great of Prussia, back when German kings had things such as “Court Jews” (really a type of banker.) Using his clout, this Court Jew was able to convince FGP to liberalize many laws surrounding the Prussian Jewry, including opening up the ghettos.

This grandmother of Felix’s would have an important role to play in music history. The family owned several rare manuscripts, and for Felix’s 17th birthday, she commissioned a new manuscript copy of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, which is of course the work with which Felix would inaugurate the modern Bach revival.

Robert Schumann, on the other hand, did not come from a wealthy background. His father was a bookseller, and young Robert’s earliest ambitions were literary. He thrilled to the novels of Jean Paul (whose Titan was similarly adored by Gustav Mahler) and the poetry of Goethe, Rilke, and Heine. He came to music late, and didn’t have a proper piano lesson until he was 19.

His piano teacher was Friedrich Wieck of Leipzig, and it was at Wieck’s house that young Robert would meet a child named Clara. Clara was on her way to becoming a virtuoso pianist; by the age of 18, she would be appointed “Imperial Concert Pianist” to the Hapsburg Emperor. (Another long-gone courtly title, although it should be noted that the Prince of Wales still employs an official harpist.)

After several years in close quarters, Robert and Clara fell in love, and this is where things became challenging. Herr Wieck did not feel that Robert—a poor young piano student with dreams of composing but little to show for himself—was a worthy match for his daughter, already a star on the European musical stage. And thus he launched into a lengthy court proceeding to keep the two apart.

This is where Mendelssohn steps into the story. Robert and Felix had become friends and admirers of one another during the 1830’s, in spite of the fact that when they first met, Mendelssohn was already an adept composer, pianist, and conductor, and Robert had only a few unpublished compositions to his name. (Not to mention the fact that he had rendered his right ring finger totally lame by trying to speed up his muscular development with a hack gadget called the chiroplast.)

And yet, Robert and Clara found a way. They mainly carried out their clandestine romance via musical composition. Clara, as we all know, was herself a distinguished composer. While she was under lock and key, forbidden to see her beloved Robert, she would compose piano pieces that were coded with motifs that had private meanings between her and Robert. Robert would then work these same motifs into his own piano works and arrange to have them delivered to Clara. Old Herr Wieck simply heard Clara practicing new works, and was none the wiser.

Oh right, back to Mendelssohn. Wieck mounted an outright defamation campaign against Robert Schumann, so much that Robert had no recourse except to countersue his father-in-law-to-be. First on the list of character witnesses for the prosecution: Felix Mendelssohn.

Their bromance was one for the ages. They visited and wrote to one another often. Felix likely conducted* the first read-through performance of Robert’s Phantasie for piano and orchestra, which would later become the first movement of the piano concerto. (*Sources differ; some say it was Ferdinand David.) When Felix died at the tragically young age of 38, Robert was one of the pall bearers at his funeral.

The two also wrote pieces that begin in a dreary a minor and end in a triumphant A major, Schumann’s piano concerto and Mendelssohn’s Scotch symphony. (Mendelssohn, however, has the distinction of having the only work in the standard repertoire that begins in major and ends in the tonic minor: his “Italian Symphony.”)

The Scotch is my personal favorite of Mendelssohn’s five symphonies. It’s another one of those cases where the numbering is out of order: though he conceived of it as early as 1829, he didn’t complete it until 1842, making it the last—i.e. the 5th—of his symphonies that he would bring to completion.

The original conception came from a trip that he took to Britain at the age of 20. Mendelssohn went there in order to perform and conduct his own music in London, where he was a huge hit. After that, he and a friend took a pleasure tour of the north of Britain, hitting the major Scottish industrial centers as well as its craggy coasts.

As you probably know, the Hebrides made a major impression on the composer, but so did the derelict ruins of the Holyrood palace chapel.

Of COURSE Mendelssohn was obsessed with this place. It was the most prototypical Romantic-with-a-capital-R site imaginable: a Gothic ruin, decaying and being taken over by nature, not to mention the site of the crowning of Queen Mary, whose story had been immortalized in a play by Goethe. There is literally NOTHING more Romantic that he could have stumbled upon, and so he wrote the opening bars of this symphony as a memento of that visit.

Schumann’s a minor-to-major piano concerto also has a deeply personal story. Naturally, it was written for Clara, shortly after they were married (she played that first, perhaps-conducted-by-Mendelssohn reading while 8 1/2 months pregnant.) The piece can easily be read as a retelling of their courtship. The stormy opening that seems to capture the moment when they were torn apart by Friedrich Wieck. Then the moody opening melody, based on the notes “C-B-A-A,” or in German “C-H-A-A,” which, if you fill in a few gaps, gives you “C-H-i-A-r-A”—”Chiara” or Italian for “Clara”. (I know it sounds far-fetched, but let me assure you: they were into stuff like this.)

The second movement reads as the delicate flirtation between two coquettish people who are taken to flights of fancy together. And of course the finale has the character of a romp, full of joy and optimism, perhaps reflecting their recent nuptials.

So that’s it, that’s the interesting stuff I learned about Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, and now I can forget it until the next time I have to become an expert on these pieces.

It’s a busy and thrilling moment for me up here in the Pacific Northwest, all to do with preparing new music, by me and by my friends. I can honestly say that I’ve been embraced by a regional community of composers, arguably for the first time in my professional life.

This Sunday, Northwest Art Song (aka my friends Arwen and Laura) will premiere a piece I wrote for them, Stabat Mater, about which:

On the concert, I’ll conduct a new song cycle by Robert Kyr, and playing the viola in my piece will be Kenji Bunch, whom, frankly, I’ve thought of as a big famous composer ever since the Ahn Trio released “Music for my Favorite Insomniac” in 2008:

This summer, I spent many an hour creating “critical editions” of the music of two Seattle composers, Carol Sams and Huntley Beyer. I’m currently in rehearsals for Carol’s The Earthmakers, a monumental work if ever there was one, and, in my view among the very best oratorios composed in the past 50 years (if not the past 100.)

Kia (that’s Carol) wrote The Earthmakers in 1986 (which, she continues to claim, was before I was born, in spite of my protestations to the contrary.) It’s an oratorio in 16 movements that tells the story of the creation of the world from a variety of cultural perspectives—Zuni, Inuit, Melanesian, Biblical, scientific, etc.

Every second I spend with this piece is filled with excitement as it comes to life in my inner ear and in rehearsals with the chorus, soloists, and orchestra. Each section flows naturally from what came before, but never in the way you’d expect. Simply put, it’s a masterpiece, and I can’t wait to perform it, not only now, but many times in the future.

The Earthmakers is on a concert I’m doing with OSSCS called “Origins,” and we’re kicking things off with music by a composer who wrote his first concert work for this very occasion. Carlos Garcia (whose instagram, @carlosgarsizzle, is highly recommended) created this little mockup, which to me sounds like a fully produced Hans Zimmer score, to give you a taste of the real thing until we make our live recording.

Hoo boy have I signed myself up for some projects this season. Visit OSSCS for more details.

I’m now at the point in my career where I’m regularly conducting pieces for the second, and I gotta say, it’s pretty great.

Don’t get me wrong—I love adding pieces to my repertoire, and I’d say at least 50% of what I program is new to me. But I’m understanding the wisdom of my teacher David Effron, who used to say that conducting a piece for the first time was “pure hell,” and that the first time was really the 0th time.

[It turns out Mr. Effron said a lot of things that, 10 years down the line, I’m finding to be true, for example, that the reason he loved conducting concerts so much was that that was the only time when nobody could bother him with a question or complaint.]

It’s not that you work less the second time you conduct a piece—much to the contrary. It’s that the work that you starts at a much deeper level. You’re able to focus on the rich inner life of the piece without having to master the technical details of who enters where and what’s a divisi and what’s not.

Plus, you’re not struggling with the ‘aural ideation’ the second time through, that process of imagining the sound of the music by reading the dots on the page. After you’ve conducted a piece once, its sound is lodged in your head in a way that it can never be just from listening to recordings or playing it in an orchestra.

Although that’s not quite true. Because as I come back to these pieces, I find so many new details that I’m shocked I missed on the first pass. So the real, complete sound of the score isn’t really in my head, but some baseline version is, onto which I can build.

And it’s not just the details—it’s the big picture too. It’s like going to a new location for the first time; it always takes longer than you expect, and you’re looking for the street signs and navigating the traffic flow. But when it’s a road you’ve trod many times, you know innately where you’re going, so you can enjoy the trip and spot the little surprises along the way.

All this makes me eager to do more pieces for the second time, but also to do more for the first time, so I can get to the second time sooner.

If you are preparing a 10 minute piece and you have…

…5 minutes:
• Do the beginning and the ending, and any tempo changes in the middle.

…10 minutes:
• Play the whole thing once through

…20 minutes:
• Play the whole thing twice through

…30 minutes:
• Play it once through
• Go over any trouble spots
• Play it through again

…60 minutes:
• Play it through
• Go back and work on: rhythm/pulse, intonation, dynamics, balance, phrasing/color, basically in that order (although see below). Once one problem is solved – say, a tuning issue – immediately focus your attention on the next level (balance/color/phrasing).
• Play it again (twice if possible)

Other tips:
• Conductors: don’t let any section sit around too long without playing
• Attack whatever problems you hear. Don’t be cute, or overly methodical, just fix what needs fixing.
• Some problems will fix themselves; it takes experience to intuit which those are.
• Don’t stop too much; some problems will not fix themselves until people have time to practice individually.
• Try to balance stopping for detail work with playing through longer passages.
• Conductors: when you’re playing through a long passage, dog-ear the corners of your score when you hear issues arise so you’ll be able to locate them as soon as you stop.
• Take notes right after rehearsal; a lot of niggling details can be fixed by giving a list to the orchestra (dynamic changes, note errors, etc.)
• When it comes to intonation, don’t be afraid to fix things that sound out of tune, even if you don’t know exactly how to tackle them. If you don’t know if something is sharp or flat, just admit it.
• Or take a guess. If you guess wrong, you’ll quickly figure out that the other option was right.
• When it comes to tuning chords, here’s a tried-and-true method: have the people who play the root play their note mf. Then add the 5th of the chord playing mp. Then add the third playing p. Once you’ve got the sonority ringing true, people can go back to their regular dynamics.
• A well-said image, analogy, or story can inspire a whole new level of playing, but these have to be used sparingly.
• Stay positive, but don’t accept unacceptable results.

It snowed in Seattle yesterday, which means we had to cancel the OSSCS concert that was to take place tonight, the fourth of our season and the third in our series examining the work of Lili Boulanger.

Which is a bummer! I built this program around Boulanger’s setting of the 129th psalm. Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms was a natural pairing, then I got to thinking about other psalms, going back as far as I could and up to the present day. Here’s what we were supposed to have performed tonight:

SCHÃœTZ Alleluja! Lobet den Herrn!
HILDEGAARD Karitas habundat
SHAW and the swallow
STRAVINSKY Symphony of Psalms
DVORAK Žalm 149
BOULANGER Psaume CXXIX
WHITE Psalm 46

It’s a wildly eclectic program spanning 900 years of music, performed in five different languages, but I’m telling you – it works!

Or so went my hypothesis anyway. I had prepared my pre-concert lecture to explain how it works, pointing out the many cross-pollinations that bounce around in this program. Since I couldn’t give it in person, here you have it:

Same Text, Different Worlds

There are two pieces on the program that share the same text: Heinrich Schütz’s Alleluia (1619) and the last movement of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms (1930), the text being that of the 150th psalm.

Here’s how Schütz sets the first lines, “Alleluja! Lobet den Herrn” (“Hallelujah! Praise the lord”)

And here’s Stravinsky’s setting of the same words, this time in Latin:

It’s immediately clear a) that we’re in two totally different sound worlds and b) that Igor Stravinsky has an awfully dour way with the word “Hallelujah”.

In fact, Stravinsky’s setting of this whole text is quite peculiar, and a case could be made that it’s hardly a musical setting of the text at all, and more a symphony to which words were appended.

Listen, for example, to the way Schütz and Stravinsky set the baldly evocative words, “Praise him with timbrel and dance, praise him with strings and organ”:

I’m not saying that a composer has to be literal with their word painting, but this psalm invites it brazenly, and it’s a bold choice to ignore it outright.

The irony here is that Stravinsky considered the music in this movement to be the single most literal musical depiction he ever composed, particularly the following passage, which depicts Elijah riding a fiery chariot through the sky. The horns and triplets represent the stomping of hooves:

Apparently Stravinsky was even embarrassed that he had written something so literal, which may well be, but it’s worth pointing out that this text contains not a single mention of a horse, a chariot, or the prophet Elijah.

Sing we and chant it

Chant plays a major role in this program, most obviously with the work of the 12th century mystic, Hildegaard von Bingen:

There was a major revival of interest in chant in Parisian musical circles around the time that Lili Boulanger was receiving her education (you’ll hear it a ton in Fauré, d’Indy, Franck, and Duruflé). Listen to the first vocal line of her setting of the 129th psalm with the Hildegaard in mind:

Even a composer like Dvorak, whose setting of the 149th psalm has a bright, festive, dance-like atmosphere, uses a bit of chantish writing to invoke the solemnity of his material:

Modern parallels

There are two contemporary works on the program, one by Caroline Shaw, the other by yours truly. (One of these composers has won the Pulitzer Prize in Music; it’s hardly worth quibbling over which it was.)

We’re composers of the same generation who mainly write in the sphere of tonal music, and what’s more, we both use some of the same techniques, one of which is writing in parallel harmonies.

Listen to this complete performance of and the swallow and I’ll explain what I mean:

Right from the start, you’re getting parallel harmonies – a G-flat major chord moves up to a B-flat minor chord, same voicing, all the parts moving in parallel motion. Another way of putting it is that she’s writing melodies, but instead of using single notes, she uses stacked chords.

This is something that I do a lot, but whereas Shaw’s writing (in this piece) tends towards modality, mine tends towards chromaticism, since I most commonly maintain the chord qualities with each melodic move.

[I am so sorry for that last paragraph. This is the kind of jargon that I would entirely eschew in a pre-concert lecture, but I would have extra tools to explain myself, like a piano and my insouciant charm.]

A simpler version of this is to say that, had I written the opening of and the swallow, it might have had a B-flat major chord instead of a B-flat minor chord, which would sound crunchier and less mellifluous.

Check out, for example, the dissonances in the opening bars of my piece:

Und jetzt?

Lots more could be said about this program, and it’s a shame that I won’t get a chance to present all these pieces in one evening, because I really believe they have all sorts of interesting resonances with each other.

But the wheels have been churning, and I think I’ve figured out how to scrap this program for parts, leading to many new programs, perhaps even more diverting and ingenious than this one, so stay tuned!

An angel has come down heaven and uploaded Stephen Sondheim’s 1994 appearance on “Inside the Actor’s Studio” to YouTube, and since I’ve given up the pretense that this space is anything other than a Sondheim fan blog, here it is:

This might actually be my favorite Sondheim interview, though it’s hard to pick because Sondheim always says the exact same things any time he is questioned. He would make a remarkably good political candidate; he is relentlessly on message.

By the way children, this is the sort of programming that used to air regularly on Bravo. It was basically ITAS, Mindwalk, and England, My England on a loop. Go ahead, click that link to Mindwalk and just imagine that playing on Bravo today. It is literally three people walking around Mont Saint-Michel for two hours talking about Systems Theory to the accompaniment of Philip Glass music. My recollection is that it ran almost every day.

As much as I despise James Lipton, I always dreamed of being interviewed on ITAS so that I could answer the famous Proust/Apostrophe/Bouillon de Culture questionnaire that he asked at the end of each episode. But that’s not going to happen, so here are my answers:

What is your favorite word?
Euphony

What is your least favorite word?
Wart

What is your favorite drug?
Green tea

The sound or noise you love the most?
Gentle birdsong

The sound or noise you hate?
Open-mouthed chewing; leaf blowers, lawnmowers, motorcycles

What is your favorite curse word?
Heaven forfend!

If you couldn’t do what you’re doing now, what job would you like most?
Diction coach… although this is part of my current job, so maybe curtsey reviewer?

What job would you like least?
Football player

What would you like to come back as if you could be reincarnated?
One of those bacteria that live in liquid asphalt. I would finally be warm enough.

If Heaven exists what would you like to hear god say when you arrive?
I’m your Auntie Mame!

Here, for your auditory delectation, is my appearance on Kyle Marshall’s excellent “Putting it Together” podcast, a nerdy Sondheim gabfest that is for me what a politics or sports podcast is for “normal” people.

I was so excited that I probably got a little out of control. The episode is seventy minutes long and we are talking about the Overture and “Let me entertain you” from Gypsy. But it’s your holiday gift, so you’d better enjoy it!