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China Tour Blog #3: The Possibility Paradigm
BEAUTY (possibility) and the BEAST (downward spiral) - How Does the Possibility Paradigm Work On a Youth Orchestra Tour to China?
6/27/2007 9:41 AMPart 1: A Fall to Grace
When I woke up the next day (June 17th) my bruise was much more painful. My attempts to get engaged in conversations at breakfast were hopeless - the pain was just too distracting. Everyone was very kind and concerned, but it didn't really help, because all we could talk about was my injury and whether I was going to be able to conduct the concert that night. The fact that the food being served looked just the same (identical?) to the dinner that we had had the night before and that I was now on the fifth day without access to a proper cup of tea, certainly didn't help my mood. I pretended to look as though Possibility was coursing through my veins, but the truth was that I was miserable. The fact that I was on the brink of one of the great insights of my life was not, of course, apparent to me, so I satisfied myself with at least enjoying everyone's genuine concern for my well-being. I was, after all, surrounded by 120 of the nicest people on the planet. I could, at least enjoy THAT. The bus trip to Tianjin (listed in the tour book as 3.5 hours) turned out to be, with a brief stop for much needed refreshments, five hours. We arrived only in time for a late lunch, a brief nap and the trip to the hall. The hall was, for some reason, a full 45 minute bus ride from the hotel, so we only had an hour for the rehearsal. It all seemed so hectic and short-winded and the pain clouded everything.
I had decided that, in spite of the little amount of time we had to rehearse, we had to spend some time on the Pasculli oboe concerto, which we had read through twice in Boston with Jonathan Cohler conducting, but was to come up at a concert quite soon.
Jonathan conducted that part of the rehearsal, since his son Yuga was playing the solo and he obviously knows the piece with all its rubato shifts inside and out and it gave me a chance to look over at the score, which I had never seen. It was a relief for me, since the pain, in spite of heavy doses of the pain killers was pretty intense. When I began rehearsing the Clarinet Fantasy I noticed that the orchestra was playing extremely well, in spite of my very spare, cautious gestures. That sense continued as I rehearsed a few passages from Till Eulenspiegel and sections of the Tchaikovsky 6th. I started to get very excited about the concert: the hall was good and the orchestra felt in the best form yet on the tour. I was myself very reduced, but the players seemed fresher and more alert than ever and the listening was if anything more acute than at the concert the night before. I later learned that, for the first time, coffee had been available for the players before the concert and it had caused a major up-shift of gears in the entire group, but that was, as they say, "an additional reason" (remind me to tell you that story).
At the concert I was more constrained in my conducting than I have probably ever been at a public concert. Although I had 1600 (!) milligrams of Ibuprofin inside me, whenever I made any kind of violent gesture it caused a pain in my ribs like the jab of a knife. However, as I went along, I found I was conducting in a different way: I would THINK the musical thoughts with extreme intensity but not actually make the gestures that went with the thoughts.
The first couple of times I did it consciously, I had the most startling realization: the orchestra actually played the THOUGHT I had just had, even though they had not been galvanized by my usual physical gestures.
I realized that I was on the brink of something very big indeed. The performance of Till was as close to perfection as one was ever likely to hear from a largely high-school orchestra, even one as stellar as YPO, and Amy's Rigoletto Fantasy was breath-taking in its brilliance, not least in the perfect co-ordination of orchestra and soloist. But it wasn't until the Tchaikovsky 6th that the full implication of my new realization began to sink in.
When we got to the second theme of the first movement, I was able for the first time to give my new modus conductendi its full rein. We usually play this theme with a great deal of rubato (freedom), which means that about 60 string players have to all feel the timings together, including the very elastic pulsing eighth notes in the lower strings. I usually use the entire range of my physical gestures to accomplish this, but now I just THOUGHT the timings with total clarity and, to my amazement, the orchestra realized the complex passage to perfection and with, apparently, not a whit less passion.
I wish I could report that throughout the performance the flow of intensity was always at full throttle even though my conducting was very restrained. If that had been the case I suspect Boston would be seeing a very different kind of conductor in the future. No, I still felt that to get the very most from the players I had to use a lot of physical energy, but it was so much more directed, because the intensity of my thought about the music was leading, rather that my body churning up my thoughts.
Mark Churchill, one of my most discerning critics and a profoundly sophisticated listener, reported to me that the the attacks (the cries of pain) in the Finale of the Tchaikovsky were almost unbearable in their intensity, and yet I had used less effort, not more. Richard Dyer, a life-long observer of the art of conducting, and an invaluable companion on this journey, unleashed a torrent of pithy observations about conductors from Levine, Toscannini and Mahler to Fritz Reiner and so the flood-gates are open and a new era in my life as a conductor has been initiated. The players themselves started sharing observations about the different experience of playing when I am less demonstrative, not more, and we have only just started the discourse. I can't wait for the next set of white sheets!
I know I will always be a Bernstein-like conductor, rather than a minimalist like Fritz Reiner or Fruebeck de Burgos, but, perhaps it isn't a question of the size of the gestures, as much as the force and clarity of the musical thought leading every motion, rather than a loose dance between feeling and motion. In any event, this exciting new and fruitful train of exploration was caused by a very lamentable fall - a fall that caused considerable inconvenience and pain to me and virtually closed down effective interaction with the group. How wonderful it would be if we could be so disciplined in the art of possibility that we could greet every event, glorious or lamentable, pleasurable or painful with a simple delighted: "How fascinating! I wonder what this will bring."
The Hallmark get-well card industry would go bankrupt and people would have to start looking for other modes of interaction than pity and self-pity, but it would make for an interesting world!
(Part 2 coming soon) |
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