Verbal hijinks (or: Concert Review: Crafton)

So Thursday the AWCB played a concert in Crafton, a suburb out west of the city. The concert was well-attended and in an intimate park setting with the audience close to the band and a baseball game going on in the distance. The weather was also absolutely gorgeous.

The venue left something to be desired for a band, though. It was almost like a disembodied piece of a warehouse, with anti-anti-glare stage lighting on either side. (We say anti-anti-glare because the lights pierced both of our anti-glare glasses coatings.) The lighting was distracting and the acoustics were bizarre – Lauren confessed that she could only hear Jon when he was playing above C; anything in the staff was completely inaudible to her, sitting about two feet away from him. Jon confessed to never really listening to anybody, but quickly retracted that in light of Lauren's previous post, and said he could barely hear Lauren and the horn player right in front of him.

The concert – what we could hear of it, anyway – sounded good, with some nice playing on all accounts. The trombone section boasted two amazing verbal solos. One was pre-arranged – a solo “scream” part in an arrangement of Phantom of the Opera that fell to Lauren tonight because no one else would do it. Before the concert, she whispered to Jon, “I was practicing the scream in the car on the way here. I figure it has about a 50/50 chance of coming out as either blood-curdling… or tentacle rape.” (Dear reader, please don’t Google “tentacle rape” if you don’t know what it is. Just take our word for it that it’s not in any possible way an appropriate scream for Phantom.)

By all accounts, the scream was indeed more blood-curdling than tentacle rape, which pleased Lauren immensely.

The other verbal solo was not pre-arranged – well, not really. If you’ve ever played the silly arrangement of tunes called Instant Concert, you know that in the middle there’s a cue for the whole band to go “Ugh!” as sort of a verbal punctuation to a line. (Unfortunately, neither of us know what tune is being played when the "ugh!" happens, so we can't explain how to look for it.) Well, the gentleman in the trombone section who we will call in the most loving way imaginable “Cantankerous Jazzer” (CJ) felt that this percussive verbalism needed “some extra texture”, so he let out with this falsetto fall that started at about two octaves above the rest of the band.

Extra texture indeed! We were lucky that we had rests after that little shenanigan, or else the first trombone line would have been nothing but a bunch of giggles.

So, all in all, it was a successful, fun concert – even if we couldn’t see or hear anything.

On being part of a section

One part of my trombonist Jedi training (another thing that will someday have to be explained) was this all-important lesson:

Being a member of a section is a whole different beast than playing by yourself.

The thing is, when you’re on your own, you’re totally in control. You control the speed, you control the style, you control the musicality. When you’re in a section – say, in a community band -- all of a sudden you find yourself in the middle of six or seven other trombonists (if you’re lucky to have that many, like we are), plus someone far away with a stick telling you how fast to play.

In an ensemble, I’m always thinking about the dreaded L-word – listen. We, as trombonists, are used to hearing this word most often regarding intonation (“wait, where’s fifth position again?”); it was one of my coming-of-age moments when I realized:

playing the right note isn’t everything.
 

Consider style, for example. When I’m sitting in the trombone section in the middle of these six other people, I find myself listening obsessively for stylistic considerations and trying to act like a diffuser so that we sound like a section. As an example, if all I see is an accent mark (>), is it separated, connected, heavy, or light? Bell tones, even? How hard am I supposed to smack these things that only give me “>” as an indicator? Theoretically, I could make my own decision and stick to my guns, but how does that help us sound like a coherent group?

It doesn’t.

The Jedi training here is to be the bigger man (or woman) and listen. Usually I listen to whatever Jon is doing (because he usually seems to know what’s going on), and I copy as fast as I can so that the guy sitting next to me can hear what I’m doing (and, theoretically, that Jon and I are doing it the same way) and copy me. And so on and so forth down the line until we all learn and remember how it’s supposed to be. Or until the conductor yells at us that we’re doing it wrong.



In an ideal band world, we’d all be completely familiar with every piece we play and have done our research and know exactly how all of the styles and dynamics are supposed to be. I don’t live in that world, though, so I do my best to at least make some improvement as I go along. In a band, it’s all about trying to match each other to create this solid, unified sound; to sound like a band instead of sounding like a bunch of sections thrown together -- or worse yet, a bunch of individual musicians sitting in a room playing their parts.

Speaking of John Adams

I was in a very good mood yesterday. Along with the usual trappings of a good mood, like an inspired reading of the Wicked Witch of the West in the latest nightly bedtime chapter of the Wizard of Oz, I found an immediate karmic balance in an unaccountable compulsion to listen to Rutter's Gloria. To excise this piece of musical pablum from my mental ipod, I decided today to listen to a cd I bought a little while ago: John Adams's Doctor Atomic Symphony, as recorded by David Robertson and the Saint Louis Symphony.

The piece is based on the opera of roughly the same name, most of which I heard when it was simulcast from the Met in October 2008. Due to circumstances out of my control, I missed the middle, but heard the beginning and end. What I remember of it are some of Adams's distinctive musical constructions: obviously the signature minimalist perpetual motion, but the falling interval that described Joseph's angst at finding his wife pregnant in El Nino and a terrorist's attempt at explaining his motive in Death of Klinghoffer found its way into Robert Oppenheimer's existential discourse on the atomic bomb, sung by the amazing baritone Gerald Finley in the original production. There was a lot of play on "Trinity"- the name of the test, appearing in the libretto (through texts by John Donne, I found out later) and in a number of allusions throughout the other chosen texts. (I should point out that having read some of the libretto later, I was kind of glad that I got more of the music than the words on a first listen, but that's another post!) The ending was especially memorable: the warning siren signaling the first detonation of an atomic bomb is overlaid with a recording of Japanese woman asking for water, shifting from the pre-bomb world to the post. It was a very effective moment, I thought.

So I went into the recording of the Symphony with a number of expectations and preconceived notions, and came away a bit disappointed on the first listen. The piece is divided into three sections, The Laboratory, Panic, and Trinity. The first section has the normal moto perpetuo that defines a lot of Adams's work, punctuated by irregular percussive bursts from the brass section. This is what I missed on a first listen, while trying to hard to make sense of the piece in terms of the opera. While these certainly happen in the opera, and the opening of the symphony is essentially the same as the opening of the opera, the opera opening is necessarily setting up for dialogue that doesn't occur in the symphonic version.

The second movement passes vocal lines through the brass, creating an orchestrational dichotomy between the ragged, harsh spikes of the first movement and the melodic, if perhaps delirious, lines in this movement. Solos in the trombone, trumpet and tuba are clearly adaptations of sung parts, following the patterns set out in other Adams operas and choral works. The liner notes list Michael Sanders as the tubist, and Timothy Myers as principal trombone. Myers (presumably, since soloists aren't listed and it wouldn't be the first time I've mistaken instruments) does some wonderful playing on some very difficult passages, but Sanders (again, presumably) does yeoman work on what sounds like an incredibly difficult solo, coming across as in complete control at all times.

The ending movement mirrors the first- the powerful ending of the opera is changed, but the new ending brings closure to the themes developed as a necessity of the new medium. The very end invokes the same percussive brass, although more insistent and more often this time, with the strings clawing away through the moto underneath, until the entire affair is cut off abruptly with a final crash. This is definitely a reimagined symphony, and not a suite from the opera.

I don't know that I would recommend this as a starting point for folks who don't know Adams- I still think Naive and Sentimental Music is his most accessible large-scale work, and Short Ride in a Fast Machine the easiest to get in touch with overall. And it will probably confuse people who are expecting a Paganini-esque suite from the opera. But for those already familiar with his body of work and compositional tendencies, it's another solid entry to his catalog, and absolutely worth a few times through to get in touch with.

This is not an innuendo, but....

Ok, I know. I have conversations that would make a normal person think I needed to be on heavy medication, or that I was on heavy medication, or maybe make them question their belief in a just and caring god. I watch cartoons for fun, and not just cartoons, foreign cartoons that aren't even in English. I am (even right now!) completely surrounded by literally thousands of recordings of classical music, many of which wouldn't be recognized as music by people that I talk to every day. I roll down the street playing Shostakovich and John Adams and Mahler at obnoxious levels. I actually like listening to Messaien. So I'm in absolutely no position to take any kind of viewpoint that questions how other people enjoy themselves.

But driving home from Ligonier last night, Lauren and I saw this license plate cover on a big blue pickup truck, and thought... what the hell?



You can buy it here!

I hear they keep sheep in the window (a.k.a. Concert Review: Ligonier)

I should note that I am typing this on my laptop from the passenger’s seat in Jon’s car.

With that out of the way, allow me to give you a report of our concert tonight in Ligonier, PA. This is probably the farthest that any of us travels to do a concert, but there’s definitely a reason that we do so. The crowd was phenomenal. (Case and point: we’re standing at the end taking the applause, and some guy in the back starts shouting “YAY TROMBONES!” This gets my approval every time.)

We had an unusual setup for the trombone section tonight with the thirds sitting behind the firsts and the seconds. It was a delight to actually hear the third part instead of having it get mixed with the tubas and euphoniums all the time. Jon calls the experience “like being in a warm insulated cocoon, surrounded by all three parts”. I think he’s a little tired, but I’m not going to question, because he’s behind the wheel.

Jon also reports that he was having a battle with the key of C, particularly the whole “B” idea. I, personally, was just having issues seeing. It was a cloudy, overcast evening, which played havoc with the page on the far side of the stand for me. I think I only missed about a third of the notes, however.

As much as both of us hate playing the march “Them Basses” by composer G.H…. something. The music is in the trunk, and I’m not going to crawl back there and find it. Anyway, we both hate that piece, but tonight we kicked it old school. There’s nothing like a bunch of low brass playing the melody and ignoring pretty much everything around them.

But seriously- what's this all about?



And now we’ve just passed a drive-in movie theater that had gerbils on the screen. I think I fear for my life, so this is Lauren, signing off from… somewhere east of Pittsburgh.