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I’m sitting in a darkened concert hall at a recent performance by one of our outstanding regional orchestras, listening and marveling once again at how the musicians respond to the nuances the conductor communicates through the baton.
And then I notice that there’s a little extra action going on a few seats away.
No, not that kind of action. No, we have an audience conductor in our row.
Quietly, not-quite-subtly, just visibly in the subdued light, his right hand is tracing much the same pattern as the conductor’s.
Of course, I have never done such a thing myself. No, no, not at all.
I remembered this when I read a recent news release from the Cleveland Orchestra. Their season sponsor is the international financial services firm UBS, who also support the Verbier Festival Orchestra in Switzerland. UBS is interested in music. VERY interested, enough so that they funded development of Virtual Maestro. I’d call Virtual Maestro a conducting video game, but you might say it’s Guitar Hero for classical music.
Virtual Maestro lets you conduct an orchestra - well, more or less. What you actually conduct is a video recording of an orchestra - the Verbier Festival Orchestra, in fact - shown on a big plasma screen. The repertoire’s a bit limited, but you’re fine as long as you’re keen to conduct Rossini’s William Tell Overture and a few bits snipped from Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth.
You mount the podium, sort of, and raise your baton game machine controller. The musicians raise their instruments. Wave your WII remote and they start to play. The faster you beat time, the faster they play. The more violent your movements, the louder they play.
Now, granted, the expressive variety is a little lacking. Cueing individual musicians and sections is pretty much futile. It’s tough to catch the musicians’ eyes. And your most dramatic Bernstein-style podium acrobatics aren’t going to have any effect. But, by golly, you sure do have a grip on the ppp, fff, largo, and presto of the performance. That’s certainly more response than my fellow concert-goer got from his audience conducting.
If you want to try out your skills at orchestra piloting, you’ll have your chance before and after Cleveland Orchestra concerts, during intermissions, and prior to other Severance Hall concerts and events - for a few weeks. The UBS Virtual Maestro will be at Severance Hall from the 4th through the 25th of May; then it continues its tour of other American orchestras.
To find out when you can have your turn at the podium, see the orchestra’s event calendar.
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Ivan Hewett wrote recently in the Telegraph (UK) that “the worlds of classical and folk music could meet and mingle.”
Could?! They’ve been doing precisely that on WKSU for years - and that’s just another chapter in a long and deeply respectful association.
From at least Renaissance times, “art” music has drawn inspiration from folk music.
Take Telemann, for example. He used to lurk in the shadowy corners of the country inns, nursing his ale and stealing ideas from the fiddlers. “One could learn enough from them in a week to last a lifetime,” he said.
Centuries before, Renaissance composers had used pop tunes - sometimes bawdy ones! - as cantus firmi of masses. Heading the other way on the timeline, although the themes Beethoven used in his symphonies are original, he arranged groups of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh songs for soloist, chorus, and chamber ensemble.
This piece, Mikhail Glinka’s Kamarinskaya, was based on Russian folk tunes (a dance and a wedding song). It was a manifesto of sorts, a guidepost for the Russian musical nationalism that later took hold in the works of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and others. Tchakovsky called Kamarinskaya the acorn from which the mighty oak of Russian music grew. That oak was rooted in Russian folk music.
Antonin Dvorak loved his homeland and its music, but during his stateside stint, he absorbed spirituals and Native American themes. Their rhythms and melodic contours added local color to his American Quartet and Suite, and to the famed New World Symphony. Back home, Smetana infused his Czech dances with the rhythms of - guess what.
Stravinsky thought this little motif was a folksong, but it turned out to be a French popular tune, and he got into legal hot water for quoting it in his ballet Petroushka. In the end, he had to pay for the rights.
Bela Bartok hauled an early recording phonograph out to the countryside to take down folksongs as they were actually sung. He did so mostly to document Hungary’s musical heritage before it faded away. However, he also folded many of the dances and songs into his rollicking (and sometimes rather pungent) piano works. If you got far enough in your piano lessons, maybe you played some of them.
Vaughan Williams, Holst, and Grainger all dug deeply into Cecil Sharp’s folksong collections, among others. Copland evoked the echoes of the US West’s singing cowboys even if he didn’t quote them. From France, Ravel and Milhaud caught the spirit of jazz. I could go on for pages, but you get the idea.
Musical ideas also flowed the other way. Early- to mid-20th century American popular song composers unabashedly reaped inspiration and themes from classical music.
The musical Kismet, for example, was practically pure Borodin. Robert Wright and George Forrest lifted the melody of this selection, He’s In Love, straight out of the Polovtsian Dances. (On a new Telarc CD, Leonard Slatkin translates Kismet’s borrowed themes into an orchestral suite - harvesting the harvest, as it were.)
More recently, Paul Simon got his American Tune from Bach’s St Matthew Passion; Bach in turn had borrowed it from a Lutheran chorale.
At least three popular songs have been derived from Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto - Buddy Kaye’s Full Moon and Empty Arms, Eric Carmen’s All By Myself, and Muse’s Space Dementia. Wikipedia lists no fewer than nineteen rock and pop tunes based on Johann Pachelbel’s Canon. This should come as no surprise: if you want to make your tune successful, it helps to start with a successful tune.
Make that twenty. A couple of years ago the South Korean pop group Redsox also borrowed the Canon, nearly note for note, giving it a title which translates as Sweet Dream (MV). Johann’s not around to make a fuss. I’m not at all sure he would, even if he were.
So while such ideas as contemporary music festivals with Alpine themes may be somewhat new, the fundamental notion of merging classical and folk music is not.
At WKSU folk and classical music share a CD library - and once in a while, we even share CDs, composers, and musicians. Jim Blum plays some of the same Renaissance pieces and some of the same early music ensembles that we do. He also includes folk-flavored versions of classical pieces, especially shorter ones, from time to time. Bach a la Bela Fleck, anyone?
From the other side of the wall between the Folk and Classical offices, we play quite a few folk-inspired works beyond the usual Vaughan Williams Folk Song Suite and Bartok’s Roumanian Folk Dances.
William Grant Still’s Miniatures (the clip is an excerpt from his adaptation of I Ride an Old Paint) and Robert Beaser’s Mountain Songs bring us home to American folk music.
Our classical programs also sometimes include works that most people would consider 100% classical, yet they’re signed by musicians most people would call folk composers. They range from Turlough O’Carolan to Edgar Meyer. We don’t make a huge deal of this. If it’s good enough for us to play, the music is its own justification.
Hewitt writes of “folk musicians ‘aspiring up’” and “classical composers delving down.” Here at WKSU, there’s no up or down involved. Folk and classical music live right across from one another. We don’t sweat the difference. It’s all just good music.
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Tune in and listen each Sunday at 4:30 p.m. as In Performance broadcasts the musical talents of our region’s finest symphonies, orchestras, string quartets and other musical ensembles.
Relive the magic or experience it for the first time. Upcoming Concert Broadcasts
May 4, 2008: Apollo’s Fire, Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra under the direction of Jeannette Sorrell, featuring soprano Amanda Forsythe. Recorded April 10 - 13, 2008.
May 11, 2008: The Akron Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Christopher Wilkins, featuring soprano Joyce Guyer, tenor Karl Dent, bass-baritone Timothy Jones, and the Akron Symphony Chorus. Recorded at E.J. Thomas Hall on April 19, 2008.
May 18, 2008: The Canton Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Gerhardt Zimmerman, and featuring baritone Charles Austin. Recorded at Umstadt Hall on May 3, 2008.
May 25, 2008: The Wooster Chamber Music Series presents The Pacifica String Quartet. Recorded at Gault Recital Hall of Scheide Music Center on April 20, 2008.
June 1, 2008: The Wooster Chamber Music Series presents Hakan Rosengren and The Chiara String Quartet. Recorded at Gault Recital Hall of Scheide Music Center on May 4, 2008.
