July 2010:
Losing the Fairy for the Trees
Today, I burst a gut with a colleague as she regaled me with stories about her gig as a mermaid. This world-class harpist spent many a sweltering summer night poised inside a clam, playing schmultz for stiff shirts with Ariel fantasies. To add insult to injury, she had to be carried by a Nordic God to her shell, since the costume’s tail had no feet,. And though he came back during each break to give her some water, she’d always refuse, since she couldn’t move to get to the little girl’s room anyway. The humor in such situations is certainly not lost on me, but it did make me question why a musician with a successful international recording career still needs to do such work to make a viable living. I made the leap from a cushy, tenure-tracked music professorship to a career as an independent artist at the ripe old age of 40. I did so with grand aspirations to focus only on satisfying artistic projects that offered me the creative freedom to select my own collaborators, venues and repertoire. As my previous entry explained (Life Beyond Facebook), I did so with a strong faith in the power of music to move people to truly meaningful experiences. And I intended to infuse all of my work with the spirit of advocacy that I described inYes, We Canada. I still wholeheartedly believe that I can best advocate for the arts as a producer and performer whose work is in the service of building new audiences for classical music. But I also recognize that this requires cultivating people’s deep listening skills in an A.D.D. world where everyone has so many competing demands, from work and family, sports and television, to facebook and twitter. I understand that the dwindling attention spans this fosters make selling subtler art forms, which require more thought and sensitivity, increasingly challenging. So, for the nervous discoverers of classical music who are already reading this because they are curious to stretch themselves out of their 140 character, sound-bit universe into the world of 60-minute sonatas and two-hour symphonies, where should we begin? Certainly, asking you to endure Wagner’s 12-hour Ring Cycle opera is like subjecting a sushi virgin to eating raw sea urchin. So, I suggest starting out with a California roll. There are thousands of stunning classical works that one can discover in less time than the commercial breaks during the Super Bowl. Chopin is famous for the depth and expression that he was able to capture in a variety of short forms. In honor of his bicentennial birthday this year, I recommend listening to any of his Piano Nocturnes for all of the delicacy and emotional power that you might get from an entire symphony. Erik Satie, the flapper era eccentric who rubbed shoulders in Paris cafes with the likes of the Pablo Picasso and the avant-garde playwright Jean Cocteau composed Three Gymnopedies & Three Gnossiennes, 2-minute miniature musical gems that have been re-used in everything from a Janet Jackson remix to the Royal Tennebaums. Their simple bass lines with even more pure melodies transport listeners into that childlike reverie that used to allow us to spend entire afternoons playing with the same shovel and pail of sand without ever getting bored. It is this rapt attention of a child that one needs to return to in order to fully appreciate the nuances of classical music. On the other hand, the 4th movement of Bruckner’s 8th Symphony has all the power and thrill of a Black Eyed Peas concert or an action flick. So, one could still enjoy the rich assets of this dense piece while watching a webisode on their Ipad and Skyping their best friend at the same time. But to fully experience the meditative quality of Arvo Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel for violin and piano, whose haunting tune sometimes sustains one pitch for more than twenty seconds before ascending to only a single note above, creating the lingering suspense of a Hitchock film, one needs to pull the car to the side of the road, shut off the engine, and roll up the windows, as I did when I heard it on CBC just last month, in order to completely immerse myself in it’s quiet perfection. So, as I remain committed to a career that opens rather than closes doors to new audiences for classical music, I have to be thoughtful about the work I accept. And as long as people are only hearing harpists from shellfish in noisy, crowded rooms, they may never no the true value of the classic, Jacques Ibert's Entr'acte. Certainly, I am all for alternatives to the sterile, funereal settings of many modern day concert halls, where new audiences are often too intimidated to attend performances for fear that they will cough, clap, or speak in the wrong places. But I still strive to create concert experiences that invite my listeners to truly hear what the music has to offer. Some of my favorite classical performances have been in bars, where the sublime quality of the composition itself hushed an entire boisterous, drinking crowd to voluntarily "shut their cake holes" (as Liesa, the other Forbidden Flute, once asked our audience, on a different occassion). So, with all due respect to the difficult choices that each musician needs to make to survive, I am personally going to stick to venues that use music not as decoration, but rather as a way to nourish souls, awaken senses, inspire critcal thought, and cultivate compassion. Suffice it to say, when the call came in last night to serenade someone’s wedding guests through a private island’s forest, playing the Theme from Beauty and the Beast in a fairy suit, I graciously replied with a resounding “no thank you!’.
