The Woman on our $100 Note - an appreciation of Melba

Melba by Henry Walter Barnett

In an age when so many Australians are world famous it’s hard for Australians to understand just how famous Nellie Melba was during the 25 years either side of the turn of the 20th century. As her biographer Ann Blainey says, ‘In an era when no woman was prime minister, chief justice, or head of a great church or financial house...Melba was - apart from a few queens and empresses - perhaps the best-known woman in the world.’

Born Helen Mitchell in 1861 in Melbourne, Melba assumed her stage-name from the home town which was, in the year of her birth, a wooden shanty-town in a far-off corner of the Empire. Her career, however, took her to the world’s great opera houses and, via recordings and pioneering broadcasts, to people all over the world. She was on familiar terms with royalty.

The story of Melba’s discovery is often recounted. After receiving some grounding in vocal technique from Pietro Cecchi who taught above Allan’s in Collins Street, she auditioned for Mathilde Marchesi in Paris who, legend has it, ran from the room to get her husband saying, ‘I have found a star.’ Thereafter Marchesi coached Melba in the bel canto style, making her one of its greatest exponents.

Melba achieved her fame principally in the French and Italian repertoire. Tonight’s excerpts are taken from two of her greatest roles, Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust and Ophélie in Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet. Few parts were written for her. Saint-Saëns created the title role for her in his 1904 one-act opera Hélène. Melba believed that Madam Butterfly was created for her though she never sang it, but Puccini did coach her as Mìmì in La bohème, which she sang in the Royal Opera’s first in-house production and at the Monte Carlo premiere paired with Caruso.

We must depend on recordings to get our own impressions of Melba’s singing. Unfortunately recording techniques earlier in her career gave only intermittent sense of the ‘starlike brilliance’ of her tone that critics like W.J. Henderson spoke of. Her farewell concert at Covent Garden in June 1926 was captured by a new electrical method she wished had been around at the beginning of her career but there, finally, you can get a sense of the richness contemporaries praised, although by this stage the 65 year-old was concentrating on roles that favoured her middle range.

It’s in the written word that we can still get a sense of ‘Melbamania’, the mass clamouring that would greet her on trips across America in her own railway car or to remote towns of Australia. Some might have derided her as a snob (‘Sing em “muck”,’ she is supposed to have said when Clara Butt asked for advice on her Australian repertoire), but she also made sure she visited out-of-the-way places. Were these concerts inspired by memories of Mackay in Queensland where she lived as a young woman?

Melba retained a great love of Australia. Bringing opera to Australia as part of the Melba-Williamson seasons she saw as patriotic acts. Her autobiography Melodies and Memories (though probably ghost-written by Beverly Nichols) gives some indication of her deepest longings. It begins with a description of the ‘long white road’ leading out from Melbourne toward the ‘great Australian Bush’ and the township of Lilydale, where she had built Coombe Cottage, her final ‘home sweet home’ (to cite one of her favourite encores). Melba died in Sydney in 1931. Her memoir goes on to say that in Lilydale when she was a child ‘there were no firm white roads over which motors speed by from a vast city, no telephones straggling through burnt-up branches of the gum trees...’ Knowing that, it’s astonishing how far she went in the wider world.

Gordon Kalton Williams, ©2014

This article first appeared in a program booklet published by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

The Pop of Vox: the rise of voice

courtesy: Gondwana Choirs

March 2012: I was visiting the Savannah Arts Academy, a specialist high school on Washington Avenue in that small Atlantic coast city. Artists from Sherrill Milnes’ VOICExperience had just finished a demonstration of operatic arias and duets. ‘Who would like to thank our visitors?’ asked the teacher. Up jumped four teenage boys and launched into....No, you probably didn’t guess it: barbershop quartets. David Starkey, General Director of Asheville Lyric Opera, was standing next to me. ‘There’s a real resurgence of a cappella going on in America at the moment,’ he said, ‘especially among young men.’

‘Resurgence’ is kind of an understatement, I was soon to discover. The growth in the area of what you’d specifically call a cappella is nothing less than amazing. There are new groups and new a cappella festivals being announced, it seems, each week. ‘VoiceJam, a new contemporary a cappella competition & festival coming to Northwest Arkansas April 10-11, 2015’, says an ad in a recent issue of one of the a cappella magazines. And if we broaden out the definition of choral singing to include choirs of all kinds, not limiting ourselves to young men, the growth is phenomenal and international. It takes in Asia and Africa. Last year, Britain’s Stylist magazine reported that '[t]he number of 30-something women adding chorister to their CV has grown sharply over the last couple of years....new choir groups are springing up at a startling rate....[there are] now more than 25,000 choirs in the UK.' The reasons given by the Stylist’s interviewees for ensemble singing ranged from ‘I would be far more stressed if I didn’t sing’ to ‘My job isn’t creative. So I love the challenge...’

‘There is indeed a huge choral movement here now in Australia, mostly at an amateur level’ says Lyn Williams, Artistic Director and Founder of Australia’s youthful Gondwana Choirs, when I contact her. ‘Having said that, I have just accepted hundreds of young people for our national Choral School in January. The young men thing is also catching on around the world. It was led here in Australia by Birralee Blokes. In the UK there are groups like Only Boys Aloud.’

Living in America though, I’m aware of a particularly American slant to this recent history. America has had a long tradition of unaccompanied, or sparsely accompanied, singing. There was the debate over Regular Singing back in the early 18th century. Reformers like Massachusetts’ Cotton Mather (credited with encouraging the use of ‘spectral evidence’ in the Salem witch trials) wanted to get rid of the irregular rhythms, unremittingly loud volume and necessarily extreme slow tempos you have when the lines of a hymn are given out one by one to a non-reading congregation. It was ‘indecent’ said his fellow puritans and, thus, the proponents of ‘Regular Singing’ won out. But the great American symphonist Charles Ives (1874-1954) idealised the degree of heterophonic individuality you got from amateur singers and he quoted from composers of this and later eras in works such as his Fourth Symphony, which makes use of the hymn, ‘Watchman’, by Savannah church musician, Lowell Mason. Of course, American vocal music has also been enlivened from another direction when you have the vocal traditions of African-Americans infusing Gospel, which has kept alive the element of rhythm in American concerted singing for more than two centuries.

I emerge, calm, from a compline service featuring Gregorian Chant at St. James’ in the City on Wilshire Boulevard and marvel at the connection with European traditions in the midst of America’s second-busiest city and the glaring neon of Los Angeles’ Koreatown. But I’m also aware that the rise in contemporary a cappella has a lot to do with its ability to incorporate contemporary pop. Ever since Deke Sharon was inspired by actor John Cusack’s use of a boom box in 1989’s Say Anything and discovered a way to get voices to mimic instruments and percussion, a cappella has had a wide-open repertoire. Contemporary college a cappella has become much more than an extension of the glee clubs that arose on American universities in the 1860s.

And it has become very cool. ‘This is, like, a thing now?’ says Beca (Anna Kendrick) in Universal Studio’s Pitch Perfect, the 2012 musical film about college a cappella competitions. Beca’s Barden Bellas (an all-girl group) will eventually go voice-to-voice against the all-boy Treblemakers at the national collegiate a cappella championships (Hanna Mae Lee will be the Bellas' human beatbox). Sure the film is fiction, but it’s based on Mickey Rapkin’s book of the same name, a non-fiction account of real inter-college musical rivalries, rivalries which have swelled to phenomenal levels since the mid-1990s, aided also by reality TV shows like Sing-Off and of course, series like Glee. Is it dorky, still?  Maybe, but cool people are involved. Mayim Bialik, Dr Amy Farrah Fowler on Big Bang Theory, started a Jewish a cappella group when she was studying to be a real scientist at UCLA. Thousands of people from all walks of life all over the world take part in Eric Whitacre’s virtual choirs on YouTube; the credits last as long as the musical numbers. And since we’ve moved beyond contemporary a cappella once again, Jimmy Fallon, host of NBC’s The Tonight Show, has his own barbershop quartet.

For young American men, singing has admittedly become - almost equal with football - the best way to pick up girls. ‘I suspect the strength of the Australian movement is as much about community as it is about music,’ says Lyn Williams. ‘The various successful and influential televised programs based on choirs both here and in the UK ( with Gareth Malone) have been centered on choirs as a vehicle for positive social change: Jonathan Welch’s Choir of Hard Knocks [involving homeless and disadvanted people from Melbourne]  and the Outback Choir [Michelle Leonard’s children’s choir, the subject of a documentary screened by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on 20 November about a children’s choir in the most isolated and disadvataged region of New South Wales, "where sport is king and music education is non-existent"]. Many other choirs have formed in their shadow,’ continues Williams, ‘so people join community choirs because it simply feels good to sing and belong to community. There are also groups such as Kwaya who sing together and then go to Uganda and work with disadvantaged children.’

What significance does any of this ‘flowering’ have for orchestras? Conductor Richard Gill recently told Radio 774’s Red Symons that singing, rather than learning an instrument, was the best way to introduce children to music: ‘If you give them a basis of singing from the beginning, and they learn their musical literacy through singing, then going to the instrument is far less problematic,’ he said. ‘There are many ex-Gondwana and obviously Sydney Children’s Choir choristers who are now working as professional musicians or studying to do so.’ says Williams, who conducts both. ‘Orchestras around the country including the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Australian Chamber Orchestra have ex-Gondwana choristers in their ranks.’

What I couldn’t find out, however, was whether there’s any research on the number of choral participants who also subscribe to orchestras; if they’ve migrated to orchestral attendance from choir; if ‘migration’ has increased as choral singing has become spectacularly popular.

It’s something to look deeper into, I guess, because I’d wonder why not. Here is a potted history of orchestral music as I understand it. Harmony is the principal element of music for the period which provides the bulk of the orchestral repertoire. Harmony dominated until Wagner, Debussy and Schoenberg pushed its expressive possibilities to an unsustainable limit. Then Stravinsky turned our attention to rhythm. (Stravinsky went on in the direction of The Rite of Spring, not Zvezdoliki, you might say) After that, the most popular music of the 20th century could often be played with three chords; percussion was king.

But here in modern choral singing are people negotiating the acute dissonances in Eric Whitacre’s music. Here are young guys, like The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon, abiding by the rules of ‘circle-of-fifths resolutions’ as specified by the Barbershop Harmony Society. There must be a way to bring all these lovers of harmony to the orchestral concert hall.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2014

This article first appeared in the Dec 2014 edition of The Podium, published by Symphony Services International (Sydney, Australia).

Moments in an inexorable drama (Puccini's Tosca)

Moments in an inexorable drama – a spotlight on Tosca’s musical highlights

Act I proper of Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie’s 1995 opera Harvey Milk begins with music that is recognisable as the brutal Scarpia motif from Puccini’s opera Tosca. Why? Harvey Milk, the assassinated San Francisco City Supervisor and gay rights leader, loved opera and....well, Tosca is arguably the opera buff’s opera par excellence.

Critics may dismiss Tosca but it’s a particularly successful piece of music theatre. Its libretto is as economical as a screenplay. At the same time audiences have great musical moments to savour. Trust Puccini to be able to detect the opera beneath a dialogue-heavy play - Sardou’s La Tosca of 1887.

I wouldn’t want to launch into an appreciation of Tosca’s great moments without first paying tribute to the swift and inexorable drama that Puccini and his librettists, particularly Illica the scenarist, created from Sardou’s well-made play. In operatic terms, Sardou’s play is too much - five acts, historical minutiae, 23 characters... Illica began the task of condensing it, reducing the number of characters and the number of acts. Together the Puccini team’s version concertina-ed the action, ratchetting up the tension, and most importantly making room for lyrical expansion (in other words arias and set pieces such as love duets).

Sardou’s play begins with the Sacristan and Cavaradossi’s servant Gennarino (not in the opera) discussing Cavaradossi’s habits. No stakes raised there! But Puccini’s curtain goes up on Angelotti, who has escaped from the Castel Sant’ Angelo. Puccini can get to the first of the opera’s ‘big numbers’ as quickly as possible.

Recondita armonia

And this is Cavaradossi’s aria – Recondita armonia (How strange a thing is beauty). Cavaradossi is painting a Mary Magdalene for the church where the First Act is set. Unconsciously almost, Cavaradossi has modelled his Magdalene on a woman who has been coming each day ostensibly to pray – the Attavanti, who has actually been preparing an escape kit to conceal in the family chapel for her brother, Angelotti. But Cavaradossi is in love with Tosca. How can he admire the Attavanti’s beauty at the same time? Cavaradossi muses on the power of art to merge all kinds of beauty.

The aria begins with one of the opera’s most striking orchestral effects. Hushed strings leading to hurdy gurdy-like swirls on flutes and clarinet. Lyricist Giacosa’s text consists of two verses of five lines each, over which Puccini constructs his ingenious melody. Cavaradossi’s musing is expressed in near-monotone, rising to a lyrical outpouring as he compares the two women’s eyes. Puccini returns to the ruminating single tones as Cavaradossi reflects on art, that ‘strange enigma’, before surging again - focussed on Tosca - to a top note. ‘Recondita armonia’ is often sung in concerts; in the theatre you get to hear it counterpointed with the Sacristan’s pious asides, a perfect example of how Puccini can use music to delineate contrasting characters.

The Sacristan leaves; Angelotti emerges from his hiding place. Puccini’s Cavaradossi recognises him as ‘the Consul of the former Roman republic’ and that is enough to establish him without Sardou’s lengthy introductions. But Tosca arrives and Angelotti must make himself scarce.

Act I Love Duet

It’s a tribute to the dramatic flow of this opera that many of the big numbers are also fully-fledged scenes, and can be discussed as such. Such is the case with the love duet in Act I, four lyrical sections interspersed with recitative.

The music settles as Tosca enters. Though her theme is sweetly orchestrated – flute and pizzicato strings - she’s jealous. Who was Mario talking to? Cavaradossi placates her and she talks (that is, in recitative) about their meeting later that evening. Ascertaining his happy expectation, she tells of her dream of a little house for the two of them in the country. We are 15 minutes in, precisely at the point where Oscar Hammerstein II later stipulated that the lead character in a show should have an ‘I Want Number’. Puccini follows Giacosa’s rhyming scheme here (although quite often, in this 20^th century opera, he overrides it) and as she rises to her highest point: ‘... palpitate/ ...albor,/ ...stellate! / ...amor!’, Cavaradossi breaks in joking about how she ‘fetters’ him. But note, they rarely sing together in this love duet – that’s one of the realistic (‘verismo’) touches; after all, real people rarely speak at the same time. In another long recitative, Tosca notices the portrait of the Attavanti as Magdalene. Cavaradossi reassures her (‘Quale occhio’) that no eyes in all the world can equal the ‘dark, fiery eyes of my Tosca’. They now sing in duet, although it’s mostly dovetailing and interjection. Tosca leaves, calmer now that he’s sworn his love, and Cavaradossi can get Angelotti from his hiding place.

Keep in mind what’s happened here. There’s another love scene later in the opera (also another tenor aria) and after the events of Acts I and II, they’re both of a more piquant emotionalism.

Angelotti now mentions that he fell victim to Baron Scarpia, police chief of Rome, and Cavaradossi swears to defend Angelotti against the ‘dirty bigot’. A cannon shot announces discovery of Angelotti’s escape. Cavaradossi has given Angelotti the key to his villa. Swift contrasts abound: no sooner has Angelotti gone than the Sacristan and pupils enter to celebrate Napoleon’s defeat at Marengo. This plot beats like a modern script.

The children’s high jinks are quashed by the arrival of Scarpia.

Act I Finale 

We now have the set-up for what Mosco Carner described ‘as one of the most effective act-endings in all opera’. Against the performance of a Te Deum, Scarpia gives vent to his twin lusts to see Cavaradossi executed  and Tosca in his paws. It’s a real inspiration, this finale. But Puccini researched thoroughly for it, seeking from his friend Fr Panichelli the plainsong melody to which the Te Deum was sung in Roman churches, the correct order of the cardinal’s procession and even the costumes of the Swiss Guard. He even sought a text that could give the chorus a murmuring effect under Scarpia’s exultation. ‘Adjutorum nostrum in nomine Domini’ - say it softly to yourself and you’ll hear how skilfully Puccini guaranteed choral mumbling. Interestingly, this is the only traditional finale in the opera. It’s as if we leave behind old opera in Acts II and III.

Act II

Act II basically consists of two large arcs: Cavaradossi’s interrogation and torture; and Scarpia’s bargain and murder. It begins with Scarpia eating alone and considering how he prefers violently conquering a woman than to have her meekly surrender. Handed a copy of the libretto in 1895 and asked to versify a monologue for Scarpia, Giacosa objected that, finishing the first act with a monologue and beginning the second with another by the same character ‘is a bit monotonous – apart from the fact that...[a] Scarpia acts; he doesn’t explain himself in words’. Actually, Scarpia’s previous monologue takes place in the context of an ensemble piece, but perhaps Giacosa was right. Scarpia presents his credo in context later in this Act when he tells Tosca how, when she sprang into her lover’s arms like a leopard, he determined to have her (‘Già mi struggea’).

This act is even more of a dramatic continuum than the first. Full-blown melodic moments emerge subtly from the story as short-lived ariosi. Puccini’s librettists got rid of Sardou’s

Act Two (preparation for the cantata) and placed the performance of the cantata as background to the Scarpia-Cavaradossi scene (Sardou’s Act III) giving Puccini a superb opportunity for a quasi-realistic spatial effect – and irony - as the cantata is performed outside Scarpia’s rooms during Cavaradossi’s initial interrogation. Tosca arrives after singing; Cavaradossi has been led away for torturing. She tries to ignore his cries but eventually reveals Angelotti’s hiding place and is allowed to see Cavaradossi. At news of Napoleon’s victory at Marengo (the earlier news had been wrong), Cavaradossi bursts into a paean to victory, another lyrical outbreak. As Cavaradossi is taken back downstairs, Scarpia begins his pursuit. ‘Now let us talk like friends together’, he sings, in the style of a nonchalant barcarolle. He tells her she has the power in her hands to free Cavaradossi – and we know the price he’s asking. Off-stage drums indicate the march of the condemned (a Puccinian sound-effect driving the plot) and increase the urgency of what Tosca must decide. Now we reach the only stand-alone aria in the entire act.

Vissi d’arte

‘I lived for art; I lived for love. Never did I harm a living creature,’ sings Tosca, wondering what she’s done to deserve this predicament. This is one of Puccini’s most-famous numbers, ‘a splendid piece,’ said Mosco Carner, ‘demanding of the singer a perfect legato and radiant, liquescent tone.’ Yet Puccini came to regret its placement in the opera; it held up the flow, he thought.

The words ‘Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore’, sung to a celestially-descending phrase, actually form the introduction to the aria. Tosca then weaves her confused thoughts (‘Daily I pray...why am I now suffering?’) around the core melody which is mainly carried by flute and cellos. ‘I gave jewels for the Madonna’s mantle,’ she goes on as violins, violas and cellos underscore the main melody and she rises to an impassioned climax. The aria is often greeted by applause in the theatre, but Puccini inserts Scarpia’s chords, odiously ingratiating, as the villain asks, ‘Your answer?’

In exchange for Tosca’s favours, Scarpia agrees to execute Cavaradossi but ‘as we did for Palmieri’. Tosca thinks he means a simulation. Scarpia writes out a safe-conduct for Tosca and Cavaradossi and as he gives it to her, she stabs him. Opera aficionados have argued over interpretations of this scene for 113 years. In the 2011 Covent Garden production, the dying Scarpia (Bryn Terfel) actually landed on top of Tosca (Angela Gheoghiu) and she had to pull herself out from under him.

Act III

Prelude

Sardou describes the opening of Act III in quite some detail in his stage directions. How much more enjoyable is Puccini’s tone poem – Puccini even made a special trip to Rome to test the realistic effect of morning church bells from this spot. Here too is another example of Puccini’s use of situational music. The score was essentially complete when he asked the poet Luigi Zanazzo for some verses that would sound like a shepherd’s song of the Romagna, an oasis of calm, text that ‘must have nothing to do with the plot’. Toward the end of the prelude we hear an anticipation of Cavaradossi’s third act aria.

E lucevan le stelle

Cavaradossi asks for permission to pen a farewell to someone who is dear to him. Four solo cellos ‘sweetly’ repeat the love theme from Act I.

Originally Illica had written a paean to art and poetry here. Verdi was very impressed by it, when he happened to hear Illica read an early version of the libretto in Paris in 1894. But Puccini thought it had the wrong tone. Illica changed it to Cavaradossi’s reminiscence of a happier time. Puccini’s choice of clarinet to lead the melody makes it a particularly doleful recollection.

Tosca arrives and tells how she killed Scarpia after he had written their safe-conduct. Cavaradossi takes Tosca’s hands (‘dolci mani’) in his, and thus begins the third act Love Duet.

Act III Love Duet

This too unfolds in a series of lyrical sections ‘always interrupted at the right moment by recitatives/ariosi in which the action moves forward’ (Carner). Tosca tells Cavaradossi that his execution is to be a mock execution, and we now arrive at the point where Ricordi, Puccini’s publisher, had his biggest disagreement with the composer during the composition of the work for here, when Cavaradossi tells Tosca that he ‘minded death only because he would have to leave her’, Puccini inserted rejected music from an earlier opera, Edgar. ‘As it stands,’ huffed Puccini in reply, ‘[this “labour-saving device”] seems full of the poetry which breathes out of the words....As for its fragmentary character, that was deliberate..... In thought Tosca is constantly returning to the need for Mario’s fall to be well simulated and for his behaviour to appear natural in front of the firing squad.’ Tosca and Cavaradossi now turn their thoughts back to their coming freedom and sing for the first time in unison – ‘Trionfal, di nuove speme’ (World of love, shining with promise). However, there’s no instrumental accompaniment, a detail which some writers see as suggesting they know their high hopes are hollow; that the execution will be for real    

From here the opera proceeds quickly to the end. Cavaradossi is shot, Scarpia’s body is discovered, and Tosca throws herself from the ramparts. The orchestra thunders out a reprise of Cavaradossi’s aria, reminding the audience of the saddest music of the Act.

These are the sort of moments that make it onto ‘highlights’ recordings, but it may be worth asking what creates the clearly perceptible unity of this work. Academic critics fault Puccini for not making a more rigourous use of recurring musical motifs, but his motifs provide a recurring web of themes which keep an audience in Tosca’s world and they do provide occasional psychological complexity, as when Tosca talks of coming to Cavaradossi’s villa that night (in Act I) and the ‘Angelotti’ theme reminds Cavaradossi that the fugitive is there.

Finally, let’s think about the three big parts which are the fortuitous result of thinning-out Sardou’s play. Aficionados endlessly debate their favourite interpreters. Gramophone might speak of Carreras’s ‘poetic ardour’ and Opera Today might declare that ‘[Jonas] Kaufmann’s Cavaradossi is more in line with the strong....leading man’. You can even ask ‘Who was the best Scarpia?’ on Google and get answers such as ‘Sherrill Milnes “implacable”’. Many remember the genial Tito Gobbi (once Melbourne’s King of Moomba) as the greatest Scarpia. Gobbi himself talks about the great Toscas he sang beside in an article he wrote for the Cambridge Opera Handbook. He and Callas didn’t just sing, he says, they lived their parts.

US academic Joseph Kerman once dismissed Tosca as a ‘shabby, little shocker’, and musicologists may wish for more ‘motivic integrity’. But audiences hand down another judgement. They tend to greet Tosca’s conclusion - as the onstage ‘audience’ in Harvey Milk greets it - with a chorus of appreciative ‘bravos’.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2013

(Australian librettist, Gordon Kalton Williams, is currently based in Los Angeles. This article originally appeared in program booklets for Opera Australia’s production of Tosca, directed by John Bell.  

Orchestras in our time and place: the League of American Orchestras conference, Seattle 2014

Orchestras in our time and place: the League of American Orchestras’ conference, Seattle, 2014

League of American Orchestra conferences are inspirational affairs. It’s not just the wealth of sessions or the chance to hear orchestras and ensembles you might not otherwise hear; it’s the chance to run into colleagues, including former employees of Australian orchestras who now work, say, in Atlanta or Dallas. Mostly, it’s those moments sitting in crowded auditoria pinching yourself and saying, ‘I never realised the world of orchestral music is this big!’

This year’s conference took place in Seattle where, according to Seattle Symphony Chair Leslie Chihuly, ‘Boeing engineers helped define air travel, Amazon and Microsoft have changed the way we use technology, and Starbucks has popularised coffee culture’ (although Australian coffee connoisseurs probably won’t get overly-excited by that last boast). Seattle is also legendary for being rainy with 226 cloudy days per year (the dark green of a well-watered Pacific Northwestern forest landscape is refreshing when you arrive from arid Southern California), but in the three days of conference I attended, we experienced brilliant sunshine. From the top of the Needle the city looked stunning with its volcano, Mt Rainier, seemingly sitting in the clouds off to the right of the skyline.

Conference themes in the years I’ve attended have hovered around the rumours of classical music’s imminent death or inevitable decline. There is often an emphasis on the importance of innovation.

Clearly, classical music has issues to face, but I’ve never been convinced that innovation is a value in itself. The Minneapolis conference three years ago didn’t answer this question for me, but Seattle started to drill down. Perhaps the conference title helped: Critical Questions, Countless Solutions. One of the speakers, Alan Brown of the San Francisco-headquartered management consultancy WolfBrown, summarised some of the challenges orchestras now face:

... music is now a visual experience for those who grew up with music videos and now YouTube. With the migration of consumption from physical media to streaming audio, we’ve witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of choice....Downloading music and making playlists is by far the dominant modality of music participation in the US. And billions of people worldwide have grown accustomed to listening to music in random order, with an algorithm as their DJ....thankfully, people are still showing up for live concerts…

Of course, the rise of Asia is another significant new feature in the classical music landscape and Seattle was the perfect conference venue to consider Asian as well as indigenous ‘outreach’ (even if that’s a word the Seattle Symphony has actually banished in favour of ‘partnership’ and ‘collaboration’). League president Jesse Rosen recalled Boeing’s Ron Woodward observing in 1996 ‘that America once looked from its eastern seaboard across the Atlantic to Europe for its connection to commerce, to culture, and to heritage. But today... America looks from the shores of the Pacific, with its independent and innovative spirit, to face towards Asia.’ Seattle now has one of the largest Asian communities in America with significant populations of Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Indians and Cambodians. And Seattle has a highly visible indigenous population. During the conference, we got to hear an extract from the ‘Potlatch’ Symphony, a collaboration between the Seattle Symphony and the local Duwamish people.

The tone for the conference was set at the outset in the keynote address by virtuoso flautist and founder of ICE (the International Contemporary Ensemble), Claire Chase. Having started her talk with a rivetting performance of Varèse’s Density 21.5, she spoke of Varèse’s observation that ‘possible musical forms are as limitless as the exterior forms of crystals’ and therefore of the need to spark the ‘fire’ to tell different kinds of stories. To a large extent, Chase’s address was an exhortation to create new economies, collaborative models and definitions of community by which ensembles could ‘pulsate’ with music’s life. When she started out in the world of commissioning and staging new works with an ensemble of 15 Oberlin classmates there was, she said, no decision that wasn’t creative ‘whether it was about marketing, fundraising, budgeting, education, production, outreach, where to put the chairs at the concert, or how to get people on and off stage between pieces...’ She reminded us that everything we in the orchestral world are engaged with, is storytelling - marketing, education, community building, ‘natural outgrowths of a burning need...to make music for people and tell them stories.’

But does Chase’s brand of guerilla music-making suit orchestras? Perhaps ICE can be ‘part 21st century orchestra, rock band, circus troupe, startup’ but what about an ensemble of 100 people whose most rewarding repertoire, for audience and players alike, has not been significantly increased in the past 50 years?

The conference’s final speaker Alan Brown noted the gulf between Claire’s call to ‘“widen the space of our imagination” with the realities of the conversations I’m hearing in breakout sessions and in the hallways’ and the 2014 conference had the regular panels on fund-raising and management (what perhaps might be called bread-and-butter issues). But even here, the dominant theme, if there was one, was how to create freer structures. Boards on Fire, presented by a Seattle-based consultant on NGOs Susan Howlett (http://susanhowlett.com/), offered useful ideas on how to inspire trustees ‘to raise money joyfully’ by finding time to get into meatier, more ‘generative’ issues, rather than be stuck, as usually happens, between strategic and fiduciary agenda items. New Habits for New Times involved discussion of ways to allow decisions and ideas to percolate up throughout an organisation, although as an Australian it surprised me that the concept of Friday evening office-wide drinks came as something of a novelty.

Perhaps the session I was most looking forward to, given the theme and location of the conference (and my own concerns), was Collaborating with Asian Communities. After all Australia doesn’t just look across the Pacific to Asia, it’s in the region.

Only 20 or so people were there to benefit from the advice of a panel including Seattle-based composer Byron Au Yong; Pankaj Nath, vice president/relationship manager for JP Morgan Chase, and Mayumi Tsutakawa, manager of grants to organisations for the Washington State Arts Commission. What was clear though was that those who attended had pondered long and hard the best way to collaborate. They agreed that what must be found is ‘true collaboration’, in the words of another panel-member Kelly Dylla (vice president of education and community engagement for the Seattle Symphony), but as an audience member said, it was ‘way harder than anything I’d imagined.’ Practical advice included making sure your board represents the population make-up of your city. Byron Au Yong also advised people to be realistic. His opera, Stuck Elevator was about people from Guangxi Province in China, ‘but they won’t be the audience. They work 24/7. It’ll be their children.’ On the plus side, a couple of attendees noted that ‘there are a lot of people who get involved in music to remind them of home’.

I guess it’s understandable that only 20 people attended the session. Such collaborations have not yet produced repertoire that’s guaranteed to reward listeners and players who are used to the narrative richness of Mahler or Shostakovich or Brahms. 

But that wouldn’t be any reason to give up the quest. The important thing, surely, is to make sure these collaborations are not one-offs and that orchestras continue to draw on everything that influences classical music in the world at this time. If there was any single take-away from this conference it might be that orchestras must continue to strive, in the words of Jesse Rosen, to ‘be the orchestra of and for your community, in this time, and in your place’.

The word “orchestra,” in ancient Greece,’ said Claire Chase, ‘meant “a dancing place.”

What if orchestras of the 21st century could revisit this most ancient part of their stories and be, literally, an open space? A place where change is the norm, where even the permanent collection - what we call our canon - is questioned, argued, retold? A place that commissions twice as much new music as it repeats? And reaches twice as many schoolchildren as it reaches patrons? Or a place where the sphere of context, the very notion of public, is constantly widening? A place where the radical reimagining of how and for whom art gets made, is a daily practice? 

I don’t know how much of that can happen when people have day-to-day questions of survival to consider, but I do believe that in the three years of League conferences I’ve attended the suggested answers to those questions have gotten deeper and deeper.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2014

This article first appeared in the mid-year edition of The Podium, published by Symphony Services International, Sydney. 

Film locations galore

A mere stroll from us is John Marshall High School, used in such films as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Grosse Pointe Blank, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. The football field was used for the final scenes of Grease ('You're the One That I Want'...)

The school is also named after the US's greatest Chief Justice, who in 1832 (1832!!) recognised the Indian tribes as sovereign nations (Worcester v Georgia).

"No worries"

When we first moved to Los Feliz, I was sitting in the Coffee Bean one day and a fellow customer asked if she could take the spare chair at my table. I said, "No worries," and she took it but then turned back:

"Are you Australian?"

"Was it the accent?" I asked.

"No, it was 'no worries'," she said.

Since then, in the last six months, I've heard Americans saying "no worries" several times. Is this how phrases catch on? Should I start saying, "No sweat" and see what happens?

The Not Quite Tamed West

The Los Angeles River comes around Griffith Park from the San Fernando Valley (I admit I used the zoom to conceal the concreted banks...and couldn't do much about the wires).

(Note to self: must do a more substantial blog again soon)