Losing Score

It has been almost a year since I participated in the 2007 "Bloggers' Night" at the San Francisco Symphony. While I responded to my invitation to this event with several posts about the performances that evening, I never mentioned that all participants were further rewarded with a modest element of swag, which included review copies of DVDs of the Keeping Score series that Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony had created for production by local PBS station KQED. I have never seen any of these programs broadcast. Truth be told, I have become very disappointed in what PBS has to offer in just about any subject area; and the local contributions from KQED are not much better. Nevertheless, I was curious about the project; but, in spite of that curiosity, the jewel cases gathered dust for about a year until last night when my wife and I decided to see what they had to offer, beginning with the "Beethoven's Eroica" broadcast. This seemed like an appropriate way to begin, particularly since we had heard Thomas conduct this work at Davies Symphony Hall last March.

That recent listening experience, however, made for an interesting and significant object lesson: The beauty of the "live" performance is that, like snowflakes, no two are alike. If they were alike, they would be little better than recordings; and, if that were they case, why should we bother to exchange our "virtual concert hall" for the real thing? Thomas is well aware of how the approach to performance changes from one occasion to the next, and he even talks about it when first introducing this work. However, as a result of that simple "principle of diversity," I found the "Beethoven's Eroica" presentation more than a little disquieting, because it felt too much as if Thomas were providing his viewers with a definitive perspective on what, in my own post, I called "The Ultimate Warhorse."

This observation then leads to my second observation, which is that there is too much talk and not enough music. Part of the problem is that this particular symphony is significant for its revolutionary approach to scale; and this poses a difficulty in presenting it, along with supplementary material, in a one-hour television program. The result is that we end up experiencing "significant excerpts," rather than the imposing whole ("Dear God, he's big") itself. Many years ago Kurt Masur worked with a British television production company to prepare recorded concerts of the four symphonies of Johannes Brahms. Each of those made for a one-hour broadcast; and Masur prepared his remarks to fill the space that was not occupied by the music. One might argue that this would be too little for a work as major as Ludwig van Beethoven's third symphony, but I doubt that anyone would claim that the details behind Brahms symphonies are any less than those behind Beethoven's.

This leads to my final observation: If the music is the most important part, how can the video do justice to it? Put another way, since it is virtually impossible to ignore a video signal (particularly if it is motion video), what can be done to make sure that the video contributes to the listening experience, rather than detracting from it? This is a question I have examined in previous posts. My primary regard is that many who read what I feel is the best answer to this question will regard it as ancient history:

I have always felt that this [skilled video production] was the "secret ingredient" that made Evening at Symphony on PBS such a triumph. All direction of camera shots was informed by the score being performed. This was such a serious matter that the camera crew would rehearse in Symphony Hall with a stage on which all the chairs were in the right place, each labeled with the name of the performer; and all the camera work would be executed against a recording of the performance. This whole process was the brainchild of Jordan Whitelaw, who supposedly once said, "If you don't see it, you may not hear it!" This is far from a trivialization of the listening process; it is one of the best strategies for cultivating that process. Of course it only works if it is properly executed; and, if it is poorly executed, it can do far more harm than good.

If Whitelaw's spirit remains with us at all today, it would be through the innovations that Barbara Willis Sweete has brought to videos of the Metropolitan Opera, apparently with the encouragement of general manager Peter Gelb. Sweete shares Whitelaw's keen sense of what it means for audiences to see the right thing; but she also has the advantage of working (by virtue of high-definition (HD) bandwidth) with far more sophisticated video management technology than WGBH was ever able to provide to Whitelaw. This was most apparent when she delivered a video product that caught all of the subtleties of the Met production of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and made them accessible (and perhaps more comprehensible) to all of us who could only attend the performance by watching it in a movie house. Alas, the few opportunities we had to see the San Francisco Symphony performing excerpts in "Beethoven's Eroica" were depressingly uninformative, particularly when assessed by the standards set by Whitelaw and extended by Sweete. This brings to mind the Annie Hall joke about the exchange between two old ladies staying at a resort in the Catskills:

"The food here is terrible!"

"Yes, and the portions are so small!"

No, the video work in "Beethoven's Eroica" is not as terrible as all that; but those of us who have been tracking the role that video can play in extending audiences for the performing arts know it can be much better.

This brings me to my final point, which is that, if we are to take the shortcomings of "Beethoven's Eroica" seriously, then we should also entertain the hypothesis that this production is more symptom than disease. In this case the "disease" (which I have also discussed in the past) is the growing neglect of the performing arts on public television. As I previously wrote, this is a "gap that cable cannot seem to fill," since it appears that every attempt cable has made to do so has come to a dismal end. Of course the problem may well be that the performing arts are just not particularly compatible with the culture of a "technological age," such as the one we are currently experiencing. Thus, while we may get no end of jawboning in favor of arts education, even when clothed in rhetoric about "the importance of arts to the future of the nation's competitiveness in a changing paradigm of global, economic, technical and social evolution and cultural change," that jawboning is unlikely to lead to much other than a few grants, which will probably go to the same old organizations that continue to get grants to do the same old thing. Just on the basis of the impact he has had on programming for the San Francisco Symphony, I have strong confidence that Michael Tilson Thomas would like to reverse this trend; but I do not see him getting the support he would need for such an endeavor. Without that support it is hard to imagine that future projects will be much more satisfying than "Beethoven's Eroica" was.

Paying Attention to the Audience

There is a corollary I neglected to mention in my recent examination of the growing neglect of the performing arts on public television. It stems from the premise I had postulated that public television used to provide a vehicle for expanding the reach of the performing arts. The focus of my discussion was on how more people could be part of the experience of a performance through the virtue of a broadcasting medium, but this is only part of the story. If, through the exposure of public television, more people developed an awareness of being an audience for the performing arts, then that awareness could then translate into ticket sales for "live" events: The translation from "virtual presence" to "physical presence" would be facilitated.

I raise this point because I doubt that there is any performing arts organization in the United States that is not currently having trouble maintaining, let alone growing, its subscriber base. At the beginning of this year, I wrote about the extent to which the 2008–09 season of the San Francisco Opera seems to have been designed by General Director David Gockley to address this problem. Gockley well understands the need to steer a safe course between Scylla and Charybdis: On the one hand he cannot run an opera company without a revenue base to support that company's budget; but, on the other hand, providing that revenue base has a lot to do with determining and satisfying the needs of current and potential audience members. One cannot steer that course without taking risks. Gockley will be taking some interesting risks; and I, for one, shall be very curious to see the sort of impact they have.

I write all this today by way of a response to Ivan Katz' latest blog post on The Huffington Post, which is basically an attack on the strategic planners of the Philadelphia Orchestra to steer a course of their own. Katz has provided an interesting yardstick for measuring the sorts of decisions taken by not only the San Francisco Opera but also the San Francisco Symphony, both of which face the same problems with their respective subscriber bases. The question, however, is whether his yardstick provides effective measurements, because some of the assumptions that Katz makes about audiences (and possibly performers) may be off the mark.

By way of disclaimer I should explain that I spent many formative years in Philadelphia. For many of those years, my parents subscribed to the Philadelphia Orchestra; and I listened to many of their concerts on the radio. When I taught at the University of Pennsylvania, I had an apartment whose living room provided a wonderful view of the entrance to the Academy of Music. I never subscribed, because I could always go out and walk a couple of blocks to pick up tickets for any performance that interested me. However, my interest in the Orchestra dissipated quickly after my parents moved to Pittsburgh to be closer to my brother (who plays in the Pittsburgh Symphony); and I know virtually nothing about what has happened since those Philadelphians left the Academy of Music.

Having gotten any lurking biases out of the way, let me now cite the key paragraphs of Katz' argument:

The traditional manner of programming orchestral concerts has involved giving audiences a balanced diet of mixed cuisine. John Adams' The Chairman Dances appears on a program with a Mozart Piano Concerto and perhaps a Rachmaninoff symphony. A large, gaudy Vaughan-Williams work follows a Rossini overture and it in turn is followed by a Haydn Symphony. The general rule seems to be that giving the audience what it wants must be balanced in some respects by a desire to give the audience music that it needs to hear. You "sugar coat" the pill of Schnittke's music (widely deemed box office poison) by surrounding it with something comfortable and familiar -- like Brahms, Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.

The mighty Philadelphians, however, have heard the Siren Song of the consultants and have decided to go in a new direction. So one of America's most storied orchestras is now offering, in addition to the traditional subscription plans, a whole host of options. One can opt for the "Masterworks" series, described by The Inquirer as "warhorses" with the music "prefaced with spoken explanations from the stage" - presumably for those too lazy to read the program notes. The "Connoisseur" series is "the traditional night at the orchestra" without the spoken commentary. (As though tarting it up with a French name is going to make it a hotter commodity.) The "Odyssey" series is said to be "...a bit more adventurous, with live-image projections of the onstage action and postlude recitals after the concerts". Finally, there is the option of the "Celebration" series which has "...Saturday night gatherings with other listeners and musicians, along with live-image projections and spoke introductions."

First of all, while I have no idea if that second paragraph is meant to be the first attempt by the Philadelphia Orchestra to break with that "traditional manner of programming" cited in the first paragraph, regular readers probably know by now that the San Francisco Symphony has little truck with that particular tradition. Furthermore, my current impression is that programs are set by the conductor; and even the guests have a hand in choosing what they will perform (while management tries to make sure that this fits in with the other concerts in the season). The result is that an evening at the San Francisco Symphony usually has some over-arching theme, which can then provide a point of departure for the pre-concert talk. That theme may involve multiple perspectives on a single composer (such as Tchaikovsky), an examination of a particular "window" on music history (such as the twentieth century), or an attempt to find a connection where others would find only contrast (as in Michael Tilson Thomas' "Vertigo-connection" between Mozart and Mahler). I have always approached this as an exploration of means to help audiences become better listeners; and, given the many attentive faces I often see in Davies Symphony Hall, I would say that the strategy seems to work at least some of the time.

The most important point of this approach is that it is not a strategy of "sugar coating." When MTT wants to serve up Charles Ives, then Ives is the focus of the evening; and, if the program ends up coupling him with Felix Mendelssohn's violin concerto, then it is no surprise that at least some aspects of listening to Mendelssohn end up informing our listening to Ives. The only time I have seen MTT frustrated in this strategy has been when he has tried to program the six short orchestral pieces of Anton Webern; and I suspect that the problem there has more to do with what I have called "the unbearable being of silence" than with Webern being too opaque for listeners unfamiliar with him. The nervous coughs that greet Webern are no different from those that always tend to descend upon those Wagner operas that begin on the brink of silence, such as Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde. Yes, this is the sort of thing that separates the experienced from the newbies; but it can only be resolved through increased exposure, rather than "sugar coating."

Having said all that, what are we to make of the new Philadelphia strategy? Personally, I feel that the most important thing that a performing arts organization can do is provide audiences with informed expectations of what is going to happen when the lights dim. This is why I have always been in favor of pre-concert talks, even if I do not attend all of them myself. When I lived in Singapore, the General Manager of the Singapore Symphony told me that her biggest problem was that most of the people in the audience did not know what to do when attending a concert. I introduced her to the concept of the pre-concert talk and then found myself accepting responsibility for preparing a series of these talks. It did not take long for these talks to build up their own audience of "regulars;" and, since they were coming regularly to the talks, presumably they were sticking around to hear the music more regularly than they had previously done.

On the basis of both the talks I have attended and those I have given, I have never encountered one that was "for those too lazy to read the program notes." Most important is that the talk provides opportunities to listen to portions of the music that are beyond the scope of the medium of the program book. Also, while those talks tend not to involve a Q&A, they provide opportunities for conversation, whether by coming up to the lecturer after the talk or by talking with friends about what the lecturer said. Remember, the prize on which we keep our eyes is an audience of better listeners; and these talks can do a lot to bring us closer to that prize.

Then there is this matter of "live-image projections." I have always felt that this was the "secret ingredient" that made Evening at Symphony on PBS such a triumph. All direction of camera shots was informed by the score being performed. This was such a serious matter that the camera crew would rehearse in Symphony Hall with a stage on which all the chairs were in the right place, each labeled with the name of the performer; and all the camera work would be executed against a recording of the performance. This whole process was the brainchild of Jordan Whitelaw, who supposedly once said, "If you don't see it, you may not hear it!" This is far from a trivialization of the listening process; it is one of the best strategies for cultivating that process. Of course it only works if it is properly executed; and, if it is poorly executed, it can do far more harm than good.

Finally, there is that "platinum-level" status that allows for socializing with other listeners and performers. This was part of the way in which the San Francisco Symphony planned their "Bloggers' Night" last summer. As a strategy for making special people feel special, it tends to be a good one and therefore should not be dismissed if it works for the revenue base. Whether or not it makes those special people better listeners is a harder call, since the quality of a conversation has a lot to do with who is actually doing the conversing. Living composers like Steve Reich and John Adams are very comfortable in talking about their work, and the result is that their clarity of speech does a lot for the listener's clarity of perception. Similarly, at the "Bloggers' Night" event the young up-and-coming pianist Gabriela Martinez did such a good job of talking about Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto that I titled my blog post in her honor, "Taming Rachmaninoff's Monster." Between such examples and my own efforts to prepare pre-concert talks, I have come to the conclusion that people want to talk about their concert-going experiences; and giving them simulating opportunities to do so is likely to contribute to their attending more concerts.

Having said all this, let me conclude by suggesting that, for all its merits, my argument may be a "tale of two coasts." Katz described the Philadelphia Orchestra as "without doubt one of the finest symphony orchestras in North America and, arguably, the world." Well, skeptic that I am, I tend to doubt everything! I am sure that for many years the San Francisco Symphony lived in the shadow of the "big five" (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago); and anyone serious about performing in an orchestra would view it as a stepping stone to a better place. I do not believe this is still true. As I have remarked many times, the San Francisco Symphony performs by virtue of a passionate bond to most of their conductors, not just MTT and former Music Director Herbert Blomstedt but many of the visitors, such as Kurt Mazur and Ingo Metzmacher. Perhaps there are some musicians who would leap at the opportunity to perform under Simon Rattle in Berlin; but I doubt that we have to contend with any serious case of "Philadelphia envy." Furthermore, radio is making it possible for serious listeners to experience more and more live performances from more and more concert halls; and the result is that those listeners are developing a better sense of diversity, rather than getting overly occupied with who is at the top of the pile. Since different conductors have so many different ways of approaching each of the works in the repertoire, that "pile" is a fiction; and all that really matters is that the opportunities through which we can be better listeners continue to grow. All I really wish is that public television would get back on board in facilitating that growth process!

"Bon Voyage" to the San Francisco Symphony!

One of the advantages of being invited to "Bloggers' Night" at the San Francisco Symphony was the opportunity to learn about the European tour that the Symphony will be making beginning at the end of August. I was particularly interested in the performances at the Edinburgh Festival and the BBC Proms, because I can now anticipate reading reviews of them through my RSS feed for the Telegraph (and perhaps hearing at least one of the Proms concerts on the BBC World Service). Today's San Francisco Chronicle further tweaked my interest with an advertisement for a "Bon Voyage" concert at Davies on August 23. Here is the program with some extra information about the soloist (omitted in the ad but culled from the Symphony press release) and which works will be performed that the two venues that interest me the most:

John Adams Short Ride on a Fast Machine (Edinburgh, August 29)

Charles Ives Symphony No. 3 (Proms, September 1)

Richard Strauss Final Scene from Salome (Deborah Voigt, soprano; Edinburgh, August 30; Proms, September 1)

Dmitri Shostakovich Symphony No. 5 (Proms, September 1)

So basically the San Francisco audience gets to hear the September 1 Proms concert with the Adams thrown in for good measure. I was also pleased to note that the Symphony will be performing a second Proms concert, consisting entirely of the Mahler seventh symphony. This was of particular interest, not only because Michael Tilson Thomas has done so much to build an audience for Mahler here but also because he seems to be doing the same in London with his performances with the London Symphony Orchestra. My guess is that the Telegraph will have a lot to write about, and I look forward to reading all of it!

Blogging at the Symphony

Last week I neglected to mention that San Francisco Symphony conductor James Gaffigan's "intermission chat with a community of local bloggers who had assembled at Davies" was made possible by the Communications Department of the Symphony, which had declared that concert to be "Bloggers' Night." Twenty pairs of prime orchestra seats were set aside for those "local bloggers," who were also given access to the Press Room (now endowed with WiFi connectivity). I thus have this kind of forward-looking thinking from the Symphony to thank for giving me the opportunity to write my two recent posts about Rachmaninoff and Richard Strauss. For those interested in the general impact of the event on those local bloggers, Louisa Spier, the Public Relations Associate who coordinated the whole affair, has set up a del.icio.us page (actually three pages), on which she has compiled all the resulting posts. As might be expected, the content ran the gamut from the sort of stuff that, a few months ago, prompted Andrew Keen's "Blogs are boring" rant to some keen perceptions from serious instrumentalists, one of whom was well experienced with the oboe part for the Strauss "Don Juan." Having now visited all of the links on Ms. Spier's pages, I have to say that the impression that pleased me most was the discovery that listening to a performance in Davies is a significantly different matter from listening to a CD or DVD, no matter how good the system may be. At its best, the recording process can only capture a single event, which can never provide a fair representation of the music being performed; and, because recording technology is still far from capturing everything in that event, collecting several recordings of the same composition does not improve the representation very much. There is also, as I mentioned in my Rachmaninoff post, the problem that most of those recordings are the result of "manufactured production" in a controlled studio setting, which really has nothing to do with the true nature of musical performance. So the bottom line is that Ms. Spier has done a great service to the San Francisco Symphony (for cultivating awareness); and some of the local bloggers were quite good about letting their awareness be cultivated!

Whose "Don Juan?"

Having written yesterday at greater length than I anticipated about the San Francisco Symphony performance of the Rachmaninoff third piano concerto, I wanted to devote a second post to the performance of Richard Strauss' "Don Juan" on the first half of that same program. From many points of view, this piece may be the most challenging of Strauss' tone poems, beginning with the fact that the opening measures provide one of the major hoops through which any string player must jump when auditioning for a symphony orchestra chair. In spite of the fact that this is may be the shortest tone poem, I have had the misfortune to hear two major conductors (whom I would prefer to leave unnamed, along with the orchestras they were leading) bungle things somewhere along the course of the score. I suspect that the problem has less to do with the feet-first burst of energy that launches the work as with the high density of abrupt energy shifts that take place over the work's brief duration. The problem, then, is that neither performer nor listener is ever on "solid ground" for very long. The music never lingers in the moment (more applicable to Faust's contract with Mephisto, at least according to Goethe) but, instead, is always charging ahead to the next "conquest." This is a vision of the Don that occupied many of the authors of the Romantic movement, with its rebellion against Enlightenment thinking. The theme shows up in a variety of languages, including English (Byron), German (Hoffmann), and Danish (Kierkegaard). This obsession to drive forward incessantly is not halted by the fires of Hell, as conceived by Mozart and da Ponte, but by the sheer exhaustion of "all passion spent," without even the comfort of past reflection that Casanova enjoyed by writing his memoirs.

Thus, while we can all appreciate Gabriela Martinez' observation that the primary challenge in "taming" "Rocky 3" is endurance, this is just as true for "Don Juan." In the spirit of the Don's activities, endurance is not just a matter of length but with everything that happens "over the duration." Consequently, the same skill that James Gaffigan had in working with Martinez to establish a good "energy budget" for the extended scale of the Rachmaninoff concerto was applied equally effectively over the brevity of the Strauss tone poem. The result was that the Strauss performance was as impressively memorable as the Rachmaninoff; and, while the two works were radically different in so many ways, that level of quality performance was achieved in these two settings for basically the same reasons.

I also want to submit the disclaimer that the "vision of the Don" I presented above is primarily my own fabrication; and it is not easy to determine whether or not this was the "story" behind the Strauss tone poem. Strauss' source was an incomplete poem by Nicolaus Lenau, who is not known, at least in the United States, anywhere near as well as the three authors I cited. As a matter of fact, when I did a Google search on the phrase "Don Juan" and the name "Lenau," all of the first ten hits were from program notes for the Strauss tone poem. (We have Robert Schumann to thank for knowing that Lenau also did a version of Faust.) Wikipedia does have an entry for Lenau, but says little about Don Juan except for its fragmentary status. (Was Lenau thinking on the same scale as Byron?) Unfortunately, the Wikipedia entry for Don Juan is a good example of what Andrew Keen calls "the cult of the amateur" at its worst. Not only is the Lenau fragment misrepresented as a play; but the accounts of both Hoffmann and Kierkegaard, however brief, leave much to be desired. We have to wonder if Strauss was drawn to Lenau through the motive of getting away from the shadow that Mozart had cast over the legend. If Strauss wanted to seek out "something completely different," he certainly succeeded, but in a way that is likely to drive performers crazy for many years to come!

Taming Rachmaninoff's Monster

As "professor" Robert Wuhl delights in reminding us in his Assume the Position lectures (on "the stories that made up America... and the stories that America simply made up") on HBO, movie-makers have no problem with distorting the historical record (along with other facts that create the context for that record) in the interest of "making it" at the box office. It is not that we are unaware of this precept. Rather, we are willing to disregard it where the entertainment industry is concerned if the product is more … well … entertaining. If "the record" loses out in the interest of entertainment, then that is just how "the system" works.

One of the more unfortunate losers in this process has been the third piano concerto of Sergei Rachmaninoff. By virtue of the success of the movie Shine, this composition now has the reputation (due in large part to the delivery that John Gielgud brought to his role) of a Grendel-like monster that devours any pianist who dares cross its path. In this respect, last night's performance at Davies Symphony Hall was memorable for two reasons: First, it reminded us that the concerto really is a piece of music that should be appreciated as music, rather than as the moral equivalent of trying to scale Everest or score a perfect ten in an Olympic gymnastic competition. Second, after the concert it provided the performers with an opportunity to reflect on the practices behind the music, putting the whole thing in a far more human perspective than the Shine experience afforded. Both of these reasons made for a far more satisfying experience than the terrors induced by the Shine story.

This is not to say that the concerto is just another piano concerto. As conductor James Gaffigan point out in his intermission chat with a community of local bloggers who had assembled at Davies, the raw note count of the work sets it apart from anything in the standard repertoire. However, as soloist Gabriela Martinez told those in the audience who remained for a question-and-answer session, this just means that the primary challenge in performing the concerto is endurance; and that challenge is hardly insurmountable. Georg Solti discussed this matter in the liner notes for Wagner's Das Rheingold. He explained that, while this was the shortest of the four Ring operas, it was the most difficult to conduct, because it was two and a half hours without intermission. Now there is a lot of high-intensity action throughout those two and a half hours; but it all leads up to the climax when Thor strikes his hammer to form the bridge that the Gods then cross to enter Valhalla. This is not just a dramatic climax, it is an energy climax. This is where every instrument in the orchestra has to be putting out with full strength; and, if that strength has been dissipated my expending too much energy on all the preceding abductions, thefts, and murders, then that final climax is weakened (and the audience leaves disappointed). So a conductor has to keep the overall energy under control from the very beginning to make sure that the strength is there to make the ending "work." Without making it sound too political in light of current conditions, there needs to be an "energy budget."

In a Wagner opera a conductor (certainly one like Solti) can take charge of that "budget;" but a concerto is a responsibility shared by soloist and conductor. What made the Rachmaninoff work so well as music was that Gaffigan and Martinez seemed to have a shared sense of what that "energy budget" should be. Since Gaffigan was not shy about discussing how little rehearsal time he had, I have no idea how "calculated" that budget was; but, even when the balance was not always the best, the two of them exhibited a sense (possibly intuitive) of what it would take to get from beginning to end without succumbing to exhaustion.

Much of this may have to do with the way in which Martinez seems to have internalized her share of the burden. During the question-and-answer session she was asked how much time it took to prepare this concerto; and her reply was that she spent two months to prepare for the performance. You could sense the jaw-dropping effect this had on everyone who knew the concerto only through Shine; so I figured it would be worth digging a bit into whether or not this was truly a superhuman effort in her part. I came to two conclusions.

First, while she may have spent two months from the first time she sat down with the music to the point at which she felt ready to perform it, that figure basically disregards all the ways in which her general music education prepared her for this task. Much of that education went into building up technique, but I suspect that there was also a generous amount of time put into learning other works of Rachmaninoff. In other words, to reflect back on one of my favorite themes, whether or not she was doing it consciously, she was building up an understanding of this music on those three levels of logic, grammar, and rhetoric:

1. Logic: What is the rationale that accounts for why Rachmaninoff wrote the notes that he did?
2. Grammar: What are the structural features through which one sorts out all those embellishing features (responsible for that massive number of notes) from the "core" features that are embellished?
3. Rhetoric: How do logic and grammar then inform the execution of the notes, particular in the context of the need to maintain that "energy budget?"

This now moves on to the second conclusion, which is that, at the level of logic and grammar, Rachmaninoff is actually rather predictable. The more you listen to Rachmaninoff, the more you begin to realize that his expressive palette is just not that extensive; so, as a performer, you probably begin to pick up on when, even if you are taking on a new work, you are actually on familiar ground.

By way of a more theoretical digression, this involves a principle of mathematics that obsessed many music theorists about fifty years ago. Leonard Meyer (who was, alas, far too much of a snob to ever put much time into Rachmaninoff's music) put a lot of effort into applying Claude Shannon's "information theory" to musical analysis. Shannon was interested in general problems of communication and recognized that the problem of distinguishing "signal" from "noise" (interference) was easier if the signal was more predictable; and he was able to quantify "how easy it was" in terms of a measurement he called "information:" the higher the information level, the more unpredictable the signal. In this language we can say that, for all that massive abundance of notes, Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto has a lower information content than (to pull an example from roughly the same time period) either of the piano sonatas by Charles Ives. The principle, then, is that, the lower the information level, the easier it is to internalize the composition. (Invoking the fiction of film once again, remember when Mozart reproduces the march Salieri composed in his honor in Amadeus. He plays about sixteen bars from memory and then says, "It's all the same after that, isn't ?" Mozart recognized predictability when he heard it!)

This is not to imply that predictability is a bad thing. The point, rather, is that predictability on the levels of logic and grammar demand more creativity on the level of rhetoric. This is the question of "putting your own stamp" on a performance that also came up in the question-and-answer session. Both Martinez and Gaffigan figured out to do this, even with limited rehearsal time.

What does this all mean? I see this as a vivid object lesson in why music is really all about what happens in a performance space, rather than what comes our of some recording. As I recently wrote, even if the recording some from a "live" performance, the latter is still a manufactured product. That product can invoke memories of performances we have enjoyed or, as I recently suggested was the case for Prince, prepare us for a performance we plan to attend; but it will never substitute for the performance. Another point that Martinez raised was the degree of public enthusiasm among the young in her native Venezuela for making music. Before recording technology "took over," adults also shared that enthusiasm: It was a familiar way to socialize. Without sounding too reactionary, I would like to hope that we wean ourselves away from all those recordings and recover that enthusiasm for the performances themselves, both doing them at whatever skill level we may have and enjoying others who do them.