The Arts

That snippet of Bach that you always hear at the beginning of A Minute with Miles is played by violinist Joanna Maurer. Joanna plays in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and for almost twenty years she’s been my colleague in the American Chamber Players. She’s a remarkable musician, and for all these years I’ve been inspired both by her beautiful violin playing and by what I might call her musical wisdom: her interpretive insights and her mastery of the craft of chamber music.

Professional opera singers often have to sing in languages with which they’re completely unfamiliar. And yet they’re expected to pronounce all the words correctly. How do they do it? Well, they certainly can, and do, work with coaches who are native speakers, but most often they start by studying the foreign words with something called the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, for short.

I attended a concert recently that featured a performance of the Schubert Fantasy in F Minor for piano four-hands. The Schubert Fantasy is a piece I’ve known and loved for decades, and I’d been looking forward to the performance. As it turned out, though, I didn’t enjoy the performance, or the music, because I didn’t like the interpretation. I simply couldn’t free myself from my conception of how the music should go, not to mention how it shouldn’t go.

Somehow it remains a struggle to define the term “classical music.” Some people call it “concert music,” which seems a little too broad, or “art music,” a little too exclusive, or “serious music,” which is an insult to every other kind of music. It’s often easier to say what classical music is not: it’s not any one of the countless different styles of music that fall in the general category of “pop” music.

A “brass quintet” consists of two trumpets, French horn, trombone, and tuba. I attended a concert by a brass quintet the other day, and I was struck by a big difference, visually, between a brass quintet concert and, say, a string quartet concert. When you watch a string quartet, you see lots of movement – arms, hands, fingers, instruments. But at a brass quintet concert the only thing you see moving much at all is the slide of the trombone. And the reason is that most of what brass players do is done with the lips, and it’s invisible to us.

Imagine you’re a professional basketball player, about to take a foul shot. You’ve practiced this thousands of times, and you know exactly how you need to set your feet and orient your body in order to get the best results. But then you notice that the floor is uneven, or slippery, or has a big depression right at the foul line, or has a board sticking up under your foot. It’s going to be much harder to make the shot. Well, this doesn’t actually happen on professional basketball courts.

Why should somebody else—anybody else, whether it’s a program annotator or a radio announcer—tell me that a piece of music is “sad,” or happy, or light, or charming, or profound, when no two people ever have precisely the same reaction to the same piece? One person’s “sad” may be another’s “noble,” and one person’s intense and penetrating may be another’s pretentious and annoying. 

A while back I spent a minute offering a few suggestions of what to say after a concert when the concert was really pretty bad, but the performer is someone you know and you have to say something. In the unfortunate event that you’ve already used up your store of useful phrases, I thought I’d suggest a few more.

The easiest thing to say is a always a simple “Bravo.” But of course it’s a little too easy – and whenever someone has only said “bravo” to me after one of my concerts I’ve always been suspicious.

In the bad old days of symphony orchestras in this country, music directors were absolute dictators, and orchestra musicians had few protections. If a music director woke up in a bad mood and decided to fire an orchestra musician on the spot, he could… never mind that it might instantly deprive that musician of his livelihood. And some of the most famous conductors, unfortunately, were egotistical tyrants who inspired as much fear as admiration in the members of their orchestras. 

We tend to be reluctant these days to say that one piece of music is better than another or that one composer is better than another. Often this reluctance is a good idea, especially if the ranking serves no useful purpose, and because “better” is sometimes hard to define. But sometimes the reluctance is a mistake, and it’s a mistake based on confusing taste with judgment. 

If you’re a flutist, you almost certainly know the name “Philippe Gaubert.” But if you’re not a flutist, you probably don’t. And yet Philippe Gaubert was one of the most famous and important French musicians of the first half of the twentieth century. As a teenager in the 1890s, Gaubert studied the flute at the Paris Conservatory with the great French flutist Paul Taffanel, and eventually the signature style of the legendary teacher and his brilliant pupil became known as “the French method.” 

I don’t suppose you have a pair of four-hundred-year-old pliers in your kitchen tool drawer, or a screwdriver made in the 1700s? No, probably not. Tools don’t tend to last that long. The tools of string players, though, are an entirely different story. 

Have you by any chance been hanging on to your grandparents’ old 78 rpm records? Carting them around, perhaps, and storing them on shelves or in boxes whenever you’ve moved from place to place? 

My cousin Stephen and his wife, Kim Lee, are scientists, and they’ve developed a malaria vaccine that may one day save millions of lives. It’s taken them years of intense effort and many disappointments along the way, but the results could one day change the world. And what do I do? I play music… 

I play concerts for a living, so you wouldn’t think I’d need reminding of the dramatic difference between listening to a recording and hearing a live performance. But it was as an audience member, recently, not as a performer, that I had my reminder – and it was a pretty spectacular one, because I was lucky enough to attend a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.